By PHK
So who does control the Blackwater contract diplomatic security guards who apparently ran amok on September 16 killing at least 11 Iraqi civilians and wounding 12 at Baghdad’s Al Nisour Square while escorting U.S. Embassy personnel to appointments outside the Green Zone?
Who are these armed escorts, how many are there, who were they protecting, who protects them, under whose laws do they operate, how much is this company paid for their services and are these trigger happy hired guns truly helping to advance America’s best interests if our continued military occupation of Iraq will, in the end, be mostly about “winning hearts and minds” not playing shoot’em up at the OK Corral?
In one of the State Department’s foggier briefings on the Blackwater fiasco last week, spokesman Tom Casey responded to a question from a journalist about a Washington Post story critical of State Department oversight of Blackwater with the following: “Well I guess my basic reaction is: don’t believe everything you read.”
Right on, Tom: I don’t. I’ve also learned not to trust everything State Department briefers say either. Often when faced with questions they’d rather not - or usually can’t - answer, the routine non-response is obfuscation or stonewalling. Occasionally, when they do answer they paint a far too rosy picture. They practice all three tactics particularly well under this administration because the W administration’s approach to information is predicated on the public’s non-right to know - first amendment not withstanding. The traditional State public affairs approach is not to lie, but to avoid providing information requested that might make a higher up look inept, or to spin information so it makes the official in question look good instead of . . . you fill in the rest.
When I was reading last week’s State press briefings on the latest 'affair' Blackwater, it was painfully clear that the briefers had not been told or if they had been, refused to reveal the amount Blackwater is paid to provide U.S. diplomatic security in Iraq.
The reporter who asked the question two days in a row was told to file a FOIA request (and we all know how long a response for that takes) or use his own sources in the Department. Give me a break: As if answering the question might reveal some great state secret as briefer Tom Casey suggested might be the reason for State’s refusal to answer.
It can’t be a problem with basic math – or can it? Contracts have line items – and sub-line items and at the very least some green eyeshade in State’s contracting office as well as someone or ones in Diplomatic Security should have access to the data.
This particular contract is an umbrella affair that covers diplomatic security services “world wide” – as the State briefer said – but the amount of the overall contract and the amount that goes to Blackwater and especially for these kinds of services in Iraq is an open question that deserves an open answer.
We do know, however, the approximate number of diplomatic security guards Blackwater provides State in Iraq because those figures are in a recently updated CRS Report on private security contractors.
The answer: All told, the State Department contract calls for a total of about 945 American diplomatic security guards in Iraq. 744 of them come through Blackwater – according to State Department data cited in Congressional Research Service’s July 11, 2007 report. DynCorp International provides 100 and Triple Canopy 101 more. (See Table I on page 7 of the CRS report for the data on third country and Iraqi nationals on contract security guard duty). True, these 945 represent only the tip-of-the-private-security-guards-in-Iraq-iceberg. Nonetheless it suggests to me that at least in terms of the guarding of U.S. diplomats when they venture outside the Green Zone, the number is small enough that continuing to engage Blackwater for this purpose is not a necessity.
The Blackwater crew operates, according to other sources, primarily in central Iraq. The company provides security for State Department personnel who work in the Embassy in Baghdad and also those on the provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) in the region. State’s contract guard force in Kurdistan comes from Dyncorp International and in the south from Triple Canopy according to other sources. Correct me if this is wrong.
Mum’s the Word: But Why?
I can think of any number of reasons why the Department refuses to release the contract information requested but I sincerely doubt that keeping it from “the enemy” for security reasons is one of them.
Two Guesses
1) the contract information would reveal – as the CRS analysis suggests– that it is far more expensive to rent a private gunslinger from a staunchly Republican connected firm that to assign an equivalent person on active duty in the US military who would be responsible for his or her conduct under the US military code.
2) the State Department office which is in charge of “waste, fraud and abuse” has been headed since 2005 by Mr. Waste, Fraud and Abuse himself – or at least mismanagement, political cheerleading and stonewalling – rendering the office ineffectual at best and, at this point, almost empty of staff. These problems are outlined in a 13 page letter from Congressman Henry Waxman, head of the House’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee to the individual in question - State’s now infamous Inspector General Howard Krongard. The information and questions in that letter of September 18, 2007 are corroborated by the American Foreign Service Association (to which I belong).
In fact, one of Waxman’s questions directly relates to Krongard’s apparent squelching of an investigation of Blackwater’s possible involvement in illegal arms sales in Iraq although the company is not referred to by name. Waxman has also requested Erik Prince, Blackwater’s chairman, to testify on Blackwater’s performance in Iraq and Afghanistan at an October 2, 2007 hearing.
But will he show? Can he not? Or will Mr. Waste, Fraud and Abuse make four members of his staff available for transcribed interviews on the conduct of the State Department’s IG’s Office by September 29, 2007 as Mr. Waxman has requested?
Legal, or “ni legalno?”
Meanwhile, seems to me that one major problem is that the legal jurisdiction over last week’s Blackwater affair is murky. This in itself is one root cause for the current imbroglio. Who does and should hold private contractors accountable? Under which laws should the investigation proceed: international (the Geneva Convention to which the US is a signatory), US, or Iraqi? These questions need resolution. They should have been clarified before a private contractor set foot in the country – but obviously that didn’t happen for any number of reasons.
Did the Blackwater security guards fire in their own defense, or in the defense of those they were hired to guard – or otherwise? This is a legitimate question but the whole incident raises far larger ones.
At this juncture, a joint US-Iraqi investigative Commission as proposed by the US is probably the best approach – perhaps the only realistic approach – to answering the question along with assigning the State Department’s seemingly indefatigable Patrick Kennedy to head an investigation into State’s civilian security contracts.
True, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior is known for being riddled with private militia, but does that excuse Blackwater wrong-doing as the right wing suggests it should? It isn’t their - or our country - after all. Or haven’t they, or we, figured that out yet?
According to the Maliki government, this is the seventh such incident Blackwater has been involved in since the beginning of 2007. US media reports suggest that Blackwater’s shoot-em-up reputation is long standing and that the US has done nothing to curb its Wild West modus operandi.
In the end, this is just one more example of how not to win anyone’s "heart or mind" in Iraq or elsewhere as members of Congress and others have feared. The administration's continuing reticence to shine light publicly on the troubled waters of private security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan only makes the situation worse.