Many of the questions I asked in my earlier post about Blackwater being kicked out of Iraq have been answered in large part by a TIME Magazine article, but the article raises even more questions.
Here’s what we know so far:
Details of the firefight are emerging. Blackwater’s account and the Iraqi Interior Minitry’s account are very, very different.
According to the incident report, the skirmish occurred at 12:08 p.m. on Sunday when, “the motorcade was engaged with small arms fire from several locations” as it moved through a neighborhood of west Baghdad. “The team returned fire to several identified targets” before leaving the area. One vehicle engine was hit and disabled by bullets and had to be towed away. A separate convoy arriving to help was “blocked/surrounded by several Iraqi police and Iraqi national guard vehicles and armed personnel,” the report says. Then an American helicopter hovered over the traffic circle, as the U.S. convoy departed without casualties. Some reports have said the helicopter also opened fire on Iraqis, but a Blackwater official told TIME that no shots were fired from the air.
Some eyewitnesses said the fighting began after an explosion detonated near the U.S. convoy, but the incident report does not reflect that. The Blackwater official declared that, contrary to some reports from Iraq, “the convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job, they fired back to defend human life.” The official said that “Blackwater is contracted to work in a war zone, its personnel are under frequent fire, and all the rules of engagement permit them to defend themselves.”
Blackwater basically says “It’s war, we did our jobs.” But somebody forgot to tell the Iraqis that, because they clearly don’t believe Blackwater gets the same immunities as the US Military when they kill somebody, self-defense or not.
Note also that Blackwater says they were attacked by “insurgents” and not “civilians”, yet the Iraqi Interior Ministry says the dead were clearly civilians. Now, the first rule of counter-insurgency is “It’s damn hard to tell friend from foe” but somebody’s not telling the truth here. Rules of engagement or not, the Iraqis are mad as hell.
However, the Blackwater Booting isn’t a done deal yet. Figures that there would be some semblance of diplomacy under all this hardball.
A spokesman for Iraq’s Interior Ministry has told reporters it has cancelled Blackwater’s license and will launch an investigation into whether excessive force was used in the incident. But, in spite of that declaration, which was carried on wire reports, a senior Iraqi official contacted by TIME said that prime minister Maliki is expected to discuss the episode at a cabinet session scheduled for Tuesday and that, as far as the license being permanently revoked, “it’s not a done deal yet.”
So now the Interior Ministry and the Maliki government may not be on the same page on this, or maybe Maliki really is finally learning how to be a politico.
All this diplomatic wrangling has attracted the attention of Condi Rice. It turns out that the VIPs I figured Blackwater was guarding? The US State Department.
Several Iraqi government officials have indicated their opposition to Blackwater’s continued presence in their country. If the suspension is made permanent, it could significantly impair security for key U.S. personnel in the country, a U.S. official in Baghdad told TIME. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, whose State Department depends on Blackwater to protect its Iraq-based staffers, called Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to say that the U.S. has launched its own investigation into the matter.
So now Condi’s in the thick of this mess, and the Iraqis have a major axe to grind.
However, the Iraqi official also said he had spoken with at least two cabinet members about yesterday’s shooting and that some in the government have “been upset about Blackwater for a while now. They want them to get out,” said the advisor. The State Department said Secretary Rice called prime minister Maliki on Monday is expected to occur later on Monday. She expressed her regret for the loss of life in the incident, assuring him that the U.S. will conduct its own investigation and inform the Iraqi government of its progress.
This of course is all leading up to one of my favorite four-word sentences to type as of late: Henry Waxman wants hearings.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman announced Monday he will launch an investigation into the incident as well, calling it “an unfortunate demonstration of the perils of excessive reliance on private security contractors.”
Again, that could have been the Iraqis’ play all along. It’s surely possible that they did this to breing the attention of the fact the US has as many PMC mercs in Iraq as they do soldiers to the attention of the American people, to a Democratic Congress, and to the press. Like I said, maybe the Iraqis really are learning how to play politics.
In fact, we’re already seeing the right-wing response to the Blackwater incident. Seems Blackwater recently was part of a billion dollar contract for the State Department’s protection service, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. In fact, that contract is the main reason why some believe Blackwater doesn’t need a license in Iraq at all.
Questions are being raised about the efficacy of Iraq’s attempt to close down Blackwater’s operations in the country after civilian deaths.
Iraqi Interior Ministry officials told reporters in Baghdad Monday they would revoke the company’s license and initiate criminal proceedings after Blackwater contractors providing security for U.S. diplomats allegedly opened fire from aircraft into a Baghdad street — killing 11 people, according to some reports.
The problem is, Blackwater does not have or need a license, and its employees are not subject to Iraqi criminal jurisdiction.
Former senior State Department official Larry Johnson wrote in his Web long No Quarter Monday, “Blackwater does not have a license to operate in Iraq and does not need one. They have a U.S. State Department contract through (the Bureau of) Diplomatic Security.”
U.S. State Department security staff, whose duties Blackwater contractors perform in Iraq, typically enjoy the same immunities accorded to all foreign diplomats.
Doug Brooks, president of The International Peace Operations Association, representing private companies involved in peace-keeping and low-intensity conflict operations around the world, said that U.S. law gave jurisdiction to federal law enforcement.
“Under the Military Extra-Territorial Jurisdiction Act,” he said, those accused of a crime “would be brought back to the U.S. and tried in federal court.”
He said that investigations could be undertaken by Dept of Justice prosecutors or FBI personnel in Iraq, working with the coalition military, but that the initial decision to refer a case for investigation would be taken by U.S. military lawyers known as JAGs.
And this is the heart of the battle. When one country’s private army of paid mercenaries kills citizens of another country while IN another country, who has jurisdiction? The argument here is that since Blackwater works for the State Department as diplomatic bodyguards, they have diplomatic immunity. But that surely doesn’t begin to apply to the rest of the tens of thousands of other PMC mercs in Iraq. They don’t ALL work for the State Department.
The thing is the deeper you dive in Blackwater’s very black waters, the darker the waters get…
At the start of the occupation, there were an estimated 10,000 private soldiers in Iraq, already far more than during the first Gulf war. Three years later, a report by the US Government Accountability Office found that there were 48,000 private soldiers, from around the world, deployed in Iraq. Mercenaries represented the largest contingent of soldiers after the US military – more than all the other members of the “Coalition of the Willing” combined. The “Baghdad boom”, as it was called in the financial press, took what was a frowned-upon, shadowy sector and fully incorporated it into the US and British war-fighting machines. Blackwater hired aggressive Washington lobbyists to erase the word “mercenary” from the public vocabulary and turn its company into an all-American brand. According to its CEO, Erik Prince, “This goes back to our corporate mantra: We’re trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the postal service.”
When you absolutely, positively, have to kill somebody overseas by 10:30 AM, huh? And it gets worse: While the number of US troops has remained around 130,000 to 160,000, the mercs have literally exploded.
The numbers tell the dramatic story of corporate mission creep. During the first Gulf war in 1991, there was one contractor for every 100 soldiers. At the start of the 2003 Iraq invasion, the ratio had jumped to one contractor for every 10 soldiers. Three years into the US occupation, the ratio had reached 1:3. Less than a year later, with the occupation approaching its fourth year, there was one contractor for every 1.4 US soldiers. But that figure includes only contractors working directly for the US government, not for other coalition partners or the Iraqi government, and it does not account for the contractors based in Kuwait and Jordan who had farmed out their jobs to subcontractors.
British soldiers in Iraq are already far outnumbered by their countrymen working for private security firms at a ratio of 3:1.
So when people say, “There’s no way we’d attack Iran, that would provoke the Iranian Army, and our troops would get cut off,” I have to reply “That’s still possible, but you’re forgetting about the 150,000 or so mercs in-country.”
Certainly Bush and Cheney haven’t, and so far the world and the American people have largely ignored the PMC merc problem. It may just be that what Bush and Cheney have been waiting on in order to attack Iran is the arrival of a hundred thousand or so mercs, with more pouring in monthly. What does it matter that Bush is bringin home 5,700 troops for Christmas for when they’ll be replaced by paid thugs?
The part that’s really got to be causing Dick Cheney into fits right now has got to be that the invisible PMC problem just became front page news across the globe today.
Hell, even stateside, Blackwater has problems.
CHICAGO – The University of Illinois has canceled a partnership between its police-training institute and a military contractor best known for providing security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan because of a potential conflict of interest.
The company, however, says it hasn’t received the letter.
The university, which inked the five-year deal in May, scrapped the partnership with Blackwater USA because the institute’s director, Tom Dempsey, hadn’t informed the school he was negotiating personal contracting work with Blackwater while helping coordinate the partnership.
And deeper we dive into that black, black water. At the bottom of it all is a lot of red blood…and even more green money.
If I were Maliki, and I knew the US was thinking about getting rid of me because I was getting to close to Shi’ite Iran in an attempt to stabilize the central government, how would YOU go about A) yanking Bush’s chain, B) lowering the odds Iran would be attacked, and C) informing the rest of the world that there’s a second US Army that has occupied your country and D) establishing your credibility as a leader of a sovereign country?
Try to throw out the most visibly awful of the PMCs, of course. And people said the Iraqi government wasn’t capable of getting anything done.