And as TPM Muckraker points out, he probably wasn't wrong. In fact, even the FBI agents sent to Iraq to investigate Blackwater will be guarded by none other than... Blackwater.

...apparently it's not so hypothetical of a scenario. From The New York Daily News: When a team of FBI agents lands in Baghdad this week to probe Blackwater security contractors for murder, it will be protected by bodyguards from the very same firm, the Daily News has learned. Half a dozen FBI criminal investigators based in Washington are scheduled to travel to Iraq to gather evidence and interview witnesses about a Sept. 16 shooting spree that left at least 11 Iraqi civilians dead. The agents plan to interview witnesses within the relative safety of the fortified Green Zone, but they will be transported outside the compound by Blackwater armored convoys, a source briefed on the FBI mission said. "What happens when the FBI team decides to go visit the crime scene? Blackwater is going to have to take them there," the senior U.S. official told The News.

The absurdity of this scenario wouldn't pass in most quality mob movies. And yet we have a situation where crooks are guarding the cops.

But the focus should really be on Darrell Issa.

What he effectively said is that it is no longer safe for Congress to perform its constitutionally mandated function of government oversight to investigate private, mercenary armies. As Naomi Wolf argues in her groundbreaking book, The End of America and her must-read diary, Blackwater: Are you scared yet? the rise of tyranny is almost always accompanied by the use of a paramilitary force.

Every effective despot -- from Mussolini to Hitler, Stalin, the members of the Chinese Politburo, General Augusto Pinochet and the many Latin American dictators who learned from these models of controlling citizens -- has used this essential means to pressure civilians and intimidate dissent. Mussolini was the innovator in the use of thugs to intimidate what was a democracy, if a fragile one, before he actually marched on Rome; he developed the strategic deployment of blackshirts to beat up communists and opposition leaders, trash newspapers and turn on civilians, forcing ordinary Italians, for instance, to ingest emetics. Hitler studied Mussolini; he deployed thugs -- in the form of brownshirts -- in similar ways before he came formally to power.

Darrell Issa is a two-bit thug. And his comments serve more to intimidate than to reflect any real danger to Mr. Waxman if he were to return to Iraq. But Henry Waxman, and indeed all of us, should heed his warning carefully. Because what he was really saying, with all seriousness, is that a private, mercenary army, available to anyone with a big enough checkbook, including the executive branch, is more powerful, in some circumstances, than the U.S. House of Representatives.

Regardless of the viability of Darrell Issa's threat, it underlines the extreme danger of allowing these private security firms so much power, and the real threat they pose to our democratic way of life.