The thing that continues to surprise me about the continuing Blackwater saga is that the White House and the GOP Right Wing Noise Machine is dead silent about Blackwater. Only the Pentagon and State Department even bother to mention anything about the company, yet news stories keep popping up daily.
It’s been two weeks now since the Blackwater shooting incident left 16 Iraqis dead. Not one word out of the White House about it. And more and more evidence is being presented that Blackwater is now being thrown under the bus, especially as of this weekend.
First we have SecDef Gates cracking down on PMCs.
In a three-page directive sent Tuesday night to the Pentagon’s most senior officers, Gates’ top deputy ordered them to review rules governing contractors’ use of arms and to begin legal proceedings against any that have violated military law.
Gates’ order contrasts with the reaction of State Department officials, who have been slow to acknowledge any potential failings in their oversight of Blackwater USA, the private security firm that protects U.S. diplomats in Iraq and was involved in a Sept. 16 shooting that left at least 11 Iraqis dead.
For years, there have been tensions between mid-level military officers who operate under strict rules and private security firm employees who work in Iraq under less-rigorous guidelines. But Pentagon officials emphasized they do not believe that wrongdoing is widespread among the agency’s 7,300 security contractors or that the armed guards operate with impunity.
However, one senior Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing internal department debates, said a five-man team that Gates sent to Iraq over the weekend discovered that military commanders there were unclear about their legal authority.
Commanders were not certain whether they had the authority to enforce existing laws, including the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice. The officers requested a clarification, the official said, prompting Gates to issue the directive.
“Commanders have UCMJ authority to disarm, apprehend and detain DoD contractors suspected of having committed a felony offense” in violation of the rules for using force, said the memo, written by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England and obtained by The Times.
The Pentagon directive does not affect private security guards under contract to other agencies, including the State Department, which is investigating the Blackwater shooting.
Unsure of the directives? I wonder why that is. If I’m a commander on the ground in Iraq, and I know that any chance of success whatsoever rests in winning the hearts and minds of the locals, and I hear tales of PMCs killing civilians and basically undoing ANY progress I’ve helped to make, you better believe I’m gonna ask somebody about what the hell to do to deal with them.
“Unsure of the directives” means that somebody very high up on the chain is telling these ground officers to ignore the PMCs, and these ground officers are politely saying “we’re not going to fry for doing that, you’re not going to Abu Ghraib us. We’re not going to be the ‘bad apples’ for you.”
Gates knows he’s got a potential mutiny on his hands. Not only are the Iraqis truly pissed off at the PMCs, but the military is clearly not going to tolerate them anymore. He’s giving a clear, loud warning. Yes, he’s covering his ass, but he’s doing it by saying that the Pentagon can and will prosecute PMCs.
Meanwhile back home, Blackwater is putting expansion on hold indefinitely.
In more fallout from the Sept. 16 shooting in Baghdad that left 11 Iraqis dead, Blackwater USA apparently has stopped its expansion projects.
On Wednesday, the North Carolina private military contractor canceled a $5.5 million deal to buy 1,800 acres of farmland near Fort Bragg, where it was going to set up a training ground for soldiers and corporate executives.
The diplomatic and public relations damage from the shooting, combined with next Tuesday’s scheduled testimony before Congress by Blackwater Chairman Erik Prince, prompted the company to put all new projects on hold, according to the president of the company that had agreed to sell the land to Blackwater.
“Blackwater said they had pulled all new projects off the table because of this shooting in Baghdad and because they were preparing Prince for Congress,” said Wayne Miller, the president of Southern Produce Distributors. “It’s a shame. This would have been good for the economy of North Carolina.”
Methinks they need the money for lawsuits more than land deals at this point. Blackwater’s in trouble and they know it. There’s several other shooting incidents they’re being tied to.
Five cases this year in which private Blackwater USA security guards killed Iraqi civilians are at the core of a U.S. review of how the hired protection forces guard diplomats in Iraq, officials said Friday.
Iraqi authorities are also concerned about a sixth incident in which Blackwater guards allegedly threw frozen bottles of water at civilian cars, breaking windshields. No one was killed.
The United States has not made conclusive findings about the incidents, which include a Sept. 16 case in which at least 11 Iraqis died. A State Department official said investigators are not aware of others. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the inquiries are in progress.
The wingers have had more than enough time to formulate a response, but the thunderous, deafening silence means the right wing is conveniently trying to retend PMCs don’t exist in Iraq, because of the fact that you don’t have to spend more than a few minutes to discover that the problem goes much, much deeper than Blackwater. Any media attention here is bad for the President. But the plan here is clearly to hang Blackwater out to dry and see if the PMC issue goes away.
The private security firm Blackwater USA brushed aside warnings from another security firm and focused on cost, not safety, before it sent its personnel to escort trucks to Fallujah in 2004, resulting in four American deaths that marked a major turning point in the war, a congressional report said yesterday.
The report comes as Blackwater — the State Department’s prime security force — faces new scrutiny for its role this month in the killing of at least 11 Iraqis. Citing e-mails, fresh interviews and previously undisclosed incident reports, the report by the majority staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform provides details about how cost considerations appeared to shape Blackwater’s decisions that led to the brutal deaths of its employees at the hands of insurgents on March 31, 2004.
For example, the assessment said that Blackwater, then operating under a Defense Department contract, was supposed to use vehicles with armored protection kits, but as of the date of the killings, no such vehicles had been obtained. A Blackwater internal report obtained by the committee quoted an employee who said the contract “paid for armor vehicles” but that “management in North Carolina . . . made the decision to go with soft skin due to cost.”
The report disclosed that another complicating factor was a contract dispute with a different company. The report suggested that Blackwater never intended to armor its own vehicles. Instead, Blackwater employees were told to “string along” the other company in hopes of forcing them out of their contract or giving them “no choice but to buy us armored cars,” according to interviews by the committee staff with Blackwater officials.
“These actions raise serious questions about the consequences of engaging private, for-profit entities to engage in essentially military operations in a war zone,” the committee report said.
So while Erik Prince twists in the wind and the rest of the wingers whistle past the graveyard in hopes that all this nasty stuff goes away, we see the standard GOP scandal-control playbook in action: disavow and ignore publicly, and leak damaging info privately.
The question is once again will the media do its duty? Will they follow up and ask questions about ALL the PMCs America has worldwide, or will they fight over Blackwater’s corpse and ignore the real story because they are being told to?
My guess is going to be not only the latter, but that Blackwater coverage won’t even make a dent in the media’s push for war with Iran unless they’re forced to.
Not much time is left.
yup, the silence is deafening for sure. ran across this article from MOJO this am. thought you would like it too. Hugs for all that you have been doing to cover this and much more..
from Mother Jones
The Pentagon just announced a new contract….gee guess who got this contract? Presidential Airways, the aviation wing of Blackwater got a 92 million dollar contract to fly state dept. passengers and cargo around Central Asia….cause Blackwater is such a fine upstanding company not tainted by any hint of scandal. Just one big circle jerk of happy war profiteers.
well here’s the thing…..they’re part of
‘The shadow army’ – Boston Globe
“IF THERE is a quagmire in Iraq, it was created more than a decade ago when the United States instituted a flawed system governing the use of contractors to perform governmental functions. Now, despite Iraqi fury at Blackwater USA, some of whose employees are accused of fatally shooting Iraqis, Washington is so reliant on the firm that it dare not order it from the field
The heavy dependence on private contractors in the military is relatively recent. In the Gulf War only 9,200 contractors supported 540,000 military personnel. The estimated 180,000 US-funded contractors now in Iraq (of which about 21,000 are Americans) outnumber the 160,000 US troops.
All too often this private army has been unmanageable and unaccountable, its interests dangerously divergent from those of the US and the Iraqi governments. The troubles exposed by the Blackwater debacle provide a glimpse into a much larger, systemic problem that pervades military, intelligence, and homeland security efforts alike.
The Bush administration came into office bent on privatizing as many government functions as possible..”
and a related interview on a policy paper that fleshes out the real issues of PMCs
`Can’t Win With `Em, Can’t Go to War Without `Em’:
Six Questions for P.W. Singer -Scott Horton , Harper’s
[Instead} contractors offer the means for the choices to be dodged at the onset, as well as the scrutiny and public concern to be lessened after deployment. Your homefront (and their representatives) does not get as involved when its contractors being called up and deployed, nor ask key questions when contractors are lost (over 1000 have been killed in Iraq and 13000 wounded, but they are not counted on official DoD reports. In turn, if you want to go to a non-Iraq example, where is the concern over the 3 American contractors still held captive by the FARC in Colombia today? Imagine if we had 3 soldiers as POWs instead.). In addition, your media also becomes less likely to cover the story with contractors (one quarter of one percent of all news stories out of Iraq mention contractors). This new option is obviously greatly appealing to executive branch policymakers, but the ..”
go read the rest
The entire Blackwater story scares the ^&* out of me. I see the inevitability of their leaving Iraq. It’s not that I believe in the candidates. No, but I think it’s inevitable that the Iraqis simply demand that we leave. Blackwater psychology won’t go away with a flick of the pen.
(That’s the only way I see us avoiding all out war with Iran.)
So where do these mercenaries go? They have to come home. There are training camps and pending contracts to put them to work “protecting” our borders from those “evil” Mexicans. It’s only a short step from there to the Canada border, and the “Michigan Militia” folk are ready and willing to welcome them.
Let’s be honest. The core of “Christian, White” America is terrified that they won’t be able to “rule” by sheer numbers in the future. (I’ve been listening to quotes from O’Reilly and Gibson on Air America all day. They know their problem!) Their solution is their own personal army–and the Blackwater folks may be unemployed soon.
Waxman may make it politically impossible to continue the lies of the Bush administration. We have twice as many “troops” in Iraq as Bush admits. But half of them don’t have the professional ethics of our own military.
Where do they go? What do they do?
But half of them don’t have the professional ethics of our own military.
…which is, all things considered, not much to be proud of in the first place. True, the US military doesn’t involve itself in rape, torture, or the mass killing of civilians in broad daylight (unless it’s by air), preferring to reserve its savagery for interrogation rooms and internment camps, that appears to be the main difference between the GIs and the mercenaries. And there are a lot more psychopaths in federal uniforms who will be returning to a neighborhood near you whenever this war finally ends than there will be Blackwater mercenaries.
I know this violates the cynical, unspoken rule that liberals must never say anything critical of soldiers lest we be accused of repeating the mistake of spitting on soldiers in airports during the Vietnam War, but since that never happened in the first place and the right will make up whatever bullshit stories they want when they blame us for losing the war, too, I’m not in any hurry to join the hot new Democrat fad of fellating anything that slithers by in a uniform.