On Monday we learned that Mike Huckabee has been accused of covering up his son’s brutal killing of a stray dog years ago. Now there is word that handlers of security service dogs employed by Blackwater, the paramilitary mercenary group with exclusive, high-level and pervasive ties to the Republican Party — and that has received over $100 million in no-bid contracts from the Bush administration — shot a dog that lived at the New York Times bureau in Baghdad:

Investigators from the State Department have made two visits to The New York Times’s news bureau in Baghdad as they look into the shooting of one of the bureau’s dogs by Blackwater bodyguards last week.

Employees of the bureau said that the Blackwater guards shot the dog, named Hentish, during a search of the Times compound for explosives. A security team was conducting the search ahead of a visit by an American diplomat.

Anne Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Blackwater, the private security firm, told Reuters that the dog had attacked one of Blackwater’s bomb-sniffing dogs.

“The K-9 handler made several unsuccessful attempts to get the dog to retreat, including placing himself between the dogs,” she said in an e-mail to Reuters. “When those efforts failed, the K-9 handler unfortunately was forced to use a pistol to protect the company’s K-9 and himself.”

It apparently didn’t occur to the Blackwater dog handler to remove the service dog from the area so that someone Hentish trusted could secure him inside. Or maybe saving the dog’s life was considered a waste of Blackwater’s precious time.

I guess we should take comfort that the Blackwater goon didn’t torture Hentish before shooting him.