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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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November 1st,
2007 - U.N.’s Ban Urges Accountability for Security Firms |
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U.N.’s Ban Urges
Accountability for Security Firms By Reuters November 1, 2007 United Nations - Following a
shooting in Iraq involving U.S. firm Blackwater, U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon called on Thursday for private security companies operating in war
zones to be held more accountable. Private U.S. security firms
have come under scrutiny since a shooting last month in which Blackwater
security guards working for the State Department were accused of killing 17
Iraqis in Baghdad. Ban's report to the U.N.
Security Council on the protection of civilians in armed conflict did not
mention the Blackwater incident. It said that as of March 2006, there were an
estimated 181 private military security companies in Iraq with 48,000
employees involved in activities that frequently bring them into direct
contact with civilians. "It is well established
that employees (of private security companies) must comply with international
humanitarian law," Ban said, adding that the responsibilities of the
states that hire them were also well established. "However, far more
needs to be done to promote compliance with the law and accountability of
employees and hiring states for any violations thereof," he said. U.S. officials said this
week the Pentagon and U.S. State Department have agreed to tighten rules governing
private security contractors in Iraq, giving a greater oversight role to the
U.S. military. The killing of the Iraqis
created tensions between the Iraqi government and Washington, and the Iraqi
government took its own steps on Tuesday to tighten controls on contractors. It approved a draft law that
would scrap a decree issued by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority
in 2004, before it handed over control to Iraqis, which granted foreign
contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraq. Blackwater says its guards
acted lawfully after being shot at, but the Iraqi government says the guards
"deliberately killed" the 17 people. © Reuters 2007 All rights
reserved. External link: http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-30286120071101 Blackwater
Mounts a Defense With Top Talent By John M. Broder and James Risen New York Times November 1, 2007 Washington, Oct. 31 -
Blackwater Worldwide, its reputation in tatters and its lucrative government
contracts in jeopardy, is mounting an aggressive legal, political and public
relations counterstrike. It has hired a bipartisan
stable of big-name Washington lawyers, lobbyists and press advisers,
including the public relations powerhouse Burson-Marsteller, which was
brought in briefly, but at a critical moment, to help Blackwater’s chairman,
Erik D. Prince, prepare for his first Congressional hearing. Blackwater for a time
retained Kenneth D. Starr, the former Whitewater independent counsel, and
Fred F. Fielding, who is now the White House counsel, to help handle suits
filed by the families of slain Blackwater employees. Another outside public
relations specialist, Mark Corallo, former chief spokesman for Attorney
General John Ashcroft, quit working for Blackwater late last year because he
said he was uncomfortable with what he termed some executives’ cowboy
mentality. Blackwater is pursuing a
bold legal strategy, going so far in a North Carolina case as to seek a gag
order on the lawyers for the families of four Blackwater employees killed in
an ambush in Falluja in 2004. The company argues that the dead men had signed
contracts that prohibited them from talking to the press about Blackwater and
that this restriction extended to their lawyers and their estates even after
death. One of Blackwater’s
Washington lawyers is Beth Nolan, who served as White House counsel for the
last two years of the Clinton administration. (Ms. Nolan is leaving private
practice at the end of November to become general counsel at George
Washington University.) Another is Stephen M. Ryan, a top white-collar
defense lawyer and former general counsel of the Senate Governmental Affairs
Committee. The company’s chief
Washington lobbyist is Paul Behrends, who worked at the now-defunct Alexander
Strategy Group, a Republican firm with close ties to the jailed lobbyist Jack
Abramoff. Mr. Behrends, who now works at C & M Capitolink, a Washington
lobbying firm, declined to discuss his work for Blackwater, which has paid
his company $300,000 since last year. Anne E. Tyrrell, the
company’s chief spokeswoman (and the daughter of R. Emmett Tyrrell, the
longtime editor of the conservative magazine American Spectator), said that
Blackwater was more comfortable operating in the shadows, but that it decided
that it had to strike back publicly. She said, however, that she was not sure
that the blitz was succeeding. “It’s not as if we woke up
one day and said it’s time to get out there,” she said. “We were put there.
But there’s only so much you can do in one month, as opposed to 10 years of
largely remaining silent.” “There’s still a lot of
misinformation out there,” she added, “but I think we have taken positive
steps toward correcting the record.” In the aftermath of the
Sept. 16 shootings in Baghdad that Iraqi authorities said left 17 Iraqis
dead, the formerly reclusive Mr. Prince has conducted a series of media
interviews intended to polish Blackwater’s tarnished brand. The company has
changed the name of its major operating division from Blackwater USA to
Blackwater Worldwide and toned down its warlike logo. It has sent out a mass
e-mail message to workers, suppliers and clients hoping to inspire them to
send letters to members of Congress and make other public statements of
support. As reports poured out of
Baghdad about the September shootings by several Blackwater guards, the
company felt it could not adequately defend itself. The company operates
under confidentiality agreements with the State Department, which employs 845
Blackwater guards to protect its diplomats in Iraq. But after Mr. Prince
testified for more than three hours before the House Oversight and Government
Reform Committee on Oct. 2, the company said it felt free to speak out. “It was no picnic to keep
our contractual obligations not to talk,” said one person close to
Blackwater, who insisted on not being named. “We wrote the book on how not to
get good P.R.” In the days leading up to
the hearing before the oversight panel, which is led by Representative Henry
A. Waxman, a liberal California Democrat who has no love for Blackwater, the
company hired Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations firm. Blackwater said
it hired the company on a temporary basis to help prepare Mr. Prince for his
testimony. Mark J. Penn,
Burson-Marsteller’s chairman and a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham
Clinton’s presidential campaign, said in an e-mail message that he had no
direct contact with Blackwater and that the work was landed by BKSH, a
subsidiary. BKSH is a political consulting firm led by Charles R. Black Jr.,
an adviser to President Bush and his father, and R. Scott Pastrick, a top
Democratic fund-raiser. Mr. Penn said that a BKSH associate had worked
briefly in Iraq and met several Blackwater personnel, who steered the work to
his firm. In the days following the
hearing, Blackwater began its media offensive. Because Mr. Prince had been
required to speak publicly about his firm before Congress, Blackwater
officials reasoned that they could now go to the news media. They mounted an impressive
publicity campaign, granting a series of interviews with Mr. Prince in quick
succession to, among others, the CBS program “60 Minutes”; CNN; NBC; PBS; The
Washington Post; and The Detroit Free Press. The central message in all of
the interviews was that Blackwater was doing only what the State Department
asked it to do, that it had not lost a single official under its protection
while 30 Blackwater guards had been killed, and that if the company lost its
$1.2 billion contract with the State Department it would find other ways to
make money. Blackwater officials clearly
believe that Mr. Prince, a young, clean-cut former member of the Navy Seals,
is their best asset as they try to dig out from their public relations hole.
“It just got to the point where we all decided it was time to defend the
company and there is no one better to do that than Mr. Prince,” Ms. Tyrrell
said. Mr. Prince’s appearances
helped dispel the notion, as one Blackwater insider put it, “that he would be
some guy with a peg leg and a parrot on his shoulder and an eye patch.” The company also released
two detailed reports about two of its most controversial operations, the
Falluja ambush in 2004 and the crash of a Blackwater-operated military flight
in Afghanistan that same year that killed six people. The papers were
intended to rebut staff reports from Mr. Waxman’s committee. The company,
citing current investigations, has not produced a similar report about the
September shootings in Baghdad. But the company still
suffers from the image that its workers are reckless gunslingers charging
around Iraq with impunity. Mr. Corallo, the former
Blackwater public relations adviser, said this image was due in part to the
company’s culture and attitude. He said he quit working for
the company last year because of personality conflicts with some top
executives, although he praised Mr. Prince as a “visionary.” “They do have a few people
at the upper levels of Blackwater who are a little bit unsophisticated and
rather disdainful of anything that goes to oversight and due process,” he
said. “The reason they get the caricature that’s been created is that they do
have a few cowboys in their midst.” External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/washington/01blackwater-sub.html |