Bury Me Broken

Contractors in Iraq by Jeanne d'Arc at Tom Tomorrow

From Tom Tomorrow: [I copied the entire post because it is the most poignant piece on the subject I have heard.]

Jeanne d'Arc:
Contractors

The Los Angeles Times had a somewhat confusing he said/she said piece last week about a group of mostly American contractors in Falluja who the Marines detained and -- according to the contractors -- physically abused:

Mark Schopper, a lawyer for two of the contractors, said that his clients, both former Marines, were subjected to "physical and psychological abuse." He said his clients told him that Marines had "slammed around" several contractors, stripped them to their underwear and placed a loaded weapon near their heads.

"How does it feel to be a big, rich contractor now?" the Marines shouted at the men, Schopper said, in an apparent reference to the large salaries security contractors can make in Iraq.
He also said that during their detention, the workers' relatives in the United States received phone calls from people with American accents threatening to kill their loved ones if they talked about the incident.

AP picked up the story yesterday.

The Marines deny they abused anyone, but the tension between underpaid military and overpaid contractors rings true. We've been hearing about this from the beginning, and the LAT returns to the topic today with an interesting follow-up on those resentments and disputes.

On the other hand, the Marines say they took the contractors into custody for firing indiscriminately on both Marines and Iraqi civilians, and for carrying unauthorized weapons -- which the contractors deny. But today's LA Times piece, while not relating to the charges against these specific contractors, lends credence to the overall complaints about contractor behavior:
Some troops and officials see the contractors as "cowboys" who enrage ordinary Iraqis with wanton behavior. Journalists have observed them pointing their guns and firing rounds at Iraqis who come too close. Contractors have been seen racing around Baghdad, Fallouja and other hotspots in armored SUVs, forcing Iraqi civilians off the road.

Yes, I know. There's a bit of hypocrisy in American troops and officials accusing contractors of alienating people in Falluja, but that shouldn't evoke any sympathy for the contractors. According to Iraq's interior ministry, they kill at least 12 Iraqi civilians every week in Baghdad.

More than a year ago, Phil Carter wrote about the problem of accountability among people who "[l]egally speaking..actually fall into the same gray area as the unlawful combatants detained at Guantanamo." People out of uniform engaging in combat and all that stuff that's supposed to land you in the -- warning, political incorrectness approaching -- "gulag." (Quite a useful word, actually.)

"Gray area" is probably the polite way of phrasing it. From my angle, it looks a lot darker. According to CorpWatch, Zapata, the company whose employees were detained, is licensed as an engineering company, not a private security company, and is therefore operating illegally in Iraq. But, conveniently, everything in Iraq is so chaotic that nobody agrees on what it means to operate legally or illegally there.

What I find most interesting and sad about this story is a single line in today's LAT piece:
One of the few things both sides largely agree on is that the Marines treated the contractors like any other detainees — treatment the contractors found abusive and humiliating.
One of the detained Americans complains about being treated like "insurgent terrorists."
In other words, it would have been okay if the same treatment were given to an Iraqi.
It reminded me of a sad anecdote in last week's Washington Post piece on tensions between American and Iraqi forces:

Last week, U.S soldiers from 1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and Iraqis from 2nd Platoon, Charlie Company, clambered into their vehicles to patrol the streets of Baiji. The Americans drove fully enclosed armored Humvees, the Iraqis open-backed Humvees with benches, the sides of which were protected by plating the equivalent of a flak jacket. The Americans were part of 1st Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.As an American reporter climbed in with the Iraqis, the U.S. soldiers watched in bemused horror."You might be riding home alone," one soldier said to the other reporter."Is he riding in the back of that?" asked another. "I'll be over here praying."

I wondered whether the American soldiers cared at all that the Iraqi soldiers they had so much contempt for lived with that level of danger on a daily basis. It's a grim joke if an American, even a reporter, faces it. An accepted part of the routine if it's an Iraqi.

It will be interesting to see if Americans complaining about being abused by our military will get a more sympathetic hearing from our press than Iraqis have. I have a terrible feeling that all the ugly stories we've been hearing about contractors in Iraq since the war began, will, ironically, work to the military's advantage, making it all the easier to find scapegoats for everything that goes wrong, and provide one more way of swatting away charges of abuse.

Several decades from now, we can always apologize. Right now victims can't even get that.

posted by Jeanne d'Arc at 07:27 PM link

posted by niteskolar @ 2:44 PM