Dirty Warriors: South African Mercs in Iraq Paid with YOUR Tax $$!

[leftchick]

http://motherjones.com/commentary/notebook/2004/11/11_200.html


~snip~

The Pentagon says it is not in the business of policing contractors’ hiring practices -- and that concerns military watchdogs, who believe this creates a climate where human rights are seen as secondary. “The point is not lost on people working in the private security market that the United States has hired companies with cowboy reputations,” says Deborah Avant, director of the Institute for Global and International Studies at George Washington University. In one case, the Pentagon awarded a security contract worth more than $250 million to a British company whose CEO has flouted basic human rights principles from Northern Ireland to the South Pacific.

Richard Goldstone, a retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, said he was revolted when he learned that some apartheid-era veterans are now employed in Iraq under U.S. government contracts. “The mercenaries we’re talking about worked for security forces that were synonymous with murder and torture,” says Goldstone, who also served as chief prosecutor of the United Nations war crimes tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. “My reaction was one of horror that that sort of person is employed in a situation where what should be encouraged is the introduction of democracy. These are not the people who should be employed in this sort of endeavor.”



PENTAGON OFFICIALS say they can no longer fight a war without private contractors. The U.S. military has shrunk from 2.1 million to 1.4 million active troops since the end of the Cold War, creating a shortage of personnel during wartime. Yet even as the Iraq war was gearing up, observers warned that replacing soldiers with contractors could cause accountability problems. “We have individuals who are not obligated to follow orders or follow the Military Code of Conduct,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat, told Mother Jones last year. “Their main obligation is to their employer, not to their country.”

Schakowsky’s fears were realized at Abu Ghraib. Long before the infamous prison became a household name, the U.S. Justice Department awarded the research and engineering company SAIC a contract to help reconstruct the Iraqi prison system. SAIC in turn hired four former corrections officials from the United States who had been involved in prisoner-abuse cases. One of them, Gary DeLand, once ran a Utah jail where a mentally ill inmate arrested for nonviolent disorderly conduct was held naked and alone for 56 days without lights, recreation, windows, bedding, or a toilet -- and without a hearing. Both SAIC and officials at the Justice Department have declined to comment.

[leftchick]

1. kick

well I am outraged....

[seemslikeadream]

2. FLY THAT FLAG UPSIDE DOWN MY BROTHERS IN ARMS

DOGS OF WAR
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=9558&mesg_id=9558

My brothers in arms


These mist covered mountains
Are a home now for me
But my home is the lowlands
And always will be
Some day you’ll return to
Your valleys and your farms
And you’ll no longer burn
To be brothers in arms

Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I’ve watched all your suffering
As the battles raged higher
And though they did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms

There’s so many different worlds
So many differents suns
And we have just one world
But we live in different ones

Now the sun’s gone to hell
And the moon’s riding high
Let me bid you farewell
Every man has to die
But it’s written in the starlight
And every line on your palm
We’re fools to make war
On our brothers in arms

--Dire Straits