AZProgressive
AZProgressive's JournalA lot of what Blackwater does is subcontracted or operating under different names
Academi is an American private military company, founded in 1997 by Erik Prince.[2][3] Formerly known as Blackwater,[4] the company was renamed Xe Services in 2009, and "Academi" in 2011.[5] The company was purchased in late 2010 by a group of private investors who changed the name to Academi and instituted a board of directors and new senior management. Prince retained the rights to the name Blackwater and has no affiliation with Academi. The company received widespread publicity in 2007, when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad.[6][7]
Academi continues to provide security services to the United States federal government on a contractual basis. The Obama administration contracted the group to provide services for the CIA for $250 million.[8] In 2013, Academi subsidiary International Development Solutions received an approximately $92 million contract for State Department security guards.[9]
In 2014, the company became a division of Constellis Holdings along with Triple Canopy and other security companies that were part of the Constellis Group as the result of an acquisition.[10][11]
<snip>
Board of directors
Red McCombs (chairman)[56]
John Ashcroft[56]
Dean Bosacki[56]
Jason DeYonker[56]
Bobby Ray Inman[56]
Jack Quinn[56]
Russ Robinson[56]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi#Board_of_directors
Halliburton & KBR are responsible for numerous human slavery & trafficking violations
Long-running debates over military privatization overlook one important fact: The U.S.
military’s post-2001 contractor workforce is composed largely of migrants imported
from impoverished countries. This Article argues that these Third Country National
(TCN) workers—so called because they are neither American nor local—are bereft of
the effective protections of American law, local regimes, or their home governments;
moreover, their vulnerability is a feature, not a flaw, in how the U.S. projects global
power today. TCN workers are an offshore captive labor force whose use allows the
government to keep politically sensitive troop numbers and casualty figures artificially
low while reducing dependence on local populations with suspect loyalties. Legislation
to combat human trafficking has done little to remedy exploitation and abuse of TCN
workers because of jurisdictional hurdles and the lack of robust labor rights protections.
Substantive reform efforts should address the deeper issue at stake, namely that the
government uses TCN workers to carry out a core state function—namely, the use of
force—without a clear relationship of responsibility to them. Unlike with soldiers, the
labor of TCN workers is not valorized as sacrifice and unlike mercenaries selling their
services to the highest bidder, they are frequently indebted to the point of indenture.
http://www.uclalawreview.org/pdf/62-1-3.pdf
(After reading the A B C on part 1 of 3 I 100x recommend reading the entire study)
Most I have personally talked to came from India, Nepal, countries in Africa (I can't remember which specific ones), Phillipines.
Corp Watch & Al-Jazeera have the best reporting I've found regarding this
Blood, Sweat & Tears:
Asia’s Poor Build U.S. Bases in Iraq
But Soliman wouldn’t be making anything near the salaries starting at $80,000 a year and often topping more than $100,000 paid to truck drivers, construction workers, office workers and other laborers recruited in the United States by Halliburton’s subsidiary, KBR. Instead, the 35-year-old father of two looked forward to earning $615 a month – including overtime. For a 40-hour work week, that’s just over $3 an hour, but Soliman made even less. He says the standard work week was 12-hour days, seven days a week, so he was actually earning $1.56 an hour.
For a year’s work, Soliman would receive $7,380. He planned to send most of his paychecks home to his family, where the combined unemployment rate tops 28 percent and the average annual income in Manila is $4,384. Nearly half of the nation's 84 million people live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.
Invisible and Indispensable Army of Low-Paid Workers
This mostly invisible, but indispensable army of low-paid workers has helped set new records for the largest civilian workforce ever hired in support of a U.S. war. They may be the most significant factor to the Pentagon’s argument that privatizing military support services is far more cost-efficient for the U.S. taxpayer than using its own troops to maintain camps and feed its ranks.
But American contractors returning home frequently share horrible tales of the working and living conditions that these TCNs endure on a daily basis.
TCNs frequently sleep in crowded trailers, wait outside in line in 100 degree heat to eat “slop,” lack adequate medical care and work almost every waking hour seven days a week for little or no overtime pay. Frequently, the workers lack proper safety equipment for hard labor
And when insurgents fire incoming mortars and rockets at the sprawling military camps, American contractors slip on helmets and bulletproof vests, but TCNs are frequently shielded by only the shirts on their backs and the flimsy trailers they sleep in.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675
IRAQ: Indian Contract Workers in Iraq Complain of Exploitation
For an $1,800 fee, the recruiter promised to get the two young south Indian men jobs as butchers on a military base in Kuwait for two years, they said. With salaries of $385 a month, a small fortune by Indian standards, they would join more than three million Indians already working in the Persian Gulf and enriching their families back home.
They mortgaged a relative's house and land, paid the fee and flew to Kuwait in August with two of their friends. What they say they encountered when they got there landed on the front pages of Indian newspapers this week, with one headline declaring "Indians Abused in Iraq" in "U.S. Slave Camps."
Within days, the brothers said, they and their friends found themselves on an American military base in northern Iraq working for a Saudi subcontractor of Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton. They said their supervisor, who had taken their passports in Kuwait, told them they were obligated to work on the base for six months and could not leave.
Working alongside 200 other laborers, from India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, they first cleaned American latrines and then washed American dishes, the brothers said. Their pay was roughly $150 a month, they said, less than half of what the recruiter had promised.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12675
I post that article to post this was one, 12 years after the start of the Iraq war.
South Asian workers are at the bottom of the social hierarchy on U.S. bases. They earn far less than American or European contractors, work 12-hour days with little or no time off and, on some bases, aren’t allowed to use cellphones or speak to military personnel. On the base we visited, Camp Marmal, most were surprised and nervous when we approached them, concerned that talking to journalists could get them in trouble. One young man’s face contorted in terror when asked whether he had paid a recruiting fee. He shook his head no, fearful of any reprisals. “To come here, you have to use an agent,” another worker told us. “There is no other way. So we pay money to come.”
An agent is a person from a recruitment agency hired to find laborers for a company — in this case, the subcontractor. Sindhu Kavinamannil, a certified fraud examiner who has investigated labor networks between India and the Middle East, says there are tens of thousands of recruitment agencies in India and Nepal, the majority of them unregistered. They might be headquartered in large cities, she adds, but they each have hundreds of agents and subagents spread out across small towns and villages.
<snip>
Why would a company outsource hiring when it receives direct applications? “Employees at the subcontractor are taking kickbacks from these agents,” the former manager told us. “They tell the workers to apply through the agent, and the agent gets money from (the workers). The agent splits some of that fee with the people in human resources.”
In other words, because taking fees from applicants is illegal, subcontractors outsource hiring to recruiters who are willing to pass a portion of their fees up the chain. As a result, applicants who pay recruiting fees are often indirectly paying their employer — the subcontractor — simply for the opportunity to work.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/7/after-12-years-ofwarlaborabusesrampantonusbasesinafghanistan.html
The reason why it is illegal because of this executive order but the "zero tolerance" claims in it are laughable.
(i) using misleading or fraudulent recruitment practices during the recruitment of employees, such as failing to disclose basic information or making material misrepresentations regarding the key terms and conditions of employment, including wages and fringe benefits, the location of work, living conditions and housing (if employer provided or arranged), any significant costs to be charged to the employee, and, if applicable, the hazardous nature of the work;
(ii) charging employees recruitment fees;
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/25/executive-order-strengthening-protections-against-trafficking-persons-fe
Al-Jazeera has reports on that, usually there is a "screening question" but if a TCN answers the did they pay recruitment fee honestly the contractor terminates them so many lie because they need that year's salary to make back what they paid to "bait & switch" recruiters.
On edit -- The "butcher" listing is obviously false given that dining facilities have a short order line & main course, that varies. For some reason Lobster is served once a week. CSC Scania had "Fajita Tuesdays", most of the food is stored/heated. TCNs I had the pleasure of "supervising" (Military was tasked keeping tabs on the cooking temperatures but we actually only used the gauge maybe once every 10 (Dinner - Midnight - Breakfast --worked the night shift here though I hear lunch is notoriously difficult) in the Zone 2 DFAC in Camp Arif Jan, Kuwait. TCNs prepared & ate curry during the down times. I tried it once, incredibly spicy. They did all the cleaning, refiling & mixing of beverage dispensers all without ever being directed or ordered too, got along with them great which is far more than I can say about Civilian contractors & enforcing DFAC rules which were very strict (couldn't allow people take ice cream outside with them during the summer time--likely an explanation in how it relates to germs is the logical explanation given that we had to watch people coming in & order those to return to the hand washing station to those who skipped it. I'll never forget the "GS-7" I told to wash his hands. No one took offense over my regulations enforcement nearly as much as he did and that includes a WO 3 who gave me props for having the courage to tell him he is taking far too many Gatorade packets.
Out of curiousity I decided to look up his "GS-7 is the equivalent of Colonel" claims
The GS-1 through GS-7 range generally marks entry-level positions
Given that Colonels in the US Army routinely outrank Battalion Commanders I wonder a little more about him who asked my NCOIC "what if a Colonel walked in here?" "He would tell the Colonel to go back & wash his hands" These DFAC rules applied to everyone though no one fucked with the 3 Star Marine General who left his soft cap on the table at breakfast every morning.
How in the hell?
I swear I didn't enter Ukraine into the search box. I tried to search supply nuclear arms Iraq and come across a well sourced article asking is United States trying to start a nuclear war with Russia.
A link of that led to me a link of this.
The U.S. ‘News’ Media Show How to Do Propaganda About Ukraine’s Civil War
The New York Review of Books is a leading intellectual publication in the United States, and it (like all of the major U.S. “news” media) has “reported” on the Ukrainian civil war as having been incited by Russia’s Vladimir Putin — a simple-minded explanation, which also happens to be deeply false. The reality is that the residents of southern Ukraine, the part of Ukraine adjoining Russia, were overwhelmingly opposed to the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, though they are portrayed in NYRB (and other “news” media) as being mere stooges of Russian propaganda for their opposing the coup that overthrew the President for whom they had voted overwhelmingly. (The only thing that America’s “news” media had previously reported about Yanukovych is that he was corrupt; but so were all of his predecessors, and U.S. media ignored this crucial fact. Selective reporting is basic to propaganda, and the U.S. major media are trained masters at it. Without a person’s knowing that Ukraine is by far the most corrupt country in the former Soviet Union, and the one with the worst economic performance of them all, Ukraine’s politics just can’t be understood at all: it has long been an extreme kleptocracy, ruled by psychopathic politicians, for the benefit of psychopathic oligarchs, who have robbed the country blind. That’s the deeper truth — and it’s key to understanding the current situation there.)
So: by digging into an example, the rot in U.S. “news” media will be dissected here, and the truth in Ukraine will be exposed here.
On 28 April 2014, NYRB’s reporter Tim Judah headlined from Donetsk in the south, “Ukraine: Hate in Progress.” He (falsely) analogized the opponents against that coup as being similar to the separatists in Yugoslavia whose ethnocentrism had produced the atrocities during the civil war that broke up Yugoslavia. Judah wrote:
“Talk to people manning the anti-government barricades and taking part in the demonstrations against Kiev [in the north] here, … and one thing in particular is scary. After a day or two you realize that they all say more or less the same thing. ‘We want to be listened to,’ people say. The government in Kiev, which took power after the pro-European revolution there, is a ‘fascist junta’ backed by Europe and the US. It is as though the Russian media—which is widely watched and read here—has somehow embedded these messages into the heads of people and they have lost the ability to think for themselves. … All that seems to be registering right now is a nationalist and hysterical drumbeat from Russia about the new Nazis of Kiev and their NATO masters. [Judah’s article provides no evidence against that ‘Nazis of Kiev’ viewpont; he simply ignores it, as if it’s not even worth checking out — and he’s supposed to be a ‘reporter.’ Instead, he goes immediately into his mere assumption that the rejectionists of the coup are the source of his alleged ‘Hate in Progress.’] This is ominously reminiscent of what the Serbian media and other bits of the former Yugoslav media did when Yugoslavia collapsed. Then, Serbs were subjected to endless documentaries about Croatia’s wartime fascists, whom they were told were coming back. Now the Russian media says the fascists have returned.”
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/u-s-news-media-show-propaganda-ukraines-civil-war.html
The "most corrupt former" government links to http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GlobalCompetitivenessReport_2013-14.pdf
I also have reported on “Why Ukraine’s Civil War Is of Global Historical Importance.” The article argued that “This civil war is of massive historical importance, because it re-starts the global Cold War, this time no longer under the fig-leaf rationalization of an ideological battle between ‘capitalism’ versus ‘communism,’ but instead more raw, as a struggle between, on the one hand, the U.S. and West European aristocracies; and, on the other hand, the newly emerging aristocracies of Russia and of China.” The conflict’s origin, as recounted there, was told in its highest detail in an article in the scholarly journal Diplomatic History, about how U.S. President George H.W. Bush in 1990 fooled the Soviet Union’s leader Mikhail Gorbachev into Gorbachev’s allowing the Cold War to be ended without any assurance being given to the remaining rump country, his own Russia, that NATO and its missiles and bombers won’t expand right up to Russia’s doorstep and surround Russia with a first-strike ability to destroy Russia before Russia will even have a chance to get its own nuclear weapons into the air in order to destroy the U.S. right back in retaliation.
That old system — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD, but actually very rational from the public’s perspective on both sides — is gone. The U.S. increasingly is getting nuclear primacy. Russia, surrounded by NATO nations and U.S. nuclear weapons, would be able to be wiped out before its rusty and comparatively puny military force could be mustered to respond. Whereas we are not surrounded by their weapons, they are surrounded by ours. Whereas they don’t have the ability to wipe us out before we can respond, we have the ability to wipe them out before they’ll be able to respond. This is the reason why America’s aristocracy argue that MAD is dead. An article, “Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War” was published in the December 2008 Physics Today, and it concluded that, “the indirect effects [‘nuclear winter’] would likely eliminate the majority of the human population.” (It would be even worse, and far faster, than the expected harms from global warming.) However, aristocrats separate themselves from the public, and so their perspective is not necessarily the same as the public’s. The perspective that J.P. Morgan and Co. had in 1915 wasn’t the perspective that the U.S. public had back then, and it also wasn’t the perspective that our President, Woodrow Wilson, did back then, when we were a democracy. But it’s even less clear today that we are a democracy than it was in 1915. In that regard, things have only gotten worse in America.
So, President Obama is now trying to persuade EU leaders to join with him to complete this plan to replace MAD with a first-strike nuclear capability that will eliminate Russia altogether from the world stage.
As I also documented, the IMF is thoroughly supportive of this plan to remove Russia, and announced on May 1st, just a day prior to our massacre of independence-supporters in the south Ukrainian city of Odessa on May 2nd, that unless all of the independence supporters in south and eastern Ukraine can be defeated and/or killed, the IMF will pull the plug on Ukraine and force it into receivership.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/indications-u-s-planning-nuclear-attack-russia.html
Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl,Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of RussianResentment toward NATO Enlargement
http://www.scribd.com/doc/166123009/Not-One-Inch-Eastward#download (PDF)
The Key Man Behind the May 2nd Odessa Ukraine Trade Unions Building Massacre: His Many Connections to the White House
The key person behind the May 2nd massacre inside Odessa’s Trade Unions Building appears to have been Ihor Kolomoyskyi
who was appointed to be the regional governor in that area by Yulia Tymoshenko, the Ukrainian Presidential candidate that the Obama Administration has apparently been hoping will win the May 25th election to take over the Ukrainian Government, from the junta that the Obama Administration imposed in Ukraine on February 22nd. Just weeks before this coup, on February 4th, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and Asia, Victoria Nuland, chose Tymoshenko’s ally Arseni Yatsenyuk to head the post-coup interim government, which appointed Kolomoyskyi.
Only a few months before this coup, Nuland had asserted that U.S. taxpayers had already invested more than $5 billion, in order to bring “democracy” to Ukraine, by which she was referring to the U.S. effort to oust the Russian-oriented, democratically elected, leader of Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych, who had prosecuted and imprisoned Tymoshenko for embezzlement and abuse of governmental office. Tymoshenko was then on 11 October 2011 sentenced to seven years in prison, and was ordered to pay the government restitution of $188 million. She was released from prison less than three years later, two days after the coup, on 24 February 2014. The Ukrainian criminal code was immediately changed, in order to legalize the actions for which Tymoshenko had been imprisoned. This allowed Tymoshenko to run for the Ukrainian Presidency. She had been Prime Minister 2007-2010. Both she and her husband, Oleksandr Tymoshenko, and his father, all three of whom were on the board of United Energy Systems of Ukraine (and thus Ms. Tymoshenko was called “the gas princess”), have been legally prosecuted as embezzling state funds; but so have most of Ukraine’s oligarchs and political leaders (and there’s a lot of crossover between those two categories).
Kolomoyskyi, who lives in Geneva Switzerland, is generally regarded as the second-richest man in Ukraine, with a fortune estimated at about $6 billion. Tymoshenko used to be called “the Eleven Billion Dollar Woman,” but, like all of Ukraine’s oligarchs (including Kolomoyskyi), nobody really knows precisely how wealthy she is, nor even whether she is more, or perhaps less, wealthy than Kolomoyskyi. Almost all of the oligarchs’ money is hidden offshore; so, is invisible.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/05/key-man-behind-may-2nd-odessa-ukraine-trade-unions-building-massacre-many-connections-white-house.html
I don't know about Nuclear but you may be more right about World War III than you think, if that is possible.
I don't blame him for this since he had no idea in 1945
but can't help but wonder if Roosevelt choose to not do business with the 'House of Saud' who used their petro dollars to invest in ISIS/global terrorism. Saudi Arabia was taken over in much the same way ISIS is seizing land.
Their strategy — like that of ISIS today — was to bring the peoples whom they conquered into submission. They aimed to instill fear. In 1801, the Allies attacked the Holy City of Karbala in Iraq. They massacred thousands of Shiites, including women and children. Many Shiite shrines were destroyed, including the shrine of Imam Hussein, the murdered grandson of Prophet Muhammad.
A British official, Lieutenant Francis Warden, observing the situation at the time, wrote: “They pillaged the whole of it [Karbala], and plundered the Tomb of Hussein… slaying in the course of the day, with circumstances of peculiar cruelty, above five thousand of the inhabitants …”
Osman Ibn Bishr Najdi, the historian of the first Saudi state, wrote that Ibn Saud committed a massacre in Karbala in 1801. He proudly documented that massacre saying, “we took Karbala and slaughtered and took its people (as slaves), then praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, and we do not apologize for that and say: ‘And to the unbelievers: the same treatment.’”
In 1803, Abdul Aziz then entered the Holy City of Mecca, which surrendered under the impact of terror and panic (the same fate was to befall Medina, too). Abd al-Wahhab’s followers demolished historical monuments and all the tombs and shrines in their midst. By the end, they had destroyed centuries of Islamic architecture near the Grand Mosque.
***
With the advent of the oil bonanza — as the French scholar, Giles Kepel writes, Saudi goals were to “reach out and spread Wahhabism across the Muslim world … to “Wahhabise” Islam, thereby reducing the “multitude of voices within the religion” to a “single creed” — a movement which would transcend national divisions. Billions of dollars were — and continue to be — invested in this manifestation of soft power.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/why-does-the-u-s-support-saudi-arabia-a-country-which-hosts-and-finances-islamic-terrorism-on-behalf-of-washington/5398408
Wikileaks: Saudis 'chief funders of al-Qaeda'
Private individuals in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states friendly to the United States are the chief source of funding for al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist groups, according to leaked US diplomatic cables.
Despite extensive efforts to limit the distribution of funds to extremists from the Middle East, the documents show deep frustration in Washington with the level of co-operation from governments in the region.
"It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority," read a cable from Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, dated Dec 30, 2009.
"Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide," added the document.
The Saudis have recognised that they have trouble policing the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, when it is estimated that millions of dollars are raised for militants who send agents into the oil-rich kingdom under the cover of Muslim pilgrims.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8182847/Wikileaks-Saudis-chief-funders-of-al-Qaeda.html
For some reason the Telegraph is incredibly friendly to Saudi Arabia but I refuse to believe the government is that dumb.
Wahhabism is named after an eighteenth century preacher and scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792).[16] He started a revivalist movement in the remote, sparsely populated region of Najd,[17] advocating a purging of practices such as the popular cult of saints, and shrine and tomb visitation, widespread among Muslims, but which he considered idolatry, impurities and innovations in Islam.[5][18] Eventually he formed a pact with a local leader Muhammad bin Saud offering political obedience and promising that protection and propagation of the Wahhabi movement(Jihad), would mean "power and glory" and rule of "lands and men."[19] The movement is centered on the principle of Tawhid,[20] or the "uniqueness" and "unity" of God.[18]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism
Do I have to mention their human rights violations & just like ISIS have a Hisbah as well.
difficulty policing the pilgrimage my ass. They regulate the shit out of it.
Saudi Arabia, Burma, North Korea,
President Karzai, Bashar al-Assad... this list goes on and on when it comes to human rights violators.
I'd stop with the (speaking from US foreign policy POV) hypocrisy, stop giving money to financiers of the Wahabbi global terrorist organization. All these bombs, CIA installing Al-Maliki as Prime Minister (and that's just Iraq), and Al-Assad himself for Syria is why they're there.
I disagree why Obama continues to use "tensions" to block torture photos & other crimes committed by the US government but he is right they certainly will use it for propaganda for recruiting (my position is NOT to do these things in the first place)
----
After the 9/11 attacks, the United States quickly declared a "war on terror." In the conduct of that war, the United States invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, imprisoned hundreds of captured "enemy combatants" without trial, tortured suspected terrorists, drastically ratcheted up homeland security, conducted drone strikes and/or targeted assassinations in several countries, and conducted a vast campaign of electronic surveillance at home and abroad.
Virtually all these actions were designed to detect or eliminate actual terrorists or prevent them from carrying out deliberate attacks. In other words, whether offensive or defensive in nature, they were actions designed to win the war by thwarting or eliminating existing terrorist organizations.
But what about the parallel problem of terrorist recruitment? The other way to defeat terrorism is to make it harder for movements employing terrorist methods to recruit new followers, and to gradually marginalize the radicals within the societies in which they were trying to grow. There was a lot of talk about trying to do this immediately after 9/11: The State Department commissioned a task force report on public diplomacy toward the Arab/Islamic world, George W. Bush’s administration hired a series of public diplomacy czarinas, and various experts offered advice on how the United States could undercut Osama bin Laden’s message and rebuild the country’s dubious image in that part of the world. This goal also underlay Barack Obama’s initial outreach to the region and especially his infamous Cairo speech in June 2009.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/26/our-one-sided-war-on-terror/
Austin, Texas — The Islamic State terrorists who have emerged in Iraq and Syria are neither new nor unfamiliar. Many of them spent years in detention centers run by the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq after 2003. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, spent nearly five years imprisoned at Camp Bucca in southern Iraq. A majority of the other top Islamic State leaders were also former prisoners, including: Abu Muslim al-Turkmani, Abu Louay, Abu Kassem, Abu Jurnas, Abu Shema and Abu Suja.
Before their detention, Mr. al-Baghdadi and others were violent radicals, intent on attacking America. Their time in prison deepened their extremism and gave them opportunities to broaden their following. At Camp Bucca, for example, the most radical figures were held alongside less threatening individuals, some of whom were not guilty of any violent crime. Coalition prisons became recruitment centers and training grounds for the terrorists the United States is now fighting.
This process began when coalition forces arrived in Iraq in 2003 and detained alleged terrorists with little preparation or oversight. Although soldiers tried to document the circumstances behind the detentions of Iraqis and foreign fighters, the process broke down under the pressure of fighting, the shortage of trained Arabic speakers, and the fog of war.
Simply being a “suspicious looking” military-aged male in the vicinity of an attack was enough to land one behind bars. There were 26,000 detainees at the height of the war, and over 100,000 individuals passed through the gates of Camps Bucca, Cropper and Taji. Quite a few were dangerous insurgents; many others were innocent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/opinion/how-america-helped-isis.html
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