Report: Tighten reins on war-zone contractors

[unhappycamper]

Report: Tighten reins on war-zone contractors
By William H. McMichael - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Nov 14, 2008 15:51:06 EST

The U.S. should continue its reliance on private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan but transfer responsibility for managing private security personnel to the military police and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, a new report on Pentagon contracting concludes.

“Our view of why this should happen is the difficulty in ensuring control of these actors and proper accountability and oversight,” says co-author Michael Cohen, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. Security contractors, he and the other authors argue, should be limited to “inside-the-wire” operations.

The authors argue that the U.S. acted similarly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when it federalized the U.S. airport security force by creating the Transportation Security Administration. “It should follow its own example and move with alacrity to address the need to protect U.S. government personnel in war zones,” the report states.

The issue of Pentagon and State Department reliance on private contractors in the war zones has been hotly debated in Congress and elsewhere following a string of high-profile incidents in Iraq involving private security firms. These included contractors involved in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prison scandal and several incidents involving the controversial private security firm Blackwater USA, including the September 2007 shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians by Blackwater guards escorting a convoy in Baghdad.

Getting rid of all contractors, as Cohen noted some on Capitol Hill have called for, is “unfeasible in the short term — particularly in stabilization missions, static defense,” where he said contractors play an important role. He pointed out that of the more than 190,000 contractors serving in Iraq alone, only 12,258 work in security jobs, and only two-thirds of those are armed.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/11/military_contractors_111408w/%2e



uhc comment: If the 190,000 contractors number is correct, we have almost 340,000 people occupying Iraq in one capacity or another.