UN-Truth

Following a meeting he co-chaired with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Satuday, in advance of the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level debate, UNSG BAN Ki-Moon said, according to a report by the Associated Press, that he “plans to open a new office in Baghdad to encourage cooperation between Iraq and its neighbors, but voiced strong concerns about the continuing security problems in the country. Ban Ki-moon said he hoped ‘more would be done’ to improve Baghdad’s security as the U.N. builds its presence, which has been greatly reduced since an Aug. 19, 2003, bombing at its Baghdad headquarters that killed 22 people … Ban said the new office in Baghdad would help foster dialogue between the countries bordering Iraq and that its framework and other details would be addressed at a meeting in October in Turkey. Another office is also being considered in the southern city of Basra and the office in Irbil, in the north, could be expanded. ‘UN experience around the world reveals that such offices facilitate communication and helps to maintain coherent direction,” he said, according to a statement of his comments to the diplomats” …
The AP report on the new UN Office in Iraq is here.

Another AP story from UNHQ/NY reported that “al-Maliki said before the session that he believed security was improving in Iraq and urged the United Nations to boost its presence in his country. ‘The security situation … has begun to develop tremendously, and the Baghdad of today is different from the Baghdad of yesterday’, he said after a solo meeting with Ban. The presence of Rice and al-Maliki at the same meeting here was the closest high-level encounter between the governments since the incident and since Rice on Friday announced a full review of State Department security in Iraq. They precede a meeting between al-Maliki and President Bush next week on the sidelines of the annual U.N. General Assembly. The security review that Rice announced will examine the rules of engagement followed by security contractors as well as rules and regulations that govern their operations. That includes the jurisdiction in which contractors should be covered and the immunity from prosecution by Iraqi and U.S. military courts that they now enjoy…

The AP story continues: “A joint U.S.-Iraqi commission is also beginning to look at widely conflicting accounts of last weekend’s incident; the first session was planned for Sunday. American witnesses have said the security guards were responding to an attack. Many Iraqi witnesses have told investigators the shooting was unprovoked. The prime minister has called the incident a “crime” and his government has suggested that the U.S. no longer use Blackwater for security”.
This AP report with comments on the security situation inside Iraq is published here.

On Saturday, The Guardian newspaper published a story predicting that the private security contractors in Iraq will soon be facing hard times: “They needed to be hired fast after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. With too few US soldiers on the ground, demand for private security guards was at a level not seen since the mercenary heyday of Congo in the 1960s. Former special forces soldiers from the US and Britain, with their wrap-around shades and swagger, had to be supplemented by Chileans, Colombians and Jordanians. Iraq was awash with billions of dollars from the US, and company profits soared, while those on the ground were earning much more than US and British soldiers. But the Iraq boom for private security firms is coming to an end, even without the Blackwater shooting row, according to those in the trade. ‘It will not be the same again’, said Andy Bearpark, former director of operations and infrastructure for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and now director-general of the recently formed British Association of Private Security Companies. The $18bn (£9bn) the US paid out for Iraqi reconstruction will not be repeated, he said. Richard Fenning, chief executive of Control Risks, the British company which has 200 employees in southern Iraq, mainly protecting officials from the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development, echoed the point. ‘The situation has deteriorated. American money has dried up on reconstruction. So there is a lull’, he said. ‘It sounds counterintuitive, but Iraq has got too dangerous for security companies to boom there’. British companies estimate that combined contracts increased from £320m in 2003 to nearly £2bn in 2004. They put the annual global value of contracts handed out to private military companies at £44.5bn. Blackwater, which was set up by a former US navy Seal, Erik Prince, is one of the biggest and most notorious. And, for many Iraqis, the most hated. Its reputation for aggression was reinforced last Sunday when Blackwater was providing protection for a US diplomatic convoy travelling through Baghdad. Blackwater says the convoy was attacked and guards returned fire. The Iraqi government says Blackwater opened fire first and wants it expelled … An Iraqi interior ministry spokesman said yesterday an investigation had concluded that Blackwater guards opened fire in Nisoor Square when a vehicle failed to stop. The guards thought they were under attack, according to the report. ‘They started shooting randomly from four positions in the square, killing 11 civilians and injuring 12 others. The first one who was killed was a driver who failed to stop and then his wife’, he said. The report recommended ending immunity for foreign security companies and replacing them with Iraqi firms”.
This story looking at diminished budgets for private security firms in Iraq is published here.

Investigative journalist Jeremy Cahill, who works for The Nation magazine and the Democracy Now! radio and TV program, has spent several years looking at Blackwater in Iraq. He has testified several times at Congressional hearing, the most recent time being 21 September to the Senate Democratic Policy Committee: Here are some of his remarks to that Committee:

“My name is Jeremy Scahill. I am an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine and the author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. I have spent the better part of the past several years researching the phenomenon of privatized warfare and the increasing involvement of the private sector in the support and waging of US wars …
While details remain murky and subject to conflicting versions of what exactly happened, this situation cuts much deeper than this horrifying incident. The stakes are very high for the Bush administration because the company involved, Blackwater USA, is not just any company. It is the premiere firm protecting senior State Department officials in Iraq, including Ambassador Ryan Crocker. This company has been active in Iraq since the early days of the occupation when it was awarded an initial $27 million no-bid contract to guard Ambassador Paul Bremer. During its time in Iraq, Blackwater has regularly engaged in firefights and other deadly incidents. About 30 of its operatives have been killed in Iraq and these deaths are not included in the official American death toll. While the company’s operatives are indeed soldiers of fortune, their salaries are paid through hundreds of millions of dollars in US taxpayer funds allocated to Blackwater. What they do in Iraq is done in the name of the American people and yet there has been no effective oversight of Blackwater’s activities and actions. And there has been absolutely no prosecution of its forces for any crimes committed against Iraqis. If indeed Iraqi civilians were killed by Blackwater USA last Sunday, as appears to be the case, culpability for these actions does not only lie with the individuals who committed the killings or with Blackwater as a company, but also with the entity that hired them and allowed them to operate heavily-armed inside Iraq–in this case, the US State Department. While the headlines of the past week have been focused on the fatal shootings last Sunday, this was by no means an isolated incident. Nor is this is simply about a rogue company or rogue operators. This is about a system of unaccountable and out of control private forces that have turned Iraq into a wild west from the very beginning of the occupation, often with the stamp of legitimacy of the US government. What happened Sunday is part of a deadly pattern, not just of Blackwater USA’s conduct, but of the army of mercenaries that have descended on Iraq over the past four years. They have acted like cowboys, running Iraqis off the road, firing indiscriminately at vehicles and, in some cases, private forces have appeared on tape seemingly using Iraqis for target practice. They have shown little regard for Iraqi lives and have fueled the violence in that country, not just against the people of Iraq but also against the official soldiers of the United States military in the form of blowback and revenge attacks stemming from contractor misconduct. These private forces have operated in a climate where impunity and immunity have gone hand in hand.

Active duty soldiers who commit crimes or acts of misconduct are prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court martial system. There have been scores of prosecutions of soldiers– some 64 courts martial on murder-related charges in Iraq alone. That has not been the case with these private forces. Despite many reports–some from US military commanders–of private contractors firing indiscriminately at Iraqis and vehicles and killing civilians, not a single armed contractor has been charged with any crime. They have not been prosecuted under US civilian law; US military law and the Bush administration banned the Iraqi government from prosecuting them in Iraqi courts beginning with the passage of Coalition Provisional Authority Order 17 in 2004. The message this sends to the Iraqi people is that these hired guns are above any law.

The actions of this one company, perhaps more than any other private actor in the occupation, have consistently resulted in escalated tension and more death and destruction in Iraq–from the siege of Fallujah, sparked by the ambush of its men there in March of 2004, to Blackwater forces shooting at Iraqis in Najaf with one Blackwater operative filmed on tape saying it was like a ‘turkey shoot’ to the deadly events of the past week.

Colonel Thomas Hammes, the US military official once overseeing the creation of a new Iraqi military, has described driving around Iraq with Iraqis and encountering Blackwater operatives. ‘[They] were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated’, Hammes said. But, he added, ‘they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town’. Hammes concluded the contractors were ‘hurting our counterinsurgency effort’.

Brigadier General Karl Horst, deputy commander of the 3rd Infantry Division said of private security contractors, ‘These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There’s no authority over them, so you can’t come down on them hard when they escalate force…. They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place’. Horst tracked contractor conduct for a two month period in Baghdad and documented at least a dozen shootings of Iraqi civilians by contractors, resulting in six Iraqi deaths and the wounding of three others. That is just one General in one area of Iraq in just 60 days … It is long past due for the actions of Blackwater USA and the other private military firms operating in Iraq–actions carried out in the names of the American people and with US tax dollars–to be carefully and thoroughly investigated by the US Congress. For the Iraqi people, this is a matter of life, and far too often, death”.

Excerpts from Scahill’s testimony on Blackwater in Iraq is published here.

According to Scahill, there are some 145,000 active-duty American military personnel serving in Iraq — and some 126,000 private security personnel.

Scahill said in earlier testimony to the U.S. Congress that “While many soldiers lack basic protective equipment–facts well-known to this committee–they are in a war zone where they see the private soldiers whiz by in better vehicles, with better armor, better weapons…” This earlier Scahill testimony on Blackwater is published here.

Filed under: BAN Ki-Moon, Iraq, UN General Assembly