IRAQ'S HIRED GUNS LIVE BY DIFFERENT RULES

Ongoing investigations into shootings on the streets of Baghdad in May by hired guns from the USA private security company, Blackwater, illustrate the dangerous and often unregulated roles of security personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Blackwater, which has headquarters in North Carolina, has been in the headlines before when a blood thirsty mob in Fallujah killed four of its staff and hung their charred bodies from a bridge in the town. It is one of the largest US security firms in Iraq and Afghanistan and boasts that is has the best protection staff in the world. It has provided interrogators to the US military and CIA. Iraq has been a lucrative outlet, providing Blackwater with multi-million dollar contracts from the Pentagon and State Department and from companies involved in reconstruction. Most of its security personnel are former US military personnel, some of them with Ranger or Special Forces’ training.
In the course of one week in May, Blackwater security staff became involved in two controversial episodes that drew severe criticism from the Iraqi authorities. The first was when hired guns in a Blackwater convoy opened fire on an Iraqi driver, killing him in a hail of bullets. The Blackwater version of events was that its men feared the car was loaded with a bomb and was aimed at their vehicles. First, they waved at the driver but he ignored them. They then fired a warning shot to disable the car’s engine and when that failed they shot through his windscreen. The explanation offered by Blackwater has a familiar ring to it and mirrors explanations given in hundreds of such incidents in Iraq since the invasion in 2003. Iraqis presented an alternative account. They claimed the driver was leaving a gas station when he came across a Blackwater convoy. He presented no threat yet was shot in the head, chest and shoulder.
Immediately after the shooting there was a tense stand-off between hired guns in the Blackwater convoy and heavily armed Iraqi police and soldiers because the shooting occurred outside the Iraqi Interior Ministry. According to Iraqi sources, Blackwater personnel refused to provide identification or an explanation for their actions. Tension was quickly defused by the timely arrival of a passing US military convoy. Days later, a second Blackwater convoy transporting US State Department staff through the center of Baghdad came under heavy fire from the ground and rooftops. US and Iraqi military units were called in and a major gun battle followed in which Apache attack helicopters were used. The outcome was that after an hour of fierce fighting the Blackwater convoy was safely extracted from the area with no casualties. There were no figures for the number of insurgents killed or for dead or wounded civilians given that the episode occurred in a heavily populated neighborhood.
Shootings by hired guns under contract to a US company like Blackwater or one of the ten British security firms that operate in Iraq and Afghanistan are hard to investigate because of a lack of oversight of their activities. It is estimated there are 40,000 to 50,000 security personnel in Iraq alone, representing a large private army which is kept in place by lucrative contracts from the US and British governments, as well as international corporations like Halliburton, who do not trust the Iraqi police or military to guard installations, food transports, pipelines, diplomatic staff or key installations. When the White House cities the figure of 150,000 for the numbers of US military personnel in Iraq it conveniently ignores the role of this smaller army that eases the overall military burden of the US and coalition forces.
Hired guns get paid well but have to risk their lives in Iraq every day. Between January and March this year 149 were killed, bringing the overall death toll of security personnel since 2003 to 900. But even those figures may not tell the full story since there are few facts one can authenticate about this private army. For example, it is difficult to establish how much it costs to keep such a larger number of highly paid former soldiers on the battlefield. There is another troubling mystery and that is the lack of information about transgressions committed by security staff. It is not known how many investigations have been carried out into their role in controversial shootings and in into their use of questionable interrogation techniques in places like Abu Ghraib prison and other detention facilities. If there are files on all these matters they are kept a closely guarded secret.
Lately, the situation in Iraq has become so unstable that contractors like Kroll Security International have pulled out, realizing that there is easier money to be earned elsewhere. One of the interesting statistics to emerge about the private security world in Iraq is that almost half the hired guns are Brits who number more than three times the British military force in Iraq. From the 1960s onwards, British ex-soldiers have been prominent in mercenary armies across the globe. It is a phenomenon that either reflects a warrior-like mentality among British ex-servicemen or the fact that they feel it is the only way they can earn high rewards for long years spent in the military. There is also the fact that from the 1940s the British acquired considerable counter insurgency experience fighting in what they called “colonial emergencies” in far flung British outposts like Palestine, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus. Many soldiers who fought in N. Ireland later offered their services to contractors in African conflict zones.
The size of the British contingent of hired guns in Iraq and Afghanistan is slightly overmatched by Americans but there are many white South Africans who were mercenaries in African war zones. Most security companies have a scale of payments for ex-soldiers and policemen ranging from $800 to $1,000 a day. Half that sum is paid to men with limited military service, or those who can only claim to have experience providing security at nightclubs. Alongside the hired guns are staffs that provide basic services such as driving, cleaning etc and they are often Asians who are paid basic salaries but salaries considerably higher than what they would earn in their own countries.
The risks facing security personnel were highlighted with the recent kidnapping of four Britons working for Garda World, a Canadian security company. It is thought their kidnappers were members of a Shiite militia group that had support and inside information from Iraqi Interior Ministry security personnel. The overall image of hired guns in Iraq has not been an uplifting one. One of the most notorious examples of how they sometimes operate was displayed in a video posted on the internet. It showed security personnel shooting at Iraqi civilian cars like they were in an amusement arcade. According to human rights campaigners there have been scores of examples of civilian vehicles being randomly fired on and no action taken. Some British members of parliament have accused the British and US governments of allowing this private army to operate outside the law by providing it with legal immunity.
Since 2004 security companies have been bound only by a memorandum issued by the then Coalition Provisional Authority, that strange body which was later unable to account for the disappearance of over $20 billion US taxpayer dollars sent to Iraq in cash. The CPA under the control of the L. Paul Bremer, who had the grand title of US Presidential Envoy and Administrator, issued Memorandum 17. It was a set of guidelines that permitted security personnel to use “deadly force” if their lives or the lives of those they were paid to protect were in danger. There was a stipulation that while they were not to engage directly in combat operations with the US and Iraqi militaries they could do so to keep their clients safe. Controversially they were also accorded the right to stop search, detain and disarm Iraqi civilians. These guidelines were judged to contravene international law. What bothered some observers was the fact that hired guns could move freely in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan and were often not available for interview by investigators. They also appeared to have the same legal immunity accorded to the US military which guaranteed that the Iraqi authorities had no right to detain, interrogate or prosecute anyone employed by a contractor. That feature of the relationship between contractors and the Iraqi authorities may have been the catalyst for enabling some security personnel to feel they could do whatever they wanted to Iraqis without fear of retribution.
From a US perspective, one of the effects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, especially Iraq, is that major components of the US defense sector have been outsourced to the private sector, even within homeland security. Those areas that have seen the greatest private sector growth have been in the fields of intelligence gathering, diplomatic protection, border and port security, overseas training of foreign police and military and the guarding of US corporate installations and staff across the globe.
So far, Congress has shown little appetite to investigate and regulate the private security industry which is a billion dollar business that has used its wealth to develop a powerful Washington lobby. It has also become such an integral part of the Pentagon’s overseas strategies that is difficult to see how its growing power can be curbed.