The heat's on private contractors
By William Fisher
NEW YORK - The publication of a mother lode of secret field reports from the
Iraq War are shining a bright light on heretofore unknown or under-reported
suspicions about the power of private security contractors and the abuse of
Iraqi prisoners by their fellow Iraqis, often with their United States military
counterparts "turning a blind eye".
The release of the 392,832 documents by WikiLeaks - the same website
responsible for the recent release of 77,000 secret reports covering six years
of the Afghanistan War - drew an immediate response from the Pentagon, as well
as efforts by unfriendly nations to paint the US military in the most gruesome
possible light.
Geoff Morrell, the US Defense Department press secretary, strongly condemned
both WikiLeaks and the release of the Iraq
documents.
"We deplore WikiLeaks for inducing individuals to break the law, leak
classified documents and then cavalierly share that secret information with the
world, including our enemies," he said.
Iran's Press TV declared, "Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has released
documents suggesting that the Pentagon instructed US-led forces to 'secretly'
torture detainees in Iraq."
The document release also unleashed a flood of bickering among competing Iraqi
politicians. For example, a senior member of the Iraqiya bloc led by former
Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi called for an investigation into possible
connections between torture operations in Iraqi prisons and Prime Minister Nuri
al-Maliki.
The March 7 parliamentary elections produced a stalemate between Allawi and
Maliki, and both are still chasing the prime minister's job long after the
election.
The WikiLeaks disclosures fall into five categories: reliance on private
contractors; the so-called "surge", the addition of 30,000 additional US troops
to work with willing Iraqis; the deaths of Iraqi civilians - killed mostly by
other Iraqis, but also by the US military; a litany of prisoner abuse by Iraqis
- from which US officials sometimes turned a blind eye - even more lurid than
the infamous photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib prison in 2004; and the
"aggressive" intervention of Iran's military providing "weapons, training and
sanctuary" to Shi'ite combatants.
The WikiLeaks documents are sparse on information about mistreatment of
prisoners in US-run detention facilities, but heavy on the chilling details of
abuse of Iraqis by Iraq's own army and police.
During the period covered by the WikiLeaks documents, at least six prisoners
died in Iraqi custody, most of them in recent years. Hundreds of reports
referenced beatings, burnings and lashings. Such treatment appeared to be
considered normal by the Iraqis.
According to The New York Times, "In one case, Americans suspected Iraqi army
officers of cutting off a detainee's fingers and burning him with acid. Two
other cases produced accounts of the executions of bound detainees. And while
some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans, most noted in the archive
seemed to have been ignored, with the equivalent of an institutional shrug:
soldiers told their officers and asked the Iraqis to investigate."
United States military orders said that if US personnel were not directly
involved in prisoner abuse, US soldiers need not take any action. This order
caused US forces to look the other way in cases of the abuse of Iraqis by
Iraqis.
When US forces discovered and reported abuse, Iraqis frequently failed to act.
One report said a police chief refused to file charges "as long as the abuse
produced no marks". Another police chief told military inspectors that his
officers engaged in abuse "and supported it as a method of conducting
investigations".
The WikiLeaks documents also show that US forces sometimes used the threat of
Iraqi brutality to persuade prisoners to cooperate with interrogators.
It was not until later in the war that some of the worst examples of Iraqi
abuse came to light. For example, in August 2009, an Iraqi police commando unit
reported that a detainee committed suicide in its custody, but an autopsy
conducted in the presence of a US official "found bruises and burns on the
detainee's body as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and
neck". The report stated that the police "have reportedly begun an
investigation".
And in December, 12 Iraqi soldiers, including an intelligence officer, were
caught on video in Tal Afar shooting to death a prisoner whose hands were tied,
The Times reports.
WikiLeaks reports that, while the US forces told the local Iraqi army
commander, no inquiry was begun because US soldiers were not involved.
It was not unusual, however, for US soldiers to intervene. One US soldier heard
screams in a prison cell and found two badly dehydrated detainees with bruises
on their bodies. He ordered them out of Iraqi custody.
In August 2006, WikiLeaks documents show, a US sergeant in Ramadi walked into
an Iraqi military police station and found an Iraqi lieutenant using an
electrical cable to slash the bottom of a detainee's feet. The sergeant stopped
him, but later he found the same Iraqi officer whipping a detainee's back.
One beaten detainee said in 2005 that "when the marines finally took him, he
was treated very well, and he was thankful and happy to see them".
The WikiLeaks documents may increase the scrutiny of the role of private
contractors, whose travails have been widely publicized since Blackwater (now
known as XeServices) was accused of opening fire on unarmed civilians in a
crowded main square in Baghdad in 2007 and killing 17 of them.
But the WikiLeaks disclosures, while reporting little that was unknown, paint a
far more detailed picture of the military sea-change that defined the United
States' involvement in Iraq. The New York Times says, "The early days of the
Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private
contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and
disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents."
The behavior of private security contractors in Iraq is already having serious
effects on the use of these same assets in Afghanistan. Abuses, including
civilian deaths, have driven the Afghan government to attempt to ban most
outside contractors entirely.
Numerous reports have forecast a substantial growth in the use of security
contractors in Iraq as US forces shrink. A July report by the Commission on
Wartime Contracting, a panel established by congress, estimated that the State
Department alone would need more than double the number of contractors it had
protecting the American Embassy and consulates in Iraq.
There are still more contractors than members of the military serving in
Afghanistan.
WikiLeaks is an international organization that publishes anonymous submissions
and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of
sources. Its website was launched in 2006.
The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese
dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company
technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Julian
Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, is its director.
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