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