The pact recently approved by the Iraqi cabinet that allows 150,000 US troops to stay in Iraq ’til 2011 could have a significant impact on the role of private military contractors deployed in the war. According to the Wall Street Journal, the draft Status of Forces Agreement, known as SOFA, appears to end immunity from local Iraqi law for private military contractors. If the pact is approved by the Iraqi parliament, contractors would fall under the jurisdiction of Iraqi courts and would be subject to prosecution.
This comes as top Justice Department prosecutors are reportedly reviewing a draft indictment against six Blackwater security guards who opened fire in a crowded Baghdad square more than a year ago, killing seventeen Iraqi civilians. The Associated Press reports senior Justice Department officials are said to be considering manslaughter and assault charges against the guards. The indictments would mark the first time armed private contractors from the United States face justice.
Meanwhile, the State Department is reportedly preparing to hit Blackwater with a multi-million-dollar fine for allegedly shipping as many as 900 automatic weapons to Iraq without the required permits.
From the beginning, this case has been extremely problematic. When the Nisour Square shootings occurred, the FBI took two weeks before it arrived in Iraq to investigate the case. There was limited immunity that was granted to some of the Blackwater contractors in the immediate aftermath by the State Department. And then, the larger question is, exactly how do you prosecute these cases? Under what law? It’s never been clear exactly what law applies to private security contractors in Iraq. That’s the biggest problem.
The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which would be the law under which these guys would be prosecuted, requires the prosecution to take place in the state in which the person who’s accused resides. So, if in fact we’re talking about six separate indictments, we could be talking about six separate prosecutions occurring in six different states. And then, of course, there are issues with evidence. There are issues with exactly what the charges are going to be. There are questions of interviews and witnesses and how exactly do you do this. So it’s extremely problematic.
STEVE FAINARU: “Big boy rules” is an expression that I first heard when I was reporting on a story in which a private contractor who worked for a company called Triple Canopy, which shares a State Department contract with Blackwater, one of their contractors announced to three of his colleagues, who were traveling with him that day, that he really wanted to shoot someone. And that day, according to these three colleagues, they were traveling on the airport road in Baghdad, and while they were passing a civilian taxi, this contractor, according to these three guys, fired into the windshield of this passing civilian taxi. When that happened, there was no real legal mechanism by which to deal with the situation. And as I was reporting the case, I heard from other contractors that they used this expression “big boy rules.” And what it really meant was that there were no rules for private security contractors in Iraq, and they operated under basically their own system of justice.
When you look at the Geneva Conventions and the definition of “mercenaries,” we’re talking about people who are not part of the armed force that’s participating in the conflict. They are people who are—their primary motivation is money. They’re being paid to take place in—to take part in hostilities. And so, the practice clearly falls under that definition.
The term “private security contractors” never really has done justice to exactly what the scope of what’s going on in Iraq with these people. We’re talking about tens of thousands of hired guns who are running around Iraq in a war zone. They are being fired upon. They’re returning fire. They’re killing people, and they’re being killed. And the term “private security contractor,” it could apply to anybody. It could apply to a Brink’s guard. It could apply to somebody who’s standing in front of a 7-Eleven. it obfuscated. it obscured the reality of what was happening.
while I was working for the Washington Post, we wanted to find out what this culture was and why these people were there, who they were. And so, I embedded with a private security company called Crescent Security Group that operated out of Kuwait City. I traveled into Iraq with these people. We were—their primary mission was to protect supply convoys on Iraq’s main highway. And so, I traveled into Iraq. We traveled up to Nasiriyah, and then we traveled back to the Iraq-Kuwait border. I interviewed them. I found out what they were about.
And one of the things that was most striking about this company was—you know, in the book, I call it basically the Kmart of private security, where, you know, if you have Blackwater sort of at the high end of the security spectrum—traveling in heavily armored vehicles, working for the State Department, paying their contractors $20,000 a month—you had companies like Crescent Security Group, who were paying their contractors $7,000 a month, they had a lot less experience, there were enormous problems with the company.
I came home. Before I had even written my story, the people that I had spent time with were kidnapped on the same highway where we had been traveling. They were missing for sixteen months, and last April their bodies turned up in southern Iraq.
First, their fingers were delivered to the air base in Basra as evidence that—from an informant, that he knew where the bodies were. And then, about a month later, the bodies were delivered to the air base at Basra.
Everybody had their own sort of story about why they should be in Iraq. The primary motivation was money. Everybody was there—that was the number one reason for being there. But when you got sort of beyond that, there were all kinds of other other issues that were in play.
The main character of the book, Jon Cote, had been in the 82nd Airborne, and he had done a tour in Afghanistan and Iraq. And when he got out, he enrolled at the University of Florida to study accounting. He was like the least likely accounting major in the history of accounting. And what he found—when he got out, he found that he just simply could not cope, that his experience in the military had put him in a sort of a place in his life where he just couldn’t adapt to civilian life. He clearly had post-traumatic stress. And so, one of his—his scout leader from the Army offered him a job to make $7,000 a month driving supply convoys—guarding supply convoys in Iraq. And he took the job, just thinking that, you know, this was some way—this was a way for him to get more money for college. He had financial problems. And so, he went back.
He realized very quickly that he had gotten into a situation that he simply was not prepared for. The company that he was working for was corrupt. They were smuggling weapons and liquor back and forth across the Iraq-Kuwait border. They were fabricating military IDs that they were using on their—that they were giving to their Iraqi employees to get onto US military installations. They were traveling in these pickup trucks in, you know, an extremely dangerous environment. And he decided to go home, after a couple of—three months. He decided he had enough and had told his friends and his family that he was planning to go home. But before he could, it was too late.
Other guys, simply thrived on the life. They were adrenaline junkies. They lived for this stuff. There was another guy that I met, John Young, who was forty-four years old. He had been in the Army in the 1980s. When he got out of the Army, he sort of drifted around to different jobs, never really feeling like he was totally content. He tried to reenlist in the military and injured himself during basic training. And so, when this job came along, he did it. And even after nearly getting shot in Baghdad, he still felt like—he said, “This is me. You know, this is what I do.” And I think there were a lot of people like that in Iraq, you know, who were drawn by the opportunity. They were making maybe ten times as much money as they could have made in the United States. They were addicted to the action, and they took the job.
The story of one guy from, Triple Canopy, is chilling. He announced to his three colleagues that he wanted to kill someone, and then he went out on Baghdad’s airport road and fired into the windshield of a taxi. Then they simply drove off.
The car, according to the witnesses, sputtered to a stop on the side of the road. The witnesses saw bullet holes in the windshield. When they got back to the base, there was a lot of confusion about what to do. Ironically, there was a Fijian guy who was on this team who was paid a tenth of what the American contractors who were in the same vehicle were being paid. He went to a Fijian supervisor and told him about what had happened, because he was disgusted. But the Fijian supervisor basically was afraid to go to his American supervisors and tell them what had happened. And so, the other two guys were also not sure what to do. They were afraid to come forward. Finally, after two days, they came forward, and they told the company what had happened. And the company’s response was to fire not only them, but the man who was accused of firing into this taxi.
One of the things I think that case points up is that there was no legal mechanism to pursue it any further. Nor was there any incentive for the company, really, to pursue it any further. The company, Triple Canopy, went to the director of security for the Green Zone and basically told him in a very vague way, what had happened: there was a questionable shooting incident that took place on Baghdad’s airport road. And that’s really basically all they told him. And when I interviewed him, he told me basically that he said to the company, you know, “Look, this is not my job. You know, this is not something that I deal with.” He brought in a JAG officer, and, the case was simply not pursued.
The two guys who were fired ultimately sued in Fairfax County Circuit Court, arguing that had been fired for essentially reporting a criminal act. Triple Canopy argued that the reason they were fired was because they had not reported this incident immediately. A jury upheld the company’s contention that, on technical grounds, they were within every right to fire the two guys who reported the incident, but at the same time the jury condemned the company for what it said was its business practices and the way it conducted its investigation.
One was the enormity of it. When I had been covering the military for fourteen months, and I’d see these guys around. And when I finally—when I started reporting it, you realize that there were hundreds of companies like Blackwater that were running around Iraq. I think the other thing that was really striking was that the Bush administration, because of its failure to provide enough troops, had essentially farmed out the responsibility for deciding who can kill and die for our country to private companies that were there and who had been created simply to make money off the war.
Steve Fainaru, with Amy Goodman.
Steve Fainaru, foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, where he covered the Iraq war from 2004 to 2007. He won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his stories on private military contractors. His new book is Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq.
– from democracynow. 19 Nov 2008.