Military contractor in Iraq holds foreign workers in warehouses

By Adam Ashton | McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD — About 1,000 Asian men who were hired by a Kuwaiti subcontractor to the U.S. military have been confined for as long as three months in windowless warehouses near the Baghdad airport without money or a place to work.

Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor to KBR, an engineering, construction and services company, hired the men, who're from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. On Tuesday, they staged a march outside their compound to protest their living conditions.

"It's really dirty," a Sri Lankan man told McClatchy, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he still wants to work for Najlaa. "For all of us, there are about 12 toilets and about 10 bathrooms. The food — it's three half-liter (one pint) bottles of water a day. Bread, cheese and jam for breakfast. Lunch is a small piece of meat, potato and rice. Dinner is rice and dal, but it's not dal," he said, referring to the Indian lentil dish.

After McClatchy began asking questions about the men on Tuesday, the Kuwaiti contractor announced that it would return them to their home countries and pay them back salaries. Najlaa officials contended that they've cared for the men's basic needs while the company has tried to find them jobs in Iraq.

The laborers said they paid middlemen more than $2,000 to get to Iraq for jobs that they were told would earn them $600 to $800 a month. Some of the men took out loans to cover the fees.

"They promised us the moon and stars," said Davidson Peters, 42, a Sri Lankan. "While we are here, wives have left their husbands and children have been shut out of their schools" because money for the families has dried up. The men live in three warehouses with long rows of bunk beds crammed tightly together. Reporters who tried to get a better glimpse inside were ushered away by armed guards.

The conditions in which the men have been held appear to violate guidelines the U.S. military handed down in 2006 that urged contractors to deter human trafficking to the war zone by shunning recruiters that charged excessive fees. The guidelines also defined "minimum acceptable" living spaces — 50 square feet per person — and required companies to fulfill the pledges they made to employees in contracts.

A U.S. military spokesman for the Multi-National Force-Iraq referred questions to KBR, a Texas-based former subsidiary of Halliburton. The spokesman said that the American military wasn't aware of the warehouses until McClatchy and the Times of London began asking questions about it on Monday.

Some of the men who've been living in the warehouses said that KBR representatives visited the site two weeks ago. They said Najlaa held their passports until the KBR inspection, which Najlaa officials denied. Seizing passports is a violation of the U.S. military's 2006 instructions to contractors.

KBR didn't answer direct questions about the warehouses but issued a two-paragraph statement. "When KBR becomes aware of potential violations of international laws regarding trafficking in persons, we work, within our authority, to remediate the problem and report the matter to proper authorities. KBR then works with authorities to rectify the matter," it said.

Reached in Kuwait, Najlaa chief executive Marwan Rizk said the company recruited the laborers for contracts it expected to begin servicing, but the work didn't materialize. He didn't specify which contracts fell through or why they were delayed. The company offers a number of services in Iraq, including catering at U.S. military bases. "We had some obstacles with the services we were contracted to do," Rizk said. "These obstacles were not forecasted."

He said it's the company's practice to begin paying its employees once they start their jobs, though Najlaa credits them from the time they arrive in Iraq.

While the main complaint in the warehouses centered on living in what many considered prison-like conditions, Najlaa officials said it was crucial to keep the men in the compound to prevent kidnappings or other dangers. "We're in Iraq; it's a war zone," said Isha Rufaie, a Najlaa logistics manager who tried to calm the protest Tuesday.

Peters, the Sri Lankan, said the men had notified Najlaa officials in advance, and the firm had agreed to let them protest their status outside their compound. They walked in thick clusters up and down an airport side road that wouldn't be visible even to the sparse traffic that passes on the airport's primary routes.

The protest, nonetheless, caught the attention of Sabre, a British company that holds a contract to maintain security at the airport.

Sabre officers halted the protest by telling Najlaa to get the men back in the compound. Najlaa officials did so by telling the men they'd be paid Tuesday. They returned to the camp voicing skepticism that Najlaa would follow through. Some of them, reached by phone later in the day, said they hadn't been paid.

Sabre representatives said they've closed similar buildings housing laborers near the airport in the past. Peters, the Sri Lankan, had a message for his countrymen who might consider pursuing work in Iraq. "There is little money here. The jobs do not come easily and people are being held against their wishes," he said.

A group of about 50 men living in tents about a mile away were even worse off than the men in the warehouses, and they appeared to be victims of human trafficking. They live in huts they built with tarps and pieces of carpet, and said they had no access to food or water.

The property is under the control of the Iraq Civil Aviation Administration, which couldn't be reached for comment Tuesday.

These men apparently didn't arrive in Iraq with contracts promising them work, but instead had relied on agents who were supposed to place them in jobs. The men in the tent camp, who're from the same countries as those in the warehouses, said they paid close to $5,000 to the agents.

"We came to make a good salary and go home, but we're not lucky," said Ganesh Kumar Bhagat, 22, a Nepalese man who sleeps with four others in a tent along the main airport road.

He hasn't told his family that his plans did not succeed in Iraq, instead assuring them that he lives and works safely on an American base.

Bhagat and others at the camp gave a McClatchy reporter phone numbers for the agents who led them to Iraq. Some numbers had been disconnected. In other cases, people quickly hung up.

(Ashton reports for the Modesto (Calif.) Bee)

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Soldiers to be arraigned in detainee murder

The Associated Press
Posted : Friday Dec 5, 2008 20:19:19 EST

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — Two Fort Campbell soldiers will be arraigned next week on charges of premeditated murder in the shooting death of an Iraqi detainee.

Base officials said Friday that Staff Sgt. Hal M. Warner, of Braggs, Okla., and 1st Lt. Michael C. Behenna, of Edmond, Okla., will appear Monday before a military judge at the base on the Tennessee-Kentucky state line.

The two 101st Airborne soldiers are charged with premeditated murder, assault, making a false statement and obstruction of justice in the May death of Ali Mansour Mohammed. Warner faces an additional charge of accessory after the fact.

During a September hearing in Iraq, military prosecutors accused Behenna of stripping the detainee naked, shooting him in the head and chest and watching as Warner set fire to the body with a grenade. He also allegedly tried to cover up the killing.

Former U.S. Interrogator: Torture Policy Has Led to More Deaths than 9/11 Attacks By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted December 5, 2008.

Amy Goodman: Writing under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, a former special intelligence operations officer, who led an interrogations team in Iraq two years ago, has written a stunning op-ed in the Washington Post called "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq." In it, he details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006. He conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than a thousand and was awarded a Bronze Star for his achievements in Iraq.

In the article, he says torture techniques used in Iraq consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence and that methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, which rest on confidence building, consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to critical information.

He writes: "My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today."

He goes on to say that the number of Americans killed in Iraq because of the U.S. military's use of torture is more than 3,000. He writes: "It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in [Iraq] have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."

Well, the former interrogator has just written a book. It's called How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. The publication date for the book was delayed for six weeks due to the Pentagon's vetting of it. The soldier is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons. He joins us now in our firehouse studio in one of his first national broadcast interviews.

We welcome you to Democracy Now!

Matthew Alexander: Thanks for having me.

AG: It's good to have you with us. Why don't you want to use your name?

MA: It's just basic security concerns. You know, al-Qaida has promised reprisals for the killing of Zarqawi. So it's just to protect myself and my family. But, you know, after the death of Zarqawi, the response was actually, I thought, quite limited. It was less than what I would expect. And I think it goes to show how much even people within his own organization disliked him.

AG: Why was it so hard to get your book out of the Pentagon? I mean, you've got the book. You have to hand it in to be vetted, but they wouldn't release it.

MA: Yeah, you know, I turned it in in the middle of July, and they're supposed to do the review within 30 days, and they didn't do that. I missed the first printing date. When they finally did come back with a review of the book after two months, they had extracted an extraordinary amount of material. There was 93 redactions made. I sued -- you know, I sued the Department of Defense first to review the book and then to argue the redactions, because they had redacted obvious unclassified material, things that I had taken straight out of the unclassified field manual and also some items that were directly off the Army's own Web site. So, eventually they acquiesced on 80 of the 93 redactions. And if you -- when you read the book, you'll see that the redactions within -- some of the redactions are still in the book, because we had to go to print before we had the results of the appeal.

AG: So why don't you talk about your time in Iraq? You were a chief interrogator. Explain how it works. And what is a " 'gator"?

MA: A 'gator, an interrogator, I mean, their job within the mission is to extract information from detainees, intelligence -- useful intelligence information. And it's a timely art. It's one in which we're always under a lot of pressure to produce results quickly, because intelligence is very time sensitive.

And when I was in Iraq, I was in charge of a team of interrogators assigned to a task force, and our mission was to find Zarqawi. We believed at that time, at least our leadership believed, that if we could kill Zarqawi, we could slow down the path toward civil war.

AG: Explain who he is, who he was.

MA: Well, Zarqawi, he was an extremist. You know, he got his start as a thug in Jordan, where he spent some time in prison. He had spent time in Afghanistan, two tours in Afghanistan. And he had come back to Iraq prior to our invasion to set up a resistance. And he was also the author of the civil war in Iraq. He was the one behind the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque that started the civil war between Sunni and Shia. And it was his idea that if they targeted Shia civilians in suicide bombing attacks that he could bog American forces down in a civil war and force us to leave.

AG: So, how did you get information about his whereabouts?

MA: Well, the things that we used in Iraq is we took the methods that had been used prior to our arrival, and we changed them. The methods that the Army was using were based on fear and control, and those techniques are not effective. They're not the most effective way to get people to cooperate. My team was a little bit different, because we were made up of several criminal investigators who had experience doing criminal interrogations, in which we don't use fear and control. We use techniques that are based on understanding, cultural understanding, sympathy, things like intellect, ingenuity, innovation. And we started to apply these types of techniques to the interrogations. And ultimately, we were able to put together a string of successes within the al-Qaida organization that led to Zarqawi's location.

AG: What does that mean, sympathy, those kind of -- using that approach?

MA: Let me just give you one example out of the book. Let's go to the example where I convince one of Zarqawi's associates to give up a path towards Zarqawi. This man was a highly religious man. He was deeply schooled in Islam. He had spent 14 years studying Islam. And we had tried fear-and-control techniques on him for a period of about three weeks, and they didn't work. He had maintained that he had nothing to do with al-Qaida.

AG: What do you mean, "fear and control?"

MA: By fear and control, I mean using tactics that are basically intended to intimidate a detainee. You're not allowed, within the rules of interrogation, to threaten a detainee, but there's ways to create fear without threatening a detainee. And those methods, although legal, are not most effective. The methods that --

AG: What are they? How do you inspire fear?

MA: You can inspire fear by -- you can state what are the consequences for someone's actions.

AG: You can say you're going to kill them if they don't talk?

MA: You can't say that you're going to kill somebody if they don't talk. You can state what are the punishments for a certain crime, and if that person's been involved in that crime, then the point will get across. I think the JAGs, the military lawyers, the terms that they use is you can't put the dagger on the table.

Now, if you look at the way we do criminal interrogations in the United States, you can certainly tell a criminal suspect what are the consequences for a crime that they've committed, or that you suspect they've committed. So that, I think, is a permissible and ethical way to conduct an interrogation. However, it's not the most effective. The most-effective techniques are those that rely on rapport-building and relationship-building and then adapt that into the culture of the person that you're interrogating.

AG: So talk now, moving from fear to what you did with him.

MA: What we did is we got to know our detainees, first of all. You can't effectively build a relationship with somebody and convince him to cooperate unless you know them. You have to get to know what motivates them, why they've joined the insurgency, why they decided to pick up arms against you. And then, once you understand that, then you can appeal to them and offer them some type of negotiation or compromise or incentive. And, you know, the best incentives that we could apply were ones that were intangible, things like hope, things like friendship, like respect, like wasta, which in Arab culture is a term referring to status.

You know, ultimately, interrogation is just one tool we're using in this war. And we have to conduct ourselves while we're doing interrogations according to American principles. If we don't, then we're not living up to the ideals that we proclaim to have. And for me, this war, it's more about preserving our American principles than it is about defeating al-Qaida. We can't become our enemies in trying to defeat them.

…

AG: You did over 300 interrogations yourself, you supervised over a thousand. But the key person who provided the information, the whereabouts of Zarqawi, you said you move from fear to this next approach -- explain it.

MA: Yes. The man who ultimately led us to Zarqawi, I call Abu Hadir in the book. And Abu Hadir was an interesting character. He was the Hannibal Lecter, if you will, of al-Qaida. He had the same appearance and the same sort of general demeanor. The way he talked was very similar. He was a grand egoist. He enjoyed having his ego stroked, and he wanted to believe that he was a man of power and influence.

And so, instead of trying to tear that down, which is a technique that we tried -- or some interrogators tried prior to my interrogation of him -- I decided to build rapport with him and to stroke his ego and to build him up. And what I ended up developing during one six-hour interrogation was a very strong relationship with him of trust. And I believe he trusted me, because we spoke extensively about the Quran, which I've read, and I showed respect for his beliefs and his religion, and I showed respect for the Sunni Iraqi cause in Iraq and how difficult it was after our invasion.

AG: He was from Iraq.

MA: He was from Iraq. He was an Iraqi. He had worked in the government prior to our arrival in Iraq, and he had lost his job. And this is another thing that you can get out of my book that you're not going to hear anywhere else, is you're going to hear the voice of Iraqis, the Sunnis who joined al-Qaida, and you can hear the reasons why they joined, which you can't read anywhere else. You know, our government tells you that -- or we have said in the past -- that all the Sunnis that were joining the insurgency were extremists. And that's not the case. You can hear the voices of Iraqi Sunnis talking about the variety of reasons why they joined. Some were economic. Some were social. Some were tribal affiliation. A large number of Sunni Iraqis joined the insurgency because they needed protection from the Shia militias that we had allowed to run loose when we disbanded the government.

AG: And their feelings about Saddam Hussein?

MA: You know, the Sunni Iraqis that I interrogated had no love for Saddam. They despised him. A lot of them were Baath Party members simply because you had to be a Baath Party member to have a job in Iraq under Saddam. And they were glad to see him gone. But at the same time, they were very concerned about their access to future oil and wealth and how were they going to feed their families. And so, many of them had joined al-Qaida in an effort to try and establish some type of Sunni power in Iraq, post-Saddam.

AG: And what did they say about Zarqawi?

MA: Well, you know, a lot of them, although they had even -- many of them had participated or in some way influenced or helped Zarqawi with his campaign of suicide bombings -- the large majority of them did not believe in his ideology. Let me give you the case of one of the guys that I interrogated early on. His name was Abu Ali, and he was an imam. And he had joined the insurgency because one of his best friends had been killed by a Shia militia, and he turned to al-Qaida for protection. He, at one point, even blessed suicide bombers. But, you know, in the end, he told me, he said, "Matthew, I don't believe in this, in bombing Shia civilians. My mother is Shia. Iraqis have a long history of intermarriage between Sunni and Shia. But we've been forced in this situation because of the Shia militias. And so, we have to do this to protect ourselves."

AG: So, how you extracted the actual information for where Zarqawi was? Bush believed that Zarqawi was responsible for the U.N. bombing also?

MA: He was. Zarqawi was responsible for a number of bombings. Even when he wasn't directly planning things, he obviously was directing or inspiring others to exact his campaign of targeting civilians. The man who ultimately led us to Zarqawi, Abu Hadir, he ultimately turned on Zarqawi because he rejected his ideology of extremism, and also because I promised him a new way ahead, a way in which Americans could work together with Sunni Iraqis, we could find middle ground to negotiate, to compromise and work together to battle against these types of extremists. And Abu Hadir ultimately rejected Zarqawi and decided that it was best for the future of Iraq if Zarqawi was dead.

AG: How long did this take?

MA: Well, the interrogation -- he was scheduled to leave the prison where I was at, and I had about six hours to sit down with him and convince him to give us some information. And it wasn't until the last 30 minutes before he was supposed to get on a helicopter that I was able to convince him to work together with us and to sell out his cause.

AG: Where were they going to take him?

MA: He would have been transferred to another prison, either Abu Ghraib or one of the other prisons.

AG: Where were you?

MA: I can't say the exact location where I was.

AG: And so, in that last 30 minutes, well, then he had more time with you?

MA: Yeah, you know, I tell in the story, the book, of this last 30 minutes, because, you know, I could hear the clock ticking in my head, and I knew this man could lead us to Zarqawi.

AG: How did you know that?

MA: I knew it, because I had been watching him, monitoring his interrogations for a few weeks. And I guess it was a gut feeling. You know, it was intuition to know that...

AG: Where had he been picked up?

MA: He had been picked up in a house with suicide bombers during a raid. There was five men captured in the house, and my team interrogated those five men. And the suicide bombers had been killed in the house by our soldiers during a very exciting, daring raid, I should say. And he had pretended for a long time that he was there accidentally. He was supposed to have come to film a wedding, which obviously was a lie. But it was obvious to me from watching him over a period of weeks that this was a very important person and that he had to have been very close to the higher echelons of al-Qaida.

AG: And so, those last 30 minutes?

MA: Those last 30 minutes, I decided to take a gamble. I decided to take a risk, which is -- part of interrogations is risk-taking and not being afraid to lay it out on the line. And so, during those last 30 minutes, I told him that I already knew that he was close to somebody and that if he would provide me the name of that person and show me that he trusted me, that I could help him. And I actually had no particular person in mind. It was a ruse. But he believed me, and he told me that he was friends with Abu Ayyub al-Masri, who is now the current leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and who was Zarqawi's right-hand man.

AG: And so, what information did he give up then? Where he was?

MA: Well, eventually -- at that point, we had just been able to establish that he was in the higher echelon. It took us a period of weeks after that, about two weeks, to get him to admit that he was friends with Zarqawi's personal spiritual adviser, who was Sheikh Abu Abdul Rahman, who was the person who led us to Zarqawi. But he told us not only who Rahman was, but how to find Rahman and how we would know when he went to meet with Zarqawi.

AG: And where was Rahman?

MA: Rahman was in Baghdad, in his home. And he was actually a coordinator of events also for Zarqawi. He was a spiritual adviser. Zarqawi used Iraqi imams like Abu Hadir and like Rahman to try to legitimize his suicide bombings against Shia civilians, and in exchange, these people got money and arms from al-Qaida. So that was his way of legitimizing what he was doing.

AG: Why was it a risk to say you would help him if he turned in someone important?

MA: It's a risk because it's very hard to make that come true. At the time that I was in Iraq, we had no program to reach out to Sunnis and to literally work with them. We could promise them that. And certainly, if they cooperated with us when they went before a panel of judges later for sentencing, they would look favorably on their cooperation. However, we had no program like they have now that Gen. [David] Petraeus put in place to reach out to Sunnis and to arm them and to physically work together with them.

AG: So you find Rahman, you bring him in, or you follow him to where he's going to meet with Zarqawi?

MA: We follow him. And yeah, let me point out that, you know, this was an entire team effort. There was a huge organization. There's people who, you know, do surveillance. There's people who do -- there's interrogators. There's analysts supporting all this. There's operations officers, intelligence officers. There's numerous people dedicated in this process. So it's an entire team effort to make this happen. I happened to have the opportunity to be the end of that chain of events to locate him. But there was numerous other links in that chain prior to that that allowed this to happen.

But, you know, ultimately, what we did is we followed Rahman. You know, in the book, I talk about the first time we followed him. We were all watching it live, and we lost him. And we were all so disheartened, because we had worked so hard to find this man and to get a path to Zarqawi, and we lost him.

AG: How did you lose him?

MA: You know, Baghdad traffic and tall buildings. It's hard to follow people. It's harder than I think we give it credit for. You know, the people who do the surveillance of these people that we're watching and following, this is a very tough skill. And they're very talented, but sometimes the elements just play against you.

AG: So how did you get him?

MA: Well, they picked him up again a couple weeks later, and they followed him. And we knew that there was a tactic in which he would change cars. And when he got into a certain type of vehicle, we knew that that meant he would be going to meet with Zarqawi. And he did that.

And, you know, we were all in a room watching this live on TV. And that car went to a house out in rural Iraq, and we watched him go inside. And we waited, and then the house exploded when some Air Force F-16s dropped bombs on it. And at that point, people cheered, but they weren't sure that Zarqawi was inside. There was no way to be 100 percent sure. But I knew at that time, 100 percent, that Zarqawi was in that house. And it was just a gut feeling that we had been right.

AG: Was there any thought of capturing him as opposed to killing him?

MA: We would have loved to have captured him because of the intelligence that he could have provided, and we had a whole plan in place, obviously. We were prepared to interrogate him. However, the decision was made by our leadership to drop the bombs, because it would have taken some time to get to his location, and he may have escaped. And he escaped once before by running a checkpoint. And so, I think it was a good decision that we had to eliminate him when we had the chance versus risking him getting away again.

AG: I want to go to some larger issues, this very important point that you make that you believe that more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq -- I mean, this is a huge number -- because of torture, because of U.S. practices of torture. Explain what you mean.

MA: Well, you know, when I was in Iraq, we routinely handled foreign fighters, who we would capture. Many of -- several of them had been scheduled to be suicide bombers, and we had captured them before they carried out their missions.

AG: Coming from where?

MA: They came from all over the area. They came from Yemen. They came from northern Africa. They came from Saudi. All over the place. And the No. 1 reason these foreign fighters gave for coming to Iraq was routinely because of Abu Ghraib, because of Guantanamo Bay, because of torture practices.

In their eyes, they see us as not living up to the ideals that we have prescribed to. You know, we say that we represent freedom, liberty and justice. But when we torture people, we're not living up to those ideals. And it's a huge incentive for them to join al-Qaida.

You also have to kind of put this in the context of Arab culture and Muslim culture and how important shame, the role of shame is in that culture. And when we torture people, we bring a tremendous amount of shame on them. And so, it is a huge motivator for these people to join al-Qaida and come to Iraq.

AG: So, talk about the pressure, I guess you could say the peer pressure, for you to torture and how you decided to follow the approach you did.

MA: Yeah, you know, torture, it's so narrowly or broadly defined depending on who you're talking to these days. I would say torture, to me, is just unethical behavior. And you can do things that are legal, within the rules, that are unethical. And so, I just know, me, by my gut feeling, based on the principles that I was raised on, you know, that my parents gave to me, that there's things I'll never do, because I know it feels wrong and it is wrong. And so, you know, others felt comfortable either pushing all the way up to the limits and doing things that were unethical, but were legal, or breaking the rules. I felt that was not something I was ever going to do, and I wasn't going to allow my team to do.

I think what's more important at this point is we know that torture has cost us American lives. We know that it's ineffective. And we know that it's wrong, and it's damaged our image. I think, you know, for me as a military officer, my job isn't to identify broken wheels, it's to fix them. And so, the approach that I took and that I talk about in the book is, how do we move forward? You know, we're given this choice of either terrorist attacks or torture. But maybe there's a third way. Maybe there's a better way to do interrogations that has nothing to do with torture. And in the book, I describe the process of coming up with these new ways and how my team, together, we were able to come up with the new methods.

AG: We have to break, but we're going to come back to this discussion and also talk with Scott Horton and who should be held responsible for the torture practices the government has been involved with, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and beyond. Matthew Alexander is our guest. It's not his name, but it's the name he's chosen. It is the name on his book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

Iran: Referendum Will Arm Iraqi Officials Against US 'Pressure

By Juan Cole

The USG Open Source Center translates a radio broadcast from The Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran praising the passage of the Security Agreement between Iraq and the US by the Iraqi parliament. The celebratory style shows that official Iran has swung behind the agreement as a tool for getting the US military out of their western neighbor. Chief Justice Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi had praised the agreement. (Shahrudi is Iraqi in origin and served 1982-84 as the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, now led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim.) Although Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei initially opposed it, he fell quiet once the Iraqi cabinet passed it. Both President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani strongly opposed it, but they don't appear to control the official radio. So if this agreement really were a good thing for Bush, would Iran be this happy?

Iranian Radio Says Referendum Will Arm Iraqi Officials Against US 'Pressures'
Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran Radio 1
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

The Iraqi parliament has approved a referendum on the Baghdad-Washington security agreement. On this basis the agreement will be put to a referendum in Moradad (month beginning 22 July) next year. The security agreement, which is called SOFA (US-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement), was approved by the parliament following months of consultation between the American and Iraqi officials and after many arguments and making some changes to its contents.

The draft of the agreement was revised and amended seven times due to strong resistance by Iraqi political groups against the irrational demands of America.

According to Resolution 1770 of the Security Council, the military presence of American troops was coming to an end by the end of the current Christian year. For this reason, to pursue their strategic objectives, the Americans have been trying for the past year to legitimize their presence in Iraq by imposing an agreement called SOFA on the Iraqi government but their efforts have been met with domestic and foreign oppositions and concerns, especially the neighboring countries. And of course, these concerns have been proved right with the recent attack on Syria.

This security agreement, which specifies the beginning of 2011 as the time for the complete withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, contains many conditions. One of these conditions, notably the withdrawal of American troops after guaranteeing stability in Iraq, can be used as a pretext by the future American government to prolong its stay in Iraq. For this reason, this agreement has been faced with opposition from various groups in Iraq giving rise to the issue of holding a referendum.

The agreement of the Iraqi government and parliament with holding a referendum shows that Iraqi officials, who are under pressure from America, will be in a better position to express their views by referring to the general consensus and the support of the Iraqi people, and will be able to free themselves from the pressures of the American statesmen.

(Description of Source: Tehran Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran Radio 1 in Persian -- state-run radio)

Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute. http://www.juancole.com

Convicted sgt. appealing to Bush for pardon

The Associated Press
Posted : Tuesday Nov 25, 2008 15:42:53 EST

BOISE, Idaho — The family of an Idaho soldier convicted of unpremeditated murder while in Iraq is hoping a presidential pardon will bring him freedom.

Sgt. Evan Vela, a 24-year-old Army sniper, was convicted in February and sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing an Iraqi civilian who stumbled upon six soldiers were sleeping.

Vela was also convicted of planting an AK-47 on the dead man’s body and of lying to military investigators.

His father, Curtis Carnahan, believes his son was unfairly treated by military courts and is asking a former U.S. ambassador to deliver letters to the president requesting a pardon.

Carnahan says, “If President Bush has an opportunity to see what took place with Evan and the tactics used against him by the government, he’ll see the wrongness of it all.”

US again misfires on Iranian arms in Iraq

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Last April, top George W Bush administration officials, desperate to exploit any possible crack in the close relationship between Iraq's Nuri al-Maliki government and Iran, launched a new round of charges that Iran had stepped up covert arms assistance to Shi'ite militias.

Secretary of Defense Robert M Gates suggested there was "some sense of an increased level of [Iranian] supply of weapons and support to these groups". And Washington Post reporter Karen DeYoung was told by military officials that the "plentiful, high quality weaponry" the militias were then using in Basra was "recently manufactured in Iran".

But a US military task force had been passing on data to the Multi-National Force Iraq (MNFI) command that told a very different story. The data collected by the task force in the previous six weeks showed that relatively few of the weapons found in Shi'ite militia caches were manufactured in Iran.

According to the data compiled by the task force and made available to an academic research project in July, only 70 weapons believed to have been manufactured in Iran had been found in post-invasion weapons caches between mid-February and the second week in April. And those weapons represented only 17% of the weapons found in caches that had any Iranian weapons in them during that period.

That actual proportion of Iranian-made weapons to total weapons found, however, was significantly lower than that, because the task force was finding many more weapons caches in Shi'ite areas that did not have any Iranian weapons in them.

The task force database identified 98 caches over the five-month period with at least one Iranian weapon, excluding caches believed to have been hidden prior to the 2003 US invasion.

But according to an e-mail from the MNFI press desk last week, the task force found and analyzed a total of roughly 4,600 weapons caches during that same period.

The caches that included Iranian weapons thus represented just 2% of all caches found. That means Iranian-made weapons were a fraction of 1% of the total weapons found in Shi'ite militia caches during that period.

The extremely small proportion of Iranian arms in Shi'ite militia weapons caches further suggests that Shi'ite militia fighters in Iraq had been getting weapons from local and international arms markets rather than from an official Iranian-sponsored smuggling network.

The database was compiled by MNFI's Task Force Troy, which was directed to examine all weapons caches found in Iraq beginning in early January 2008 to identify Iranian-made weapons. The database was released by MNFI in July to the Empirical Studies of Conflict project, co-sponsored by the US Military Academy and Princeton University, and was published for the first time by West Point's Counter-Terrorism Center last month as an appendix to a paper on Iranian strategy in Iraq by Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman.

In late April, the US presented the Maliki government with a document that apparently listed various Iranian arms found in Iraq and highlighted alleged Iranian arms found in Basra. But the US campaign to convince Iraqi officials collapsed when Task Force Troy analyzed a series of large weapons caches uncovered in Basra and Karbala in April and May.

Caches of arms found in Karbala late in April and May totaled more than 2,500 weapons, and caches in Basra included at least 3,700 weapons, according to official MNFI statements. That brought the total number of weapons found in those former Mahdi Army strongholds to more than 6,200 weapons.

But the task force found that none of those weapons was Iranian-made. The database lists three caches found on April 19, but provides no data on any of them. It lists no other caches for the region coinciding with that period, confirming that no weapons had been found to be of Iranian origin.

In announcing the weapons totals discovered in Basra on May 7, Major General Kevin Bergner said nothing about the provenance of the weapons, implicitly admitting that they were not Iranian-made.
Only two months before the new high-level propaganda push on alleged Iranian weapons supplied to Shi'ite militias, the US command put out a story suggesting that large numbers of Iranian-supplied arms had been buried all over the country. On February 17, 2008, US military spokesman Rear Admiral Gregory Smith told reporters that Iraqi and coalition forces had captured 212 weapons caches across Iraq over the previous week "with growing links to the Iranian-backed special groups".

The Task Force Troy data for the week of February 9-16 show, however, that the US command had information on Iranian arms contradicting that propaganda line. According to the task force database, only five of those 212 caches contained any Iranian weapons that analysts believed might have been buried after the US invasion. And the total number of confirmed Iranian-made weapons found in those five caches, according to the data, was eight, not including four Iranian-made hand grenades.

The task force database includes 350 armor-piercing explosively formed penetrators (EFPs) found in Iraqi weapons caches. However, the database does not identify any of the EFPs as Iranian weapons.

That treatment of EFPs in the caches appears to contradict claims by US officials throughout 2007, and much of 2008, that EFPs were being smuggled into Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. The allegedly Iranian-manufactured EFPs had been the centerpiece of the US military's February 2007 briefing charging Iran with arming Shi'ite militiamen in Iraq.

Press reports of a series of discoveries of shops for manufacturing EFPs in Iraq in 2007 forced the US command to admit that the capacity to manufacture EFPs was not limited to Iran. By the second half of 2008, US officials had stopped referring to an Iranian supply of EFPs altogether.

Felter and Fishman do not analyze the task force data in their paper, but they criticize official US statements on Iranian weapons in Iraq. "Some reports erroneously attribute munitions similar to those produced in Iran as Iranian," they write, "while other Iranian munitions found in Iraq were likely purchased on the open market."

The co-authors note that Iranian arms can be purchased directly from the website of the Defense Industries of Iran with a credit card.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy

. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.

(Inter Press Service)

Security firms told they lose immunity in Iraq: official

US officials on Thursday told scores of firms offering security in Iraq that their personnel will lose immunity from prosecution under a new US-Iraq security pact due to take effect in January.

The officials told reporters that they briefed delegates from 172 security contractors employing nearly 175,000 Americans, Iraqis and others in Iraq about the new rules under a pact set to replace a UN mandate expiring December 31.

Security firms heard how many rules and procedures for troops and contractors were "rightfully changed as a result of this historic development," the officials told reporters, quoting from a statement they read to the firms.

The firms provide armed escorts and other security measures to US and Iraqi government officials, as well as foreign diplomats and members of non-government organizations like aid groups.

Under the changes, contractors "can no longer expect that they will enjoy the wide ranging immunity from Iraqi law that has been in effect since 2003," when US-led forces invaded Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, according to the statement.

The firms were reminded that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and other Iraqi political leaders have said publicly that "they plan to take the legal steps necessary to remove these immunities at an early date," the statement said.

Contractors "can expect to be fully subject to Iraqi criminal and civil law and to procedures of the Iraqi judicial system," it said, adding their status will be in line with that of contractors in Afghanistan and other countries.

The US embassy in Baghdad will work with the Iraqi government to help ensure that any US government contractor "accused of a crime is treated fairly," the statement said.

The official draft of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which has still to be approved by the Iraqi parliament, has not yet been made public.

A Department of Defense official told reporters that he was not aware of any security firm wishing to leave Iraq over the loss of immunity.

"We have had for months informal discussions," the official said on the condition of anonymity.

"Some of our contractors expressed concerns ... None of them, to my knowledge ... have made the explicit statement if 'I loose immunity, I will walk,'" the official said.

"I would suspect there is a wait and see attitude, to see how this in fact plays out," the official added.

The lifting of immunity was expected since 17 Iraqi civilians died in Baghdad in September last year when guards escorting a diplomatic convoy on behalf of private security firm Blackwater USA opened fire at a crossroads.

The firm says its guards were acting in self-defense.

There are more security contractors than there are US troops, which currently number around 150,000 men and women.

The Defense Department says it employs 163,000 contractors in Iraq, with 17 percent of them US citizens, 49 percent of them Iraqi and the rest from other countries.

The State Department says it employs 5,500 contractors, the vast majority of them US citizens, while the US Agency for International Development employs 4,800 security personnel.

MI5 said Iraq “exacerbated the threat from international terrorism”

By David Morrison | Stella Rimington, the last but one head of MI5, was interviewed by Decca Aikenhead in The Guardian on 18 October 2008. She asked her about the effect of Britain’s invasion of Iraq on the terrorist threat to Britain:

I ask Rimington what importance she would place on the war, in terms of its impact on the terrorist threat. She pauses for a second, then replies quietly but firmly: ‘Look at what those people who’ve been arrested or have left suicide videos say about their motivation. And most of them, as far as I’m aware, say that the war in Iraq played a significant part in persuading them that this is the right course of action to take. So I think you can’t write the war in Iraq out of history. If what we’re looking at is groups of disaffected young men born in this country who turn to terrorism, then I think to ignore the effect of the war in Iraq is misleading. [1]

Decca Aikenhead seemed to be surprised at this forthright assertion by an ex-head of MI5 of a causal connection between Britain’s invasion and occupation of Iraq and the heightened terrorist threat to Britain. She commented:

These might not be unremarkable views for most Guardian readers - of whom Rimington is one. But according to Rimington, they are widely held within the intelligence service - much more so than most members of the public, and perhaps particularly Guardian readers, ever suspect.

Official MI5 view

In fact, it is the official view of MI5, and has been for several years, that such a causal connection exists. I know that because I read it on MI5’s website in July 2005, at the time of the London bombings. There, on a page entitled Threat to the UK from International Terrorism, I read:

In recent years, Iraq has become a dominant issue for a range of extremist groups and individuals in the UK and Europe.

I was astonished to read this since it acknowledged that al-Qaeda activity was, at least in part, a reaction to Western interference in the Muslim world, rather than driven by an evil ambition to destroy our way of life in the West, as our political leaders kept telling us.

At that time, Prime Minister Blair was (understandably) trying to deny the existence of a connection between the invasion of Iraq and the bombings in London on 7 July 2005, lest somebody accuse him of having blood on his hands. That was not an unreasonable accusation, given that, having been warned in advance by the intelligence services that the threat from al-Qaida “would be heightened by military action against Iraq” (see Intelligence & Security Committee report of 11 September 2003 [2], Paragraph 126), he chose to make Britain a less safe place by invading Iraq in March 2003.

I made considerable efforts to draw the attention of The Guardian and other newspapers to the extraordinary fact that the words coming out of the Prime Minister’s mouth were at variance with what was published on the MI5 website. This seemed to me to be newsworthy. But to no avail. To the best of my knowledge, this plain, publicly stated, view of MI5 was never quoted in the columns of The Guardian, until a letter by me was published on 3 July 2007 [3]. That Guardian readers are ignorant of MI5’s view on the issue is due to the failure of Guardian journalists to bring it to their readers’ attention.

International Terrorism: Impact of Iraq

Lest there is any doubt that the intelligence services have long held the view that invading Iraq increased the terrorist threat to Britain, listen to this from a Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) assessment entitled International Terrorism: Impact of Iraq dated April 2005, extracts of which were published in The Sunday Times on 2 April 2006:

Iraq is likely to be an important motivating factor for some time to come in the radicalisation of British Muslims and for those extremists who view attacks against the UK as legitimate.

There is a clear consensus within the UK extremist community that Iraq is a legitimate jihad and should be supported. Iraq has re-energised and refocused a wide range of networks in the UK.

We judge that the conflict in Iraq has exacerbated the threat from international terrorism and will continue to have an impact in the long term. It has reinforced the determination of terrorists who were already committed to attacking the West and motivated others who were not.

Some jihadists who leave Iraq will play leading roles in recruiting and organising terrorist networks, sharing their skills and possibly conducting attacks. It is inevitable that some will come to the UK. [4]

Blair’s blowback

Even Tony Blair eventually acknowledged that his military adventures in the Muslim world had produced “blowback”. Here’s is what he said in his resignation speech in Sedgefield on 10 March 2007:

Removing Saddam and his sons from power, as with removing the Taliban, was over with relative ease. But the blowback since, from global terrorism and those elements that support it, has been fierce and unrelenting and costly. [5]

The Guardian has yet to report this confession by the former Prime Minister that he has made Britain a less safe by his military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq and, in the process, he has caused the deaths of around 400 British soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis.

Crucial point erased

Today, the MI5 website still has a page about “international terrorism” [6], but you won’t find a word about Iraq on it. The previous plain statement by MI5 that there was a causal connection between Iraq and the risk of terrorism in Britain was removed some time since June 2007, when I last saw it there. Now al-Qaeda’s motivation is described in the following terms:

The terrorists draw their inspiration from a global message articulated by figures such as Usama bin Laden. The message is uncompromising and asserts that the West represents a threat to Islam; that loyalty to religion and loyalty to democratic institutions and values are incompatible; and that violence is the only proper response.

It doesn’t quite go so far as to say that al-Qaeda is out to destroy our way of life in the West, but the crucial point – that al-Qaeda terrorism in the West is a response to Western interference in the Muslim world – has been erased.

Jacqui Smith speaks
Fresh from her ignominious defeat in the House of Lords on 42-day detention on 13 October 2008, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, made a major speech on “the threat of international terrorism” to Britain on 15 October 2008 [7]. Like the MI5 website today, her speech omits to mention British intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq as a motivating force for al-Qaeda activity in Britain. In a 3,000-word speech, she provided the following penetrating analysis of what drives al-Qaeda to commit terrorism: “They want a reordering of global political structures and a separation of faith groups …. and to subvert our institutions.”

Most of her speech was taken up with detailing the measures she was taking to counter al-Qaeda in Britain. Four regional counter-terrorism policing hubs, in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds have been established and a fifth one is on the way on the M4 corridor. These are tasked “not only to investigate conspiracies and terrorist operations but to understand radicalisation and radicalisers and to tackle them effectively”.

Several Government departments are also involved in countering “radicalisation”: the Department for Children Schools and Families in providing advice to teachers on how to deal with signs of radicalisation; the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills in working with student bodies and higher and further education to do something rather similar; the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in considering what impact the issue of counter radicalisation should have on their programmes; ditto the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department of Health; the Department of Justice is addressing the problem of radicalisation in prisons; and, last but not least, the Department for Communities and Local Government is working on the Preventing Violent Extremism plan. And she holds “a Weekly Security Meeting with senior representatives from each of these Departments and others across Whitehall to discuss their work and the current threat with the police and the security and intelligence agencies”.

How any of this is meant to reduce or prevent “radicalisation” in circumstances in which the main driver – the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq – is still going on is not clear. Withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan would certainly diminish, and perhaps eliminate, the threat to Britain from al-Qaeda. In other words, if we ceased spending money and blood invading Muslim countries, we wouldn’t need to spend money protecting the British homeland from terrorism emanating from the Muslim world in response – and blood would not be spilled on our streets when the protection proves to be fallible.

Notes
[1] The Guardian
[2] Intelligence & Security Committee (pdf)
[3] The Guardian
[4] The Times
[5] Labour website
[6] MI5
[7] Home office.

Will The US Government Accept Responsibility For The Slaughter Of Over 1,000,000 Iraqis?

By Michael Schwartz

November 18, 2008 "Huffington Post" -- Will The US Government And Media Finally Report The Slaughter Of Iraqis By The US Military?

I recently received a set of questions from Le Monde Diplomatique reporter Kim Bredesen about the 2007 Project Censored story about 1,000,000 Iraqi deaths due to the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. The questions and answers are, I think, useful in framing both the untold story of the slaughter in Iraq and the failure of the U.S. media to report on its extent or on U.S. culpability for the deaths of 4% of the Iraqi population.

Bredeson : I observed recently that your story on Iraqi deaths caused by US occupation became story no. 1 in this year's listing by Project Censored. I wondered if I could ask you a few questions on e-mail regarding this issue?

Regards,
Kim Bredesen, Le Monde diplomatiqe (Norway)

These are my questions.

1.Do you expect that the new administration under Barrack Obama will acknowledge the validity of the statistics concerning Iraqi deaths caused by the US occupation force?

It is always difficult to predict the political future, but even if the Obama administration pursues a very different policy in Iraq and the Middle East, I doubt it will acknowledge the amount of violence caused by the war during its first six years. Historically, the U.S. government has a poor record of acknowledging its responsibility for death and/or destruction of other peoples, beginning with the genocide against Native Americans (never officially acknowledged), continuing through two hundred years of the slave trade and slavery (there has actually been a limp official apology), and culminating in the ongoing refusal to acknowledge one to three million deaths in Vietnam caused by the U.S. attempt to conquer that country.

2.You mention in your update to Censored 2009 that there is a media blackout about the dramatic statistics in US mass media. Do you think this will change?

I think that the U.S. mainstream media has a poor record of acknowledging the many instances in which it has (collectively) failed to maintain its constitutionally mandated independence from government policy, and instead has ignored or written false reports supporting government malfeasance and tyranny. It was refreshing that the New York Times and Washington Post acknowledged their failure to report the contrary evidence to the US government claims about WMDs in Iraq, but this is a rare moment that has not led to more independent reporting on other U.S. government action in the Middle East.

I think that we can expect the U.S. mainstream media to continue to compromise its journalistic integrity in reporting on Iraq, and this will mean failing to report its own suppression of the Lancet studies and continuing to misreport the U.S. role in the Iraq war. This expectation is, of course, speculation, but the best evidence for this speculation is the fact that the major media have been withdrawing their personnel from Iraq, instead of taking advantage of more favorable security conditions to send reporters to locations that were previously inaccessible and therefore more thoroughly report the impact of the war on Iraqi life.

3.How have you experienced the coverage about the issue in other Western or international media, have they taken the situation in Iraq more seriously?

I find the reporting in Al Jazeera, the British national press, other international media, and independent U.S. media far more comprehensive in their coverage of the Iraq war. I would not say that they take the situation more “seriously,” – there has never been a problem with the U.S. media taking the war seriously. The differences are in very specific parts of the coverage: reporting on U.S. involvement in deaths and destruction, reporting on Iraqi resistance to the U.S. presence; reporting on the economic and social chaos caused by U.S. military, political, and economic policies in Iraq; reporting on who is fighting against the U.S.; reporting on the actual reality of life under U.S. occupation; and reporting on the day-to-day antagonism of Iraqis to the U.S. presence.

I should add, however, that these failures are not so much failures of U.S. mainstream reporters, but of the editors and publishers who assign reporters to particular stories and not to others. There are many reporters who fit information about all these issues into assignments that are aimed at other subjects. One small example will illustrate what I mean. In reporting about the U.S. offensive in Haifa Street in January 2007, mainstream reporters (for McClatchy and the Washington Post, if memory serves me) whose assignment was to report on the successful capture by U.S. troops of an insurgent stronghold also described the destructiveness of the U.S. attack and mentioned that U.S. soldiers stood idly by while Shia death squads cleansed the neighborhood of Sunnis. This information appeared toward the end of published reports, but it was published nevertheless. In contrast, a CBS report on the overarching destructiveness of the offensive and of the anger of residents at U.S. military actions was not broadcast and was only made public because of the protests of the censored reporter.

4.The journalist Joshua Holland compare the mass killings in Iraq with Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia. Is this an accurate comparison in your opinion?

Holland’s purpose in this comparison is the same as my purpose in comparing the deaths in Iraq to those in Darfur: we are trying to give people a sense of the scale of the violence wrought in Iraq by the U.S. military. The mass murders in Cambodia under Pol Pot and the displacements and genocide in Darfur--as well as so many other recent and more distant instances of such violence--all have different sources, intentions, and outcomes from the Iraq violence and from each other. The point of making these comparisons is to point out the magnitude of the slaughter in Iraq, not to make analytic comments about the dynamics of the war.

5. Do you believe it is appropriate that the Bush-administration should face trial for their actions?

In “The Fog of War,” former U.S. Secretary of Defense McNamara said to the camera that if the U.S. had lost World War II, then he and other American leaders would have stood trial as war criminals for the terrorist fire bombings of Japanese and German cities by the U.S. air force. Certainly the actions of U.S. political leaders and military commanders in ordering their troops to attack civilian targets in Iraq (for example the destruction of the city of Falluja—well publicized everywhere in the world except in the United States) fall under the same definition of war crimes that McNamara was considering in making this statement, and so it would be perfectly appropriate for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, and the various commanding generals to stand trial for these actions.

But take note that McNamara said that trials would have taken place if the U.S. had “lost.” This statement has actually turned out to be a kind of half truth. In World War II, the Japanese and Germans certainly lost, but only a relative handful of those responsible for their war crimes stood trial (the Japanese Emperor, for example, was actually restored to his throne). In the Vietnam War, most observers say that the U.S. “lost” the war, but no U.S. leaders stood trial for the many war crimes they committed during that long conflict. There is no predicting the future, but I expect that, no matter how the Iraq war ends--with either McCain’s “victory” or with the “defeat” that President Bush has repeatedly warned the U.S. citizens about—there will be no war crimes trials of U.S. political and military leadership.

Blackwater Busted? Six Guards May Be Charged in Iraq Massacre

After more than five years of rampant violence and misconduct carried out by the massive army of private corporate contractors in Iraq -- actions that have gone totally unpunished under any system of law -- the US Justice Department appears to be on the verge of handing down the first indictments against armed private forces for crimes committed in Iraq. The reported targets of the "draft" indictments: six Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16, 2007, killing of seventeen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square.The Associated Press reports, "The draft is being reviewed by senior Justice Department officials but no charging decisions have been made. A decision is not expected until at least later this month." The AP, citing sources close to the case, reports that the department has not determined if the Blackwater operatives would be charged with manslaughter or assault. Simply drafting the indictments does not mean that the Blackwater forces are certain to face charges. The department could indict as few as three of the operatives, who potentially face sentences of five to twenty years, depending on the charges.

If the Justice Department pursues a criminal prosecution, it would be the first time armed private contractors from the United States face justice.

But that is a very big "if."

"The Justice Department has had this matter for fourteen months and has done almost everything imaginable to walk away from it -- including delivering a briefing to Congress in which they suggested that they lacked legal authority to press charges," says Scott Horton, distinguished visiting professor of law at Hofstra University and author of a recent study of legal accountability for private security contractors. "They did this notwithstanding evidence collected by the first teams on the scene that suggested an ample basis to prosecute. The ultimate proof here will be in the details, namely, what charges are brought exactly and what evidence has Justice assembled to make its case. Still, it's hard to miss Justice's lack of enthusiasm about this case, and that's troubling."

Even if some Blackwater operatives face charges, critics allege it is the company that must be held responsible. "I am encouraged that the Justice Department is finally making progress in the investigation, but I am disappointed that it took over a year and a lot of pressure for the department to take any action," says Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who introduced legislation that seeks to ban using Blackwater and other armed security companies in US war zones. (She was also the national campaign co-chair of Barack Obama's presidential campaign and is a top candidate to replace him in the US Senate.)

"While it is important to hold these individual contractors accountable for their actions, we must also hold Blackwater accountable for creating a culture that allows this type of reckless behavior," adds Schakowsky. "The indictments do nothing to solve the underlying problem of private security contractors performing critical government functions. The indictments will likely get rid of a few bad apples, but there will be no real consequences for Blackwater. This company is going to continue to do business as usual -- the solution is to get them out of this business."

News of potential indictments over the Nisour Square shootings comes as the State Department is reportedly preparing to hit Blackwater with a multimillion-dollar fine for allegedly shipping as many as 900 automatic weapons to Iraq without the required permits. Some of the guns may have made their way to the black market.

Blackwater has served as the official bodyguard service for senior US occupation officials since August 2003, when the company was awarded a $27 million no-bid contract to guard L. Paul Bremer, the original head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. To date, the company has raked in more than $1 billion in "security" contracts under its arrangement with the State Department.

Despite widespread accusations of killings of civilians and other crimes, not a single armed contractor from Blackwater -- or from any other armed war corporation -- has faced charges under any legal system. Instead, they have operated in a climate where immunity and impunity have gone hand in hand. At present, private contractors -- most of them unarmed -- outnumber US troops in Iraq by roughly 50,000 personnel.

There is no doubt that the Bush administration will continue enthusiastically to use armed private forces until the second Bush leaves office. This means that the future of Blackwater and the hundreds of for-profit war corporations servicing the Iraq occupation will lay with President-elect Barack Obama. This includes Blackwater and at least 300 other companies, which have been hired by the US government for privatized armed services in Iraq to the tune of about $6 billion in taxpayer money.

"One of the biggest problems that Barack Obama is going to have is turning the government back into a civil service and getting rid of all the private contractors," says Washington Democratic Representative Jim McDermott. "The private contracting thing is the most erosive thing that this administration has done. You look at all the things that are being run by private contractors, you simply cannot be handing money to a private contractor who is not under the law of that country or the law of this country and can do anything they want. They're really -- they're rogue outfits."

Obama has been a passionate critic of the war industry and is the sponsor of the leading Democratic legislation in the Senate to bring more effective regulation and oversight to it. But he has stopped short of supporting Schakowsky and Senator Bernie Sanders's legislation seeking a ban on using Blackwater and other armed contracting companies in Iraq. One of his top foreign policy advisers told The Nation earlier this year that Obama "can't rule out [and] won't rule out" using these companies in Iraq.

In a brief interview with Democracy Now! in February, Obama explainedhis position when asked about the report in The Nation.

"Here's the problem: we have 140,000 private contractors right there, so unless we want to replace all of or a big chunk of those with US troops, we can't draw down the contractors faster than we can draw down our troops," Obama said. "So what I want to do is draw -- I want them out in the same way that we make sure that we draw out our own combat troops."

As Obama's inauguration day draws near, he is facing increased calls from Democrats who have spent years investigating Blackwater to ban the company. Most prominent among these is Henry Waxman, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He called on Obama to cancel Blackwater's security contracts. "I don't see any reason to have a contract with Blackwater," says Waxman. "They haven't lived up to their contract, and we shouldn't be having these private military contracts. We should use our own military."

As of now, Blackwater's Iraq contract expires in April (it was extended for a year by the State Department despite numerous investigations). "I think there should be very strong handcuffs put on this whole outsourcing question, but particularly with these private security contractors like DynCorp and Blackwater," says Vermont Democrat Peter Welch, who serves on the Oversight Committee with Waxman and supports the calls for Obama to cancel Blackwater's security contracts. "It's just an incredible waste of taxpayer money. It dishonors the Code of Military Conduct. Our soldiers are over there. They abide by rules. Blackwater doesn't."

But not all Democrats agree. Senator John Kerry, who is reportedly among the people being considered for Secretary of State in the Obama administration, shares the president-elect's view. "I don't think they should be banned," says Kerry. "I think they need to operate under rules that apply to the military and everybody else."

As of January 20, 2009, if Obama decides to keep Blackwater and other armed war corporations on the US payroll, these private forces would go from being Bush's mercenaries in Iraq to Obama's. As commander in chief, he would be responsible for their crimes. As for the accountability issue, many critics allege that the most serious problems in holding contractors responsible for their crimes stem from the Bush administration's covering-up of their misconduct and immunizing them from prosecution, and the total lack of political will to bring them to justice. When Obama appoints a new attorney general, there will be more than five years' worth of crimes to investigate -- and prosecute.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, blackwater, private contractors

Jeremy Scahill, an independent journalist who reports frequently for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq and Yugoslavia. He is currently a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. Scahill is the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.