Understanding BlackWater

Good stuff here. Aggressive Nationalism: McCulloch v. Maryland and the Foundation of Federal Authority in the Young Republic (Oxford), that makes the point that the Bank of the United States was scarcely the unambiguous "federal instrumentality" as described by Marshall. Instead, it was a bank 80% of whose stock was owned by private investors, with the remainder owned by the US. (This was a point emphasized by Jackson in his bank veto message in 1832.)... The most telling paragraph in the book is a message from the Secretary of the Treasury to the newly elected President of the 2nd Bank saying that (of course) the president's loyalties were to the shareholders, not the public (or US) in general. Surprised? Well, even as cynical as I am, I was certainly caught off-guard. Blackwater is presumably the beneficiary of a catch-22 feature of the state action doctrine: It is, like the Bank, fundamentally an instrumentality of the US with regard to immunity from prosecution (more immune, apparently, even than the military). On the other hand, we all know that ordinary constitutional limits don't apply to Blackwater because it is a "private" organization. SO, Blackwater has all the benefits of governmental immunity, without all of those annoying governmental limitations. How convienent.