Remember when those Blackwater mercenaries shot up those Iraqi civilians and were ordered out of the country? Well slap my thigh if they aren’t already back on the street of Baghdad.

Blackwater operate with enviable an impunity. Imagine the larks you could get up to with their mandate for mayhem. This is from the latest Private Eye (still not online, dammit):

[Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri] Al-Maliki has already tried (and failed) to impose his will on Blackwater. When he said last week that he was revoking its licence because of the shootings, it turned out Blackwater didn’t even have a current licence. When its old one ran out in 2005 and the Iraqi government had ‘impeded’ its application for a new one, Blackwater simply continued sending armed men on to the streets of Iraq and the US government continued to pay for them.

Further humiliation for the Iraqis came last Christmas when an off-duty Blackwater man got drunk and shot dead the personal bodyguard of Iraq’s vice president, Dr Adil Abdul Mahdi. The Blackwater guard was then spirited out of Iraq without charge.

In fairness, who hasn’t done something stupid after a few brewskis? In my callow, fresh-off-the-leash youth as a fresher at polytechnic, drunk on life and copious amount of cheap alcohol, my (short-lived) party piece du twat was shaking cans of lager and letting them off on the student union dancefloor. The difference between my antics and those of Blackwater is that mine never failed to get me ejected from the premises.