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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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August 17th,
2009 - Blackwater Armed and Dangerous in Iraq |
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Blackwater Armed and
Dangerous in Iraq By Jeremy Scahill National Public Radio August 17, 2009 Despite the Iraqi
government's announcement earlier this year that it had canceled Blackwater's
operating license, the US State Department continues to allow Blackwater
operatives in Iraq to remain armed. A State Department official told The
Nation that Blackwater (which recently renamed itself Xe Services) is now
operating in Iraq under the name "US Training Center" and will
continue its armed presence in the country until at least September 3. That
means Blackwater will have been in Iraq nearly two years after its operatives
killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. "Authorized personnel
under that task order are permitted to continue carrying weapons until that
time," said a State Department diplomatic security official who spoke on
condition that his name not be used. He added: "The purpose and mission
of the Department of State's private security contractors is limited to
protection of US diplomats and diplomatic facilities only and is defensive in
nature." That last point will come as
little comfort to Iraqis. The Blackwater operatives involved with the Nisour
Square killings on September 16, 2007, were operating under that very
description. "The public perception in Iraq is that Blackwater is no
longer operating in the country; that they were kicked out and their license
revoked," says Raed Jarrar, the Iraq consultant at the American Friends
Service Committee. "The public perception is that they are gone already.
This is very disturbing." The State Department's
confirmation of Blackwater's continued armed presence in Iraq comes a week
after a former Blackwater employee alleged in a sworn statement that the
company's owner, Erik Prince, views his company's role as fighting a
Christian crusade to "eliminate" Muslims and Islam globally,
alleging that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the
destruction of Iraqi life." According to the State
Department, Blackwater's sole remaining contract for diplomatic security in
Iraq is an aviation contract. As The Nation recently reported, the Obama
administration extended that contract on July 31, increasing Blackwater's
payment by $20 million and bringing the total paid by the State Department to
Blackwater for its "aviation services" in Iraq to $187 million.
Blackwater has also been paid over $1 billion by the State Department for
"diplomatic security." The large, publicly traded company DynCorp
is scheduled to take over Blackwater's aviation contract in September, while
Triple Canopy will get the lion's share of the protective security work in
Iraq. On January 28, the Iraqi
government announced that it was not issuing Blackwater a license to operate
in Iraq, saying the company needed to leave once private security companies
were officially placed under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, as outlined in the
Status of Forces Agreement. "Those companies that don't have licenses,
such as Blackwater, should leave Iraq immediately," declared Iraqi
Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf. Despite these
declarations, Blackwater remained. "Why were they allowed to stay for
seven months without any operating license?" asks Jarrar. The language of the Status
of Forces Agreement that took effect January 1, 2009, technically places
Defense Department contractors under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law, but it
appears to exempt State Department contractors such as Blackwater, Triple
Canopy and DynCorp from Iraqi jurisdiction. Whether that has played a role in
Blackwater's continued presence in Iraq is unclear. Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki and other officials "gave a lot of lip service after the
Nisour Square massacre, promising to prosecute Blackwater and ban them from
Iraq, but they've done nothing," says Jarrar. "It seems they were
deliberately deceiving the public without actually holding the State Department
or Blackwater accountable." A week after Nisour Square,
Maliki's government said it would ban the company. "The Iraqi government
is responsible for its citizens, and it cannot be accepted for a security
company to carry out a killing," Maliki said on September 23, 2007.
"There are serious challenges to the sovereignty of Iraq." (The
Iraqi government did not respond to a request for comment.) Meanwhile, Blackwater
continues to have a substantial presence in Afghanistan as well. There it
also operates under the banner of US Training Center on a diplomatic security
contract for the State Department's Worldwide Personal Protection Program. It
also works for the Department of Defense under the banner of Paravant LLC,
another Prince-owned company. Four Paravant operatives are under
investigation by the US military over the shooting deaths of two Afghan
civilians in May. Blackwater is bidding on
more contracts in Afghanistan, which is increasingly becoming the new gold
mine for the war industry. Nearly 70,000 contractors are now deployed in
Afghanistan on the US government payroll, meaning there are now more
contractors than US soldiers (48,000) in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Interior
Ministry has licensed nearly forty private security companies who collectively
employ 23,000 people in Afghanistan. These companies also control 17,000
weapons there. In addition to those hired by the State Department, the US
Department of Defense has about 4,300 security contractors in Afghanistan,
and these numbers are steadily increasing. In the second quarter of 2009, the
Obama administration increased the number of armed private contractors in
Afghanistan by 29 percent. "I'm not surprised that
this transition is happening," says Sonali Kolhatkar, author of Bleeding
Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence. "We
were warned before the election of Obama that Afghanistan was going to be the
top war priority, so it is not surprising that Washington would dedicate much
of its war machinery to Afghanistan." As for Blackwater, she says:
"If they build the same record of killing civilians in Afghanistan that
they had in Iraq, it will cement the Afghan resistance even further against
the US occupation." On August 6, Representative
Jan Schakowsky wrote letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
Defense Secretary Robert Gates citing Blackwater's "history of
abuse" and called on Clinton and Gates "not to award further
contracts to Xe and its affiliates and to review all existing contracts with
this company." Neither department has responded to Schakowsky. External link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111946211 |