Growing Use of Contractors Added to War’s Chaos in Iraq

[cal04]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/middleeast/24contractors.html?_r=1&hp

The first shots sailed past Iraqi police officers at a checkpoint. They took off in three squad cars, their lights flashing.

It was early in the Iraq war, Dec. 22, 2004, and it turned out that the shots came not from insurgents or criminals. They were fired by an American private security company named Custer Battles, according to an incident report in an archive of more than 300,000 classified military documents made public by WikiLeaks.

The company’s convoy sped south in Umm Qasr, a grubby port city near the Persian Gulf. It shot out the tire of a civilian car that came close. It fired five shots into a crowded minibus. The shooting stopped only after the Iraqi police, port security and a British military unit finally caught up with the convoy.

Somehow no one had been hurt, and the contractors found a quick way to prevent messy disciplinary action. They handed out cash to Iraqi civilians, and left.

[gratuitous]

1. The Paper of Record, on this like a goose on a junebug

Just made it ahead of the six years "who gives a flying fuck anymore" statute of limitations. Where was the Times when this story and others like it might have mattered? Oh yeah; employing Judith Miller for her riveting reports on unidentified men in baseball caps walking to and fro. And keeping Elisabeth Bumiller on the payroll to write her weekly Monday morning valentine to George W. Bush.

[OHdem10]

2. Common sense should have told them there would be more

problems than they bargained for starting with the fact
that contractors earned three and four times as much as
our soldiers.