My previous post reported that the U.S. security firm Blackwater U.S.A. had been “busted” for an incident in which 11 Iraqi civilians were killed.
Although the mainstream press refers to people who work in Iraq as “security contractors”, we will call them what they really are: mercenaries, also known as “soldiers of fortune”. They are paid many times what U.S. soldiers make, and apparently are less disciplined.
The NYT article excerpted below makes clear that employees of Blackwater, the largest U.S. mercenary job-shop operating in Iraq, have been killing Iraqi civilians with abandon, and may even have smuggled arms into Iraq.
Please write your Senators and Congress-people. Tell them that allowing U.S. mercenaries to operate in Iraq, out of control and free from legal consequences of their actions, is not the way to fight terrorism. Tell them that you will not stand for such malfeasance and contempt for Iraqi civilian life.
In my next few blog posts, I will talk about ways to bring about peace in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
New York Times, 23 September 2007
Security Firm Faces Criminal Charges in Iraq
By James Glanz and Sabrina Tavernise
The New York Times
Baghdad — The Iraqi government said Saturday that it expects to refer criminal charges to its courts within days in connection with a shooting here by a private American security company, and the Interior Ministry gave new details of six other episodes it is investigating involving the company.
The state minister for national security affairs, Shirwan al-Waili, said the government had received little information from the American side in the early days of a joint investigation of the shooting, which involved the company Blackwater USA and left at least eight Iraqis dead. But he said that the Iraqi investigation was largely completed and that he believed the findings were definitive. “The shots fired on the Iraqis were unjustifiable,” he said. “It was harsh and horrible.”
Although Mr. Waili did not spell out what the investigative committee would recommend to the criminal court, a preliminary report of findings by the Interior Ministry, the National Security Ministry and the Defense Ministry stated that “the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operation. The criminals will be referred to the Iraqi court system.” The spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, also laid out previous episodes involving Blackwater this year in which he said a total of 10 Iraqis had been killed and 15 wounded. The company would not comment on those incidents on Saturday.
…
The Iraqi government has already demanded that Blackwater, which handles security for diplomatic personnel, be banned from working in Iraq, and the broadening investigation is sure to pull the Iraqis and their American supporters even further apart.
Blackwater may also face investigation on another front: The News and Observer newspaper in Raleigh, N.C., reported that United States federal investigators were looking into whether the company shipped unlicensed automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq. …
The main shooting under investigation began near midday last Sunday when Blackwater guards fired at Iraqi civilians for reasons that neither the company nor the United States government, which is also investigating, have fully explained. Some witnesses have said that Iraqi Army soldiers nearby also began firing at some point, greatly complicating efforts to understand what happened and raising the question, at least among American officials, of whether the Blackwater guards believed they were under attack and acted properly. Blackwater, in its only statement on the shooting, has said its employees were responding to an ambush.
Iraqi officials indicated that they were weighing the earlier shootings involving Blackwater in their consideration of what the practical consequences of the Nisour Square shooting should be. “The American Blackwater company has made for the seventh time the same mistake against the Iraqis and in different places in Baghdad,” according to a preliminary report from the Iraqi investigation obtained by The New York Times.
According to General Khalaf, the other events under investigation are:
- a Feb. 4 shooting that killed an Iraqi journalist near the Foreign Ministry;
- a Feb. 7 shooting in which three guards at the Iraqi state television station were killed;
- a Feb. 14 episode in which Blackwater employees are accused of smashing windshields;
- a shooting in May that killed one person near the Interior Ministry;
- a Sept. 9 shooting that killed five people near a Baghdad city government building;
- and a Sept. 12 shooting that wounded five people in eastern Baghdad.
No results of the American inquiry have been made public. For that reason, American officials have privately cautioned against drawing early conclusions. … A United States Embassy official said Saturday that investigators did not want to present incorrect results that would have to be revised, and so would let the investigation take its course before commenting. And the official said that cooperation between the two sides in the investigation was beginning and that information would begin flowing more freely. But the official also said that embassy activities had been slowed because convoys protected by Blackwater guards had been temporarily stopped as a result of the shooting. “Our own movements, as you know, were severely restricted and remain restricted,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “So ever since the incident took place, we have not been moving around Baghdad as we did before.”
Although the official declined to comment directly on how those restrictions may have had an impact on the American investigation, United States military personnel, who can move with their own security details, have been seen interviewing Iraqis at the scene of the shooting in recent days. If American civilian officials who are leading the investigation from the embassy are unable to move through the city, that restriction could clearly slow the work of gathering information from the scene and from witnesses.
The embassy official said he had not heard that the Iraqi government was preparing to forward the Blackwater case to the Iraqi justice system. “In all honesty I’m not aware of that,” the official said. “I don’t think they’ve communicated that to us government-to-government.”
Even if murder charges were referred to Iraqi courts, it is unclear what real legal peril would be faced by Blackwater or any of its employees. A provision originally called Order 17, signed by L. Paul Bremer III in 2004, while he was the top American administrator in Iraq, was later enshrined into Iraqi law, effectively giving security companies working for the United States government immunity from prosecution here. Perhaps for that reason, no Western contractors of any kind are known to have been convicted of any crimes in Iraq.
In the possible weapons smuggling case, evidence of a federal investigation came to light earlier this week, when the Democratic chairman of a House committee mentioned it in a letter complaining about the actions of the State Department’s inspector general.
In a Sept. 18 letter to Howard J. Krongard, the inspector general, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said a federal prosecutor had asked State Department investigators for help in looking into whether “a large private security contractor working for the State Department was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq.”
In its statement Saturday from its headquarters in Moyock, N.C., Blackwater said it had uncovered thefts by two employees who were then fired. The company said that it notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and that the two former employees have been convicted in court.
The statement added that the “issue is completely unrelated to Blackwater U.S. government programs in Iraq.” It said “the company has no knowledge of any employee improperly exporting weapons.”
…
In Baghdad, Mr. Waili, the security minister, indicated that despite announcements that Iraqi and American investigators would be working together, Iraqi investigators had received little or no information from their American counterparts and had gotten no access to the Blackwater guards at the center of the events. Mr. Waili said that there were effectively three separate investigations: an Iraqi one, an American one, and a joint effort that had gotten nowhere. But the embassy official said cooperation between the two sides was taking place. “From our point of view there are not three investigations,” he said. “There is only the joint investigation that we have with the Iraqis.” He said that the United States had received cooperation from Iraqi officials and that the first joint meetings were just starting. … “It was really painful,” Mr. Waili said. “We are losing Iraqis every day, but this was a really painful incident. They were innocent people.”
