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October 3rd,
2007 - US Control over Guards in Iraq Urged News article by the Boston Globe News article by the New York Times |
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US Control over Guards in
Iraq Urged Blackwater criticized By Bryan Bender Boston Globe October 3, 2007 Washington - Humanitarian groups
and security specialists urged Congress yesterday to pass new legislation
placing US contractors in Iraq under the jurisdiction of federal courts after
new allegations that personnel at the largest private security company
working there have used excessive, deadly force against Iraqi civilians and
gone unpunished. The calls for accountability
come after alarming new reports that Blackwater USA, a firm employed by the
State Department to guard American diplomats in Iraq, has been responsible
for mounting Iraqi casualties and property damage. The use of thousands of
heavily armed private security forces in Iraq came under scrutiny yesterday
at a hearing of the House Oversight and Govern ment Reform Committee that
featured Erik Prince, the chief executive officer of Blackwater, a former
Navy commando. Representative Tom Davis of
Virginia, the top Republican on the committee, said using deadly force with
impunity against everyday Iraqis is undermining the United States' mission.
Davis said Iraqis "understandably resent our preaching about the rule of
law when so visible an element of the US presence there appears to be above
the law." But Prince said employees
work in a highly volatile combat zone and often face the same type of attacks
as US troops. Any Blackwater guard who is found to have used excessive force
is disciplined or fired, he said. Thousands of private
contractors, including those protecting US and Iraqi officials, have operated
in a legal limbo since an order approved by the now defunct US Coalition
Provisional Authority in 2003 granted them immunity from prosecution in both
US or Iraqi courts. Legislation earlier this year partially lifted that
immunity, making private contractors working for the Pentagon subject to US
military prosecution. That has left State
Department contractors such as Blackwater and others to operate with far less
accountability, according to legal specialists. "It's time to close the
legal loopholes that allow contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan to commit
crimes with impunity," Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel
at Human Rights Watch, said yesterday. "Illegal and abusive conduct
should not go unpunished." Daskal and others urged
lawmakers to support a bill proposed by Representative David Price, a Democrat
from North Carolina, that would extend the reach of federal law to all
security contractors in Iraq. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act
is expected to come up for consideration today. The International Peace
Operations Association, a security trade organization whose members include
Blackwater, also endorsed the bill yesterday. "Effective legal
structures are necessary to ensure ethical operations in the field, and are
not just valued by clients and local populations, but are also viewed as
being in the long-term interest of our industry," the group said in a
statement yesterday. Meanwhile, the Campaign for
Innocent Victims in Conflict, a humanitarian organization based in
Washington, called for "uniform rules and accountability measures for
all private security contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan." The United States has paid
billions of taxpayer dollars to private firms in Iraq and Afghanistan,
issuing contracts to provide American troops with everything from food, fuel,
and supplies to protecting US and Iraqi diplomats as they travel. The private
bodyguards, however, have garnered intense scrutiny because of frequent
firefights with insurgents - and because they aren't bound by the same rules
of engagement as US military personnel. In 2004, Blackwater came
under the spotlight when insurgents ambushed and killed four of its
employees, burned their corpses, and dangled the charred, mutilated remains
above a bridge near Fallujah. The ambush precipitated a major US offensive, a
bloody battle that took the lives of three dozen US military personnel. During yesterday's hearing,
Davis and other House members yesterday grilled Prince, Blackwater's founder,
about new allegations that employees protecting American diplomats in Iraq
killed 11 Iraqi civilians last month - and a report that a drunken Blackwater
guard gunned down the Iraqi vice president's bodyguard after a Christmas Eve
party last year. The FBI is investigating the September episode; Prince said
the employee involved in the Christmas Eve shooting was removed from Iraq and
fined but never faced criminal charges. Earlier this week, the House
oversight panel released a report that found that Blackwater employees have
been involved in at least 196 firefights in Iraq since 2005 - roughly 1.4
shootings a week. In 84 percent of those cases, the report found, Blackwater
workers opened fire first, despite contract stipulations that they use force
only in self defense. The report also found that other Blackwater employees
involved in illicit activities, including drug use and vandalism, have been
relieved of duty but were not held responsible in Iraq or in the United
States. Representative Elijah
Cummings, a Democrat of Maryland, likened Blackwater's Iraq personnel to
"a shadow military of mercenary forces that are not accountable to the
United States government or to anyone else." Prince rejected allegations
that his company's guards have operated as rogue "cowboys." He said
his employees are professional and disciplined, trained to use force as a
last resort to get clients out of potentially deadly situations. "I
believe we acted appropriately at all times," Prince, 38, told the House
committee, noting that no US officials have been killed while under his
company's protection. "We are the targets of
the same ruthless enemies that have killed more than 3,800 American military
personnel and thousands of innocent Iraqis," he added. "Any
incident where Americans are attacked serves as a reminder of the hostile
environment in which our professionals work to keep American officials and
dignitaries safe, including visiting members of Congress. In doing so, more
American service members are available to fight the enemy." Based in North Carolina,
Blackwater's workforce consists mostly of former US military commandos,
including highly trained Army Rangers and Special Forces troops. Started in
1997, it has been paid nearly $1 billion by the State Department for its
services, including providing military training for Iraqis and combat
survival classes for civilians. But mounting reports that
Blackwater employees are willing to shoot first and ask questions later have
set off new concerns about the role of private security firms working for the
US government in battle zones. Peter W. Singer, a
specialist in military contractors at the Brookings Institution in
Washington, said heavy reliance on private contractors has damaged the US
effort in Iraq by taking on war-zone jobs the Pentagon used to do itself and
charging far more than government personnel would have cost. "The US government
needs to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate its use of private
military contractors, especially armed roles within counterinsurgency and
contingency operations," he concluded in a Brookings report in
September. David Satterfield, the State
Department's Iraq coordinator, told the House committee that his agency
relies on private security personnel in Iraq and insisted that abuses are
extremely rare. On the whole, he said, the contractors have "performed
exceedingly well," and "with professionalism and courage." Satterfield also assured the
committee that each reported firefight involving private security forces is fully
investigated. He said that a joint US-Iraqi commission has been established
to conduct a "comprehensive examination" of the role of private
security forces in Iraq, and a top US diplomat was asked to review of the
department's overall security practices. But even Prince acknowledged
that holding his employees accountable is ultimately a matter for law
enforcement, not the State Department or the Pentagon. Asked about the
shooting involving the drunken Blackwater worker, he told the committee,
"We fired him. We fined him. But we as a private organization can't do
any more. We can't flog him. We can't incarcerate him. That's up to the
Justice Department. We are not empowered to enforce US law." External link: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/10/03/us_control_over_guards_in_iraq_urged/ From Errand to Fatal Shot to
Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths By James Glanz & Alissa J. Rubin New York Times October 3, 2007 Baghdad, Oct. 2 - It started
out as a family errand: Ahmed Haithem Ahmed was driving his mother, Mohassin,
to pick up his father from the hospital where he worked as a pathologist. As
they approached Nisour Square at midday on Sept. 16, they did not know that a
bomb had gone off nearby or that a convoy of four armored vehicles carrying
Blackwater guards armed with automatic rifles was approaching. Moments later a bullet tore
through Mr. Ahmed’s head, he slumped, and the car rolled forward. Then
Blackwater guards responded with a barrage of gunfire and explosive weapons,
leaving 17 dead and 24 wounded - a higher toll than previously thought,
according to Iraqi investigators. Interviews with 12 Iraqi
witnesses, several Iraqi investigators and an American official familiar with
an American investigation of the shootings offer new insights into the
gravity of the episode in Nisour Square. And they are difficult to square
with the explanation offered initially by Blackwater officials that their
guards were responding proportionately to an attack on the streets around the
square. The new details include
these: - A deadly cascade of events
began when a single bullet apparently fired by a Blackwater guard killed an
Iraqi man whose weight probably remained on the accelerator and propelled the
car forward as the passenger, the man’s mother, clutched him and screamed. - The car continued to roll
toward the convoy, which responded with an intense barrage of gunfire in
several directions, striking Iraqis who were desperately trying to flee. - Minutes after that
shooting stopped, a Blackwater convoy - possibly the same one - moved north
from the square and opened fire on another line of traffic a few hundred yards
away, in a previously unreported separate shooting, investigators and several
witnesses say. But questions emerge from
accounts of the earliest moments of the shooting in Nisour Square. The car in which the first
people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy
until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of his
vehicle. Not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around
the square. And following a short initial burst of bullets, the Blackwater
guards unleashed an overwhelming barrage of gunfire even as Iraqis were
turning their cars around and attempting to flee. As the gunfire continued, at
least one of the Blackwater guards began screaming, “No! No! No!” and
gesturing to his colleagues to stop shooting, according to an Iraqi lawyer
who was stuck in traffic and was shot in the back as he tried to flee. The
account of the struggle among the Blackwater guards corroborates preliminary
findings of the American investigation. Still, while the series of
events pieced together by the Iraqis may be correct, important elements could
still be missing from that account, according to the American official
familiar with the continuing American investigation into the shootings. Among the questions still to
be answered, the official said, is whether at any time nearby Iraqi security
forces began firing, possibly leading the Blackwater convoy to believe it was
under attack and therefore justified in returning fire. It is also possible
that as the car kept rolling toward the intersection, the Blackwater guards
believed it posed a threat and intensified their shooting. Blackwater has said that its
guards were fired upon and responded appropriately. Witnesses close to the
places where most of the Iraqi civilians were killed directly facing the
Blackwater convoy on the southern rim of the square all give a relatively
consistent picture of how events began and unfolded. The Blackwater convoy was in
the square to control traffic for a second convoy that was approaching from
the south. The second convoy was bringing diplomats who had been evacuated
from a meeting after a bomb went off near the compound where the meeting was
taking place. That convoy had not arrived at the square by the time the
shooting started. The events in the square
began with a short burst of bullets that witnesses described as unprovoked. A
traffic policeman standing at the edge of the square, Sarhan Thiab, saw that
a young man in a car had been hit. In the line of traffic, that car was the
third vehicle from the intersection where the convoy had positioned itself. “We tried to help him,” Mr.
Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was
crying out: ‘My son, my son. Help me, help me.’” Another traffic policeman
rushed to the driver’s side to try to get her son out of the car, but the car
was still rolling forward because her son had lost control, according to a
taxi driver close by who gave his name as Abu Mariam (“father of Mariam”). Then Blackwater guards
opened fire with a barrage of bullets, according to the police and numerous
witnesses. Mr. Ahmed’s father later counted 40 bullet holes in the car. His
mother, Mohassin Kadhim, appears to have been shot to death as she cradled
her son in her arms. Moments later the car caught fire after the Blackwater
guards fired a type of grenade into the vehicle. The taxi driver was a few
feet ahead of Mrs. Kadhim’s car when he heard the first gunshots. He was
aware of cars behind him trying to back out of the street or turn around and
drive away from the square. He tried frantically to turn his car, but ran
into the curb. Unable to escape, he pulled
himself over to the passenger side, which was the one not facing the square,
opened the door and crawled out, flattening his body to the ground. “The dust from the street
was coming in my mouth and as I pulled myself out of the area, my left leg
was shot by a bullet,” he said. Accounts in the initial days
after the event described Mrs. Kadhim as holding a baby in her arms. It now
appears that those accounts were based on assumptions that the charred
remains of Mrs. Kadhim’s son were mistaken for an infant. By then cars were struggling
to get out of the line of fire, and many people were abandoning their
vehicles altogether. The scene turned hellish. “The shooting started like
rain; everyone escaped his car,” said Fareed Walid Hassan, a truck driver who
hauls goods in his Hyundai minibus. He saw a woman dragging her
child. “He was around 10 or 11,” he said. “He was dead. She was pulling him
by one hand to get him away. She hoped that he was still alive.” As the shooting started in
earnest Jabber Salman, a lawyer on his way to the Ministry of Justice for a
noon meeting, described people crying and shouting. “Some people were trying
to escape by crawling,” he said. “Some people were killed in front of me.” As Mr. Salman tried to drive
away from the shooting, bullets came one after another through his rear
windshield, hitting his neck, shoulders, left forearm and lower back. “I
thought, ‘I’m sorry they are going to kill me and I can do nothing.’” Iraqi investigators believe
that during the shooting Blackwater helicopters flew overhead and fired into
the cars from above. They say that at least one the car roofs had bullets
through them. Blackwater has denied that its helicopters discharged any
weapons. Minutes after the first
shootings, a Blackwater convoy arrived at the other side of the square, where
civilian traffic was also backed up, and shot into cars, according to an
Iraqi official who is a member of the investigation committee set up by the
Iraqi government. “I found three people from
that incident in Khadimiya hospital,” the Iraqi official said. “One died and
two were injured. Why is the private security shooting again in this area?” Two weeks after the events
that claimed the life of Mrs. Kadhim and her son, her husband, Haithem Ahmed,
her daughter Mariam and her younger son, Haider, are still bewildered. “My son was very gentle,
very clever,” Mr. Ahmed said, looking down at the floor of the police
investigation center where he had come to give more details at the request of
Iraqi investigators. “He was easy to be around. He planned to be a surgeon.” “She is a beautiful woman,” he
said of his wife, speaking as if she were still alive. Then he looked at a picture
of his son, captured on a memorial video made by a friend and stored on
Haider’s cellphone camera. Seeming to forget there was anyone else in the
room, he spoke to the video image. “I am waiting to meet you in
paradise,” he said. Qais Mizher contributed
reporting. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/world/middleeast/03firefight.html |