In a war filled with too-strange-for-fiction tales, this may be the
strangest yet. Was Iraq's former electricity minister, jailed on
corruption charges, really "sprung
from a Green Zone prison this weekend by U.S. security
contractors?" If
so, it's the latest chapter in an ugly story: guns-for-hire
running around war zones, with almost zero
accountability, undermining the American military, again and again.
Brookings Institution Senior Fellow href="http://www.pwsinger.com/">P.W. Singer -- who wrote href="http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Warriors-Privatized-Military-Industry/dp/0801489156/ref=ed_oe_p/103-2975862-3491847">Corporate
Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, which
has become the ur-text on this new wave of mercenaries --
tells me:
So the Great Private Military Escape joins the lengthy list vying to
be made into a bad Hollywood movie (sorry, href="http://blooddiamondmovie.warnerbros.com/">Blood
Diamonds). My other favorites include the Triple Canopy
lawsuit which alleges that a company supervisor told his employees
that he had "href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Triple_Canopy_Inc.">never
shot anyone with my handgun before" and then fired his handgun
through the windshield of a parked taxi, killing the driver; the Aegis
"trophy
video," in which employees posted footage on the web of shooting
at Iraqi cars on the web, set to Elvis music; the Donald Vance case,
in which a US contractor was href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0612190270dec19,1,7444574.story?coll=chi-newslocalchicago-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true">held
97 days without charges in a US military prison; the various
Blackwater episodes, ranging from the href="http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11772">4 guys sent to
Fallujah without maps, intell, or proper equipment, to the plane
crash in Afghanistan, in which the plane lacked basic safety equipment
and didn't even follow basic flight safety procedures, flying by
guesswork into a box canyon, killing 3 civilians and 3 US Army; and of
course don't forget the wonderfully named Custer Battles charging for
all sorts of fraud at Baghdad airport, such as a bomb-sniffing dog
that in the words of a US Army colonel turned out to be a
guy with his pet.At what point do we accept that this whole situation has gone well
beyond the original idea of privatization and start to rein it in?
Then again, the Army Under Secretary testified
to Congress 2 months back that the Army had never authorized
Halliburton or its subcontractors to carry weapons or guard convoys,
denying we even had firms handling these jobs. So, I guess its like
the end of href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077000/">Dallas, where the
whole private military industry in Iraq (estimated by Centcom to be
100,000) was "just a dream."
Phil Carter, just back from a
year-long Army deployment in Iraq, notes that the 100,000 contractors
(mostly logistics guys, not trigger-pullers) "very nearly doubles the
size of the U.S. force in country. However, there has never been an
open, public, meaningful debate over the wisdom of using so many
contractors in so many battlefield roles. Instead, it has happened
over time as the slow result of small policy decisions made by myriad
actors. I think this will be one of the major policy questions which
emerges from the Iraq war once it is over."