Clemson Tigers' Blackwater Connection

If you look closely at Blackwater's website , you'll see a slight change. It's barely perceptible, but it is there. Apparently, in an attempt to soften its deadly cowboy ways, the outfit is changing its logo from a bear track in crosshairs of a rifle scope to a softer, less-butch version of the original that looks exactly like the Clemson Tigers logo. Well, almost.

The company said the decision to update its logo was made long before Sept. 16, the day a Blackwater took down 17 Iraqis in Baghdad. But the new logo did not appear on Blackwater's website until after the incident, a Blackwater spokeswoman said.

 The New York Times:  

The rifle-scope crosshairs so obvious in the old Blackwater logo have been reduced to a set of horizontal elipses that bracket, but no longer enclose, the paw print, which has also changed to more closely resemble an actual bear-paw imprint. The original Blackwater logo had thick white serif lettering draped over the crosshairs on a menacing black field. The new logo separates the image and the letters, which now appear in buttoned-down sans-serif black and slightly italicized on a white field.

"I would say it's a highly significant change; they're repositioning themselves," said Lauren Miller, the owner of MDesign, a graphic design firm in New York. "The old logo suggests that they're targeting people. The new logo is a more ambiguous, more safe corporate logo."

Blackwater's spokeswoman said the logo was the same, "just modernized." To that, we say: Bullshit! Just admit that the Clemson Tigers are a Blackwater farm team.

Blackwater Softens Its Logo From Macho to Corporate [The New York Times]