Recently disclosed documents have spilled the beans on the activities of US security contractors, revealing offenses committed by more than 200 security contract employees in different countries.
The documents obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act highlighted previously kept secret offences committed by personnel working under a broad State Department security services contract in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries between 2004 and 2008.
The security service contracts were shared by private security firms such as DynCorp of Falls Church, Va., Triple Canopy of Reston, Va., and Blackwater Worldwide -- now called Xe Services of Moyock, NC.
Most of the incidents included excessive drinking, drug use, sexual misconduct, and mishandling of weapons -- all of which are considered violations of corporate and US policies.
In one incident on September 9, 2005, five DynCorp International security guards assigned to protect Afghan President Hamid Karzai returned to their compound drunk at 2 in the morning, accompanied by a prostitute.
Less than a week later, three of the same five guards got drunk in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight to Thailand.
Afghanistan's deputy director for elections and a foreign diplomat were also present in the airport lounge.
Such incidents are widely viewed as damaging the US reputation which is already accused of launching a privatized war in the Middle East.
Kabul has confirmed the presence of 52 foreign private security companies, including the notorious American security firm Xe Services.
Karzai has ordered all security companies to be disbanded by the end of this year.
Most of the security contractors are believed to have close ties with Afghan warlords and are also accused of contributing to the rising number of civilian casualties in the country.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Blackwater killings: 'US at fault'
Private security company, now known as Xe Services, says responsibilty for 2007 Iraq killings lies with US government.
The security company formerly known as Blackwater has told a US federal judge that the US government, and not the company itself, should be held accountable for a 2007 shooting by its contractors that killed 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square in Baghdad.
Lawyers for the company, now known as Xe Services, argued in court on Thursday that Blackwater contractors were essentially acting as employees of the US government because they were providing security to State Department personnel.
The North Carolina-based company and several of its contractors are seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit that was filed on behalf of three people killed in the shooting: Ali Kinani, Abrahem Abed Al Mafraje and Mahde Sahab Naser Shamake. The lawsuit accuses the parties of wrongful death and negligence, and seeks punitive damages.
But attorney Andrew Pincus argued the sensitive nature of providing security in a war zone required the kind of oversight the government normally reserves for its own employees, as opposed to the duties performed by other types of contractors.
'Not food service'
"This isn't food service, where we can sort of leave it to the chefs," he said.
Lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the government disputed the contractors' argument, saying the practical effect of transferring the focus of the lawsuit to the federal government would be its dismissal.
The federal government is exempt from such lawsuits.
Judge Terrence W. Boyle did not immediately rule on the motions in the case, but said the most important issue seems to be whether the government is ultimately responsible for the actions of its contractors.
"If the government can cut the cord and let that drift off into space, that's one world," he said. "But it's a different world if the government has to be held accountable."
In separate motions, lawyers for Blackwater and the contractors argued they cannot be sued by foreigners for something that happened in a foreign country governed by foreign law. They also argue that Iraqi law prohibits such lawsuits.
Prosecutors say the contractors unleashed an unprovoked attack on civilians using machine guns and grenades.
The five men were initially charged with manslaughter for their role in the 2007 Nisoor Square shooting, which strained relations between Baghdad and Washington.
A year ago, however, a federal judge dismissed those charges, citing missteps by the government.
A sixth contractor, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty in the criminal case.
He filed a separate defense in the civil lawsuit, arguing that the federal court in North Carolina has no jurisdiction to hear the case.
Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services in March, saying its brand had been tarnished by its work in Iraq. The company settled a separate series of federal lawsuits earlier this year connected to the Nisour Square shooting and other controversial incidents in Iraq.
Change in ownership
In addition to the change in name, Xe Services has also sought to distance itself from its controversial founder, Erik Prince.
The former Navy Seal resigned from his post as the company's CEO in March 2009, but stayed on as chairman.
The controversy over allegations of murder and bribery have continued, and the company has been looking for new ownership.
In 2009, Blackwater was barred from Iraqfor "excessive force". US government documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks in October revealed another 14 incidents, in addition to the Nisour Square shooting, in which Blackwater shot at civilians in Iraq.
Despite its record, a front company for Xe was awarded another lucrative contract by the US government in recent months.
The security company formerly known as Blackwater has told a US federal judge that the US government, and not the company itself, should be held accountable for a 2007 shooting by its contractors that killed 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square in Baghdad.
Lawyers for the company, now known as Xe Services, argued in court on Thursday that Blackwater contractors were essentially acting as employees of the US government because they were providing security to State Department personnel.
The North Carolina-based company and several of its contractors are seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit that was filed on behalf of three people killed in the shooting: Ali Kinani, Abrahem Abed Al Mafraje and Mahde Sahab Naser Shamake. The lawsuit accuses the parties of wrongful death and negligence, and seeks punitive damages.
But attorney Andrew Pincus argued the sensitive nature of providing security in a war zone required the kind of oversight the government normally reserves for its own employees, as opposed to the duties performed by other types of contractors.
'Not food service'
"This isn't food service, where we can sort of leave it to the chefs," he said.
Lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the government disputed the contractors' argument, saying the practical effect of transferring the focus of the lawsuit to the federal government would be its dismissal.
The federal government is exempt from such lawsuits.
Judge Terrence W. Boyle did not immediately rule on the motions in the case, but said the most important issue seems to be whether the government is ultimately responsible for the actions of its contractors.
"If the government can cut the cord and let that drift off into space, that's one world," he said. "But it's a different world if the government has to be held accountable."
In separate motions, lawyers for Blackwater and the contractors argued they cannot be sued by foreigners for something that happened in a foreign country governed by foreign law. They also argue that Iraqi law prohibits such lawsuits.
Prosecutors say the contractors unleashed an unprovoked attack on civilians using machine guns and grenades.
The five men were initially charged with manslaughter for their role in the 2007 Nisoor Square shooting, which strained relations between Baghdad and Washington.
A year ago, however, a federal judge dismissed those charges, citing missteps by the government.
A sixth contractor, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty in the criminal case.
He filed a separate defense in the civil lawsuit, arguing that the federal court in North Carolina has no jurisdiction to hear the case.
Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services in March, saying its brand had been tarnished by its work in Iraq. The company settled a separate series of federal lawsuits earlier this year connected to the Nisour Square shooting and other controversial incidents in Iraq.
Change in ownership
In addition to the change in name, Xe Services has also sought to distance itself from its controversial founder, Erik Prince.
The former Navy Seal resigned from his post as the company's CEO in March 2009, but stayed on as chairman.
The controversy over allegations of murder and bribery have continued, and the company has been looking for new ownership.
In 2009, Blackwater was barred from Iraqfor "excessive force". US government documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks in October revealed another 14 incidents, in addition to the Nisour Square shooting, in which Blackwater shot at civilians in Iraq.
Despite its record, a front company for Xe was awarded another lucrative contract by the US government in recent months.
Contractors behaving badly mean headaches for US
WASHINGTON (AP) — At two in the morning on Sept. 9, 2005, five DynCorp International security guards assigned to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's protective detail returned to their compound drunk, with a prostitute in tow. Less than a week later, three of these same guards got drunk again, this time in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight to Thailand.
"They had been intoxicated, loud and obnoxious," according to an internal company report of the incident, which noted that Afghanistan's deputy director for elections and a foreign diplomat were also in the lounge. "Complaints were made regarding the situation." DynCorp fired the three guards.
Such episodes represent the headaches that U.S. contractors can cause in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They are indispensable to the State Department's mission overseas, handling security, transportation, construction, food service and more. But when hired hands behave badly — or break the law — they cast a cloud over the American presence.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad State Department security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va., Triple Canopy of Reston, Va., and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide — Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.
Most of the infractions, which include excessive drinking, drug use, sexual misconduct, and mishandling weapons, were violations of corporate and U.S. policies that probably went unnoticed by ordinary Afghans and Iraqis. But other offenses played out in public, undermining U.S. efforts in both countries and raising questions about how carefully job candidates are screened.
Despite complaints from foreign capitals about reckless behavior and heavy-handed tactics, U.S. contractors are more important than ever.
In Iraq, the departure of U.S. combat forces has left a security and logistics support vacuum to be filled by the private sector. In testimony to the independent Wartime Contracting Commission in June, a State Department official said as many as 7,000 security contractors — more than double the current number — will be needed to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other offices across Iraq.
Karzai had to back away from the Friday deadline he had set to ban security contractors after Western diplomats said the move threatened the completion of billions of dollars worth of critical reconstruction projects that need to be protected from insurgent attacks.
In 2009, DynCorp employees working under a separate State Department contract to train Afghan police would be the source of more trouble. A diplomatic report disclosed by the WikiLeaks organization described a panicked Afghan minister urging U.S. officials to stop The Washington Post from running a story about DynCorp workers who had hired an Afghan teenage boy to dance at a company party. Videotape of the event showed more than a dozen DynCorp workers cheering the teenage dancer on as he moved around a single employee sitting on a chair, according to the Post story, which ran in July 2009.
Interior Minister Hanif Atmar claimed the embarrassing publicity could cause a backlash in Afghanistan and "endanger lives."
DynCorp is one of the department's most prominent vendors. More than one-third of the company's $3.1 billion in 2009 revenues came from State Department contracts for armed security, law enforcement training and aviation services, according to the company's latest annual report. The police training contract alone is valued at $651 million.
DynCorp fired four senior managers for the dancing episode, which it said was "culturally inappropriate" and reflected poor judgment by the employees.
"No company can guarantee that their employees will behave perfectly at all times, under all conditions," DynCorp spokeswoman Ashley Burke said. "What we can guarantee is that we will clearly define expectations, train our employees according to those expectations and hold people accountable for their behaviors."
U.S. contractors have sought to improve their reputation through advocacy groups such as the Professional Services Council and the International Stability Operations Association, both based in Washington. In Geneva last month, more than 50 companies that work in war zones signed an international code of conduct to improve openness and accountability.
Ignacio Balderas, Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, said his company will push to ensure the code gains worldwide acceptance "and becomes an integral part of how the industry operates."
But reversing entrenched attitudes isn't easy. In a telling assessment of how U.S. contractors are viewed, Atmar, who Karzai dismissed as interior minister in June, reported that "these contractor companies do not have many friends."
The documents obtained by AP help to show why.
In March 2008, Blackwater guards forced an Afghan soldier to the ground and handcuffed him after he refused to let their vehicle pass through a checkpoint at the Kabul airport because they didn't have proper identification. A 13-page report by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul describes a tense confrontation between the Blackwater personnel and Afghan troops that could have resulted in a gun battle.
The confrontation caused "significant damage" to the embassy's reputation with the Afghan National Army, the report said. The embassy ordered the firing of the two Blackwater guards it said were most responsible.
In early 2006, when U.S. authorities were stressing the importance of cultural sensitivity in Iraq, a Blackwater contractor was openly hostile to Iraqis, according to a company record. During a detail at Iraq's ministry of water, he refused to shake hands with the ministry's chief of security, accusing the Iraqi official of being "part of the (expletive) Mahdi militia," a reference to a paramilitary force loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
A month later, the same employee repeatedly disrupted a class on Iraqi culture, accusing the instructor of "spreading propaganda." He was fired after that for being "unable to act professionally" toward the Iraqis, State Department employees, and co-workers, according to the document.
In March 2005, a fired Blackwater contractor who was in a hotel in Jordan awaiting a flight back to the U.S. ignored a supervisor's order to stay in his room until his plane was ready to leave. He got drunk and fought with several Jordanians, spit at and tore down a picture of Jordan's King Abdullah, and was arrested. Blackwater managers escorted him from the jail to the airport.
Blackwater eventually lost its license to operate as guardian of U.S. diplomats in Iraq after its security guards were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.
In a written statement, Xe said it maintains high standards of conduct. When company policy is violated, "disciplinary actions are taken up to and including termination from employment," the company said.
On Friday, the investment group USTC Holdings announced it had bought Xe in a deal that includes the company's training facility in North Carolina. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"They had been intoxicated, loud and obnoxious," according to an internal company report of the incident, which noted that Afghanistan's deputy director for elections and a foreign diplomat were also in the lounge. "Complaints were made regarding the situation." DynCorp fired the three guards.
Such episodes represent the headaches that U.S. contractors can cause in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They are indispensable to the State Department's mission overseas, handling security, transportation, construction, food service and more. But when hired hands behave badly — or break the law — they cast a cloud over the American presence.
Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad State Department security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va., Triple Canopy of Reston, Va., and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide — Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.
Most of the infractions, which include excessive drinking, drug use, sexual misconduct, and mishandling weapons, were violations of corporate and U.S. policies that probably went unnoticed by ordinary Afghans and Iraqis. But other offenses played out in public, undermining U.S. efforts in both countries and raising questions about how carefully job candidates are screened.
Despite complaints from foreign capitals about reckless behavior and heavy-handed tactics, U.S. contractors are more important than ever.
In Iraq, the departure of U.S. combat forces has left a security and logistics support vacuum to be filled by the private sector. In testimony to the independent Wartime Contracting Commission in June, a State Department official said as many as 7,000 security contractors — more than double the current number — will be needed to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other offices across Iraq.
Karzai had to back away from the Friday deadline he had set to ban security contractors after Western diplomats said the move threatened the completion of billions of dollars worth of critical reconstruction projects that need to be protected from insurgent attacks.
In 2009, DynCorp employees working under a separate State Department contract to train Afghan police would be the source of more trouble. A diplomatic report disclosed by the WikiLeaks organization described a panicked Afghan minister urging U.S. officials to stop The Washington Post from running a story about DynCorp workers who had hired an Afghan teenage boy to dance at a company party. Videotape of the event showed more than a dozen DynCorp workers cheering the teenage dancer on as he moved around a single employee sitting on a chair, according to the Post story, which ran in July 2009.
Interior Minister Hanif Atmar claimed the embarrassing publicity could cause a backlash in Afghanistan and "endanger lives."
DynCorp is one of the department's most prominent vendors. More than one-third of the company's $3.1 billion in 2009 revenues came from State Department contracts for armed security, law enforcement training and aviation services, according to the company's latest annual report. The police training contract alone is valued at $651 million.
DynCorp fired four senior managers for the dancing episode, which it said was "culturally inappropriate" and reflected poor judgment by the employees.
"No company can guarantee that their employees will behave perfectly at all times, under all conditions," DynCorp spokeswoman Ashley Burke said. "What we can guarantee is that we will clearly define expectations, train our employees according to those expectations and hold people accountable for their behaviors."
U.S. contractors have sought to improve their reputation through advocacy groups such as the Professional Services Council and the International Stability Operations Association, both based in Washington. In Geneva last month, more than 50 companies that work in war zones signed an international code of conduct to improve openness and accountability.
Ignacio Balderas, Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, said his company will push to ensure the code gains worldwide acceptance "and becomes an integral part of how the industry operates."
But reversing entrenched attitudes isn't easy. In a telling assessment of how U.S. contractors are viewed, Atmar, who Karzai dismissed as interior minister in June, reported that "these contractor companies do not have many friends."
The documents obtained by AP help to show why.
In March 2008, Blackwater guards forced an Afghan soldier to the ground and handcuffed him after he refused to let their vehicle pass through a checkpoint at the Kabul airport because they didn't have proper identification. A 13-page report by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul describes a tense confrontation between the Blackwater personnel and Afghan troops that could have resulted in a gun battle.
The confrontation caused "significant damage" to the embassy's reputation with the Afghan National Army, the report said. The embassy ordered the firing of the two Blackwater guards it said were most responsible.
In early 2006, when U.S. authorities were stressing the importance of cultural sensitivity in Iraq, a Blackwater contractor was openly hostile to Iraqis, according to a company record. During a detail at Iraq's ministry of water, he refused to shake hands with the ministry's chief of security, accusing the Iraqi official of being "part of the (expletive) Mahdi militia," a reference to a paramilitary force loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
A month later, the same employee repeatedly disrupted a class on Iraqi culture, accusing the instructor of "spreading propaganda." He was fired after that for being "unable to act professionally" toward the Iraqis, State Department employees, and co-workers, according to the document.
In March 2005, a fired Blackwater contractor who was in a hotel in Jordan awaiting a flight back to the U.S. ignored a supervisor's order to stay in his room until his plane was ready to leave. He got drunk and fought with several Jordanians, spit at and tore down a picture of Jordan's King Abdullah, and was arrested. Blackwater managers escorted him from the jail to the airport.
Blackwater eventually lost its license to operate as guardian of U.S. diplomats in Iraq after its security guards were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.
In a written statement, Xe said it maintains high standards of conduct. When company policy is violated, "disciplinary actions are taken up to and including termination from employment," the company said.
On Friday, the investment group USTC Holdings announced it had bought Xe in a deal that includes the company's training facility in North Carolina. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
More examples of contractor headaches at a glance
By The Associated Press
-- Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees of the State Department in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va.; Triple Canopy of Reston, Va.; and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide - Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.
Some examples of the offenses:
-In March 2006, two guards working for Triple Canopy were involved a gunfight outside a club called the Soft Lady in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, according to a report of the incident.
They went to the bar to meet friends. In keeping with the club's policy, they locked their weapons inside their vehicle. Once inside, an unknown man with a gun confronted one of the Triple Canopy guards and shot him at least twice before running from the club. The uninjured guard helped his partner to their vehicle outside, where they came under fire "from an unknown number of assailants shooting from behind two parked cars," the report said. The guards now had access to their own weapons and they returned fire. Once they did, the attackers took off.
The injured Triple Canopy guard was taken to the hospital, where he survived, according to the report. Both men were ordered out of the country and barred from working on the security contract for unprofessional conduct and lack of judgment.
-An unidentified weapon was "test fired" by a Blackwater aircraft in January 2005 near the home of an Iraqi official, who is not named in the records describing the incident. U.S. officials in Baghdad ordered the pilot and the aircraft's gunner dismissed. Several months later, however, Fred Piry, then a senior State Department official, reinstated both contractors "after a careful review of the incident." The records don't say what information caused Piry to reverse the earlier decision.
-In March 2008, three DynCorp employees in Iraq were fired after a flare was shot from their vehicle at a truck being driven by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. An inquiry by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad found that the use of the flare was justified in stopping the truck, which was being driven erratically. But the employees were sacked because they initially lied to investigators, claiming they hadn't shot the flare or witnessed anyone else doing so
-- Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees of the State Department in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va.; Triple Canopy of Reston, Va.; and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide - Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.
Some examples of the offenses:
-In March 2006, two guards working for Triple Canopy were involved a gunfight outside a club called the Soft Lady in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, according to a report of the incident.
They went to the bar to meet friends. In keeping with the club's policy, they locked their weapons inside their vehicle. Once inside, an unknown man with a gun confronted one of the Triple Canopy guards and shot him at least twice before running from the club. The uninjured guard helped his partner to their vehicle outside, where they came under fire "from an unknown number of assailants shooting from behind two parked cars," the report said. The guards now had access to their own weapons and they returned fire. Once they did, the attackers took off.
The injured Triple Canopy guard was taken to the hospital, where he survived, according to the report. Both men were ordered out of the country and barred from working on the security contract for unprofessional conduct and lack of judgment.
-An unidentified weapon was "test fired" by a Blackwater aircraft in January 2005 near the home of an Iraqi official, who is not named in the records describing the incident. U.S. officials in Baghdad ordered the pilot and the aircraft's gunner dismissed. Several months later, however, Fred Piry, then a senior State Department official, reinstated both contractors "after a careful review of the incident." The records don't say what information caused Piry to reverse the earlier decision.
-In March 2008, three DynCorp employees in Iraq were fired after a flare was shot from their vehicle at a truck being driven by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. An inquiry by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad found that the use of the flare was justified in stopping the truck, which was being driven erratically. But the employees were sacked because they initially lied to investigators, claiming they hadn't shot the flare or witnessed anyone else doing so
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Blackwater Founder in Deal to Sell Company
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and BEN PROTESS
Erik D. Prince, founder of the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, has reached a deal to sell his embattled firm to a small group of investors based in Los Angeles who have close ties to Mr. Prince, according to people briefed on the deal.
Blackwater, now called Xe Services, was once the United States’ go-to contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been under intense pressure since 2007, when Blackwater guards were accused of killing 17 civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The company, its executives and personnel have faced civil lawsuits, criminal charges and congressional investigations surrounding accusations of murder and bribery. In April, federal prosecutors announced weapons charges against five former senior Blackwater executives, including its former president.
The sale, which is expected to be announced on Friday, came after the State Department threatened to stop awarding contracts to the company as long as Mr. Prince owned the firm, people involved in the discussions said. These people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the confidential talks. The sale is intended to help shake the stigma associated with its ownership under Mr. Prince.
Yet questions remain about Mr. Prince’s continuing relationship with the company. While he is expected to step down from any management or operational role, he will have a financial interest in the company’s future, according to people briefed on the negotiations. As part of the deal, he will be paid an “earn out,” or a payment that depends on the company’s financial performance over the next several years, these people said.
One of the lead investors in the deal is Jason DeYonker of Forté Capital Advisors, who has a long relationship with Mr. Prince and Blackwater. He helped advise Mr. Prince in his development of Blackwater’s business plan when the company was founded and helped negotiate the company’s first training contracts with United States government agencies and the company’s expansion of its training center in Moyock, N.C. In addition, he managed the Prince family’s money from 1998 to 2002. The other lead investor is Manhattan Growth Partners, a private equity firm in New York.
Exact terms of the deal could not be learned, but people involved in the talks said the transaction was worth about $200 million. Bank of America led the financing of the transaction, these people said.
Mr. Prince, a former Navy Seal who created Blackwater in 1997, put his company up for sale in June and moved his family to Abu Dhabi, court records show. Mr. Prince, who built Blackwater using an inheritance from his family’s Michigan auto parts fortune, stepped aside as Xe’s chief executive in 2009 but has remained chairman until now. Mr. Prince sold the company’s aviation division, Presidential Airways, to the AAR Corporation in March.
The auction for Xe Services has dragged on for months as speculation has swirled about the company’s future and the auction process. Some bidders speculated that Mr. Prince had always favored selling the company to the investor group led by Mr. DeYonker.
The new buyers are hoping to recast the company as a military training organization instead of a private security service. The company’s training center in Moyock has trained more than 50,000 United States government personnel and allied forces. The buyers hope to receive new contracts to train forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, among other locations, especially as the United States withdraws troops and needs to train local forces.
After the sale, the company will continue to be subject to an agreement it reached with the State Department in August. Under the settlement, the company paid $42 million in fines over hundreds of violations of United States export control regulations, permitting it to continue to compete for government contracts.
Wendy Wysong, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance, was appointed as a special compliance officer for Xe Services as a result of the settlement.
James Risen contributed reporting.
Erik D. Prince, founder of the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, has reached a deal to sell his embattled firm to a small group of investors based in Los Angeles who have close ties to Mr. Prince, according to people briefed on the deal.
Blackwater, now called Xe Services, was once the United States’ go-to contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been under intense pressure since 2007, when Blackwater guards were accused of killing 17 civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The company, its executives and personnel have faced civil lawsuits, criminal charges and congressional investigations surrounding accusations of murder and bribery. In April, federal prosecutors announced weapons charges against five former senior Blackwater executives, including its former president.
The sale, which is expected to be announced on Friday, came after the State Department threatened to stop awarding contracts to the company as long as Mr. Prince owned the firm, people involved in the discussions said. These people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the confidential talks. The sale is intended to help shake the stigma associated with its ownership under Mr. Prince.
Yet questions remain about Mr. Prince’s continuing relationship with the company. While he is expected to step down from any management or operational role, he will have a financial interest in the company’s future, according to people briefed on the negotiations. As part of the deal, he will be paid an “earn out,” or a payment that depends on the company’s financial performance over the next several years, these people said.
One of the lead investors in the deal is Jason DeYonker of Forté Capital Advisors, who has a long relationship with Mr. Prince and Blackwater. He helped advise Mr. Prince in his development of Blackwater’s business plan when the company was founded and helped negotiate the company’s first training contracts with United States government agencies and the company’s expansion of its training center in Moyock, N.C. In addition, he managed the Prince family’s money from 1998 to 2002. The other lead investor is Manhattan Growth Partners, a private equity firm in New York.
Exact terms of the deal could not be learned, but people involved in the talks said the transaction was worth about $200 million. Bank of America led the financing of the transaction, these people said.
Mr. Prince, a former Navy Seal who created Blackwater in 1997, put his company up for sale in June and moved his family to Abu Dhabi, court records show. Mr. Prince, who built Blackwater using an inheritance from his family’s Michigan auto parts fortune, stepped aside as Xe’s chief executive in 2009 but has remained chairman until now. Mr. Prince sold the company’s aviation division, Presidential Airways, to the AAR Corporation in March.
The auction for Xe Services has dragged on for months as speculation has swirled about the company’s future and the auction process. Some bidders speculated that Mr. Prince had always favored selling the company to the investor group led by Mr. DeYonker.
The new buyers are hoping to recast the company as a military training organization instead of a private security service. The company’s training center in Moyock has trained more than 50,000 United States government personnel and allied forces. The buyers hope to receive new contracts to train forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, among other locations, especially as the United States withdraws troops and needs to train local forces.
After the sale, the company will continue to be subject to an agreement it reached with the State Department in August. Under the settlement, the company paid $42 million in fines over hundreds of violations of United States export control regulations, permitting it to continue to compete for government contracts.
Wendy Wysong, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance, was appointed as a special compliance officer for Xe Services as a result of the settlement.
James Risen contributed reporting.
America's New Mercenaries
Tim Shorrock Wed Dec 15, 10:39 pm ET
NEW YORK – As American commanders meet this week for the Afghanistan review, Obama is hiring military contractors at a rate that would make Bush blush. Tim Shorrock on the Blackwater heirs.
Top U.S. commanders are meeting this week to plan for the next phase of the Afghanistan war. In Iraq, meanwhile, gains are tentative and in danger of unraveling.
Both wars have been fought with the help of private military and intelligence contractors. But despite the troubles of Blackwater in particular – charges of corruption and killing of civilians—and continuing controversy over military outsourcing in general, private sector armies are as involved as ever.
Without much notice or debate, the Obama administration has greatly expanded the outsourcing of key parts of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East and Africa, and as a result, for its secretive air war and special operations missions around the world, the U.S. has become increasingly reliant on a new breed of specialized companies that are virtually unknown to the American public, yet carry out vital U.S. missions abroad.
Companies such as Blackbird Technologies, Glevum Associates, K2 Solutions, and others have won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military and intelligence contracts in recent years to provide technology, information on insurgents, Special Forces training, and personnel rescue. They win their work through the large, established prime contractors, but are tasked with missions only companies with specific skills and background in covert and counterinsurgency can accomplish.
Some observers fear that the widespread use of contractors for U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Horn of Africa could deepen the secrecy surrounding the American presence in those regions, making it harder for Congress to provide proper oversight.
Even in Iraq, where the U.S. has ended combat operations, the government is "greatly expanding" its use of private security companies, creating "an entirely new role for contractors on the battlefield," Michael Thibault, the co-chairman of the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting, recently warned Congress.
Blackbird, which is staffed by former CIA operatives, is a key contractor in a highly classified program that sends secret teams into enemy territory to rescue downed or captured U.S. soldiers.
Among the companies getting contracts is Blackbird, which is staffed by former CIA operatives, and is a key contractor in a highly classified program that sends secret teams into enemy territory to rescue downed or captured U.S. soldiers.
Glevum, meanwhile, fields a small army of analysts in Iraq and Afghanistan who provide the U.S. military with what the company opaquely describes as "information operations and influence activities."
And K2 is a highly sought-after subcontractor and trainer for the most secretive units of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, including the SEAL team that rescued the crew of the Maersk Alabama from a gang of pirates last year. It is based near the Army's Special Forces headquarters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was founded by Lane Kjellsen, a former Special Forces soldier.
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander of conventional and special forces in the war zones, is using contractors because "he wants an organization that reports directly to him," said a former top aide to the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, the umbrella organization for all Special Forces. "Everyone knows Petraeus can't execute his strategy without the private sector." The former aide spoke on the condition that he not be identified, saying his career could be jeopardized if he went public. The International Security Assistance Force, the general's home command, did not respond to a request for comment.
The use of contractors could become a serious problem if controversies about them are not addressed, a senior British official warned during a recent visit to Washington. Pauline Neville-Jones, the U.K.'s minister of state for security and counterterrorism (and a former executive with QinetiQ PLC, a major intelligence contractor), told an audience at the Brookings Institution that "we have something of a crisis in Afghanistan" partly because of the "largely unregulated private sector security companies performing important roles" there.
The Pentagon's Central Command had nearly 225,000 contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan and other areas at last count, doing tasks ranging from providing security to base support. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency field thousands more under classified contracts that are not publicly disclosed, but extend into every U.S. military command around the world. (According to reports in The Nation and elsewhere, Blackwater, which is now known as Xe, has contracted to send personnel into Pakistan to fight with the Joint Special Operations Command, although a command spokesman said the reports were "totally wrong.")
In response to a question from The Daily Beast, Neville-Jones said that American and British forces must work out "the operational rules and roles that they have when they are in the frontline." Unless that happens, "We are in danger of getting up against Geneva Convention problems and failure to observe fundamental rules of war."
A spokesman for SOCOM would not say exactly how many people work on its contracts, but did say that between 2001 and 2009, SOCOM's budget has grown from about $3 billion to about $10 billion. Neither SOCOM nor Special Operations forces outsource combat operations, the spokesman said. "About the only contractors Special Operations forces might have with them on operations are interpreters," he said.
However, private contractors are now fulfilling vital functions previously done by the military itself.
Blackbird is a case in point. Based in Herndon, Virginia, a stone's throw from the CIA, Blackbird deploys dozens of former CIA operatives and provides "technology solutions" to military and intelligence agencies. Much of the company's revenue—including a $450 million contract awarded last year by the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command—comes from the deployment of special teams and equipment into enemy territory to rescue American soldiers who have been captured by Taliban or al Qaeda units or have stranded after losing their helicopters in battle.
Until recently, the task of rescuing American soldiers was largely carried out by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recommended that the agency's parent command in Virginia be closed. If the recovery agency is shut down, Blackbird would likely pick up the rescue business as it is outsourced. In that case, recovery of captured or stranded American soldiers "won't be a military command anymore; it will be a business," said the former Special Operations command aide (an agency spokesman said, "It's too early to say what will happen.")
Blackbird is run by CEO Peggy Styer, an investor once labeled a "serial defense entrepreneur" by CNN. Last year, she hired Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, to a senior position. (Black hired and managed some of the first private operatives to enter Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and later joined Blackwater.) Perhaps anticipating a pickup in future business, a venture-capital fund launched by Styer and two other Blackbird founders recently raised $21 million on Wall Street. Blackbird did not return phone calls or emails.
Glevum Associates, for its part, has won contracts for controversial intelligence-gathering work.
The Boston-based company was founded in 2006 by Andrew Garfield, a former British intelligence officer with counterinsurgency experience in Northern Ireland. Garfield first gained public notice in 2004, when he was a key player in the Lincoln Group, a defense contractor that became notorious for engaging in a covert psychological operation to plant stories in the Iraqi press that put a positive spin on America and the U.S. war effort in Iraq. (Covert psychological operations are known in the trade as psy-ops.)
Garfield won his first contracts for Glevum as an adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq. Drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland, his company began researching the views of Iraqi citizens toward the U.S. military. At the time, "no one was doing systematic target audience research," he told me in an interview.
Glevum's contribution to counterinsurgency efforts is a trademarked program called "Face-to-face Research Analysis" that combines intelligence collection with polls and interviews, primarily for the Army's Human Terrain System—a system that some American social scientists have described as unethical because information gleaned from anthropological researchers ultimately can be used to kill people.
Garfield denies the charge. The U.S. military, he told me, can't "connect opinions to location." Rather, the military uses his information "to focus their operations the right way and to provide solutions that Afghans would choose." Several experts on the program said it's impossible to divorce it from other—bloodier—counterinsurgency efforts. "HTS has been an intelligence-funded program from the beginning," said John Stanton, a Virginia military analyst who has written extensively about the system.
(Glevum's corporate partners include primary contractors BAE Systems and ManTech International. K2, which declined to comment, also wins much of its classified work as a subcontractor for larger companies such as Boeing and CACI.)
Garfield pushes back against the notion that Glevum Associates bears any resemblance to Blackwater, which became synonymous with corruption and incompetence for a series of incidents that included shooting innocent civilians and smuggling illegal weapons. "Whenever people think of contractors now, they think of Blackwater," said Garfield. "Well, if you hire a cheap plumber, don't be surprised when the plumbing breaks."
Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation and many other publications at home and abroad. He can be reached through his website at timshorrock.com.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-15/counterinsurgency-outsourcing-americas-new-mercenaries-in-afghanistan-middle-east-africa/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsR2
NEW YORK – As American commanders meet this week for the Afghanistan review, Obama is hiring military contractors at a rate that would make Bush blush. Tim Shorrock on the Blackwater heirs.
Top U.S. commanders are meeting this week to plan for the next phase of the Afghanistan war. In Iraq, meanwhile, gains are tentative and in danger of unraveling.
Both wars have been fought with the help of private military and intelligence contractors. But despite the troubles of Blackwater in particular – charges of corruption and killing of civilians—and continuing controversy over military outsourcing in general, private sector armies are as involved as ever.
Without much notice or debate, the Obama administration has greatly expanded the outsourcing of key parts of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East and Africa, and as a result, for its secretive air war and special operations missions around the world, the U.S. has become increasingly reliant on a new breed of specialized companies that are virtually unknown to the American public, yet carry out vital U.S. missions abroad.
Companies such as Blackbird Technologies, Glevum Associates, K2 Solutions, and others have won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military and intelligence contracts in recent years to provide technology, information on insurgents, Special Forces training, and personnel rescue. They win their work through the large, established prime contractors, but are tasked with missions only companies with specific skills and background in covert and counterinsurgency can accomplish.
Some observers fear that the widespread use of contractors for U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Horn of Africa could deepen the secrecy surrounding the American presence in those regions, making it harder for Congress to provide proper oversight.
Even in Iraq, where the U.S. has ended combat operations, the government is "greatly expanding" its use of private security companies, creating "an entirely new role for contractors on the battlefield," Michael Thibault, the co-chairman of the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting, recently warned Congress.
Blackbird, which is staffed by former CIA operatives, is a key contractor in a highly classified program that sends secret teams into enemy territory to rescue downed or captured U.S. soldiers.
Among the companies getting contracts is Blackbird, which is staffed by former CIA operatives, and is a key contractor in a highly classified program that sends secret teams into enemy territory to rescue downed or captured U.S. soldiers.
Glevum, meanwhile, fields a small army of analysts in Iraq and Afghanistan who provide the U.S. military with what the company opaquely describes as "information operations and influence activities."
And K2 is a highly sought-after subcontractor and trainer for the most secretive units of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, including the SEAL team that rescued the crew of the Maersk Alabama from a gang of pirates last year. It is based near the Army's Special Forces headquarters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was founded by Lane Kjellsen, a former Special Forces soldier.
Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander of conventional and special forces in the war zones, is using contractors because "he wants an organization that reports directly to him," said a former top aide to the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, the umbrella organization for all Special Forces. "Everyone knows Petraeus can't execute his strategy without the private sector." The former aide spoke on the condition that he not be identified, saying his career could be jeopardized if he went public. The International Security Assistance Force, the general's home command, did not respond to a request for comment.
The use of contractors could become a serious problem if controversies about them are not addressed, a senior British official warned during a recent visit to Washington. Pauline Neville-Jones, the U.K.'s minister of state for security and counterterrorism (and a former executive with QinetiQ PLC, a major intelligence contractor), told an audience at the Brookings Institution that "we have something of a crisis in Afghanistan" partly because of the "largely unregulated private sector security companies performing important roles" there.
The Pentagon's Central Command had nearly 225,000 contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan and other areas at last count, doing tasks ranging from providing security to base support. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency field thousands more under classified contracts that are not publicly disclosed, but extend into every U.S. military command around the world. (According to reports in The Nation and elsewhere, Blackwater, which is now known as Xe, has contracted to send personnel into Pakistan to fight with the Joint Special Operations Command, although a command spokesman said the reports were "totally wrong.")
In response to a question from The Daily Beast, Neville-Jones said that American and British forces must work out "the operational rules and roles that they have when they are in the frontline." Unless that happens, "We are in danger of getting up against Geneva Convention problems and failure to observe fundamental rules of war."
A spokesman for SOCOM would not say exactly how many people work on its contracts, but did say that between 2001 and 2009, SOCOM's budget has grown from about $3 billion to about $10 billion. Neither SOCOM nor Special Operations forces outsource combat operations, the spokesman said. "About the only contractors Special Operations forces might have with them on operations are interpreters," he said.
However, private contractors are now fulfilling vital functions previously done by the military itself.
Blackbird is a case in point. Based in Herndon, Virginia, a stone's throw from the CIA, Blackbird deploys dozens of former CIA operatives and provides "technology solutions" to military and intelligence agencies. Much of the company's revenue—including a $450 million contract awarded last year by the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command—comes from the deployment of special teams and equipment into enemy territory to rescue American soldiers who have been captured by Taliban or al Qaeda units or have stranded after losing their helicopters in battle.
Until recently, the task of rescuing American soldiers was largely carried out by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recommended that the agency's parent command in Virginia be closed. If the recovery agency is shut down, Blackbird would likely pick up the rescue business as it is outsourced. In that case, recovery of captured or stranded American soldiers "won't be a military command anymore; it will be a business," said the former Special Operations command aide (an agency spokesman said, "It's too early to say what will happen.")
Blackbird is run by CEO Peggy Styer, an investor once labeled a "serial defense entrepreneur" by CNN. Last year, she hired Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, to a senior position. (Black hired and managed some of the first private operatives to enter Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and later joined Blackwater.) Perhaps anticipating a pickup in future business, a venture-capital fund launched by Styer and two other Blackbird founders recently raised $21 million on Wall Street. Blackbird did not return phone calls or emails.
Glevum Associates, for its part, has won contracts for controversial intelligence-gathering work.
The Boston-based company was founded in 2006 by Andrew Garfield, a former British intelligence officer with counterinsurgency experience in Northern Ireland. Garfield first gained public notice in 2004, when he was a key player in the Lincoln Group, a defense contractor that became notorious for engaging in a covert psychological operation to plant stories in the Iraqi press that put a positive spin on America and the U.S. war effort in Iraq. (Covert psychological operations are known in the trade as psy-ops.)
Garfield won his first contracts for Glevum as an adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq. Drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland, his company began researching the views of Iraqi citizens toward the U.S. military. At the time, "no one was doing systematic target audience research," he told me in an interview.
Glevum's contribution to counterinsurgency efforts is a trademarked program called "Face-to-face Research Analysis" that combines intelligence collection with polls and interviews, primarily for the Army's Human Terrain System—a system that some American social scientists have described as unethical because information gleaned from anthropological researchers ultimately can be used to kill people.
Garfield denies the charge. The U.S. military, he told me, can't "connect opinions to location." Rather, the military uses his information "to focus their operations the right way and to provide solutions that Afghans would choose." Several experts on the program said it's impossible to divorce it from other—bloodier—counterinsurgency efforts. "HTS has been an intelligence-funded program from the beginning," said John Stanton, a Virginia military analyst who has written extensively about the system.
(Glevum's corporate partners include primary contractors BAE Systems and ManTech International. K2, which declined to comment, also wins much of its classified work as a subcontractor for larger companies such as Boeing and CACI.)
Garfield pushes back against the notion that Glevum Associates bears any resemblance to Blackwater, which became synonymous with corruption and incompetence for a series of incidents that included shooting innocent civilians and smuggling illegal weapons. "Whenever people think of contractors now, they think of Blackwater," said Garfield. "Well, if you hire a cheap plumber, don't be surprised when the plumbing breaks."
Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation and many other publications at home and abroad. He can be reached through his website at timshorrock.com.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-15/counterinsurgency-outsourcing-americas-new-mercenaries-in-afghanistan-middle-east-africa/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsR2
Wendy Wysong
Wendy Wysong is now responsible for making sure that Blackwater doesn’t continue to illegally export weapons, under a $42 million settlement agreement between the infamous mercenary company and the US State Department.
Wysong is a partner at a top-flight Washington, DC law firm, and an export in arms trade regulations. She also happened to be the US Commerce Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement for several years when Blackwater happened to be—that’s right—illegally exporting weapons.
http://www.warisbusiness.com/2010/12/former-bush-admin-lawyer-will-keep-tabs-on-blackwater/
Wysong is a partner at a top-flight Washington, DC law firm, and an export in arms trade regulations. She also happened to be the US Commerce Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement for several years when Blackwater happened to be—that’s right—illegally exporting weapons.
http://www.warisbusiness.com/2010/12/former-bush-admin-lawyer-will-keep-tabs-on-blackwater/
Residents of quiet desert town up in arms over proposed military training center
San Diego-based Wind Zero Inc. says the facility would bring much-needed jobs and revenue to cash-strapped Imperial County. Critics say it would upset Ocotillo's peaceful rural atmosphere.
By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times
For years this tiny desert town in western Imperial County has been a haven for retirees and others who desire a slow and quiet existence.
Howard Kelly, 62, a Vietnam War veteran, moved here to escape the urban noise that triggers his incapacitating post-traumatic stress disorder. Joseph Asciutto, 64, a retired firefighter from San Diego, built a home in this stark landscape he visited as a boy and grew to love, and which he now calmly observes from a lawn chair on his front porch.
Brandon Webb, 36, a former Navy SEAL sniper, was also attracted to this stretch of desert. But for different reasons.
Its remote setting, he said, would make it ideal for his dream of building a sprawling $100-million military and law enforcement training center that would include shooting ranges, live-fire training houses, a commercial racetrack, a heliport and an airstrip. He said the project will provide much-needed jobs and revenue to the cash-strapped county, where the unemployment rate in October hit 29.3%.
"This will put the county on the map" in the law enforcement community, Webb said.
But residents fear the center would upset the rural atmosphere of their desert community — home to about 300 residents — and destroy the peace and quiet they cherish.
"The idea of putting something so ugly and disruptive in a place so quiet and beautiful is offensive," said Susan Massey, a retired teacher and leader of a group of activists who have lobbied against the center since it was proposed in 2006.
The Imperial County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to hold a public hearing Monday on whether to give Webb's San Diego-based company, Wind Zero Inc., approval to begin construction of the 944-acre facility.
Much of the county's law enforcement community has endorsed the project, citing the high cost of sending officers to Riverside County to attend the academy and for other training there. It can cost as much as $38,000 for a single officer, El Centro Police Chief Ed McGinley said.
"All law enforcement agencies in this county can benefit from having a facility with these capabilities," he said.
Wind Zero also hopes to negotiate contracts with the military and federal law enforcement agencies for training at the center when it is completed in 2013, Webb said. Former Navy SEAL colleagues have expressed interest, he added.
If approved, the facility would be built across a dirt road from Kelly's home in the Nomirage area of Ocotillo.
He worries that the noise will make life unbearable. He is particularly concerned about helicopters and the shooting ranges.
"If gunfire goes off," he said, "I come unglued."
If the center is built, Kelly said, he and his wife plan to move from their home of 23 years.
Webb said that helicopter operations would be limited to daylight hours a few days a month and that the shooting ranges would either be indoors or semi-enclosed, "taking the noise issue off the table" in terms of gunfire. He pointed out that the project's environmental impact report concluded that noise in the area already exceeds acceptable levels for residential neighborhoods.
Asciutto, whose home is also across the road from the proposed site, disputes the findings. He said the little noise in the area comes from cars on Interstate 8, which is about a mile away from his home, and from adjacent Highway 98.
Opponents also worry the center could deplete the city's limited water supply.
Although most of the county's residents receive water from the Colorado River via an expansive canal system, Ocotillo relies solely on a natural underground aquifer. The aquifer is fed by scarce rainwater that seeps through the ground. It is unknown how much groundwater is there or what kind of effect the project would have on it, said Noel Ludwig, a hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
According to plans, the center would use about 65 acre-feet of water annually, or 21,180,341 gallons, nearly twice the amount of water now permitted by the land's residential zoning. A typical family of four uses about 1.5 acre-feet annually, or about 488,776 gallons, said Dave Black, an Imperial County planner.
During construction, Wind Zero would have to follow stringent water-level monitoring and mitigation requirements so as not to deplete the groundwater, Black said.
Officials know the risks but are attracted by the potential jobs the project would bring to a county that routinely has the highest unemployment rate in both California and the nation, Massey said.
The center would generate an estimated 100 full-time jobs and bring in about $500,000 in annual tax revenue, providing an economic boost to the city and county, Webb said. "There's no economy in Ocotillo," he said. "There's nothing out there. There is a gas station and a bar, I think."
About 70% of the workers would be recruited from Imperial and San Diego counties. Some jobs would require specialized skills, and local businesses would be contracted for custodial, security and maintenance positions.
Critics see unsettling similarities between the Wind Zero project and a training and supply facility proposed but then scrapped in San Diego County by the controversial private security firm Blackwater USA, which trains and supplies civilian military personnel for assignments overseas. Some have suggested that Wind Zero is a front for Blackwater — which now operates under the name Xe — or could be sold to it once the project has been approved. Webb dismisses the claims.
Wind Zero has made a commitment to not train mercenaries, Webb said. "Our business philosophy is to train men and women in uniform, not replace them."
Kelly, the Vietnam vet, said there may be a need for such a facility, but Webb should have been more sensitive to those who would be most affected.
"I'm a military man, we need training," he said. "But they don't need to destroy a whole neighborhood to do it."
By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times
For years this tiny desert town in western Imperial County has been a haven for retirees and others who desire a slow and quiet existence.
Howard Kelly, 62, a Vietnam War veteran, moved here to escape the urban noise that triggers his incapacitating post-traumatic stress disorder. Joseph Asciutto, 64, a retired firefighter from San Diego, built a home in this stark landscape he visited as a boy and grew to love, and which he now calmly observes from a lawn chair on his front porch.
Brandon Webb, 36, a former Navy SEAL sniper, was also attracted to this stretch of desert. But for different reasons.
Its remote setting, he said, would make it ideal for his dream of building a sprawling $100-million military and law enforcement training center that would include shooting ranges, live-fire training houses, a commercial racetrack, a heliport and an airstrip. He said the project will provide much-needed jobs and revenue to the cash-strapped county, where the unemployment rate in October hit 29.3%.
"This will put the county on the map" in the law enforcement community, Webb said.
But residents fear the center would upset the rural atmosphere of their desert community — home to about 300 residents — and destroy the peace and quiet they cherish.
"The idea of putting something so ugly and disruptive in a place so quiet and beautiful is offensive," said Susan Massey, a retired teacher and leader of a group of activists who have lobbied against the center since it was proposed in 2006.
The Imperial County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to hold a public hearing Monday on whether to give Webb's San Diego-based company, Wind Zero Inc., approval to begin construction of the 944-acre facility.
Much of the county's law enforcement community has endorsed the project, citing the high cost of sending officers to Riverside County to attend the academy and for other training there. It can cost as much as $38,000 for a single officer, El Centro Police Chief Ed McGinley said.
"All law enforcement agencies in this county can benefit from having a facility with these capabilities," he said.
Wind Zero also hopes to negotiate contracts with the military and federal law enforcement agencies for training at the center when it is completed in 2013, Webb said. Former Navy SEAL colleagues have expressed interest, he added.
If approved, the facility would be built across a dirt road from Kelly's home in the Nomirage area of Ocotillo.
He worries that the noise will make life unbearable. He is particularly concerned about helicopters and the shooting ranges.
"If gunfire goes off," he said, "I come unglued."
If the center is built, Kelly said, he and his wife plan to move from their home of 23 years.
Webb said that helicopter operations would be limited to daylight hours a few days a month and that the shooting ranges would either be indoors or semi-enclosed, "taking the noise issue off the table" in terms of gunfire. He pointed out that the project's environmental impact report concluded that noise in the area already exceeds acceptable levels for residential neighborhoods.
Asciutto, whose home is also across the road from the proposed site, disputes the findings. He said the little noise in the area comes from cars on Interstate 8, which is about a mile away from his home, and from adjacent Highway 98.
Opponents also worry the center could deplete the city's limited water supply.
Although most of the county's residents receive water from the Colorado River via an expansive canal system, Ocotillo relies solely on a natural underground aquifer. The aquifer is fed by scarce rainwater that seeps through the ground. It is unknown how much groundwater is there or what kind of effect the project would have on it, said Noel Ludwig, a hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
According to plans, the center would use about 65 acre-feet of water annually, or 21,180,341 gallons, nearly twice the amount of water now permitted by the land's residential zoning. A typical family of four uses about 1.5 acre-feet annually, or about 488,776 gallons, said Dave Black, an Imperial County planner.
During construction, Wind Zero would have to follow stringent water-level monitoring and mitigation requirements so as not to deplete the groundwater, Black said.
Officials know the risks but are attracted by the potential jobs the project would bring to a county that routinely has the highest unemployment rate in both California and the nation, Massey said.
The center would generate an estimated 100 full-time jobs and bring in about $500,000 in annual tax revenue, providing an economic boost to the city and county, Webb said. "There's no economy in Ocotillo," he said. "There's nothing out there. There is a gas station and a bar, I think."
About 70% of the workers would be recruited from Imperial and San Diego counties. Some jobs would require specialized skills, and local businesses would be contracted for custodial, security and maintenance positions.
Critics see unsettling similarities between the Wind Zero project and a training and supply facility proposed but then scrapped in San Diego County by the controversial private security firm Blackwater USA, which trains and supplies civilian military personnel for assignments overseas. Some have suggested that Wind Zero is a front for Blackwater — which now operates under the name Xe — or could be sold to it once the project has been approved. Webb dismisses the claims.
Wind Zero has made a commitment to not train mercenaries, Webb said. "Our business philosophy is to train men and women in uniform, not replace them."
Kelly, the Vietnam vet, said there may be a need for such a facility, but Webb should have been more sensitive to those who would be most affected.
"I'm a military man, we need training," he said. "But they don't need to destroy a whole neighborhood to do it."
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Panel at ODU weighs ethics of contractors in war zones
By Bill Sizemore
Xe Services, the security company formerly known as Blackwater, has given the United States a black eye abroad and undermined U.S. claims to uphold the rule of law, a State Department attorney said Wednesday evening.
Virginia Patton Prugh, who works in the department's International Bureau of Counter-Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, spoke at a panel discussion at Old Dominion University on ethical issues raised by the proliferation of private military companies in conflict zones.
"Perhaps our reputation in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places in the world has not been terribly good even before Blackwater, but Blackwater certainly didn't help," Prugh said.
As exhibit A, she pointed to the incident in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007, when Blackwater guards killed as many as 17 Iraqi civilians in a fusillade of gunfire. Compounding the tragedy, Prugh said, has been the inability of government prosecutors to hold anyone accountable.
Five of the guards were put on trial for manslaughter but a federal judge dismissed the charges early this year, ruling that some evidence was tainted. The government is appealing.
"All that doesn't translate well to the rest of the world," Prugh said. "What they get is this hypocrisy of the United States teaching the rule of law on the one hand and then effectively giving immunity to their own citizens when they are engaged in criminal conduct. That's the perception, even if it's not the reality."
None of the three panelists offered a ringing defense of Moyock, N.C.-based Xe, but they agreed that private security contractors have a place on the battlefield in an era of overstretched militaries and persistent world conflict.
"Nisoor Square was a horribly tragic incident," said J.J. Messner, director of the International Stability Operations Association, a trade group to which Xe once belonged. "But we do have to deal with human nature and we do have to deal with the realities of conflict zones. "
Deane-Peter Baker, an assistant professor of philosophy at the U.S. Naval Academy, said the problem is that international law has not kept pace with the changing nature of warfare.
"There's no intrinsic reason why we should reject the employment of contracted combatants," he said.
The discussion was sponsored by ODU's Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs.
Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com
Xe Services, the security company formerly known as Blackwater, has given the United States a black eye abroad and undermined U.S. claims to uphold the rule of law, a State Department attorney said Wednesday evening.
Virginia Patton Prugh, who works in the department's International Bureau of Counter-Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, spoke at a panel discussion at Old Dominion University on ethical issues raised by the proliferation of private military companies in conflict zones.
"Perhaps our reputation in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places in the world has not been terribly good even before Blackwater, but Blackwater certainly didn't help," Prugh said.
As exhibit A, she pointed to the incident in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in September 2007, when Blackwater guards killed as many as 17 Iraqi civilians in a fusillade of gunfire. Compounding the tragedy, Prugh said, has been the inability of government prosecutors to hold anyone accountable.
Five of the guards were put on trial for manslaughter but a federal judge dismissed the charges early this year, ruling that some evidence was tainted. The government is appealing.
"All that doesn't translate well to the rest of the world," Prugh said. "What they get is this hypocrisy of the United States teaching the rule of law on the one hand and then effectively giving immunity to their own citizens when they are engaged in criminal conduct. That's the perception, even if it's not the reality."
None of the three panelists offered a ringing defense of Moyock, N.C.-based Xe, but they agreed that private security contractors have a place on the battlefield in an era of overstretched militaries and persistent world conflict.
"Nisoor Square was a horribly tragic incident," said J.J. Messner, director of the International Stability Operations Association, a trade group to which Xe once belonged. "But we do have to deal with human nature and we do have to deal with the realities of conflict zones. "
Deane-Peter Baker, an assistant professor of philosophy at the U.S. Naval Academy, said the problem is that international law has not kept pace with the changing nature of warfare.
"There's no intrinsic reason why we should reject the employment of contracted combatants," he said.
The discussion was sponsored by ODU's Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs.
Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com
Blackwater/Xe Flees Jo Daviess County, But Training Continues
By Dan Kenney
Co-Coordinator of No Private Armies
Nearly four years ago citizens joined together in a small church near Mt. Carroll Illinois forming No Private Armies/ Clearwater to Stop Blackwater. The citizens group worked for four years to get Blackwater, now Xe, to leave Illinois. The last major demonstration held at the Blackwater/Xe training site in northwest Illinois occurred April 27th 2009 and resulted in 22 arrests.
Blackwater was once the largest and most powerful mercenary company in the U.S. making over $1 billion in U.S. contracts. But now beleaguered with lawsuits, and having undergone massive changes in the company’s administration the sole owner of Blackwater, Eric Prince has moved out of the country and put the company up for sale.
The Galena Gazette reports http://galenagazette.com/index.asp that Blackwater/Xe as of October 1st 2010 no longer has a financial interest in the Jo Daviess’ County facility. It is now a private business locally owned and operated. According to the current business owner Eric Davis, who was the manager of the site for Blackwater since 2007, “Blackwater is currently in the process of moving their equipment that still remains back to North Carolina.”
In 2009 Blackwater changed the name of their training facilities to U.S. Training Center. They still operate two training facilities one in San Diego and the other in Moyock North Carolina. Blackwater also owns and operates a mobile training unit that travels the country training law enforcement.
The facility on Skunk Hallow Road twenty miles south of Stockton, Illinois has been renamed North American Weapons and Tactical Training Center. The new company is owned by Impact Training Group. Mr. Davis, former U.S. military, reports that all of the full and part-time instructors are former law enforcement. The company’s Facebook page states: ‘Impact Training Group offers the finest and most comprehensive firearms and tactics instruction available.”
The NAWTTC also offers, “a unique training experience that can accommodate any of your training requirements or needs. Whether you or your unit wishes to rent our ranges, participate in IMPACT’s training courses, or just learn basic fundamentals of marksmanship give us a call and we’ll make the arrangements.”
The North American Weapons Group joins the many other companies that have sprung up around America over the past decade. These companies have moved in to capitalize on the growing trend to outsource the training of local law enforcement and military. Over the past two years I have been contacted by citizens in California, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Michigan concerned about start-up Blackwater want-a-bes.
It is good to know Blackwater was not able to make sufficient profit to continue to operate a training facility in northwest Illinois. However the fight against the outsourcing of America’s security continues. Currently contractors out number American soldiers in Afghanistan, where there are 206,000 private contractors performing many tasks, and in Iraq where 177,000 contractors remain. Over 40,000 of these contractors are armed and may engage in combat. In the first six months of 2010 contractor casualties outnumbered those of US soldiers; there is an increasing reliance on mercenaries to carry out American operations as US troops are brought home.
We are witnessing the largest transfer of combat fighting and security work from public hands to private in the history of our country. We are also witnessing the privatization of war by multi-billion dollar companies such as Dyncorp and Blackwater and hundreds of others like them. Some 600 private companies are profiting off of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is reported that nearly half of every tax dollar spent in these conflicts goes to a for profit military contracting company.
Senator Levine after a trip to Afghanistan stated clearly recently one of the dangers this privatization process presents:
“The reliance on private security contractors in Afghanistan too often empowers local warlords and powerbrokers who operate outside the Afghan government’s control. There is even evidence that some security contractors work against coalition forces, creating the very threat that they are hired to combat. Not only do these contractors threaten the security of our troops, but they put the success of our mission at risk –”
If American citizens want their security provided by soldiers who take an oath to uphold and protect our constitution and have strong allegiance to our country then we need to remain vigilant of what is happening to our security and what is happening to the way we conduct our wars. We also need to be watchful of how and by whom our local law enforcement is being trained.
Co-Coordinator of No Private Armies
Nearly four years ago citizens joined together in a small church near Mt. Carroll Illinois forming No Private Armies/ Clearwater to Stop Blackwater. The citizens group worked for four years to get Blackwater, now Xe, to leave Illinois. The last major demonstration held at the Blackwater/Xe training site in northwest Illinois occurred April 27th 2009 and resulted in 22 arrests.
Blackwater was once the largest and most powerful mercenary company in the U.S. making over $1 billion in U.S. contracts. But now beleaguered with lawsuits, and having undergone massive changes in the company’s administration the sole owner of Blackwater, Eric Prince has moved out of the country and put the company up for sale.
The Galena Gazette reports http://galenagazette.com/index.asp that Blackwater/Xe as of October 1st 2010 no longer has a financial interest in the Jo Daviess’ County facility. It is now a private business locally owned and operated. According to the current business owner Eric Davis, who was the manager of the site for Blackwater since 2007, “Blackwater is currently in the process of moving their equipment that still remains back to North Carolina.”
In 2009 Blackwater changed the name of their training facilities to U.S. Training Center. They still operate two training facilities one in San Diego and the other in Moyock North Carolina. Blackwater also owns and operates a mobile training unit that travels the country training law enforcement.
The facility on Skunk Hallow Road twenty miles south of Stockton, Illinois has been renamed North American Weapons and Tactical Training Center. The new company is owned by Impact Training Group. Mr. Davis, former U.S. military, reports that all of the full and part-time instructors are former law enforcement. The company’s Facebook page states: ‘Impact Training Group offers the finest and most comprehensive firearms and tactics instruction available.”
The NAWTTC also offers, “a unique training experience that can accommodate any of your training requirements or needs. Whether you or your unit wishes to rent our ranges, participate in IMPACT’s training courses, or just learn basic fundamentals of marksmanship give us a call and we’ll make the arrangements.”
The North American Weapons Group joins the many other companies that have sprung up around America over the past decade. These companies have moved in to capitalize on the growing trend to outsource the training of local law enforcement and military. Over the past two years I have been contacted by citizens in California, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Michigan concerned about start-up Blackwater want-a-bes.
It is good to know Blackwater was not able to make sufficient profit to continue to operate a training facility in northwest Illinois. However the fight against the outsourcing of America’s security continues. Currently contractors out number American soldiers in Afghanistan, where there are 206,000 private contractors performing many tasks, and in Iraq where 177,000 contractors remain. Over 40,000 of these contractors are armed and may engage in combat. In the first six months of 2010 contractor casualties outnumbered those of US soldiers; there is an increasing reliance on mercenaries to carry out American operations as US troops are brought home.
We are witnessing the largest transfer of combat fighting and security work from public hands to private in the history of our country. We are also witnessing the privatization of war by multi-billion dollar companies such as Dyncorp and Blackwater and hundreds of others like them. Some 600 private companies are profiting off of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is reported that nearly half of every tax dollar spent in these conflicts goes to a for profit military contracting company.
Senator Levine after a trip to Afghanistan stated clearly recently one of the dangers this privatization process presents:
“The reliance on private security contractors in Afghanistan too often empowers local warlords and powerbrokers who operate outside the Afghan government’s control. There is even evidence that some security contractors work against coalition forces, creating the very threat that they are hired to combat. Not only do these contractors threaten the security of our troops, but they put the success of our mission at risk –”
If American citizens want their security provided by soldiers who take an oath to uphold and protect our constitution and have strong allegiance to our country then we need to remain vigilant of what is happening to our security and what is happening to the way we conduct our wars. We also need to be watchful of how and by whom our local law enforcement is being trained.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said US private security firms, including Xe Services LLC, formerly known as Blackwater, are being behind terrorism
At a press conference in Kabul, Karzai said that US security companies have been behind explosions that have claimed the lives of women and children.
The Afghan president added that they have caused "blasts and terrorism" in different parts of Afghanistan over the past months.
The Afghan president said his administration cannot even distinguish between the bomb blasts carried out by US security firms and those of the Taliban militants.
"In fact we don't yet know how many of these blasts are by Taliban and how many are carried out by them (US security companies)."
Blackwater has been involved in the murder of several Afghan citizens over the past years. The company has also been struggling with a trail of legal cases and civil lawsuits, including one for killing 17 Iraqi civilians during a Baghdad shootout in 2007.
Earlier in June, the CIA reportedly admitted that Blackwater had been loading bombs on US drones that target suspected militants in neighboring Pakistan.
The Afghan president has also pointed out that American private security firms are corrupt and have fueled nine years of war.
"Deals under the name of private security companies are cut in the hallways of American government buildings. It involves 1.5 billion dollars," he said.
Karzai has accused security companies of running what he called an economic mafia based on crooked contracts.
"The money, 1.5 billion dollars, is being distributed there (in the United States) on Blackwater [sic] and this and that."
The developments come as the notorious Blackwater has been awarded a five-year State Department contract worth up to USD 10 billion for operations in Afghanistan.
In August, Karzai ordered all security firms to disband before the end of the year.
Some diplomats and military officials say Karzai has been under intense pressure to reconsider his decision.
However, Karzai says he is steadfast in his decision to dissolve foreign security firms in the country despite US pressure to reconsider the decision.
The private companies are said to be in charge of providing security for foreign officials and embassies as well as development projects in Afghanistan.
Karzai has blamed mercenaries for civilian deaths and corruption in the troubled region.
The Afghan president added that they have caused "blasts and terrorism" in different parts of Afghanistan over the past months.
The Afghan president said his administration cannot even distinguish between the bomb blasts carried out by US security firms and those of the Taliban militants.
"In fact we don't yet know how many of these blasts are by Taliban and how many are carried out by them (US security companies)."
Blackwater has been involved in the murder of several Afghan citizens over the past years. The company has also been struggling with a trail of legal cases and civil lawsuits, including one for killing 17 Iraqi civilians during a Baghdad shootout in 2007.
Earlier in June, the CIA reportedly admitted that Blackwater had been loading bombs on US drones that target suspected militants in neighboring Pakistan.
The Afghan president has also pointed out that American private security firms are corrupt and have fueled nine years of war.
"Deals under the name of private security companies are cut in the hallways of American government buildings. It involves 1.5 billion dollars," he said.
Karzai has accused security companies of running what he called an economic mafia based on crooked contracts.
"The money, 1.5 billion dollars, is being distributed there (in the United States) on Blackwater [sic] and this and that."
The developments come as the notorious Blackwater has been awarded a five-year State Department contract worth up to USD 10 billion for operations in Afghanistan.
In August, Karzai ordered all security firms to disband before the end of the year.
Some diplomats and military officials say Karzai has been under intense pressure to reconsider his decision.
However, Karzai says he is steadfast in his decision to dissolve foreign security firms in the country despite US pressure to reconsider the decision.
The private companies are said to be in charge of providing security for foreign officials and embassies as well as development projects in Afghanistan.
Karzai has blamed mercenaries for civilian deaths and corruption in the troubled region.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
NOW IN CONTROL -- THE INDEPENDENT PRIVATE CONTRACTOR MILITARY
By Marti Hiken and Luke Hiken
A funny thing happened on the way to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. military became privatized. Private contractors, i.e. mercenaries, are now the predominant military force comprising the armamentarium of the United States. In effect, private contractors supplanted the U.S. military as the primary decision-makers and fighting force of the U.S. government.
Private contractors were the saving grace to the need for more troops to fight overseas in multiple countries as well as to staff the multitude of U.S. bases on foreign soil. Very comfortably and conveniently they eliminated the need for a draft and all the problems associated with the selective service. What the American people did not consider is the more-or-less secret, diminishing power of the U.S. government over its own fighting forces.
As law professor Steven Schooner was asked in an interview, “Is there any danger of the military becoming overly dependent on the private sector?” he answered, “There’s no question that the military has become overly dependent on the private sector. When I was a young Army officer, as I learned the military doctrine, … the military relied on contractors on the battlefield only to the extent that they could fight without the contractors. That’s simply no longer the case in the United States military. The United States military can no longer fight effectively without contractors on the battlefield, and that has to be an item of great concern both to commanders and to the public. If we are faced with a legitimate foe that could in fact compete with us in terms of competence on the battlefield … this pervasive presence of contractors could be potentially disastrous.[1]
Every year the federal government spends half a trillion dollars on contracts for goods and services from private companies. The total workforce of those companies -- including workers not on federal contracts -- accounts for 22 percent of American workers, according to David Madland, director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress.[2]
There is no way of knowing the total count of all private contractors. The estimate in June of this year is that there are around 200,000 service members in both Iraq and Afghanistan.[3]
There were over 200,000 DOD private contractors alone in 2009, comprising 53% of the DOD’s workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan.[4] In 3rd quarter FY 2010, USCENTCOM reported approximately 224,433 contractor personnel working for the DOD in the USCENTCOM AOR (Area of Responsibility).[5] Even the casualty list for this year exceeds the deaths of military ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.[6]
By mercenaries, we mean hired soldiers outside of any military chain of command. They can act independently of the U.S. military under the direction of their employer, and their allegiance is not to the U.S. government. They are motivated by private gain. They are usually not citizens or residents where these conflicts take place.
There is a lack of public information on the terms regarding the contracts including their costs and the standards governing hiring and performance. Without this information, how can the corporations and the contracts be documented or evaluated?[7]
In addition, there are factors that make it impossible to know how many contractors there are and how they are used. One is that the number of casualties of private contractors remains unknown. By contracting with private contractors who were former special operation forces and who end up working for corporations, the U.S. is able to deny any official “military” presence in a country, even though there might be as many as 100,000 hired mercenaries there.
Mercenary casualties should be reported more accurately. “It’s extremely likely that a generation ago, each one of these contractors deaths would have been a military death,” Schooner said. “As troop deaths have fallen, contractor deaths have risen. It's not a pretty picture …. I'm not accusing either the Bush or the Obama administration of intentionally deceiving the public, but when a president applauds a reduction in military deaths but fails to acknowledge the contractor personnel now dying in their place, someone isn't telling the whole story.” [8]
As to their role in Afghanistan, most recently, Mr. Karzai summed it up best when he lashed out in public, accusing U.S.-funded private security companies of killing people and looting homes and shops. “They violate the law, they kill people, the people get attacked and the civilians get killed by these private security companies,” he said. [9]
Of grave concern, given the change to the military effort, is the question of who has control over the individual armed forces of all these troops operating under different U.S. agencies and corporations. Ultimately, it is possible the president has lost control as commander-in-chief of the military forces of the United States. Can the commander-in-chief fire privatized soldiers? Has the U.S. military itself lost control of troops engaged in armed combat and other maneuvers when privatized soldiers outnumber GIs and are beholden to the dictates of separate and independent corporations?
Who is in charge of operations involving independent contractors? Is the DOD, the Pentagon, other governmental departments or agencies, the president, or the corporations? One thing is certain, the American people, the majority of whom are opposed to these wars, who are supposed to be in charge, are not. Likewise, the Karzai government is not. The fact is the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, the CIA, and USAID, etc., all employ private contractors in foreign countries.
The State Department has steadily increased its use of private contractors over the last 23 years to provide protection overseas, i.e. providing perimeter security to U.S. diplomatic and consular posts; providing worldwide personal protective services, providing bodyguards and static guards for buildings and other infrastructure; deterring visa and passport fraud, overseeing worldwide training and assistance programs in anti-terrorism; providing a courier service for the Department; and, providing a wide range of protective services for the Secretary of State, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN and foreign dignitaries visiting the U.S.[10]
One wonders if full transparency were revealed concerning the number and role of State Department forces involved in the war effort stateside and overseas wouldn’t by itself show that the U.S. State Department has under its command an army operating independently from the U.S. military and commander-in-chief.
The breadth of the private contractor problem boils down to this: Take the example of a United States corporation that still operates on U.S. soil and manufactures tanks for the DOD to use in Pakistan. On the floor of the factory, a worker, who works on building the tanks, rapes a fellow worker, a woman. In fact, there’s a long history in this corporation of sexual harassment, including rape. There is no doubt that the corporation can fire the individual responsible for the crime. However, can the DOD or president of the United States fire the worker? The president, furious by the illicit activity and the fact that the corporation does nothing to quell the abuse, marches into the factory headquarters and tells the CEOs that they must fire the worker. The corporation owners and bosses say no, letting the president know in no uncertain terms that he has no jurisdiction over the workers in their plant. So, the president marches over to the Pentagon and orders his Secretary of Defense to end the contract with the corporation. The Secretary informs the president that it and the State Department have a contract with Pakistan to build the tanks and can’t break it. Besides, without this corporation manufacturing this type of tank, there would be no tanks in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
One thing is certain and that is that an employee can be fired by the corporation (s)he works for -- and there will be no striking, picketing, collective bargaining or disrupting production.
The problems that arise with using contractors rather than the U.S. military forces have been well documented: “ [the] shortcomings with this new system [are]: how a failure to coordinate among contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy.”[11]
There are significant jurisdictional questions that remain:
- What happens when commanders in the field have no control over the private contractors working in various countries?
- Who controls the drone battlefield when special operation forces and independent corporations run their own ops?
- What happens when the communications during a battle or at any time bypass the members of the U.S. military and instead passes to another department under the Executive Branch, such as the State Department?
- What happens when individual heads of governmental departments and agencies issue orders to commanders on the field? This would include the private, individual armed forces of the Department of Defense, State Department, CIA and other agencies.
Who, exactly, maintains the jurisdiction within the U.S. government to fire individual private contractors when hired by corporations? When the use of private contractors is under no single government department or branch of government, the jurisdictional questions remain ambiguous, untested, undefined, unregulated, and unlawful. The following is a partial list of the military’s assertion of authority over mercenaries/private contractors. It ranges from the Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) or the SMTJ - Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction of the U.S. (Title 18 U.S.C., Section 7), to the Coalition Provisional Authority Orders (CPAs) and their own judicial systems, to DOD Instructions (e.g. DOD 5525.11 -- Criminal Jurisdiction Over Civilians Employed By or Accompanying the Armed Forces Outside the United States, Certain Service Members, and Former Service Members), to the UCMJ and Inspectors General and the Defense Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), to U.S federal courts, to international laws of armed conflict, to Memoranda of Understanding – agreements between the DOD and State Department that coordinate the movement of PSCs (private security contractors) throughout a foreign country.[12]
Have there been prosecutions? Peter Singer, the author of “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” states that no contractor has been prosecuted for misbehavior in Iraq. There have been some civil lawsuits, for example, the families of the four Blackwater guards killed in Fallujah are suing for wrongful death.[13]
Human Rights First reports, “Over the last several years, scores of well-documented reports of serious abuse by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, both in the context of interrogations and in the use of excessive and often lethal force in various security operations, have not been prosecuted. Through February 2006, only 20 cases of alleged detainee abuse by contractors are known to have been assigned within the DOJ for investigation; only two more cases involving abuse of local nationals are known to have been assigned for department investigation, the most recent of which is the September 2007 Blackwater Nisoor Square shooting in Baghdad. And since military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq began, only one contractor has been tried for violence or abuse towards local nationals. In contrast, to date more than 60 U.S. military personnel have been court-martialed in connection with the deaths of Iraqi citizens and more are under investigation.” [14]
All of these questions are up for grabs and as Jeremy Scahill writes, “The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. ‘We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention,’ said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. ‘In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations.’ Addicott added, ‘If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court.’”[15]
As Scahill summarizes the situation:
“During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command]. ‘What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing,’ said Colonel Wilkerson. ‘That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing.’"
“He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. ‘I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it.
“At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."
“Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. ‘When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?’”[16]
The Congressional Research Service (8-25-20) reports:
“Contractors working with the Department of State or the U.S. military (or with any of the coalition forces) in Iraq are non-combatants who have no combat immunity under international law if they engage in hostilities, and whose conduct may be attributable to the United States. Section 552 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for FY2007 (P.L. 109-364) makes military contractors supporting the Armed Forces in Iraq subject to court-martial, but due to constitutional concerns, it seems more likely that contractors who commit crimes in Iraq would be prosecuted under criminal statutes that apply extraterritorially or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or by means of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Generally, Iraqi courts do not have jurisdiction to prosecute contractors without the permission of the relevant member country of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq. Some contractors including those with the State Department, may remain outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, civil or military, for improper conduct in Iraq.” [17]
Certainly, the ambiguity can serve a political purpose when the U.S. government needs justification for a war effort: “This arrangement, the former executive [at Blackwater] said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country.”[18]
It also can serve the purpose of increasing military funding, increasing the coffers of the many U.S. corporations involved in these wars, and surrendering the decision-making concerning who dies and how in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nevertheless, the ambiguity surrounding the relationship among the different players involved in making war, i.e. the U.S. military, the executive and judicial branches of government, corporations and their private independent contractors/mercenaries, is bad and illegal policy and practice.
Neither the executive branch of government nor the Pentagon wishes to acknowledge the political independence of the massive number of mercenaries fighting abroad under our name, but when push comes to shove, these private contractors constitute an “army” beholden only to the CEOs who hire them.
____________________
Marti Hiken is the director of Progressive Avenues. She is the former associate director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and former chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. She can be contacted at info@progressiveavenues.org, 415-702-9682.
The Progressive Avenues website is updated regularly: www.progressiveavenues.org
Luke Hiken is a former supervising attorney at the California Appellate Project, and has handled many courts-martial over the years.
End – End- End
[1] Steven Schooner, Private Warriors, Frontline, 6-21-05, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/interviews/schooner.html
[2] “Sweatshop Army -- Why does the Pentagon use low-road companies to feed and clothe our troops?” 9-2-10, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=sweatshop_army
[3] Bowers, Chris, “U.S. withdrawal from Iraq on schedule, but total number of troops overseas the same (for now),” 6-1-10, Open Left, http://openleft.com/diary/18926/us-withdrawal-from-iraq-on-schedule-but-total-number-of-troops-overseas-the-same-for-now
[4] CRS Summary, Schwartz, Moshe, “DOD Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis, 12-14-09, http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:bbDx-uHmHzAJ:www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf+total+number+of+private+contractors+in+Iraq+%26+Afghanistan&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESirgvzEFkqkk3uz1juX5iCxw9G2EUaHYk7MmTIp90j8sa7F7WcYPGabql2uyJicGl6rRfyJWYgJYx94TLNpGdOSGAwvIuH3dq_VvJnG80csUfnPjIkMWsqp-a9y3KoaBfUM27eF&sig=AHIEtbQcZUyNjxXoQSDE0uPkcBsezxnQbg
[5] Chatterjee, Pratap, “Danger Zone Jobs,” Overseas Civilian Contractors, 10-27-10, http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/category/iraq-2/
[6] Miller, T. Christian, “This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Overseas Civilian Contractors, ProPublica Disposable Army, 9-23-10, http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/
[7] See Taylor, Marisa, “U.S. can’t account for cash to rebuild,” McClatchy Newspapers, 10-27-10, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/27/102724/us-cant-untangle-billions-sent.html
[8] id., Miller, T. Christian
[9] Partlow, Joshua, “Karzai delays expulsion of security groups,” 10-27-10, Financial Times Asia-Pacific
[10] Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report for Congress, p. 7, Order Code RL32419, “Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues,” Updated 8-25-08, Elsea, Jennifer K., Legislative Attorney, Schwartz, Moshe, Analyst in Defense Acquisition Policy, and Nakamura, Kennon H., Analyst in Foreign Affairs, http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:iZI7eD0HJi4J:www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32419.pdf+Can+the+U.S.+President+fire+civilian+private+contractors&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiuBSgDPhzRGBjT7U0kX-jw-1t6xUdmBtE66lvPWEA6hqjE3IMUKzqJHG_KUipCIsTBtldhHDb7rOv-w2_K7BGLfsCedSrgao6PA6BQBG3OuVUaZ5vovUAgGjEAO7sXCY91xEW4&sig=AHIEtbQO47tfzHdyY8usfGF3-0-0y69GJA ; and updated 9-9-08: http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL32419_20080929.pdf
(See also: Department of Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis, Moshe Schwartz, Specialist in Defense Acquisition, 7-2-10, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf
[11] James Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren, “Use of Contractors Added to War’s Chaos in Iraq,” NYT, World Section, 10-24-10
[12] For a listing of other management and oversight DOD sources, see Political Vel Craft, Veil of Politics, “Obama Increases Military/Mercenary Contractor Presence by 23% in Iraq and 29% in Afghanistan,”
http://politicalvelcraft.org/2009/09/21/obama-increases-militarymercenary-contractor-presence-by-23-in-Iraq-and-29-in-afghanistan/
[13] Private Warrior, Frontline, Frequently Asked Questions, 6-21-05, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/faqs/
[14] Department of Justice Continues to Ignore Violent Crimes Committed By Private Security Contractors in Iraq, Afghanistan, 1-16-08,
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/etn/2006/alert/195/
[15] Scahill, Jeremy, “Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan,” 11-26-09, Alaiwah!, http://alaiwah.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/blackwater-in-pakistan/
[16] Scahill, Jeremy, “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” The Nation, 11-23-01, http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-us-war-pakistan
[17] id., CRS, Summary, p. 2
[18] Scahill, Jeremy, “The Secret US War in Pakistan, The Nation, 11-23-01
A funny thing happened on the way to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. military became privatized. Private contractors, i.e. mercenaries, are now the predominant military force comprising the armamentarium of the United States. In effect, private contractors supplanted the U.S. military as the primary decision-makers and fighting force of the U.S. government.
Private contractors were the saving grace to the need for more troops to fight overseas in multiple countries as well as to staff the multitude of U.S. bases on foreign soil. Very comfortably and conveniently they eliminated the need for a draft and all the problems associated with the selective service. What the American people did not consider is the more-or-less secret, diminishing power of the U.S. government over its own fighting forces.
As law professor Steven Schooner was asked in an interview, “Is there any danger of the military becoming overly dependent on the private sector?” he answered, “There’s no question that the military has become overly dependent on the private sector. When I was a young Army officer, as I learned the military doctrine, … the military relied on contractors on the battlefield only to the extent that they could fight without the contractors. That’s simply no longer the case in the United States military. The United States military can no longer fight effectively without contractors on the battlefield, and that has to be an item of great concern both to commanders and to the public. If we are faced with a legitimate foe that could in fact compete with us in terms of competence on the battlefield … this pervasive presence of contractors could be potentially disastrous.[1]
Every year the federal government spends half a trillion dollars on contracts for goods and services from private companies. The total workforce of those companies -- including workers not on federal contracts -- accounts for 22 percent of American workers, according to David Madland, director of the American Worker Project at the Center for American Progress.[2]
There is no way of knowing the total count of all private contractors. The estimate in June of this year is that there are around 200,000 service members in both Iraq and Afghanistan.[3]
There were over 200,000 DOD private contractors alone in 2009, comprising 53% of the DOD’s workforce in Iraq and Afghanistan.[4] In 3rd quarter FY 2010, USCENTCOM reported approximately 224,433 contractor personnel working for the DOD in the USCENTCOM AOR (Area of Responsibility).[5] Even the casualty list for this year exceeds the deaths of military ones in Iraq and Afghanistan.[6]
By mercenaries, we mean hired soldiers outside of any military chain of command. They can act independently of the U.S. military under the direction of their employer, and their allegiance is not to the U.S. government. They are motivated by private gain. They are usually not citizens or residents where these conflicts take place.
There is a lack of public information on the terms regarding the contracts including their costs and the standards governing hiring and performance. Without this information, how can the corporations and the contracts be documented or evaluated?[7]
In addition, there are factors that make it impossible to know how many contractors there are and how they are used. One is that the number of casualties of private contractors remains unknown. By contracting with private contractors who were former special operation forces and who end up working for corporations, the U.S. is able to deny any official “military” presence in a country, even though there might be as many as 100,000 hired mercenaries there.
Mercenary casualties should be reported more accurately. “It’s extremely likely that a generation ago, each one of these contractors deaths would have been a military death,” Schooner said. “As troop deaths have fallen, contractor deaths have risen. It's not a pretty picture …. I'm not accusing either the Bush or the Obama administration of intentionally deceiving the public, but when a president applauds a reduction in military deaths but fails to acknowledge the contractor personnel now dying in their place, someone isn't telling the whole story.” [8]
As to their role in Afghanistan, most recently, Mr. Karzai summed it up best when he lashed out in public, accusing U.S.-funded private security companies of killing people and looting homes and shops. “They violate the law, they kill people, the people get attacked and the civilians get killed by these private security companies,” he said. [9]
Of grave concern, given the change to the military effort, is the question of who has control over the individual armed forces of all these troops operating under different U.S. agencies and corporations. Ultimately, it is possible the president has lost control as commander-in-chief of the military forces of the United States. Can the commander-in-chief fire privatized soldiers? Has the U.S. military itself lost control of troops engaged in armed combat and other maneuvers when privatized soldiers outnumber GIs and are beholden to the dictates of separate and independent corporations?
Who is in charge of operations involving independent contractors? Is the DOD, the Pentagon, other governmental departments or agencies, the president, or the corporations? One thing is certain, the American people, the majority of whom are opposed to these wars, who are supposed to be in charge, are not. Likewise, the Karzai government is not. The fact is the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of State, the CIA, and USAID, etc., all employ private contractors in foreign countries.
The State Department has steadily increased its use of private contractors over the last 23 years to provide protection overseas, i.e. providing perimeter security to U.S. diplomatic and consular posts; providing worldwide personal protective services, providing bodyguards and static guards for buildings and other infrastructure; deterring visa and passport fraud, overseeing worldwide training and assistance programs in anti-terrorism; providing a courier service for the Department; and, providing a wide range of protective services for the Secretary of State, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN and foreign dignitaries visiting the U.S.[10]
One wonders if full transparency were revealed concerning the number and role of State Department forces involved in the war effort stateside and overseas wouldn’t by itself show that the U.S. State Department has under its command an army operating independently from the U.S. military and commander-in-chief.
The breadth of the private contractor problem boils down to this: Take the example of a United States corporation that still operates on U.S. soil and manufactures tanks for the DOD to use in Pakistan. On the floor of the factory, a worker, who works on building the tanks, rapes a fellow worker, a woman. In fact, there’s a long history in this corporation of sexual harassment, including rape. There is no doubt that the corporation can fire the individual responsible for the crime. However, can the DOD or president of the United States fire the worker? The president, furious by the illicit activity and the fact that the corporation does nothing to quell the abuse, marches into the factory headquarters and tells the CEOs that they must fire the worker. The corporation owners and bosses say no, letting the president know in no uncertain terms that he has no jurisdiction over the workers in their plant. So, the president marches over to the Pentagon and orders his Secretary of Defense to end the contract with the corporation. The Secretary informs the president that it and the State Department have a contract with Pakistan to build the tanks and can’t break it. Besides, without this corporation manufacturing this type of tank, there would be no tanks in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
One thing is certain and that is that an employee can be fired by the corporation (s)he works for -- and there will be no striking, picketing, collective bargaining or disrupting production.
The problems that arise with using contractors rather than the U.S. military forces have been well documented: “ [the] shortcomings with this new system [are]: how a failure to coordinate among contractors, coalition forces and Iraqi troops, as well as a failure to enforce rules of engagement that bind the military, endangered civilians as well as the contractors themselves. The military was often outright hostile to contractors, for being amateurish, overpaid and, often, trigger-happy.”[11]
There are significant jurisdictional questions that remain:
- What happens when commanders in the field have no control over the private contractors working in various countries?
- Who controls the drone battlefield when special operation forces and independent corporations run their own ops?
- What happens when the communications during a battle or at any time bypass the members of the U.S. military and instead passes to another department under the Executive Branch, such as the State Department?
- What happens when individual heads of governmental departments and agencies issue orders to commanders on the field? This would include the private, individual armed forces of the Department of Defense, State Department, CIA and other agencies.
Who, exactly, maintains the jurisdiction within the U.S. government to fire individual private contractors when hired by corporations? When the use of private contractors is under no single government department or branch of government, the jurisdictional questions remain ambiguous, untested, undefined, unregulated, and unlawful. The following is a partial list of the military’s assertion of authority over mercenaries/private contractors. It ranges from the Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) or the SMTJ - Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction of the U.S. (Title 18 U.S.C., Section 7), to the Coalition Provisional Authority Orders (CPAs) and their own judicial systems, to DOD Instructions (e.g. DOD 5525.11 -- Criminal Jurisdiction Over Civilians Employed By or Accompanying the Armed Forces Outside the United States, Certain Service Members, and Former Service Members), to the UCMJ and Inspectors General and the Defense Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), to U.S federal courts, to international laws of armed conflict, to Memoranda of Understanding – agreements between the DOD and State Department that coordinate the movement of PSCs (private security contractors) throughout a foreign country.[12]
Have there been prosecutions? Peter Singer, the author of “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,” states that no contractor has been prosecuted for misbehavior in Iraq. There have been some civil lawsuits, for example, the families of the four Blackwater guards killed in Fallujah are suing for wrongful death.[13]
Human Rights First reports, “Over the last several years, scores of well-documented reports of serious abuse by private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, both in the context of interrogations and in the use of excessive and often lethal force in various security operations, have not been prosecuted. Through February 2006, only 20 cases of alleged detainee abuse by contractors are known to have been assigned within the DOJ for investigation; only two more cases involving abuse of local nationals are known to have been assigned for department investigation, the most recent of which is the September 2007 Blackwater Nisoor Square shooting in Baghdad. And since military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq began, only one contractor has been tried for violence or abuse towards local nationals. In contrast, to date more than 60 U.S. military personnel have been court-martialed in connection with the deaths of Iraqi citizens and more are under investigation.” [14]
All of these questions are up for grabs and as Jeremy Scahill writes, “The use of private companies like Blackwater for sensitive operations such as drone strikes or other covert work undoubtedly comes with the benefit of plausible deniability that places an additional barrier in an already deeply flawed system of accountability. When things go wrong, it's the contractors' fault, not the government's. But the widespread use of contractors also raises serious legal questions, particularly when they are a part of lethal, covert actions. ‘We are using contractors for things that in the past might have been considered to be a violation of the Geneva Convention,’ said Lt. Col. Addicott, who now runs the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas. ‘In my opinion, we have pressed the envelope to the breaking limit, and it's almost a fiction that these guys are not in offensive military operations.’ Addicott added, ‘If we were subjected to the International Criminal Court, some of these guys could easily be picked up, charged with war crimes and put on trial. That's one of the reasons we're not members of the International Criminal Court.’”[15]
As Scahill summarizes the situation:
“During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command]. ‘What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing,’ said Colonel Wilkerson. ‘That's dangerous, that's very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don't tell the theater commander what you're doing.’"
“He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. ‘I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it.
“At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch--read: Cheney and Rumsfeld--wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier."
“Wilkerson said the JSOC teams caused diplomatic problems for the United States across the globe. ‘When these teams started hitting capital cities and other places all around the world, [Rumsfeld] didn't tell the State Department either. The only way we found out about it is our ambassadors started to call us and say, 'Who the hell are these six-foot-four white males with eighteen-inch biceps walking around our capital cities?’”[16]
The Congressional Research Service (8-25-20) reports:
“Contractors working with the Department of State or the U.S. military (or with any of the coalition forces) in Iraq are non-combatants who have no combat immunity under international law if they engage in hostilities, and whose conduct may be attributable to the United States. Section 552 of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for FY2007 (P.L. 109-364) makes military contractors supporting the Armed Forces in Iraq subject to court-martial, but due to constitutional concerns, it seems more likely that contractors who commit crimes in Iraq would be prosecuted under criminal statutes that apply extraterritorially or within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States, or by means of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA). Generally, Iraqi courts do not have jurisdiction to prosecute contractors without the permission of the relevant member country of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq. Some contractors including those with the State Department, may remain outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, civil or military, for improper conduct in Iraq.” [17]
Certainly, the ambiguity can serve a political purpose when the U.S. government needs justification for a war effort: “This arrangement, the former executive [at Blackwater] said, allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces who now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country.”[18]
It also can serve the purpose of increasing military funding, increasing the coffers of the many U.S. corporations involved in these wars, and surrendering the decision-making concerning who dies and how in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nevertheless, the ambiguity surrounding the relationship among the different players involved in making war, i.e. the U.S. military, the executive and judicial branches of government, corporations and their private independent contractors/mercenaries, is bad and illegal policy and practice.
Neither the executive branch of government nor the Pentagon wishes to acknowledge the political independence of the massive number of mercenaries fighting abroad under our name, but when push comes to shove, these private contractors constitute an “army” beholden only to the CEOs who hire them.
____________________
Marti Hiken is the director of Progressive Avenues. She is the former associate director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and former chair of the National Lawyers Guild Military Law Task Force. She can be contacted at info@progressiveavenues.org, 415-702-9682.
The Progressive Avenues website is updated regularly: www.progressiveavenues.org
Luke Hiken is a former supervising attorney at the California Appellate Project, and has handled many courts-martial over the years.
End – End- End
[1] Steven Schooner, Private Warriors, Frontline, 6-21-05, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/interviews/schooner.html
[2] “Sweatshop Army -- Why does the Pentagon use low-road companies to feed and clothe our troops?” 9-2-10, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=sweatshop_army
[3] Bowers, Chris, “U.S. withdrawal from Iraq on schedule, but total number of troops overseas the same (for now),” 6-1-10, Open Left, http://openleft.com/diary/18926/us-withdrawal-from-iraq-on-schedule-but-total-number-of-troops-overseas-the-same-for-now
[4] CRS Summary, Schwartz, Moshe, “DOD Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis, 12-14-09, http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:bbDx-uHmHzAJ:www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf+total+number+of+private+contractors+in+Iraq+%26+Afghanistan&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESirgvzEFkqkk3uz1juX5iCxw9G2EUaHYk7MmTIp90j8sa7F7WcYPGabql2uyJicGl6rRfyJWYgJYx94TLNpGdOSGAwvIuH3dq_VvJnG80csUfnPjIkMWsqp-a9y3KoaBfUM27eF&sig=AHIEtbQcZUyNjxXoQSDE0uPkcBsezxnQbg
[5] Chatterjee, Pratap, “Danger Zone Jobs,” Overseas Civilian Contractors, 10-27-10, http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/category/iraq-2/
[6] Miller, T. Christian, “This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Overseas Civilian Contractors, ProPublica Disposable Army, 9-23-10, http://civiliancontractors.wordpress.com/
[7] See Taylor, Marisa, “U.S. can’t account for cash to rebuild,” McClatchy Newspapers, 10-27-10, http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/10/27/102724/us-cant-untangle-billions-sent.html
[8] id., Miller, T. Christian
[9] Partlow, Joshua, “Karzai delays expulsion of security groups,” 10-27-10, Financial Times Asia-Pacific
[10] Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report for Congress, p. 7, Order Code RL32419, “Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues,” Updated 8-25-08, Elsea, Jennifer K., Legislative Attorney, Schwartz, Moshe, Analyst in Defense Acquisition Policy, and Nakamura, Kennon H., Analyst in Foreign Affairs, http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:iZI7eD0HJi4J:www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32419.pdf+Can+the+U.S.+President+fire+civilian+private+contractors&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiuBSgDPhzRGBjT7U0kX-jw-1t6xUdmBtE66lvPWEA6hqjE3IMUKzqJHG_KUipCIsTBtldhHDb7rOv-w2_K7BGLfsCedSrgao6PA6BQBG3OuVUaZ5vovUAgGjEAO7sXCY91xEW4&sig=AHIEtbQO47tfzHdyY8usfGF3-0-0y69GJA ; and updated 9-9-08: http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL32419_20080929.pdf
(See also: Department of Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis, Moshe Schwartz, Specialist in Defense Acquisition, 7-2-10, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf
[11] James Glanz and Andrew W. Lehren, “Use of Contractors Added to War’s Chaos in Iraq,” NYT, World Section, 10-24-10
[12] For a listing of other management and oversight DOD sources, see Political Vel Craft, Veil of Politics, “Obama Increases Military/Mercenary Contractor Presence by 23% in Iraq and 29% in Afghanistan,”
http://politicalvelcraft.org/2009/09/21/obama-increases-militarymercenary-contractor-presence-by-23-in-Iraq-and-29-in-afghanistan/
[13] Private Warrior, Frontline, Frequently Asked Questions, 6-21-05, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/faqs/
[14] Department of Justice Continues to Ignore Violent Crimes Committed By Private Security Contractors in Iraq, Afghanistan, 1-16-08,
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/media/etn/2006/alert/195/
[15] Scahill, Jeremy, “Blackwater: Company Non Grata in Pakistan,” 11-26-09, Alaiwah!, http://alaiwah.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/blackwater-in-pakistan/
[16] Scahill, Jeremy, “The Secret US War in Pakistan,” The Nation, 11-23-01, http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-us-war-pakistan
[17] id., CRS, Summary, p. 2
[18] Scahill, Jeremy, “The Secret US War in Pakistan, The Nation, 11-23-01
Friday, October 29, 2010
Baghdad to investigate role of Blackwater in deaths
By Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi government says that it will investigate whether employees of the Blackwater security company were involved in hitherto undisclosed killings that emerged from the Wikileaks documents.
In addition to a notorious case in Baghdad in 2007, when Blackwater guards killed 17 and wounded 18 civilians, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that it has discovered a further 14 cases when Blackwater personnel allegedly opened fire on civilians. The information comes from the war logs made public by Wikileaks and allegedly shows that a further 10 civilians were killed and seven wounded by Blackwater, a US-based private security company now known as Xe. In one third of cases, the Blackwater guards were protecting US diplomats under a $465m (£300m) contract when they opened fire.
The war logs reveal repeated cases when they shot at civilian vehicles that came close to their convoys, on one occasion even shooting dead the driver of an ambulance who had attended the scene of a bomb attack.
Sunni politicians in Baghdad say that the US military reports confirm and give credibility to their claims over the years that members of their community were being tortured by Shia-dominated security forces.
Iraq Body Count says that the 400,000 Wikileak war logs show that an additional 15,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in addition to the 107,000 in the group's database, which was built up from published sources. From the start of the war in 2003, the US military claimed that it did not have statistics on how many Iraqi civilians were being killed or injured. The aim of this was apparently to try to undermine protests against civilian loss of life as had happened in Vietnam.
The American and British governments both sought to play down civilian casualties in Iraq, claiming that only four out of 18 Iraqi provinces had a high level of violence. The Pentagon did ultimately admit that civilian deaths peaked at between 3,500 and 4,000 in a single month in December 2006.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/baghdad-to-investigate-role-of-blackwater-in-deaths-2115636.html
The Iraqi government says that it will investigate whether employees of the Blackwater security company were involved in hitherto undisclosed killings that emerged from the Wikileaks documents.
In addition to a notorious case in Baghdad in 2007, when Blackwater guards killed 17 and wounded 18 civilians, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that it has discovered a further 14 cases when Blackwater personnel allegedly opened fire on civilians. The information comes from the war logs made public by Wikileaks and allegedly shows that a further 10 civilians were killed and seven wounded by Blackwater, a US-based private security company now known as Xe. In one third of cases, the Blackwater guards were protecting US diplomats under a $465m (£300m) contract when they opened fire.
The war logs reveal repeated cases when they shot at civilian vehicles that came close to their convoys, on one occasion even shooting dead the driver of an ambulance who had attended the scene of a bomb attack.
Sunni politicians in Baghdad say that the US military reports confirm and give credibility to their claims over the years that members of their community were being tortured by Shia-dominated security forces.
Iraq Body Count says that the 400,000 Wikileak war logs show that an additional 15,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in addition to the 107,000 in the group's database, which was built up from published sources. From the start of the war in 2003, the US military claimed that it did not have statistics on how many Iraqi civilians were being killed or injured. The aim of this was apparently to try to undermine protests against civilian loss of life as had happened in Vietnam.
The American and British governments both sought to play down civilian casualties in Iraq, claiming that only four out of 18 Iraqi provinces had a high level of violence. The Pentagon did ultimately admit that civilian deaths peaked at between 3,500 and 4,000 in a single month in December 2006.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/baghdad-to-investigate-role-of-blackwater-in-deaths-2115636.html
Killing Reconciliation
By Jeremy Scahill
**************
"They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
***************
On March 26, 2009, Mullah Sahib Jan, a militant Taliban imam from the Mohammed Agha district in Afghanistan's Logar province, walked into the office of the Independent National Reconciliation Commission, the main body encouraging the Taliban to lay down their weapons and work with the government. He was escorting fifty Taliban fighters who, he said, had committed to ending their fight against the Afghan government and entering the process of integration. To the government, Sahib Jan was a shining example of how reconciliation with the Taliban is supposed to work. But less than a year later, the former militant's story would stand as a devastating symbol of how the actions of US Special Operations Forces are sabotaging the very strategy for reaching a political settlement that US officials claim to support.
Throughout Afghanistan, large billboards line the major roads encouraging Taliban fighters to do what Sahib Jan did—reconcile with the government. The billboards show red silhouettes of Kalashnikov-carrying Taliban fighters walking across a line, after which they transform into civilians and join white silhouettes of unarmed Afghans dressed in traditional garb. The message is clear: lay down your weapons and rejoin the family.
When Sahib Jan walked into the reconciliation office, he publicly announced that he and his Taliban colleagues had agreed to work with the government on a peace process after the commission assured him that it would restrict US-led NATO forces from conducting night raids and killing civilians. "If the killing and arrests of people were not stopped," he said, "we would withdraw our support to the government and the foreign forces."
Reconciliation officials in Logar province say that making allies out of figures like Sahib Jan is the centerpiece of their work. Logar and its neighboring provinces, Paktia, Wardak and Ghazni, contain a strong presence of not only the Taliban but also the Haqqani network, the insurgent group portrayed by US officials as having the closest ties to Al Qaeda and a cozy relationship with Pakistan's ISI spy organization. Logar is also home to several tribes that say they have spent the past two years trying to make peace. A crucial part of this, they say, is building enough trust with the Taliban to make a serious case for ending their insurgency. Soon after his initial trip to the reconciliation office, Sahib Jan left his calling as an imam and took a position as a religious adviser to the reconciliation commission. As part of his work, reconciliation officials say, he traveled to hardcore Taliban areas.
"He was preaching to the Taliban, encouraging them to come to the government, telling the fighters there were a lot of benefits to laying down their arms," says Mohammed Anwar, director of Logar's reconciliation commission and an adviser to a local tribal council. Council officials credit Sahib Jan with putting Taliban fighters on the road to reconciliation.
But on the morning of January 14, Sahib Jan's bullet-riddled body lay on the ground outside his family's mud-brick compound in Logar's Safed Sang village. According to local officials and his family, he was killed in a night raid by US Special Operations Forces. "At 1 or 1:30 in the morning, US soldiers pulled up to the gas station in front of our house. We were sleeping in our rooms at that time," recalls Sahib Jan's 18-year-old son, Haider. "They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
According to Haider, US forces entered the compound with ladders and corralled the men into one room, where they handcuffed and blindfolded them. They moved the women to a separate room. "They tied all of our hands and roughed us up a little bit. They were beating us with both weapons and their hands," recalls Haider. "I was tied up from 1 or 1:30 in the morning until 6 in the morning." The family says that during the raid much of their property was damaged or destroyed. As Sahib Jan's sons were tied up, they had no idea of their father's fate until the Afghan translator appeared with US soldiers. They showed them a picture and said, "This is the man we killed."
"It was my father," Haider recalls. The soldiers then escorted the surviving men of the family to their father's body, where they saw about six bullets in it. With that, the Americans left; they have never contacted the family since.
"We have checked our logs and with our units that conduct these types of mission profiles. There is no record of the operation," US Lt. Commander Thomas Porter wrote in an e-mail to The Nation. But an eyewitness to the raid named Azmuddin, who works at the gas station in front of Sahib Jan's home, says, "US forces told me the next morning that they killed him because he had shot at them." Azmuddin says the morning after the raid he was arrested by US forces and taken to the classified Tor Prison, or "black jail," for fifteen days before being locked up at the Bagram prison for four months. In response to NATO's statement, government officials in Logar reacted angrily and swore that Sahib Jan was killed by US forces.
"There was a false report claiming that Sahib Jan was a Taliban, and the Americans conducted a night raid and killed him even though he had been working with us for months," says Anwar, the head of Logar's reconciliation commission. "During the entire time he worked with us, he hadn't participated in any attacks against the government. He worked with us as a religious adviser. Only the US soldiers know why they killed Sahib Jan. We don't know why." The local district chief, Abdul Hameed, says US forces carried out the raid without the cooperation of provincial security personnel. Anwar says that when he tries to contact US forces about these deadly incidents, they won't let him on their base, and the guards always tell him the appropriate officials are too busy or not there.
Officials at the reconciliation office point to several night raids over the past year, which they say targeted former Taliban who entered the process of reconciliation, as devastating to their work. "We are trying to build bridges between the Taliban and the government and trying to find jobs for them. We are working to get them decent housing in return for leaving the Taliban," says Anwar. "We are also trying to ensure that once they turn themselves in, they are not arrested again. How can we encourage reconciliation in good faith in the face of these American raids against the very people who agree to disarm?"
Meanwhile, US and NATO officials proclaim that the Taliban are on the ropes and will eventually be forced to make a deal. "The insurgency is under pressure, under pressure like never before in Afghanistan," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on October 22. "Our aim for this year was to regain the momentum. Now we have it." In recent weeks, such rhetoric has been bolstered by a flurry of reports about senior Taliban officials engaging in direct talks with the Karzai government, and US officials portray Washington as open to some form of a political settlement. But there is an enormous disconnect between the image projected by the US and Afghan governments and reality. On the ground the Taliban seem to be gaining traction and increasing membership despite, or perhaps because of, intensified US targeted-killing operations and night raids.
Two senior officials of the former Taliban government have told The Nation that the Taliban will not engage in any meaningful talks until foreign troops are expelled from Afghanistan and that reports that the Taliban are engaged in serious negotiations are false. "There is nothing going on, no negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans or the Taliban and the [Afghan] government," says Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as the Taliban government's ambassador to Pakistan, in an interview at his home in Kabul. He says if anyone claiming to be Taliban is negotiating, they are essentially nobodies to the movement. "There was no 'peace meeting' because the Taliban reject it."
Privately, US officials have acknowledged that reports in US media outlets of senior Taliban negotiating are propaganda aimed at sowing dissent among the Taliban leadership. "This is a psychological operation, plain and simple," a US official with firsthand knowledge of the Afghan government's strategies told the McClatchy news service. "Exaggerating the significance of it is an effort to sow distrust within the insurgency."
The story of Sahib Jan raises a complicated question: was he really an influential Taliban figure? A current Taliban commander from Kunduz told The Nation that there is no evidence of the reconciliation program's success and that rural people are sometimes used as pawns in a game to elevate the status of tribal leaders with the Afghan government by "reconciling" Taliban fighters. "These are people who are just getting salaries from foreign powers or Afghan officials. You and I just invent a group and give them turbans and weapons and they go and say, We are Talibs and we surrender," says the Taliban commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Salahuddin. It is not clear whether Sahib Jan was an example of this, but in terms of public perception in Logar, that is irrelevant. What is not in dispute is that he publicly announced he was a Taliban mullah on the path to reconciliation and was killed in a night raid ten months later.
The US strategy seems to be to force the Taliban to the table through a fierce killing campaign. According to the US military, over a ninety-day period this past summer, US and coalition Special Operations Forces killed or captured more than 2,900 "insurgents," with an estimated dozen killed a day. Between July 4, when Gen. David Petraeus assumed command in Kabul, and early October, according to the military, US and Afghan Special Operations Forces killed more than 300 Taliban commanders and more than 900 foot soldiers in 1,500 raids. "This is precisely the kind of pressure we believe will lead to reconciliation and reintegration" of the Taliban, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently.
Zaeef, the former senior Taliban official, who spent four years in Guantánamo prison, confirmed that the American targeted-killing campaign of Taliban leaders has been successful, but he believes that the strategy will backfire for both the US and Afghan governments. "If these people, important, known people, disappear from the [Taliban] movement, what will happen? Who should [the Afghan government] make a dialogue with?" he asks. "The fighting will not stop. I know the new generation is more extremist than the last generation. The new generation will not listen to anyone. This is a dangerous thing. It will be bad for the Americans, but it will be worse for the people of Afghanistan."
Evidence of this can be found in a recent incident in Paktia province, when the Taliban leadership in Quetta, Pakistan, sent a representative to "reprimand a group of young commanders who were breaking the organization's rules," according to veteran Afghanistan journalist Anand Gopal. "But the defiant young commanders killed the cleric. While such incidents are still isolated, the danger is that as the Taliban undergo a massive demographic change in the coming years, this trend will accelerate, and the ability of Quetta to enforce decisions on its rank and file will be diminished."
Zaeef says the night raids and the targeted killings are strengthening the Taliban and inspiring more people "to become extremist against the Americans." US political and military leaders, he says, "are thinking, 'When we scare the people, they should be quiet.' But this is a different nation. When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you. If you are killing five people, twenty, at least, are rising against you. When you are disrespecting the people or the honor of the people in one village, the whole village becomes against you. This is creating hatred against Americans."
The US killing of civilians, combined with a widely held perception that the Afghan government exists only for facilitating the corruption of powerful warlords, drug dealers and war criminals, is producing a situation in which the Taliban and the Haqqani network are gaining support from the Pashtun heartland in communities that would not otherwise be backing them. Since 2005, when Zaeef was released from Guantánamo, "the Taliban have become stronger," he says. "Are the Taliban coming from the sky?" Zaeef asks. "No, it's new people."
Zaeef and Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the former Taliban foreign minister, insist that the Taliban is still the umbrella under which all of the insurgent forces operate. But at the same time they acknowledge that smaller, localized militias not loyal to Mullah Mohammed Omar or the Quetta-based Taliban leadership are popping up more and more. "By killing leaders, the war will not come to an end, but on the contrary, things will get worse, which will give birth to more leaders," says Muttawakil. "Many people might not like Taliban but join them because they are being harassed by powerful Afghans or foreigners and want to get revenge." Many of these newer insurgents live in rural areas of Afghanistan and, for now, fight in their own communities rather than as part of a cohesive national rebellion. "The nature of this kind of war is that it starts from the rural areas, as it started against the Soviet Union. Gradually the war spreads to district centers and then to the center of small provinces," Muttawakil says. "The war has started in rural areas and gradually will spread to big cities."
On a practical level, the discontent in those rural areas with the corruption of the Afghan government and the consistent killing of civilians by US forces is raising the prospect that Afghans offering assistance to the Afghan government and NATO forces—such as allowing safe passage to key supply convoys—may withdraw that support.
* * *
One community leader in Logar, Hajji Showkatt, works with a network of tribal leaders across Logar and its neighboring provinces who broker complex deals with the Taliban and Haqqani network forces to refrain from attacking oil and supply convoys headed to and from Kabul. Part of this involves paying bribes to the Taliban, but the deals also rely on assurances from Showkatt and the reconciliation commission to insurgent forces that they are working to end the night raids and arrests.
In the weeks leading up to Sahib Jan's killing, Logar officials say, there had been three other night raids in the area. Sahib Jan's killing was the final straw. "At the funeral everyone was so emotional when we took his body to be buried. We cursed the Americans," Showkatt says. In response, local people—not aligned with the Taliban—attacked an oil convoy, blowing up more than a dozen trucks, according to local officials. The scorched earth left by the attack can still be seen on the highway running through Logar. "Here is the bottom line: the US is conducting actions that are killing innocent people," Showkatt says. "The Taliban use this as propaganda and say to the people, 'This is what America is about.' It makes them more powerful."
Showkatt, who fought as a mujahedeen against the Soviets, continues to protect supply convoys for the United States and Afghan governments along key routes, but he says that this is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Showkatt and other leaders say they cannot guarantee they will continue to offer convoy protection. "In the mujahedeen times, we stopped all of the Russian convoys in this area," Showkatt boasts.
"We fought the Russians when they were here and we expelled them," adds Showkatt's friend Azrat Mohammed, a former mujahedeen commander from Logar. "Americans are not stronger than the Russians. If they continue with these actions, disrespecting our women, killing the wrong people, inshallah, we will rise up to defeat them too."
Throughout the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, police officials and civilians alike tell stories about personal grudges being settled through death by US night raids, where false intelligence is deliberately passed on to NATO forces to get a rival or enemy killed or captured.
Mohammed is living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, he says, for that very reason. He says he has been warned he is on a list for kill or capture. "I am too afraid to even sleep in my own home at night, so I spend most of my time in the camps in Pakistan. I am afraid the Americans will kill me," he says. "The way the Americans rely on bad intelligence to target people like me, the night raids we keep witnessing, the arrests and the torture and the killing is all making me want to pick up a weapon again. We are not by our nature against the government, but what they are doing is encouraging people to rise up against them."
In Afghanistan, Taliban commanders are fond of characterizing their fight to expel the United States and its allies with the phrase, "You've got the clocks, we've got the time." While US leaders are struggling to define what victory would look like in Afghanistan, the forces they are fighting are not. "We have two goals: freedom or martyrdom," says Taliban commander Salahuddin. "If we do not win our freedom, then we'll die honorably for its cause." The continuing US targeted-killing campaign and renewed airstrikes ordered by General Petraeus seem only to be further weakening the already fragile Karzai government. In plain terms, the United States' own actions in Afghanistan seem to be delivering the most fatal blows to its counterinsurgency strategy and its goal of winning hearts and minds. "I think that the Americans are already defeated in Afghanistan, they are just not accepting it," says former Taliban official Zaeef.
"If the US pulls out, my heart will be very sad because there will be a civil war," says Asif Mohammed, a young driver who escorts supply convoys to Kabul. "If they stay, they will continue killing our women and children." In the end, there could be the worst of both worlds: an escalation in raids by US Special Operations Forces, with their heavy toll on civilians, and a failed counterinsurgency campaign incapable of stopping a civil war.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/155622/killing-reconciliation
**************
"They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
***************
On March 26, 2009, Mullah Sahib Jan, a militant Taliban imam from the Mohammed Agha district in Afghanistan's Logar province, walked into the office of the Independent National Reconciliation Commission, the main body encouraging the Taliban to lay down their weapons and work with the government. He was escorting fifty Taliban fighters who, he said, had committed to ending their fight against the Afghan government and entering the process of integration. To the government, Sahib Jan was a shining example of how reconciliation with the Taliban is supposed to work. But less than a year later, the former militant's story would stand as a devastating symbol of how the actions of US Special Operations Forces are sabotaging the very strategy for reaching a political settlement that US officials claim to support.
Throughout Afghanistan, large billboards line the major roads encouraging Taliban fighters to do what Sahib Jan did—reconcile with the government. The billboards show red silhouettes of Kalashnikov-carrying Taliban fighters walking across a line, after which they transform into civilians and join white silhouettes of unarmed Afghans dressed in traditional garb. The message is clear: lay down your weapons and rejoin the family.
When Sahib Jan walked into the reconciliation office, he publicly announced that he and his Taliban colleagues had agreed to work with the government on a peace process after the commission assured him that it would restrict US-led NATO forces from conducting night raids and killing civilians. "If the killing and arrests of people were not stopped," he said, "we would withdraw our support to the government and the foreign forces."
Reconciliation officials in Logar province say that making allies out of figures like Sahib Jan is the centerpiece of their work. Logar and its neighboring provinces, Paktia, Wardak and Ghazni, contain a strong presence of not only the Taliban but also the Haqqani network, the insurgent group portrayed by US officials as having the closest ties to Al Qaeda and a cozy relationship with Pakistan's ISI spy organization. Logar is also home to several tribes that say they have spent the past two years trying to make peace. A crucial part of this, they say, is building enough trust with the Taliban to make a serious case for ending their insurgency. Soon after his initial trip to the reconciliation office, Sahib Jan left his calling as an imam and took a position as a religious adviser to the reconciliation commission. As part of his work, reconciliation officials say, he traveled to hardcore Taliban areas.
"He was preaching to the Taliban, encouraging them to come to the government, telling the fighters there were a lot of benefits to laying down their arms," says Mohammed Anwar, director of Logar's reconciliation commission and an adviser to a local tribal council. Council officials credit Sahib Jan with putting Taliban fighters on the road to reconciliation.
But on the morning of January 14, Sahib Jan's bullet-riddled body lay on the ground outside his family's mud-brick compound in Logar's Safed Sang village. According to local officials and his family, he was killed in a night raid by US Special Operations Forces. "At 1 or 1:30 in the morning, US soldiers pulled up to the gas station in front of our house. We were sleeping in our rooms at that time," recalls Sahib Jan's 18-year-old son, Haider. "They broke down the doors of our house. My father was in one room, and we were in another. We don't know exactly when the US soldiers entered our house, we just know that they took our father and killed him. They killed our father outside our house, a short ways away. We don't know if they killed him from a helicopter or if commandos killed him."
According to Haider, US forces entered the compound with ladders and corralled the men into one room, where they handcuffed and blindfolded them. They moved the women to a separate room. "They tied all of our hands and roughed us up a little bit. They were beating us with both weapons and their hands," recalls Haider. "I was tied up from 1 or 1:30 in the morning until 6 in the morning." The family says that during the raid much of their property was damaged or destroyed. As Sahib Jan's sons were tied up, they had no idea of their father's fate until the Afghan translator appeared with US soldiers. They showed them a picture and said, "This is the man we killed."
"It was my father," Haider recalls. The soldiers then escorted the surviving men of the family to their father's body, where they saw about six bullets in it. With that, the Americans left; they have never contacted the family since.
"We have checked our logs and with our units that conduct these types of mission profiles. There is no record of the operation," US Lt. Commander Thomas Porter wrote in an e-mail to The Nation. But an eyewitness to the raid named Azmuddin, who works at the gas station in front of Sahib Jan's home, says, "US forces told me the next morning that they killed him because he had shot at them." Azmuddin says the morning after the raid he was arrested by US forces and taken to the classified Tor Prison, or "black jail," for fifteen days before being locked up at the Bagram prison for four months. In response to NATO's statement, government officials in Logar reacted angrily and swore that Sahib Jan was killed by US forces.
"There was a false report claiming that Sahib Jan was a Taliban, and the Americans conducted a night raid and killed him even though he had been working with us for months," says Anwar, the head of Logar's reconciliation commission. "During the entire time he worked with us, he hadn't participated in any attacks against the government. He worked with us as a religious adviser. Only the US soldiers know why they killed Sahib Jan. We don't know why." The local district chief, Abdul Hameed, says US forces carried out the raid without the cooperation of provincial security personnel. Anwar says that when he tries to contact US forces about these deadly incidents, they won't let him on their base, and the guards always tell him the appropriate officials are too busy or not there.
Officials at the reconciliation office point to several night raids over the past year, which they say targeted former Taliban who entered the process of reconciliation, as devastating to their work. "We are trying to build bridges between the Taliban and the government and trying to find jobs for them. We are working to get them decent housing in return for leaving the Taliban," says Anwar. "We are also trying to ensure that once they turn themselves in, they are not arrested again. How can we encourage reconciliation in good faith in the face of these American raids against the very people who agree to disarm?"
Meanwhile, US and NATO officials proclaim that the Taliban are on the ropes and will eventually be forced to make a deal. "The insurgency is under pressure, under pressure like never before in Afghanistan," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on October 22. "Our aim for this year was to regain the momentum. Now we have it." In recent weeks, such rhetoric has been bolstered by a flurry of reports about senior Taliban officials engaging in direct talks with the Karzai government, and US officials portray Washington as open to some form of a political settlement. But there is an enormous disconnect between the image projected by the US and Afghan governments and reality. On the ground the Taliban seem to be gaining traction and increasing membership despite, or perhaps because of, intensified US targeted-killing operations and night raids.
Two senior officials of the former Taliban government have told The Nation that the Taliban will not engage in any meaningful talks until foreign troops are expelled from Afghanistan and that reports that the Taliban are engaged in serious negotiations are false. "There is nothing going on, no negotiations between the Taliban and the Americans or the Taliban and the [Afghan] government," says Abdul Salam Zaeef, who served as the Taliban government's ambassador to Pakistan, in an interview at his home in Kabul. He says if anyone claiming to be Taliban is negotiating, they are essentially nobodies to the movement. "There was no 'peace meeting' because the Taliban reject it."
Privately, US officials have acknowledged that reports in US media outlets of senior Taliban negotiating are propaganda aimed at sowing dissent among the Taliban leadership. "This is a psychological operation, plain and simple," a US official with firsthand knowledge of the Afghan government's strategies told the McClatchy news service. "Exaggerating the significance of it is an effort to sow distrust within the insurgency."
The story of Sahib Jan raises a complicated question: was he really an influential Taliban figure? A current Taliban commander from Kunduz told The Nation that there is no evidence of the reconciliation program's success and that rural people are sometimes used as pawns in a game to elevate the status of tribal leaders with the Afghan government by "reconciling" Taliban fighters. "These are people who are just getting salaries from foreign powers or Afghan officials. You and I just invent a group and give them turbans and weapons and they go and say, We are Talibs and we surrender," says the Taliban commander, who goes by the nom de guerre Salahuddin. It is not clear whether Sahib Jan was an example of this, but in terms of public perception in Logar, that is irrelevant. What is not in dispute is that he publicly announced he was a Taliban mullah on the path to reconciliation and was killed in a night raid ten months later.
The US strategy seems to be to force the Taliban to the table through a fierce killing campaign. According to the US military, over a ninety-day period this past summer, US and coalition Special Operations Forces killed or captured more than 2,900 "insurgents," with an estimated dozen killed a day. Between July 4, when Gen. David Petraeus assumed command in Kabul, and early October, according to the military, US and Afghan Special Operations Forces killed more than 300 Taliban commanders and more than 900 foot soldiers in 1,500 raids. "This is precisely the kind of pressure we believe will lead to reconciliation and reintegration" of the Taliban, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said recently.
Zaeef, the former senior Taliban official, who spent four years in Guantánamo prison, confirmed that the American targeted-killing campaign of Taliban leaders has been successful, but he believes that the strategy will backfire for both the US and Afghan governments. "If these people, important, known people, disappear from the [Taliban] movement, what will happen? Who should [the Afghan government] make a dialogue with?" he asks. "The fighting will not stop. I know the new generation is more extremist than the last generation. The new generation will not listen to anyone. This is a dangerous thing. It will be bad for the Americans, but it will be worse for the people of Afghanistan."
Evidence of this can be found in a recent incident in Paktia province, when the Taliban leadership in Quetta, Pakistan, sent a representative to "reprimand a group of young commanders who were breaking the organization's rules," according to veteran Afghanistan journalist Anand Gopal. "But the defiant young commanders killed the cleric. While such incidents are still isolated, the danger is that as the Taliban undergo a massive demographic change in the coming years, this trend will accelerate, and the ability of Quetta to enforce decisions on its rank and file will be diminished."
Zaeef says the night raids and the targeted killings are strengthening the Taliban and inspiring more people "to become extremist against the Americans." US political and military leaders, he says, "are thinking, 'When we scare the people, they should be quiet.' But this is a different nation. When you are killing one person, four or five others rise against you. If you are killing five people, twenty, at least, are rising against you. When you are disrespecting the people or the honor of the people in one village, the whole village becomes against you. This is creating hatred against Americans."
The US killing of civilians, combined with a widely held perception that the Afghan government exists only for facilitating the corruption of powerful warlords, drug dealers and war criminals, is producing a situation in which the Taliban and the Haqqani network are gaining support from the Pashtun heartland in communities that would not otherwise be backing them. Since 2005, when Zaeef was released from Guantánamo, "the Taliban have become stronger," he says. "Are the Taliban coming from the sky?" Zaeef asks. "No, it's new people."
Zaeef and Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, the former Taliban foreign minister, insist that the Taliban is still the umbrella under which all of the insurgent forces operate. But at the same time they acknowledge that smaller, localized militias not loyal to Mullah Mohammed Omar or the Quetta-based Taliban leadership are popping up more and more. "By killing leaders, the war will not come to an end, but on the contrary, things will get worse, which will give birth to more leaders," says Muttawakil. "Many people might not like Taliban but join them because they are being harassed by powerful Afghans or foreigners and want to get revenge." Many of these newer insurgents live in rural areas of Afghanistan and, for now, fight in their own communities rather than as part of a cohesive national rebellion. "The nature of this kind of war is that it starts from the rural areas, as it started against the Soviet Union. Gradually the war spreads to district centers and then to the center of small provinces," Muttawakil says. "The war has started in rural areas and gradually will spread to big cities."
On a practical level, the discontent in those rural areas with the corruption of the Afghan government and the consistent killing of civilians by US forces is raising the prospect that Afghans offering assistance to the Afghan government and NATO forces—such as allowing safe passage to key supply convoys—may withdraw that support.
* * *
One community leader in Logar, Hajji Showkatt, works with a network of tribal leaders across Logar and its neighboring provinces who broker complex deals with the Taliban and Haqqani network forces to refrain from attacking oil and supply convoys headed to and from Kabul. Part of this involves paying bribes to the Taliban, but the deals also rely on assurances from Showkatt and the reconciliation commission to insurgent forces that they are working to end the night raids and arrests.
In the weeks leading up to Sahib Jan's killing, Logar officials say, there had been three other night raids in the area. Sahib Jan's killing was the final straw. "At the funeral everyone was so emotional when we took his body to be buried. We cursed the Americans," Showkatt says. In response, local people—not aligned with the Taliban—attacked an oil convoy, blowing up more than a dozen trucks, according to local officials. The scorched earth left by the attack can still be seen on the highway running through Logar. "Here is the bottom line: the US is conducting actions that are killing innocent people," Showkatt says. "The Taliban use this as propaganda and say to the people, 'This is what America is about.' It makes them more powerful."
Showkatt, who fought as a mujahedeen against the Soviets, continues to protect supply convoys for the United States and Afghan governments along key routes, but he says that this is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Showkatt and other leaders say they cannot guarantee they will continue to offer convoy protection. "In the mujahedeen times, we stopped all of the Russian convoys in this area," Showkatt boasts.
"We fought the Russians when they were here and we expelled them," adds Showkatt's friend Azrat Mohammed, a former mujahedeen commander from Logar. "Americans are not stronger than the Russians. If they continue with these actions, disrespecting our women, killing the wrong people, inshallah, we will rise up to defeat them too."
Throughout the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan, police officials and civilians alike tell stories about personal grudges being settled through death by US night raids, where false intelligence is deliberately passed on to NATO forces to get a rival or enemy killed or captured.
Mohammed is living in a refugee camp in Pakistan, he says, for that very reason. He says he has been warned he is on a list for kill or capture. "I am too afraid to even sleep in my own home at night, so I spend most of my time in the camps in Pakistan. I am afraid the Americans will kill me," he says. "The way the Americans rely on bad intelligence to target people like me, the night raids we keep witnessing, the arrests and the torture and the killing is all making me want to pick up a weapon again. We are not by our nature against the government, but what they are doing is encouraging people to rise up against them."
In Afghanistan, Taliban commanders are fond of characterizing their fight to expel the United States and its allies with the phrase, "You've got the clocks, we've got the time." While US leaders are struggling to define what victory would look like in Afghanistan, the forces they are fighting are not. "We have two goals: freedom or martyrdom," says Taliban commander Salahuddin. "If we do not win our freedom, then we'll die honorably for its cause." The continuing US targeted-killing campaign and renewed airstrikes ordered by General Petraeus seem only to be further weakening the already fragile Karzai government. In plain terms, the United States' own actions in Afghanistan seem to be delivering the most fatal blows to its counterinsurgency strategy and its goal of winning hearts and minds. "I think that the Americans are already defeated in Afghanistan, they are just not accepting it," says former Taliban official Zaeef.
"If the US pulls out, my heart will be very sad because there will be a civil war," says Asif Mohammed, a young driver who escorts supply convoys to Kabul. "If they stay, they will continue killing our women and children." In the end, there could be the worst of both worlds: an escalation in raids by US Special Operations Forces, with their heavy toll on civilians, and a failed counterinsurgency campaign incapable of stopping a civil war.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/155622/killing-reconciliation
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Iraq war logs: military privatisation run amok
Pratap Chatterjee
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 23 October 2010 13.00 BST
The Wikileaks Iraq war logs bring to light previously unknown incidents involving military contractors like Blackwater, acting with legal immunity, which resulted in deaths of civilians during the occupation of Iraq. Photograph: Gervasio Sanchez/AP
Shortly after 10am on 14 May 2005, a convoy of private security guards from Blackwater riding down "Route Irish" – the Baghdad airport road – shot up a civilian Iraqi vehicle. While they were at it, the Blackwater men fired shots over the heads of a group of soldiers from the 69th Regiment of the US Army before they sped away heading west in their white armoured truck. When the dust cleared, the Iraqi driver was dead and his wife and daughter were injured.
A terse, 57-word dispatch in the Iraq war logs published by Wikileaks is the first public evidence of the shooting, as recorded by the US military.
The incident is one of several dozen "escalation of force" incidents involving private security companies in Iraq – which is military parlance for an unwarranted attack, almost all of which have never been previously reported. Blackwater, the company from Moyock, North Carolina, is responsible for about half of the attacks, closely followed by Erinys, a British private security company registered in the Virgin Islands, which seems to have an unusually high number of vehicle crashes.
On my four visits to Iraq in the last seven years, I learned quickly to steer clear of the fast-moving vehicles belonging to these private security companies. The men – sporting identical reflective wrap-around sunglasses, bullet-proof jackets – would aim their high-powered assault rifles and shout "Imshi" ("Move") at any vehicle that came within a 50m perimeter. Sometimes, they would throw plastic water bottles to shock pedestrians into staying away.
Easily the best-known private security company is Blackwater (recently renamed Xe), which rocketed to fame three years ago when four company security guards, escorting a convoy of US state department vehicles en route to a meeting in western Baghdad, opened fire in Nisour Square in Baghdad killing 17 Iraqi civilians. Yet, a query of the Iraq war logs for "Blackwater" or "Nisour Square" turns up nothing, at first.
In this failure to identify what is probably the most notorious carnage of Iraqi civilians, the strengths and weakness of the military reporting process (and, by association, Wikileaks) become startlingly clear. Had the media not reported this incident, there would be no way to identify the company or the location in which this massacre took place. Initially, I wondered: was it possible that the soldier who recorded the incident made a mistake or that the record was erased?
Eventually, I tracked down the incident by trying a few other methods. It is easy to see why I missed the record: there is no mention of the company, or the location, and even the death toll is incorrectly recorded as nine, suggesting that the Pentagon casualty record is incomplete.
Human rights investigators know this problem only too well. Media reports are often incomplete and government reports are sometimes deliberately vague. They are just a starting point from which painstaking research is needed to build up a true picture of what has happened.
Quite possibly, there were many more incidents in which civilians were injured, or even killed, which were never reported. Some of the reports may have been altered before they were entered into the military system. But given the other records that I found, at the very least, Wikileaks has revealed that Blackwater and other private security companies are guilty of many more injuries and killings than the media have previously reported.
Today, there as many as 40,000 armed private security contractors working in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to data collected by Commission on Wartime Contracting staff during the first quarter of 2010.
Some of them are ill-paid ex-soldiers from countries like Sierra Leone who make just $250 a month; others are former US soldiers, who are paid $500 or more per day. These men are often doing the very same jobs that soldiers once did – like guard duty – but with a lot less accountability.
Until quite recently, these men with guns were untouchable: they were protected from any kind of prosecution by Coalition Provisional Authority Order No 17, issued by Paul Bremer, the US diplomat charged with running Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
For example, Andrew J Moonen, a Blackwater employee, who has been accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice-president on 24 December 2006, was spirited out of the country and has never faced charges in Iraq. Nor have the five men accused of opening fire in Nisour Square: Donald Ball, Dustin Laurent Heard, Evan Shawn Liberty Nicholas Abram Slatten and Paul Alvin Slough. Lawsuits in the US have also failed.
Blackwater and Erinys were not the only ones who acted with seeming impunity. Perhaps the most egregious incident occurred on 28 May 2005, when the US Marines came under fire from four white Ford pickup trucks and a grey Excursion sports utility vehicle "recklessly driving through Fallujah traveling west – and firing sporadically at vehicles".
The shooters worked for Zapata Engineering, one of five companies originally hired under a $200m contract to supervise the destruction and storage of US military ammunition worldwide. They were paid well for this work: each company manager earned an average of $275,000 a year, under their contract.
Eventually, one of the Zapata vehicles ran over a spike strip in the road near a guard house under the control of the US Marines. The Marines placed 19 Zapata employees under arrest.
At the time, Lawrence Peter, the director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told my colleague David Phinney at CorpWatch:
"I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is no company named Zapata that is a licensed private security company under the terms of CPA Memorandum 17. I do not know under what legal authority those men thought they were operating, but it was not in keeping with the law of Iraq nor consistent with what professional, responsible and law-abiding private security companies are doing here."
But Iraqis cannot tell which of these companies are licensed and which are not. Technically, they could complain to the military or raise the matter with yet another private military company named Aegis Defence from Britain, which was in charge of monitoring the movements of fellow private security contractors, under a $293m contract issued in June 2004. Yet Aegis hardly inspired confidence – one of their employees caused an uproar when he uploaded a video of security contractors shooting at Iraqis, with an Elvis Presley soundtrack to match.
Things got even worse when the Washington Post published an article about yet another security company named Triple Canopy, in which team leader Jacob C Washbourne was quoted as saying: "I want to kill somebody today."
Today, the Pentagon says that the random shootings are a thing of the past. In May 2008, an Armed Contractor Oversight Bureau (ACOB) was set up (pdf) by the US government in Iraq. Unfortunately, there is no website or any other public way to contact this important body.
Perhaps the most worrying news about private military contractors came on 18 August 2010, when the New York Times revealed that the US government was planning to double the number of private security contractors in Iraq:
"Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said."
It's not just Iraqis who are worried. At a hearing in congress on 23 September 2010, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the commission on wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former senior Pentagon auditor, said that he was troubled by the fact that the state department had very little experience to oversee this civilian surge in Iraq:
"(I)t is not clear that it has the trained personnel to manage and oversee contract performance of a kind that has already shown the potential for creating tragic incidents and frayed relations with host countries."
Courtesy Wikileaks, we now know that many more deadly shootings have taken place by these unregulated private security contractors than we knew of before. Given this new knowledge, it is time that we demand an inquiry into the privatisation of the military. Right now, the prime facie evidence is that it has considerably increased the number of unnecessary violent incidents, while reducing military discipline and accountability and costing taxpayers a bundle.
• Editor's note: the incident detailed at the top of this article occurred in 2005, not 2004, as was originally stated; all other details are correct, and the article was amended at 12:00 on 24 October 2010.
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 23 October 2010 13.00 BST
The Wikileaks Iraq war logs bring to light previously unknown incidents involving military contractors like Blackwater, acting with legal immunity, which resulted in deaths of civilians during the occupation of Iraq. Photograph: Gervasio Sanchez/AP
Shortly after 10am on 14 May 2005, a convoy of private security guards from Blackwater riding down "Route Irish" – the Baghdad airport road – shot up a civilian Iraqi vehicle. While they were at it, the Blackwater men fired shots over the heads of a group of soldiers from the 69th Regiment of the US Army before they sped away heading west in their white armoured truck. When the dust cleared, the Iraqi driver was dead and his wife and daughter were injured.
A terse, 57-word dispatch in the Iraq war logs published by Wikileaks is the first public evidence of the shooting, as recorded by the US military.
The incident is one of several dozen "escalation of force" incidents involving private security companies in Iraq – which is military parlance for an unwarranted attack, almost all of which have never been previously reported. Blackwater, the company from Moyock, North Carolina, is responsible for about half of the attacks, closely followed by Erinys, a British private security company registered in the Virgin Islands, which seems to have an unusually high number of vehicle crashes.
On my four visits to Iraq in the last seven years, I learned quickly to steer clear of the fast-moving vehicles belonging to these private security companies. The men – sporting identical reflective wrap-around sunglasses, bullet-proof jackets – would aim their high-powered assault rifles and shout "Imshi" ("Move") at any vehicle that came within a 50m perimeter. Sometimes, they would throw plastic water bottles to shock pedestrians into staying away.
Easily the best-known private security company is Blackwater (recently renamed Xe), which rocketed to fame three years ago when four company security guards, escorting a convoy of US state department vehicles en route to a meeting in western Baghdad, opened fire in Nisour Square in Baghdad killing 17 Iraqi civilians. Yet, a query of the Iraq war logs for "Blackwater" or "Nisour Square" turns up nothing, at first.
In this failure to identify what is probably the most notorious carnage of Iraqi civilians, the strengths and weakness of the military reporting process (and, by association, Wikileaks) become startlingly clear. Had the media not reported this incident, there would be no way to identify the company or the location in which this massacre took place. Initially, I wondered: was it possible that the soldier who recorded the incident made a mistake or that the record was erased?
Eventually, I tracked down the incident by trying a few other methods. It is easy to see why I missed the record: there is no mention of the company, or the location, and even the death toll is incorrectly recorded as nine, suggesting that the Pentagon casualty record is incomplete.
Human rights investigators know this problem only too well. Media reports are often incomplete and government reports are sometimes deliberately vague. They are just a starting point from which painstaking research is needed to build up a true picture of what has happened.
Quite possibly, there were many more incidents in which civilians were injured, or even killed, which were never reported. Some of the reports may have been altered before they were entered into the military system. But given the other records that I found, at the very least, Wikileaks has revealed that Blackwater and other private security companies are guilty of many more injuries and killings than the media have previously reported.
Today, there as many as 40,000 armed private security contractors working in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to data collected by Commission on Wartime Contracting staff during the first quarter of 2010.
Some of them are ill-paid ex-soldiers from countries like Sierra Leone who make just $250 a month; others are former US soldiers, who are paid $500 or more per day. These men are often doing the very same jobs that soldiers once did – like guard duty – but with a lot less accountability.
Until quite recently, these men with guns were untouchable: they were protected from any kind of prosecution by Coalition Provisional Authority Order No 17, issued by Paul Bremer, the US diplomat charged with running Iraq after the 2003 invasion.
For example, Andrew J Moonen, a Blackwater employee, who has been accused of killing a guard assigned to an Iraqi vice-president on 24 December 2006, was spirited out of the country and has never faced charges in Iraq. Nor have the five men accused of opening fire in Nisour Square: Donald Ball, Dustin Laurent Heard, Evan Shawn Liberty Nicholas Abram Slatten and Paul Alvin Slough. Lawsuits in the US have also failed.
Blackwater and Erinys were not the only ones who acted with seeming impunity. Perhaps the most egregious incident occurred on 28 May 2005, when the US Marines came under fire from four white Ford pickup trucks and a grey Excursion sports utility vehicle "recklessly driving through Fallujah traveling west – and firing sporadically at vehicles".
The shooters worked for Zapata Engineering, one of five companies originally hired under a $200m contract to supervise the destruction and storage of US military ammunition worldwide. They were paid well for this work: each company manager earned an average of $275,000 a year, under their contract.
Eventually, one of the Zapata vehicles ran over a spike strip in the road near a guard house under the control of the US Marines. The Marines placed 19 Zapata employees under arrest.
At the time, Lawrence Peter, the director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told my colleague David Phinney at CorpWatch:
"I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is no company named Zapata that is a licensed private security company under the terms of CPA Memorandum 17. I do not know under what legal authority those men thought they were operating, but it was not in keeping with the law of Iraq nor consistent with what professional, responsible and law-abiding private security companies are doing here."
But Iraqis cannot tell which of these companies are licensed and which are not. Technically, they could complain to the military or raise the matter with yet another private military company named Aegis Defence from Britain, which was in charge of monitoring the movements of fellow private security contractors, under a $293m contract issued in June 2004. Yet Aegis hardly inspired confidence – one of their employees caused an uproar when he uploaded a video of security contractors shooting at Iraqis, with an Elvis Presley soundtrack to match.
Things got even worse when the Washington Post published an article about yet another security company named Triple Canopy, in which team leader Jacob C Washbourne was quoted as saying: "I want to kill somebody today."
Today, the Pentagon says that the random shootings are a thing of the past. In May 2008, an Armed Contractor Oversight Bureau (ACOB) was set up (pdf) by the US government in Iraq. Unfortunately, there is no website or any other public way to contact this important body.
Perhaps the most worrying news about private military contractors came on 18 August 2010, when the New York Times revealed that the US government was planning to double the number of private security contractors in Iraq:
"Defending five fortified compounds across the country, the security contractors would operate radars to warn of enemy rocket attacks, search for roadside bombs, fly reconnaissance drones and even staff quick reaction forces to aid civilians in distress, the officials said."
It's not just Iraqis who are worried. At a hearing in congress on 23 September 2010, Michael Thibault, co-chair of the commission on wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former senior Pentagon auditor, said that he was troubled by the fact that the state department had very little experience to oversee this civilian surge in Iraq:
"(I)t is not clear that it has the trained personnel to manage and oversee contract performance of a kind that has already shown the potential for creating tragic incidents and frayed relations with host countries."
Courtesy Wikileaks, we now know that many more deadly shootings have taken place by these unregulated private security contractors than we knew of before. Given this new knowledge, it is time that we demand an inquiry into the privatisation of the military. Right now, the prime facie evidence is that it has considerably increased the number of unnecessary violent incidents, while reducing military discipline and accountability and costing taxpayers a bundle.
• Editor's note: the incident detailed at the top of this article occurred in 2005, not 2004, as was originally stated; all other details are correct, and the article was amended at 12:00 on 24 October 2010.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
