Blackwater USA under investigation

Private military contractors sued by Center for Constitutional Rights

DEREK DEGRAAD
Staff Writer

On Oct. 9 two civilian women were killed in Baghdad when their white Oldsmobile was riddled with automatic gunfire from private American security guards. The shooting was the latest in a series of incidents involving Blackwater U.S.A., a private company contracted by the U.S. military to provide thousands of soldiers for the purpose of policing the streets of Iraq.

Federal investigations into Blackwater's practices lead to the Oct. 24 resignation of Richard Griffin, the State Department official responsible for its oversight.

Griffin's resignation came after intense scrutiny by the FBI and U.S. State Department into the military practices of Blackwater. An Oct. 22 New York Times article reported that the State Department recently reviewed its own practices regarding Blackwater. The report assails the department for poor coordination, communication, oversight and accountability involving armed security companies like Blackwater USA.

In addition to the 150,000 American soldiers in Iraq, the Bush administration has deployed a little known force of some 100,000 contractors, according to a March 19 interview with Jeremy Scahill on National Public Radio. Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the Worlds most Powerful Mercenary Army.

According to Scahill, many of Blackwater's employees are heavily armed mercenaries who provide security and in many cases perform all the duties of a U.S. soldier. Critics charge that these men are allowed to perform their jobs without accountability since they are separate from the U.S. military and in many cases, not bound by its codes of conduct.

"This was one of the first times Americans had even heard of private contractors in Iraq," Scahill said. "The occupation of Iraq and the war on terror has brought the greatest privatization of warfare in modern history. Blackwater has become one of the most powerful private actors in the so-called war on terror. It provides the Bush administration with an extraordinary amount of political cover."

In presenting its recommendations to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a 45-minute briefing on Monday Oct. 22, the four-member panel found serious fault with virtually every aspect of the department's security practices, especially in and around Baghdad, where Blackwater has responsibility.

The panel's recommendations included creating a special coordination center to monitor armed convoys operated by independent contractors as well as working with the Pentagon to create a strict set of rules to deal with the families of Iraqi civilians killed by companies like Blackwater.

"The U.S. has always used private contractors," said Jacqueline Swansinger, a history professor. "During the Civil war, the Spanish American War and World War I, there was tremendous profit being made by the arms merchants who were working under Government contracts. The difference here is that before you didn't think of these people as carrying weapons as much. What's their status? Are they Americans in a foreign country? Are they military? There are different rules for these matters and who has jurisdiction. There was a lack of planning before the war on these matters."

In one of many incidents reported by The New York Times and wire services, a Blackwater employee was heavily intoxicated when he shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard at a checkpoint in Baghdad's Green Zone on Oct. 2.

Chaos also erupted in Baghdad's green zone on Sept. 16 when a soldier working for Blackwater began shooting at a civilian car. One of the initial shots hit the driver causing him to slump over dead. With the dead mans foot still on the accelerator, the car kept rolling towards the soldiers causing them to panic and start shooting indiscriminately around the area. The result was 17 dead Iraqi bystanders and many more injured.

Days later, the Iraqi Government called on the Bush administration to sever its ties to Blackwater and pay the families of the victims $8 million each. Blackwater is now being sued in U.S. courts over its actions in Iraq. On Oct. 11 The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit under the Alien Tort Claims Act on behalf of three of the Iraqis killed in the September incident.

The Alien Tort Claims Act is a federal law that provides a means of allowing American government, military and corporate leaders to be held responsible in a court of law for the human rights abuses committed as a result of their presence in a foreign country.

"What you have to remember are economic interests," said Ivani Vassoler, a political science professor who teaches a course in American foreign policy. "You have a firm that is making a lot of money. What is their interest in seeing the end of war?"

In 2003, private security guards and their contractors were granted immunity from Iraqi courts by Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul Bremer. Later the provision was extended ahead of Iraq's return to sovereignty.

"The immunity is not absolute. The order requires contractors to respect all Iraqi laws, so it's not a blanket immunity," Bremer said according to an Oct. 22 New York Times article.

Blackwater is among the most powerful of the private companies fighting in Iraq. It is a highly secretive company based in the wilderness of North Carolina that's headed by Eric Prince; a billionaire and former Navy seal who donated to both of Bush's presidential campaigns. The Oct. 22 New York Times article about Blackwater reported that the company has been given nearly $340 million dollars in government contracts.

Blackwater went mostly unnoticed by Congress and the American public in the early stages of the Iraq war. Then on the morning of March 31, 2004, the U.S. public was shocked by widely disseminated video footage of four Blackwater soldiers' burnt and dismembered bodies being dragged through the Sunni city of Fallujah while Iraqis cheered and danced.

Within days President Bush ordered a massive retaliatory assault on the city that became one of the largest and most destructive battles of the Iraq war. The siege killed hundreds of people, displaced tens of thousands more and fanned the flames of the Iraqi resistance that haunts American occupation forces to this day.

"We know virtually nothing about this," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). "We think about 40 cents of every dollar (spent on the war) goes to private military contractors. We think about 800 of them have been killed in Iraq. We think there are between 25,000-40,000 people engaged in combat but we don't know and we can't find out."