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Edited on Fri Dec-22-06 09:44 AM by marmar
The Shadow Army Posted on Dec 22, 2006 alternet.org What is striking about the current debate going on in Washington---whether to “surge” troops to Iraq and increasing the size of the U.S. Army—is that roughly 100,000 bodies are missing from the equation: the number of American forces in Iraq is not 140,000 but more like 240,000. What makes up the difference is the huge army of mercenaries—known these days as “private contractors”. After the U.S. army itself, they are by far the second largest military force in the country.Yet no one seems sure of how many there are since they answer to no single authority. Indeed the U.S. Central Command has only recently started taking a census of these battlefield civilians in an attempt to get a handle on the issue. The private contractors are Americans, South Africans, Brits, Iraqis and a hodgepodge of others nationalities. Many of them are veterans of the U.S. or other armed forces and intelligence services, who are now deployed in Iraq to perform duties normally carried by the U.S. Army, but at salaries usually two or three times greater than those of American soldiers.
They work as interrogators and interpreters in American prisons, body guards for top American and Iraqi officials, trainers for the Iraqi army and police, and engineers constructing huge new American bases. They are often on the front lines. In fact, 650 of them have been killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion
The security companies fielding these forces are thriving. For instance, DynCorp International, with about 1,500 employees in Iraq, by itself fields the third largest “military” contingent, after the Americans and the British.
Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in Iraq, most of them providing “private security”. One of the most mammoth contractors in Iraq, Kellogg, Brown and Root, has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors spread over Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. Titan a division of L-3 communications, has 6,500 linguists in Iraq. (Compare that to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad where only 6 of the 1000 American diplomats stationed there are fluent in Arabic!).
Their salaries, are, in the end, paid directly by the U.S. government—or tacked on as huge additional “security charges” to the bills of private American or other contractors. Yet the Central Command still doesn’t have a complete list of who they are or what they are up to. The final figure could be much higher than 100,000.
The U.S. Congress, under Republican control until now, knows even less.
Yet these private contractors, man their own helicopters and humvees and look and act just like American troops.
"It takes a great deal of vigilance on the part of the military commander to ensure contractor compliance," William L. Nash, a retired Army general, told the Washington Post. "If you're trying to win hearts and minds and the contractor is driving 90 miles per hour through the streets and running over kids, that's not helping the image of the American army. The Iraqis aren't going to distinguish between a contractor and a soldier."
But who, in the end, do these contractors answer to? The Central Command? Their company boss? Or the official they’ve been assigned to protect?
A recent case in point: the former Iraqi Minister of Electricity, who had been imprisoned on corruption charges, managed to escape in broad daylight in the heavily fortified Green Zone. Iraqi officials claimed he was spirited away by contractors from a private security detail that had hired when he was minister.
Which raises another question. Who has jurisdiction over these private contractors if they run afoul of the law in Iraq? Also, are they supposed to follow the Geneva Conventions? Or Bush’s conventions?
For instance, according to the New York Times, although twenty civilian contractors working in U.S. prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq—including Abu Ghraib --have been charged with mistreating prisoners none has ever been successfully prosecuted.
Another point, which brings us back to the discussion about increasing American troop levels in Iraq. It would seem that the Pentagon could outsource a “surge” by a simple accounting-slight-of-hand: quietly contracting for another ten or twenty thousand mercenaries to do the job, and Congress and the public would be none the wiser.
Which, after all, seems to have been the hallmark of the Iraqi disaster.
More at: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20061222_the_shadow_army/
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