Private Military Contractors - Data Dump

[Jan Klimkowski]

Ed -thanks for posting this.

But the most shocking allegation was raised by whistleblower James Gordon, former director of operations at ArmorGroup, who claimed that the firm quashed an investigation into employees frequenting brothels in Kabul that housed trafficked women.
Spencer Ackerman has this key paragraph:
Perhaps most seriously, Gordon said that he found out that both guards and even ArmorGroup program manager Nick Du Plessis were regularly frequenting brothels in Kabul. “Many of the prostitutes in Kabul are young Chinese girls who were taken against their will to Kabul for sexual exploitation,” Gordon said. Federal contracting regulations designed to support the Trafficking in Victims Protection Act prevents contractors from “procuring commercial sex acts during the period of performance of the contract,” meaning that ArmorGroup could lose its contract if State learned of the violation. Yet Gordon’s lawsuit alleges he was shut out of an investigation into the solicitation of prostitutes at the behest of Armor Group’s London-based parent company, despite recurring evidence that ArmorGroup employees continued to solicit prostitutes and perhaps even run their own prostitution services. A trainee boasted to Gordon “that he could purchase a girl for $20,000 and turn a profit after a month.”

It’s strongly reminiscent of the decade-old DynCorp scandal in Bosnia. The company became embroiled in a controversy over military contractors buying and “owning” young women, many of whom had been forced into prostitution. Two DynCorp employees were fired after they complained that co-workers were involved in Bosnia’s sex-slave trade. While several DynCorp employees were dismissed, none were brought up on criminal charges; the whistleblowers were later vindicated in whistleblower-relation lawsuits. DynCorp remains a top security provider to the State Department.

I remember the DynCorp Balkans incident. There were allegations of human trafficking for finanical and sexual purposes made against other PMCs in the Balkans too.

Nothing was done. The PMCs are still thrusting their snouts gleefully into the trough of taxpayer money.

Of course, some of the business of drug, gun and human trafficking through the Balkans into western Europe has now been subcontracted to the client gangster state of Kosovo, and the murdering thugs of the KLA.

[Ed Jewett]

Judges Shame America

By Sherwood Ross

September 13, 2009 "Information Clearing House" --- The federal Appeals Court decision to toss a lawsuit claiming contractors tortured detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is what you’d expect from a tyranny.

The new ruling brushes off the charges by 212 Iraqis who said they or their late husbands were abused by U.S. personnel at Abu Ghraib. The suit charged private security firm CACI International Inc., of Arlington, Va., of crimes inside the Baghdad hellhole.

Yet in a 2-1 ruling, the D.C. Court of Appeals said CACI “is protected by laws barring suits filed as the result of military activities during a time of war,” the Associated Press reported. This opinion was written by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, and supported by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a Bush appointee.

"During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be pre-empted," Silberman wrote. If so, with about as many U.S.-led contract mercenaries as regular army involved in the Iraq conflict, this decision preposterously exempts some 150,000 fighters from legal action for any crimes they commit. It gives a shoot-to-kill pass to privateers such as Blackwater, whose operatives on one occasion are said to have gunned down 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

“This abuse and torture of these prisoners detained during war time constituted war crimes and torture in violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Convention against Torture, and the U.S. Federal Anti-torture Statute---felonies, punishable by death if death results as a violation thereof,” said Francis Boyle, an international law authority at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

“Judges Silberman and Kavanaugh have now become Accessories After the Fact to torture, war crimes and felonies in violation of United States federal law and international criminal law,” Boyle asserted. (See if they are ever prosecuted!)

Dissenter Judge Merrick Garland, appointed by President Bill Clinton, argued the law does not protect independent contractors, particularly when they are accused of acting outside the rules or instructions of their military overseers. But where Silberman said most of the claims were limited to “abuse” or “harm,” not war crimes or torture, according to Courthouse News Service, Garland “found the claims much more alarming.”

“The plaintiffs in these cases allege they were beaten, electrocuted, raped, subjected to attacks by dogs, and otherwise abused by private contractors working as interpreters and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison,” Garland said.

“No act of Congress and no judicial precedent bars the plaintiffs from suing the private contractors---who were neither soldiers nor civilian government employees,” he wrote.

"Neither President Obama nor President Bush nor any other Executive Branch official has suggested that subjecting the contractors to tort liability for the conduct at issue here would interfere with the nation's foreign policy or the Executive's ability to wage war,” Garland pointed out.

"To the contrary, the Department of Defense has repeatedly stated that employees of private contractors accompanying the Armed Forces in the field are not within the military's chain of command, and that such contractors are subject to civil liability," he wrote.

Judge Silberman was named to the Federal bench in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan and in 2008 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from (surprise!) President George W. Bush, the man who launched the Afghan and Iraq aggressions.

Silverman was supported in his opinion by Kavanaugh, a former legal aide to President Bush who was later appointed by Bush to the Federal bench. In July, 2007, Senators Patrick Leahy(D-Vt.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) accused Kavanaugh of "misleading" the Senate during his nomination.

In a statement issued at the time opposing the appointment, Sen. Durbin prophesied, “By every indication, Brett Kavanaugh will make this judgeship a gift that keeps on giving to his political patrons who have rewarded him richly with a nomination coveted by lawyers all over America.” And that, of course, is exactly what happened. Here’s what aroused Durbin’s concern:

“For example, he (Kavanaugh) would not tell us his views on some of the most controversial policy decisions of the Bush administration--like the issues of torture and warrantless wiretapping. He would not comment. He would not tell us whether he regretted the role he played in supporting the nomination of some judicial nominees who wanted to permit torture as part of American foreign policy… It would have been so refreshing and reassuring if Brett Kavanaugh could have distanced himself from their extreme views. But a loyal White House counsel is not going to do that. And that is how he came to this nomination.” And that is how he came to dismiss the torture charges against contractor CACI. Surely, Kavanaugh’s decision in the CACI case is proof he misled the Senate and merits impeachment.

In Jan., 2005, The New York Times reported testimony suggesting that guards and/or interrogators at Abu Ghraib were urinating on detainees, pouring phosphoric acid on them, sodomizing them with a baton, tying ropes to their penises and dragging them across the floor, and jumping on their wounds. Some prisoners were hung with their hands tied behind their back until they died. It should be remembered that the Abu Ghraib inmates were suspects, imprisoned without due process or trials. Abu Ghraib’s commanding officer Brig. General Janis Karpinski estimated that 90 percent of them were innocent.

According to an article by Jeffrey Toobin in the September 21 issue of The New Yorker, President Obama already has the chance to nominate judges for 21 seats on the federal appellate bench---more than 10 percent of the 179 judges on those courts, and at least half a dozen more seats should open in the next few months.

In a Detroit speech, Obama said the role of our courts “is to protect people who don’t have a voice…the vulnerable, the minority, the outcast, the person with the unpopular idea, the journalist who is shaking things up…And if somebody doesn’t appreciate that role, then I don’t think they are going to make a very good justice.”

Surely, hundreds of foreign prisoners tortured in an illegal war made by the U.S., or their survivors, are supplicants entitled to a fair hearing, not non-persons to be brushed aside as judges Silberman and Kavanaugh have done this past week. Their ruling that, essentially, injured parties cannot sue the Warfare State and its contractors, drives a tank through the Constitution. Americans had better pray Obama’s judicial choices will aspire to a higher standard. #

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based media consultant who has written for major dailies, wire services, and national magazines. To reach him or support his Anti-War News Service contact him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com. )


http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e23485.htm

[Jan Klimkowski]

The suit charged private security firm CACI International Inc., of Arlington, Va., of crimes inside the Baghdad hellhole.

Yet in a 2-1 ruling, the D.C. Court of Appeals said CACI “is protected by laws barring suits filed as the result of military activities during a time of war,” the Associated Press reported. This opinion was written by Judge Laurence Silberman, a Reagan appointee, and supported by Judge Brett Kavanaugh, a Bush appointee.

"During wartime, where a private service contractor is integrated into combatant activities over which the military retains command authority, a tort claim arising out of the contractor's engagement in such activities shall be pre-empted," Silberman wrote. If so, with about as many U.S.-led contract mercenaries as regular army involved in the Iraq conflict, this decision preposterously exempts some 150,000 fighters from legal action for any crimes they commit. It gives a shoot-to-kill pass to privateers such as Blackwater, whose operatives on one occasion are said to have gunned down 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians.

Judge Silberman was named to the Federal bench in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan and in 2008 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, from (surprise!) President George W. Bush, the man who launched the Afghan and Iraq aggressions.

Silberman was supported in his opinion by Kavanaugh, a former legal aide to President Bush who was later appointed by Bush to the Federal bench. In July, 2007, Senators Patrick Leahy(D-Vt.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) accused Kavanaugh of "misleading" the Senate during his nomination.

Bought and paid for scum providing legal immunity for war crimes perpetrated by private military contractors.

They disgrace America.

My mind is drawn to the resonant ending of Cimino's masterly The Deer Hunter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtbW-3GZCvM

[Ed Jewett]

Prosecutors: Blackwater Guards Opened Fire to 'Instigate Gun Battles' 14 Sep 2009 Private security guards Terrorists who worked for Blackwater repeatedly shot wildly into the streets of Baghdad without regard for civilians long before they were involved in a 2007 shooting episode that left at least 14 Iraqis dead, federal prosecutors charge in a new court document. While traveling through Baghdad in heavily armored vehicles, at least one of the guards, under contract with the State Department to provide security for United States Embassy personnel, fired an automatic weapon "without aiming" while another deliberately fired into the streets to "instigate gun battles in a manner that was inconsistent with the use of force and escalation of force policies that governed all Blackwater personnel in Iraq," the federal prosecutors stated. [Looks like CLG was right all along for stating that Blackwater/Xe carries out acts of terrorism so that they are 'needed' to stop attacks that they are blaming on so-called insurgents. --LRP]

14 Sep 2009

http://www.legitgov.org

[Magda Hassan]

Just showing a bit of entrepreneurship there Ed. Other wise all these people would just be peacefully getting on with their lives and there is no money in that is there? Without Blackwater and co. to be their sheltered workshop what would happen to all the angry losers of this world? They'd be left to roam the streets and cause trouble, that's what.

[Ed Jewett]

Floyd J. McKay / Guest columnist
Blackwater: bulging biceps fueled by ideological purity

BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political...

BLACKWATER, the secretive private army now emerging into public view, is a perfect hinge linking two key elements of the Republican political base: America's war machine and a muscular form of fundamentalist Christianity.
Military contractors such as Halliburton and Blackwater are the brainchild of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A major goal of Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration was to privatize as much military work as possible, ostensibly to make it more efficient. He commissioned a study by Halliburton, which predictably liked the idea and wound up as America's largest military contractor. Cheney was hired as Halliburton's chief officer, awaiting the return of a Republican administration.
When that occurred, Cheney and Rumsfeld enthusiastically promoted privatization, and went so far as to include private contractors in the "Total Force" of the American military, standing never before given to contractors. When Rumsfeld left the Pentagon in 2006, there were nearly as many private contractors in Iraq (100,000) as American troops (130,000). Contractors provided food, fuel, housing and, in the case of Blackwater, heavily armed soldiers with a license to kill and an aggressive attitude.
Blackwater operated basically without oversight since proconsul Paul Bremer gave it a no-bid $27.7 million security contract in 2003, with immunity from Iraqi law. In 2004, four of its soldiers were ambushed in Fallujah and their bodies desecrated, bringing retaliation that killed hundreds of Iraqis, leveled the city and fueled the insurgency. A month ago, Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians, in an incident that has drawn the attention of Congress and the FBI.
Blackwater soldiers, often with Navy SEAL or Army Special Operations backgrounds, are paid from $500 to $1,500 a day, far more than regular-duty troops. Their image is straight from central casting: young men, tanned biceps bulging from black T-shirts, wearing wraparound sunglasses and brandishing automatic weapons. For young veterans who loved military action but couldn't afford to stay in, Blackwater offered big money and plenty of opportunities to order people around. Blackwater's aggressive guards became the image of American cultural insensitivity, sometimes erasing the best efforts of our uniformed soldiers.
Blackwater is the private empire of billionaire Erik Prince, a major Republican fundraiser and bankroller of several fundamentalist Christian organizations. His private army employs some 2,300 active gunners and boasts a register of 21,000 ready to serve on call. He has the largest privately held arsenal in the country and the expertise and firepower to bring down a small country.
In 2006, Prince expanded internationally, forming a new subsidiary in Barbados, outside American taxes and regulation, to train foreign forces, often funded by American military aid. Elite Blackwater soldiers have conducted secretive "black jobs" for the CIA or other spy agencies.
Despite its financial success, Blackwater is under fire from two sides: Democratic critics who want accountability and families of the four men killed in Fallujah in 2004. The families have sued, alleging negligence.
Blackwater's lawyers assert it cannot be sued because it is part of the "Total Force." But, while Congress demands that it be subject to American military codes and international treaties, Blackwater takes the opposite view — it is not military, it's a civilian contractor. Big money has gone into D.C. lawyers, lobbyists and public-relations spinners to sell this apparent contradiction.
There have always been mercenaries, and a case can be made for limited use of contractors, but the Bush administration has erased the line between a national military and a private war machine. Iraq is our first outsourced war, siphoning billions of taxpayer dollars into the private war machine.
Military contractors have become an integral part of the American military, allowing the White House to understate troop numbers and avoid a military draft. Unpopular wars for oil or ideology can be waged without calling on middle-class families to send their children; mercenaries will fill the jobs if volunteers don't come forth.
In Prince, the Republicans' radical Christian base is wed to the war-machine base, the one providing votes and manpower, the other providing campaign funds.
The resulting combination is one of rigid ideology and eagerness to solve any problem with overwhelming force. The Bush administration convinced itself its views on Iraq were right, pushing aside contrary evidence, then failed to think beyond "shock and awe," with resultant horrors.
In a world of nuance and gray areas, ideological purity and bulging biceps will cause as many problems as they solve. Blackwater seems to epitomize a dark side of our psyche that should be troubling to all Americans.
Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/op...oyd14.html

[Ed Jewett]

Another lawsuit targets founder of Blackwater


By Bill Sizemore
The Virginian-Pilot
© September 16, 2009
Yet another civil lawsuit accuses Blackwater guards of driving through the streets of Baghdad randomly shooting innocent Iraqis.
The latest case accuses Blackwater founder Erik Prince of personally directing murders from a 24-hour remote monitoring "war room" at the private military company's Moyock, N.C., headquarters.
Prince "personally directed and permitted a heavily-armed private army... to roam the streets of Baghdad killing innocent civilians," alleges the suit, filed by four Iraqi citizens.
Prince was well aware that his men, including top executives, "viewed shooting innocent Iraqis as sport," the suit says. In fact, "those who killed and wounded innocent Iraqis tended to rise higher in Mr. Prince's organization than those who abided by the rule of law."
Prince's top executives openly discussed "laying Hajjis out on cardboard" and "bragged about their collective role in killing those of the Islamic faith," the suit alleges.
On more than one occasion, the suit says, Prince's men went "night hunting" in helicopters after 10 p.m. over the streets of Baghdad, wearing night goggles, killing at random.
The lawsuit says Prince caused murders to occur on at least 11 occasions, including one and perhaps more in the United States.
The suit describes one case in which a young man, not identified in the court papers, died after photographing Anna Bundy, a Blackwater executive, packaging illegal weaponry outfitted with silencers for shipment to Iraq.
One employee is said to have warned the young man that such photographs "are what get people killed." Lawyers for the plaintiffs plan to use the legal discovery process to learn whether Prince participated in the events leading to his death.
The latest suit, filed last week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, is the sixth civil case brought against Prince and his company, now known as Xe, by the Washington law firm Burke O'Neil on behalf of more than 60 Iraqis or their estates.
Many of them were injured or killed two years ago today - Sept. 16, 2007 - in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in a shooting incident that left 17 Iraqis dead and ultimately led to the loss of Blackwater's diplomatic security contract.
Five former Blackwater guards face criminal charges of voluntary manslaughter in that incident. Last week, federal prosecutors filed papers alleging a yearlong pattern of hostile action against Iraqis by the defendants leading up to that shooting.
In one episode described in those papers, one of the five defendants, Evan Liberty, allegedly drove through Baghdad on Sept. 9, 2007, a week before the Nisoor Square incident, randomly shooting Iraqis through the porthole of an armored vehicle.
The latest civil suit is an apparent outgrowth of that event. The plaintiffs are four Iraqis who operated a shop in Baghdad and were allegedly injured by Liberty's "wanton shooting."
Xe had no immediate comment on the new allegations.


http://hamptonroads.com/2009/09/another-...blackwater

[Peter Presland]

My mind is drawn to the resonant ending of Cimino's masterly The Deer Hunter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtbW-3GZCvM

Agreed, an impressive, even masterly film - on its own terms - dealing as it does with lost innocence and the desperate clinging to patriotism through grave hurt and loss; values that had hitherto always been an unquestioned part of life.

But its those 'terms' that I have an issue with.

To make its point the Vietnamese are portrayed as primitive savages and mere props to the angst of America and Americans trying to do the right thing and being killed, crippled and mentally disabled in the process (Shades of the 'Indian Wars' all over again). Not even a hint that the Vietnamese might have similar issues. I agree there is an attempt at a wider anti-war perspective but IMHO it is largely vitiated by total failure to deal with the war's context and the Vietnamese as human beings racked and savaged by war too - and in their OWN country by invaders to boot. In many ways it epitomises the inability of Hollywood to deal intelligently with America's place in a world. Everything has to be presented through American eyes and judged according to 'American values'.

Similar considerations apply to those other, and otherwise exceptional, films: 'Platoon' and 'Full Metal Jacket'.

There are exceptional films where such issues are less ruinous (The Godfather - 1 & 2 being a couple of my favourites) but these days I have to have a film on major recommendation from someone I trust before I will give any Hollywood output the time of day.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Peter - to keep this thread about PMCs, I've started a new thread about The Deer Hunter at the link below. Mea culpa for introducing movie endings into this discussion:

http://www.deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/...#post11041

[Ed Jewett]

Maybe we can contact some mogul and have them make a movie about what is discussed in this thread, or here at DPF ... it'd make the Godfather series look like Sesame Street. Meanwhile:

From the CorpWatch e-mailed newsletter:

Holding Corporations Accountable

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