How does it feel to be a big, rich contractor now?

A group of American security guards in Iraq have alleged they were beaten, stripped and threatened with a snarling dog by US marines when they were detained after an alleged shooting incident outside Falluja last month.

“I never in my career have treated anybody so inhumane,” one of the contractors, Rick Blanchard, a former Florida state trooper, wrote in an email quoted in the Los Angeles Times. “They treated us like insurgents, roughed us up, took photos, hazed [bullied] us, called us names.”

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Mark Schopper, a lawyer for two of the contractors, told the newspaper that his clients, both former marines, were subjected to “physical and psychological abuse”. He said they had told him that marines had “slammed around” several con tractors, stripped them to their underwear and placed a loaded weapon near their heads.

“How does it feel to be a big, rich contractor now?” one of the marines is alleged to have shouted at the men, in an apparent reference to the large sums of money private contractors can make in Iraq.

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They also complained they were made to wear orange prison uniforms and fed the same “bad food” as Iraqi prisoners.

According to Peter Singer, a Brookings Institute scholar and author of the book Corporate Warriors, private military contractors in Iraq are operating in a black hole as they do not fall within the military chain of command. “What appears to have happened here is tension between forces bubbling to the surface,” he told the Guardian.

But he said the incident also raised the question of what happens to contractors if they are caught doing something wrong, such as firing on civilians, as their legal status is not defined. “If the marines think [the contractors] did do something illegal there is no process they can go through. Who are they going to hand them over to?” Mr Singer said. “There have been more than 20,000 [contractors] on the ground in Iraq for more than two years and not one has been prosecuted for anything.”