Into each life, a little rain must fall.
Into Blackwater’s life is coming down a lot more than just a little rain. The Iraqis have finished their investigation of the September 16th shooting, and the results are quite clear: nothing short of an unprovoked slaughter. And now the Iraqis want Blackwater gone.
Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki asked the U.S. State Department to “pull Blackwater out of Iraq,” saying the private contractors committed unprovoked and random killings in a September 16 shooting, an adviser to al-Maliki told CNN.
Adviser Sami al-Askari told CNN the Iraqis have concluded their investigation into the shooting at Nusoor Square in Baghdad.
Al-Askari said the United States is still waiting for the findings of the American investigation, but al-Maliki and most Iraqi officials are “completely satisfied” with the findings of their probe and are “insisting” that Blackwater leave the country.
Once again, we come to the real question: who is running Iraq’s “democracy”, the US military or the Iraqis themselves? The Iraqis have stated their opinion, but does it even matter to the Bush neocon junta?
Even more, we have US citizens accused of cold-blooded murder of Iraqis. “Diplomatic snafu” doesn’t even begin to describe it. There’s a huge rift between the Maliki and Bush governments over this. Each one believes they have the other one over a barrel right now. Who blinks first may go a long way towards determining if we stay in Iraq forever or start the long road home.
U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Mirembe Natango told CNN by telephone that the Iraqi-U.S. joint commission met and is proceeding with its work on the matter.
“We need to let the joint commission do its work,” she said, adding that once the joint commission has finished, it will make policy recommendations.
Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince has said the team was attacked and was defending itself at an intersection not far from the heavily guarded Green Zone on September 16. Seventeen Iraqis were killed, including women and children, and 27 were wounded, according to Iraqi officials.
Prince told CNN Sunday that the guards did not commit “deliberate violence.”
“There was definitely incoming small arms fire from insurgents” he said on CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “Late Edition.”
Somebody’s lying here. Either Erik Prince is lying baldfaced to America (and I might add possibly to Congress) or the Iraqi government is putting on a hell of a show in order to get rid of Blackwater.
Evidence is overwhelmingly against Blackwater, of course. It would be entirely different if this was the first incident of its kind, but it’s not.
In fact, when the UN is throwing around terms like “war crimes” for what the Bush PMC army is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, you know you’re in for a bad day.
The Iraqi government is now demanding the expulsion of the Blackwater security firm, a perfectly sensible desire on the part of a sovereign government, even if it might not be justified in this particular case. United Nations officials in Baghdad and an American civil liberties organization, meanwhile, are suggesting that contractor security personnel in Iraq be investigated for “war crimes.”
The latter proposition — put aside for a moment the presumption of guilt and the inflammatory language of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” — goes to the heart of a much larger problem: Is the United States eroding the distinction between military and civilian, and if so, what implications does this have for the war against terrorists?
An Iraqi government investigation into the Blackwater incident on Sept. 16, in which 17 civilians were killed, concluded with five recommendations, one of which is that the United States stop using Blackwater. U.S. and Iraqi officials are now negotiating the expulsion of Blackwater and their replacement by “a new, more disciplined organization that would be answerable to Iraqi laws,” in the words of the Iraqi recommendations. The U.S. isn’t particularly defending Blackwater: It just wants a replacement organization in place before Blackwater leaves.
The FBI has taken over the investigation in Baghdad to determine what happened and whether a crime was even committed. Recognizing that the contractors operate in a legal netherworld outside of the military courts martial system and are also outside of Iraqi civil law, the House of Representatives has approved legislation that would subject civilian guards working under U.S. contract to prosecution by U.S. courts. Similar legislation is expected to be introduced in the Senate.
Blackwater’s replacement is one thing, but the war crimes angle is entirely something different. The PMC problem is both endemic and systemic right now.
While Iraqi authorities focus on expelling Blackwater, United Nations officials in Baghdad are following a different tack: “Investigations as to whether or not crimes against humanity, war crimes, are being committed and obviously the consequences of that is something that we will be paying attention to and advocating for,” said Ivana Vuco, the U.N.’s senior human rights officer in Iraq. The U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights has also filed suit against Blackwater, saying it violated U.S. law by committing “extrajudicial killings and war crimes.”
Blackwater USA founder Erik Prince, while accepting that his company’s fate in Iraq is probably a foregone conclusion, has vociferously defended the company. “There was no deliberate murder, no deliberate violence by our guys,” Prince said this weekend.
Put aside for a moment the political motivations of both the U.N. and the center. Under international law, a war crime is a violation of the laws of war by any person, military or civilian. A crime against humanity is a much broader term involving large-scale atrocities against a body of people. The war crime most applicable to the Blackwater incident is that involving “willful killing” or “great suffering or serious injury to body or health” — that is, intentionally, with no regard for the distinction between the military status of the victim.
This standard is quite high; the term “war crime” shouldn’t be used lightly. The Blackwater guards would need to be shown to have intentionally targeted civilians, knowing they were civilians, in the commission of their crime — if there was a crime committed.
And if we start asking about Blackwater and war crimes, Bush has to be scared about somebody asking about the US military and war crimes as well, it’s the only logical endpoint of the PMC fiasco. Blackwater is virulently awful ground for the President and his neocon pals, and they are trying to get this taken care of as soon as possible.
But the problem will not go away. Endemic and systemic problems do not vanish overnight.
Which brings us to the question: Who are these guys anyway? They are in a war zone, carrying guns, with authority granted by the U.S. government to engage in warfare under the name of “security.” Blackwater has about 1,000 employees in Iraq, constituting less than 1 percent of the contractors in the country.
That means there are tens of thousands of similar civilians also out there in Iraq and other countries with ambiguous legal standing. Many are armed men who do not wear the uniform of any state, men whom the U.S. government has said are subject to the laws of war rather than the laws of civil society. And yet, they do not wear the uniform of the United States and are not lawful combatants under the laws of war.
We have only begun the scratch the surface of what the Blackwater era means, but to me a central question is our obligation as a society to continue to maintain the distinction between who and what is military and who and what is civilian. The more the military (and the American government) relies on civilian contractors with guns in war zones and on battlefields, the more it signals that those who wear the uniform of a recognized nation state are just one of many “combatants” out there.
The distinction between what is military and what is civilian is thus eroded. In the current war — one in which our enemies have made a point to obliterate that distinction — I am not sure this is a difference we want to let dissolve.
These are the questions that need to be asked…and the questions the Bush junta are desperately trying to avoid. This is precisely why Blackwater is so dangerous to Bush and why the right wing noise machine has been all but silent. Any scrutiny, any press, any attention to this issue is a no-win situation for this President.
Bush keeps pretending the problem doesn’t exist. But in the end, he’s trying to dodge raindrops.