Oscar
Wilde once described the traditional English gentleman’s pastime of fox
hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.”

I
thought of that great line when I caught news that Monsanto, probably
the globe’s most reviled agribusiness firm, had contracted the services of
Blackwater, the globe’s most notorious “private security” (i.e.,
paramilitary) firm.

Jeremy Scahill,

The Nation‘s ace investigative journalist who has been dogging Blackwater and breaking news on the shadowy company for years, has the goods. Monsanto hired the company in 2008, Scahill reports.

Before

we dig into the story, let’s establish that by 2008, Blackwater had
proven itself to be a really, really dodgy company. Blackwater first
became famous in 2003, soon after the start of the war in Iraq, when
the company flooded the country with armed contractors at the invitation
of the Bush administration, which
had multiple ties to
Blackwater’s right-wing founder, the wealthy heir Erik Prince.
Blackwater quickly involved itself in a long string of violent
incidents, including the killing of 17 unarmed civilians in 2007 in Iraq.
By then, the company’s trigger-happy gunmen had become involved in the
war in Afghanistan and even in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The
2007 atrocity in Iraq wrecked the company’s reputation, forcing it
change its name to the unpronounceable Xe and break into what

The New
York Times recently called “a
web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries [created] in part to obtain
millions of dollars in American government contracts.” (None of this
has stopped the Obama administration from continuing to work with
Blackwater and its shell companies; last year, Scahill reported that Blackwater was on the ground in Pakistan on a U.S. contract.)

Into
this unsavory milieu stepped Monsanto in 2008, Scahill reports. The
agribusiness giant was one of a group of transnationals — others
include Chevron, the Walt Disney Company, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines,
Deutsche Bank, and Barclays — that hired a Blackwater shell company
called “Total Intelligence Solutions” for overseas services.