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.