WASHINGTON, Oct 2: Blackwater, the company which is accused of opening fire on Iraqi citizens on 156 occasions, has strong ties to the Bush administration, the US media reported on Tuesday.

The ties that the company has maintained with the administration and prominent Republicans allowed it to increase its annual federal contracts from less than $1 million in 2001 to over $1 billion in 2007.

The reports noted that during this period several senior US officials have left important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the security company.

Reports say Erik Prince, Blackwater’s founder and CEO, and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees. His Freiheit Foundation gave $500,000 to Prison Fellowship Ministries in 2000.

In the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. During college, he interned in George H.W. Bush’s White House, and also for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republic.

Betsy Prince, Erik’s sister, married into the DeVos family, one of America’s biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. Between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration and $531,000 to Focus on the Family, another conservative NGO. Joseph Schmitz, Blackwater’s chief operating officer and general counsel, also had close links to the Bush administration. In 2002, President Bush nominated Mr Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon’s military contracts as the Defence Department’s inspector-general.

J. Cofer Black, the company’s vice-chairman, who spent most of his 28-year CIA career running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, later went to the State Department, and joined Blackwater in 2004.

Mr Black’s work on Afghanistan presentation earned him ‘special access’ to the White House, the Washington Post’s Dana Priest reported in December 2005. Rob Richer, Blackwater’s vice-president for intelligence, was head of the CIA’s Near East division – and the agency’s liaison with King Abdullah of Jordan – from 1999 to 2004.