The Company Formerly Known As Blackwater is now officially the Company Formerly Known As Xe Which Was The Company Formerly Known As Blackwater.

Xe has officially changed its name to Academi. CEO Ted Wright told The Wall Street Journal that he wanted to make the company more boring. Blackwater was frequently in the headlines for events like the 2007 shooting in Baghdad that left 17 dead; the 2004 ambush in  Fallujah that left four Blackwater contractors dead and sparked a bloody invasion of the Iraqi city; the indictment of  five Blackwater officials on  federal weapons charges; and the 2004 airplane crash in Afghanistan that killed three U.S. soldiers.

Much as it did a few years ago with NBC's neglected jewel "Friday Night Lights," DirecTV rescued FX's superb drama "Damages" from the scrap heap last year, promising the show's fans two more seasons of Patty Hewes' mind-bending machinations.

The fourth season of that acclaimed Glenn Close series -- its first on DirecTV -- premieres tomorrow night at 10pm.

Season 4's legal plot involves a lawsuit against a powerful military security contractor, à la Blackwater, with John Goodman playing the Erik Prince role (in a fairly obvious nod, Goodman's character is named Howard Erickson). Chris Messina ("Julie and Julia") plays an Iraq war vet who took a job in Afghanistan with Erickson's High Star Security Corporation. He just happens to be an old high school friend of Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), who is trying to bring about the lawsuit on behalf of families of those killed during questionable High Star missions.

The Nation's Jeremy Scahill reports that Blackwater founder and owner Erik Prince may be moving to the United Arab Emirates. This report comes after Prince announced that he was looking to sell Blackwater, now rebranded as Xe services.

Scahill suggests that Prince would flee the country to avoid prosecution -  the Emirates do not have an extradition treaty with the United States. Five former Blackwater executives were indicted in federal court in Raleigh last month, but neither Prince nor the company have been charged.

What to make of this? Scahill is one of Blackwater's most vocal critics, and the company regularly pooh-poohs his scoops. The report is based on three anonymous sources, so it's a rumor at this point. Still, Scahill, who literally wrote the book on Blackwater, has broken a number of stories on the company: stay tuned.
 

It's back to school for Erik Prince, the founder and owner of the private military firm Blackwater.  

Prince told Vanity Fair that he's through with defense contracting and is turning the company over to its employees and a board. 

What next?

“I’m going to teach high school,” he says, straight-faced.
“History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones
taught school, too.”

Prince also talks about his work for the CIA in the VF article. He's bitter that government insiders leaked details of his classified work to the media. 

This link takes you to a partial archive of the N&O's extensive coverage of Blackwater, dating back to the Fallujah massacre of 2004.