Despite Warnings, Private Security Firms Expanded Presence
Although the US government was warned on numerous occasions “about the risks of using Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms in Iraq,” it allowed these first to expand their presence in the war-torn country.
“The warnings were conveyed in letters and memorandums from defense and legal experts and in high-level discussions between U.S. and Iraqi officials,” the Washington Post reports. “They reflected growing concern about the lack of control over the tens of thousands of private guards in Iraq, the largest private security force ever employed by the United States in wartime.”
Even after some serious incidents, the Pentagon and the US State Department didn’t take any substantive action. They only started doing something after a September 16 incident when “Blackwater guards opened fire” at “a Baghdad traffic circle, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and provoking protests over the role of security contractors in Iraq.”
The US should’ve seen that incident coming, according to experts and people who actually have and use common sense. Before the Sept. 16 incident, Blackwater guards had already killed innocent Iraqis:
- “On Feb. 7, 2006, Blackwater guards allegedly killed three Kurdish civilians outside the northern city of Kirkuk. That incident triggered demonstrations outside the U.S. Consulate and led Rizgar Ali, president of the Kirkuk provincial council, to complain to U.S. authorities in Kirkuk and Baghdad.”
- “On Christmas Eve 2006, a Blackwater employee killed the bodyguard of an Iraqi vice president in the Green Zone.”
- Six weeks into 2006 “a Blackwater sniper killed three security guards for the state-run media network.”
- “On May 24, a Blackwater team shot and killed a civilian driver outside the Interior Ministry gates, sparking an armed standoff between the Blackwater guards and Iraqi security forces in downtown Baghdad.”
The situation got so bad last year that “[b]y June 6, concerns about Blackwater had reached Iraq’s National Intelligence Committee, which included senior Iraqi and U.S. intelligence officials, including Maj. Gen. David B. Lacquement, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, who heads the Interior Ministry’s intelligence directorate, called on U.S. authorities to crack down on private security companies.” The US, however, told him “that Blackwater was under State Department authority and outside their control, according to notes of the meeting. The matter was dropped.”
T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel who advised the new Iraqi army from January to March 2004 says that “[w]e set this thing up for failure from the beginning.” “We’re just sorting it out now. I still think, from a pure counterinsurgency standpoint, armed contractors are an inherently bad idea, because you cannot control the quality, you cannot control the action on the ground, but you’re held responsible for everything they do,” he added.
I’m completely with the retired colonel on this one. It’s absolutely ludicrous to sent in many thousands of private security guards to do the work well trained soldiers should do. Soldiers, at least, have to act in line with rules. Their behavior is strictly monitored and regulated. With these private Blackwater ‘heroes’ the situation is completely different. They’re more like bountyhunters than anything else.
The sad reality is that the US could’ve prevented at least some of the incidents. They were warned about the dangers. They should’ve dealt with this.
Here’s, by the way, a video of Bush answering a question about private contractors.
Watch it. Very troubling.
He argues that he delegates tasks like this, but he should’ve been informed about the matter, especially considering that it’s a critical issue.
Round-up:
Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker: “A cynic might observe that that’s exactly the problem. And that problem has done significant damage to the U.S. mission in Iraq. So this t-shirt probably isn’t in his Christmas stocking.”
Matthew Yglesias: “If you thought about it for fifteen minutes you could see that introducing heavily-armed unaccountable mercenaries into a combat zone where you were trying to conduct a delicate counterinsurgency mission was a bad idea.”
Buck Naked Politics: “not only has our intense reliance on private contractors resulted in questionable services to our government, but it’s also costing us taxpayers an unnecessary bundle.”
More opinions here.
Edited by MvdG: Xel, I’m in no mood for snarks. Either add something to the debate / post or don’t comment at all.
I find this whole situation very troubling..in every aspect. First, I don’t think private security should be involved in Iraq, at least on the current level. There is no accountability to the UCMJ, US civil or Iraqi law..who are they accountable to? There is no secret of the Eric Prince \ GOP relationship, the type of politics this administration should be trying to avoid at all costs. I also find Bush’s answer on the video insulting.. either he is lying out his teeth, or is completely out of touch with policy. The laugh track (however real) adds insult to injury.
I cant understand why we have Blackwater and other security firms providing this type of security. Snipers? This goes beyond providing personal security in the green zone. As a taxpayer, I find it more troubling to think these firms are soaking up billions of dollars of our money to further tarnish our mission and respectability while trained responsible soldiers are being disregarded for this duty. Considering the video is from the summer, I would hope the Pentagon is rectifying the situation by now…but something tells me, its business as usual.
Bob A.: yes, I agree completely with your comment.
I’ll repeat the message in a more mature tone then; It is hypocritical to say you are doing the best for a group of people when you can’t be bothered to demand some circumspection from the people you support in subjecting the group in question to startling and delicate changes. It is, in fact, immoral to ask taxpayers to fund a company with contracts that are stains on true capitalism.
That’s what has been bothering me since day one: It is not about hope but rather faith, and in John Q’s case, near-criminal negligence
I would say the security situation is a lot more complicated, and less nefarious than this and most articles imply. There are not 50,000 "gun totin’ mercenaries" over there doing whatever they please, accountable to no one.
Let’s start with the numbers. We have the escalation of the sensational. It started at 18,000 contractors back in 2003-04 and each story has to make it larger and more dark – I see stories now that there are 50,000, no 75,000, no 100,000, no 120,000 contractors now – and they are a “shadow army” giving the impression that they are all skulking around trying to shoot innocents. The story has to grow and have a new hook or you can’t sell the story. In reality, the numbers of “contractors” has been growing, but mostly Iraqi companies themselves building schools, hospitals, water plants, pipelines, power plants, etc – you can go on the US Army Corps of Engineers, USAID and other sites to see the explosion of projects. Not quite a shadow army, but many articles will intermingle the use of contractors with security contractors as if they are all the same – and then jump to wrong conclusions. Having been there, and having been protected by very serious, professional, security contractors, I would say the reality is somewhat different.
Believe it or not, the security firms themselves have been working with State and others since 2003 to set up regulation & oversight and rules of engagement – the professionals among them realize that the types of sensationalized incidents cited in the article are something that is in no one’s interest. They try to avoid it at all costs. They are not “mercs” fighting some kind of “shadow war”. Incidents do happen, because it was easier for insurgents to target security teams vs. armed forces. But for the number that are there – the accidents and bad incidents are pretty few & far between. It is a war zone though and these things will happen.
All of the contractors are under contract to a US or international company and all of the companies I worked with certainly believed that they were accountable to rule of law – to US law if nothing else, but also were very cognizant of local laws.
Having said that, the US has been slow to regulate the security firms, and you can see just from this article – where a company like Armor Group has been asking for it for some time, as have the others. Why is it so prevalent in this war vs. other wars? First, is that the US scaled back its military in the early ‘90s – remember the “peace dividend”? So, they decided they did not need as large of a standing army, and could outsource the laundry, cooking and other logistics. That is when the first LOGCAP contracts were put in place (the infamous, but wrongly named “no bid” contracts that Halliburton/ KBR happened to be the providers of when this war started. The second is that we are involved in a civilian rebuilding effort on the scale of a Marshall plan, but taking place in an active war zone – necessitating more security than any previous undertakings.
This is already too long a post and a grim topic for a Christmas Eve, so let me end it with – best Christmas wishes to you all.
It’s a grim topic indeed, and a long comment, but well worth the read. I think that the strategy to keep the normal US army small is absolutely disastrous. I mean, centuries ago people were already warning against using hired guns (Machiavelli comes to mind).
With regards to ‘rules’: they’re not enforced strictly enough, and there’s a reason that soldiers, real soldiers, have to adhere to a very strict code and very strict rules. These hired guns don’t have to.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that they’re all loose canons. I think that many of them are real professionals. But it would be better to make the army bigger, then, and to pay those people to become regular soldiers.
I don’t disagree especially for the ones that are guarding US government personnel & perimeters of US. But what are you going to do about protecting all of the other various contractors – who have nothing to do with the military? As I said, this is a civilian rebuilding program that happens to be going on in a war zone. Not to mention most of the press also have their own private security – something they usually fail to mention in these articles.
I would like to see the source link for the story of the Blackwater "sniper" that took out three people from the state run media — that has the smell of BS and/or a total lack of context of the situation. Again, this is the kind of reporting that we have been getting from Iraq – completely slanted to provide the worst possible view of the situation or outright distortion of events to suit the narrative.
Bill brings up a very important point. The media and anti-war groups routinely and intentionally conflate the number of contractors with the number of non-military security personnel. But the vast majority of American contractors in Iraq are construction personnel, project managers, etc.
And the media has NO excuse for that conflation, as they know full well the diference and use those security contractors themselves, even as they actively demonize them.
I would like to see the source link for the story of the Blackwater “sniper” that took out three people from the state run media — that has the smell of BS and/or a total lack of context of the situation.
You are correct to be skeptical. The details of the incident are disputed. The Blackwater guards were on the roof of the Iraq Ministry of Justice (that little detail was left out, wasn’t it?) and the IMN guards were on a balcony across the street. Both claim the other guys began shooting first, and to muddy it up a bit more there was an altercation going on in the street in front of the IMN at the time as someone attempted to bring a car into the “clear zone” in front of the IMN despite being warned off at gunpoint by the IMN guards on the balcony.
IOW, dueling accounts, with one side treated quite sympathetically and the other side treated as liars. Guess which sides the media picked to portray in which fashion.