War By Mercenary

I'm just going to quote Jim Henley a bit:

Deborah Hastings of Associated Press explains what happens to people who blow the whistle on corruption in Iraqi contracting: very bad things. One man was detained for 97 days and subjected to “fear up” interrogation. One woman was demoted and ostracized after a blameless 20-year civilian career with the Pentagon. A KBR contractor who blew the whistle on invoice-padding and diversion of resources was kept under guard until she could be ejected from Iraq. The federal government, which has happily joined Federal False Claims act suits for Medicare/Medicaid and domestic contracting fraud, has declined to sign onto even a single lawsuit against contractors in Iraq.

Financial improprieties aside, I would further note that insofar as the rationale for our continued presence in Iraq is humanitarian, unleashing on the country a body of thousands of mercenaries who are subject to neither Iraqi nor American law seems like an odd way of going about that.

Comments

This guy never stops, and I can't believe that people won't come to see him as bombastic and deceptive as the campaign goes on. My biggest fear is that, like Krauthammer says, Republicans line up behind him as the "toughest" guy out there, thus encasing him in teflon.

Between Romney and Rudy, the GOP has people with very confused political records and methods for "explaining" them.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 25, 2007 12:28 PM

Oops. Meant to post this under the Guiliani lede. Sorry, folks.

Posted by Unreal Veal | August 25, 2007 12:32 PM

Why is it that no Dem presidential candidate has yet gone for the army vote by promising to end all support for private military forces and create a special division or two of the army itself which would recruit more experienced veterans for every task that Blackwater does? It is so obviously a no brainer. Just say no to privatizing the army.

Posted by roger | August 25, 2007 12:55 PM

Here is one place where a Democratic administration could make a gigantic difference. None of this is tangential to the DOJ either.

In fact taking control of the DOJ should be job one for Hillary or whoever. The prospects of giant swaths of the Iraq profiteers spending years and years in court should be scaring the hell out of them.

Need I remind anyone that Blackwater and Custer Battles have a lot of guns and are strongly partisan.

Posted by rapier | August 25, 2007 1:29 PM

Well, you gotta give the Bush administration props for taking the bitter lemons of war and making sweet, sweet lemonade for well connected corporations and campaign contributors.

Posted by jlw | August 25, 2007 1:46 PM

This is an enormous story. The police state is at work to protect massive corruption. American citizens have no rights and are at the mercy of lawless thugs. The nightmare is now real. This is what people have been warning us about.

Will the story have traction? Of course not.

Al? Tell me everything's OK.

Posted by John Emerson | August 25, 2007 2:29 PM

I tried to help the government, and the government didn't seem to care.

The Bush Crime Family doesn't care. No "seem" about it.

All y'all here are too refined to read Bartcop.com, but he's been trying to tell you these things. But he's uncool, the poor bastard.

Posted by John Emerson | August 25, 2007 2:32 PM

Remember, one of the initial aims of the war was to provide a channel to pass taxpayers money to "Friends of W". In that way, it has been quite sucessful. Thats why they don't want to quit.

Posted by M. Carey | August 25, 2007 3:31 PM

Eventually the cognitive dissonance becomes too much. All those things that seem to be head scratchers and do not make sense, do make sense if you stop believing certain myths.

Posted by Doug | August 25, 2007 4:54 PM

There actually is some law that governs these people, but it is extremely difficult to enforce. There is the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, Amended in 2004, but that has only prosecuted one person in Turkey for a killing on a base. There is the Special Maritime and Territorial Jurisdiction Statute, which prosecuted David Passaro last year. There is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which was recently amended to allow for military jurisdiction over civilians accompanying the armed forces "in a contingency operation."

There is the possibility of prosecuting someone under the War Crimes Act or the Torture Statute, but that probably won't happen. See also H.R. 2740, which would create an FBI taskforce to oversee all crimes committed by contractors in any theater of operations. Curiously enough, the Senate version of that bill was introduced by Obama, and one would think he would say something about the issue on the campaign trail. Who knows.

Posted by eggman | August 25, 2007 6:12 PM

When are people going to get a clue?

The government - any government anywhere in human history, now or in the past or in the future - is NOT "here to help you."

Stop looking for rationality in the behavior of the state. There is none. It is by definition a pathological and criminal enterprise.

There are no exceptions, except for very, very short and temporary periods.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 25, 2007 8:01 PM

See also Matt Taibbi's devastating new long piece in Rolling Stone, "The Great Iraq Swindle: How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury," http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle/print.

Posted by jason | August 26, 2007 12:19 AM

Would you be in a hurry to sue people who know 21 ways of killing you without leaving a trace?

Posted by James Wimberley | August 26, 2007 1:30 PM

The Monopoly of Violence is the core power of the State. Ideally but not necessarily, its controlled by a democratic rule and judicial restraint.

A battlefield with tens of thousands of mercenaries who don't take orders from a lawful chain of command is a bigger threat to liberty than reinstating the draft. A

Its far better to have a universal military service (of the Swiss or Israeli sort) that to hire mercenaries. A regime that outsources its military functions is doomed.

Posted by beowulf | August 26, 2007 4:18 PM