Most major news outlets are reporting today that some Blackwater guards involved the Sept. 16th shooting have been given immunity under strange circumstances. The State Department investigators from the agency's investigative arm, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, offered the immunity grants even though they did not have the authority to do so, the officials said. Prosecutors at the Justice Department, who do have such authority, had no advance knowledge of the arrangement, they added. Most of the guards who took part in the Sept. 16 shooting were offered what officials described as limited-use immunity, which means that they were promised that they would not be prosecuted for anything they said in their interviews with the authorities as long as their statements were true. The immunity offers were first reported Monday by The Associated Press. Giving contractors immunity sets a bad precedent. Too many of them will think they can get away with anything. The civilian shootings may continue, and who knows if anybody will be held accountable. How important is accountability and responsiveness in a war zone? So important that the military is probably one of the most hierarchical organizations on earth. But now, not only are we losing control of our hired guns while they're on the battlefield, we could be letting them off after the fact. This is our foreign policy we're talking about. These guys can shoot anyone they want if they aren't punished. They say they're doing it on behalf of the United States, but they don't really answer to us if they aren't punished for doing something nobody wanted them to do. They're making foreign policy for us (see this argument better developed by Paul Verkuil in Outsourcing Sovereignty. I can't think of an instance where military personnel or government employees (political appointees excluded) had been offered the same deal. In fact, the contractors involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal got off just as easily, whereas the military personnel were severely disciplined, according to Verkuil. A pattern is developing. Structural forces are probably at work. So perhaps the drawbacks of using contractors over public employees aren't quite as small and insignificant as some see.