Mystery man

Iraq | Erik Prince and the U.S. government are keeping a lid on how they do a $1 billion-plus business together | Warren Cole Smith

They say that in war the first casualty is truth. That may be why investigators from Baghdad to Capitol Hill are finding it difficult to get at the truth regarding Erik Prince and the company he leads, Blackwater USA.

Not that many sources aren't trying. The Iraqi government became the first to release a detailed report of an investigation claiming Blackwater gunmen needlessly killed 17 Iraqis—one policeman and 16 civilians—at a busy Baghdad intersection Sept. 16.

The week before, Prince sat before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for more than five hours, answering mostly hostile questions from mostly Democratic lawmakers.

Front-page articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post portray Blackwater as a secretive organization run by wealthy power players in the Republican Party. Times columnist Maureen Dowd complained of a "mercenary-evangelical complex" and at one point Focus on the Family issued a formal statement clarifying its relationship with the Prince family. But some blog sites became only more fevered, portraying Blackwater as George W. Bush's private militia used by him and his friends in the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tri-Lateral Commission to run up oil prices and take over the world.