Yet another story in the Blackwater/PMC file surfacing today, and it’s almost too crazy to believe. Yet the results are pretty undeniable.
Several years ago, George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and Ice Cube starred in Three Kings, a heist movie where a group of Gulf War soldiers snuck into Iraq during the first Gulf War and stole Saddam’s hidden stash…not of WMD, but of gold. Clooney plays Major Archie Gates, who’s a pretty mercenary character, but even Archie’s gold-plated heart is melted when he sees the conditions in Iraq under Saddam, and the heist turns into a humanitarian mission of sorts. Still, the movie works because the story is at least possible: you have the chaos of war, a dictator’s hidden treasure hoard, a long suffering people and a lot of open desert. Heists during a war are nothing new to either history or Hollywood.
Which brings us around to America’s favorite PMC “brand” Blackwater. Just how mercenary are these guys? It’s important to keep in mind in the end that these guys work for money…lots of it. TPM’s Spencer Ackerman has the breakdown of the breakout.
It’s a prime example of the lawlessness in Iraq. The details are sketchy and disputed, but here they are: An Iraqi corruption judge, continually thwarted in his pursuit of justice, finally helps convict a high-ranking official. But then the official breaks out of jail. Or, rather, the official is helped out of jail by guards working for one defense contractor, but is then returned — only to leave jail with the help of another. Allegedly.
Testimony today from Iraqi corruption judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi touched on the conviction of
Ayham al-Samarrai, the former Iraqi electricity minister. al-Radhi helped put al-Samarrai away for what the judge called “wasting” public funds. al-Samarrai is the highest-ranking official to be convicted of corruption in Iraq.
Now these are some pretty serious charges here, folks. Breaking out a corrupt minister, especially one supposed to be in charge of arguably the largest single infrastructure failure on earth, Iraq’s electrical grid, has to be pretty high on the list for an investigation by both law enforcement AND the media.
His name may be familiar to Blackwater watchers. Last month, an Iraqi defense official told McClatchy’s Leila Fadel that Blackwater helped break al-Samarrai out of prison in the Green Zone last December. Today, however, al-Radhi suggested that the defense official was wrong. A rival private-security company, DynCorp, assisted al-Samarrai’s prison break, al-Radhi said.
DynCorp? This gets even better, two rival PMCs each trying to blame the breakout on each other. Anyone ever play Shadowrun? That’s a tactic I’ll have to remember in that corp-run game of the dark future. Of course that future may be pretty close, looks like…
But DynCorp says it’s a huge misunderstanding. “It’s absolutely untrue,” says spokesman Gregory Lagana. “We are absolutely 100 percent convinced it wasn’t us.” However, Lagana says, he knows why al-Radhi thinks DynCorp was behind it. Two DynCorp employees, one named George Dillman and another whom Lagana didn’t recall, were stationed in Iraq to assist in training Iraqi policemen. Among the police stations the two were detailed to was the Green Zone station where al-Samarrai was detained. In October, al-Samarrai, who holds dual U.S.-Iraqi citizenship, told the DynCorp employees that he would be murdered if he was convicted.
And I’m sure the millions in corrupt kickback cash had nothing to do with THAT decision.
When Samarrai was convicted, the DynCorp employees tried to help al-Samarrai, to whom they had become sympathetic. They improperly transported him to the U.S. embassy to seek protection for him. But the embassy told them that their intended transfer was improper, and took al-Samarrai back to the Iraqi police. “That was our last contact with him, and the two guys were fired,” Lagana said. “They had no business doing what they did.” The story was first reported in The Chicago Tribune last December.
I’m sensing a “but” here…
However, al-Samarrai’s story doesn’t end there. According to Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) — and confirmed by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction — al-Samarrai is currently living in Chicago. It’s still not certain which contractor sprung al-Samarrai from jail. But beyond that: who helped al-Samarrai get back into the U.S.?
That’s a damn good point. Despite the denials from DynCorp and Blackwater, the indisputable fact is that SOMEBODY got this joker out of Iraqi prison and into Chicago. Somebody most likely got paid a pretty fat fee to do so. There’s certainly a very good story here about which PMC may have done so, but the real question is “If a PMC did this, why aren’t there a whole lot more people in prison?” Furthermore, if the US Government, in this case the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction as well as the House of Representatives, KNEW an Iraqi minister convicted of corruption by our allies, the Iraqi government, was living in Chicago after magically escaping prison…WHY is he still in Chicago?
It’s like lancing a massive boil. Just under the skin is a cesspool of corruption and behind it all the infection that caused the mess in the first place. PMCs like Blackwater have been that boil for years now, and it’s had time to get absolutely gigantic. Now that it’s been cut open, there’s a lot of truly disgusting stuff we’ll have to wade through in order to fix the problem.
But the source of the infection is the Bush Administration, and that needs to be excised as well.
