Posted on 10/23/2010 11:55:28 AM PDT by lbryce
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.
The documents sketch, in vivid detail, a critical change in the way America wages war: 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.
There have been many abuses, including civilian deaths, to the point that the Afghan government is working to ban many outside contractors entirely.
The use of security contractors is expected to grow as American 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The article starts off in breathless,meticulously-crafted detail like some high-intensity action-thriller, the sense of imminent danger abounds, death lurks everywhere.... blah, blah, blah, blah blah, blah, blah, blah
Hey, New York Slimes;
Did you not get the memo that the war is over, the war was won, our soldiers coming home, no more road-side bombs blowing up..Nobody gives a rat's *ss about the "treasure trove" you've trumpeted as being the "greatest" leak ever.
The war is over. Move along, move along, Nothing to see here...
and while you're at it why not try getting a life instead of going after "non-news" news stories.
Did I also mention to please go F**K yourselves? No? All right then. New York Slimes, please go F**K your collective self.
Obvious these docs show little of consequence.
We are the only country that fights wars so carefully.
Between the French and the Germans,,we probably had more contractors during the Rev war....
“Added to the Chaos of War”??????
So without them it would have been a nice, calm war?
They’re really reaching to come up with something apocalyptic and Watergate-level from their little treasure trove, but it looks like the pickin’s aren’t giving them much.
I agree and disagree with this article. I agree that armed contractors should not be in a war zone doing the job that the US military SHOULD BE DOING. It just adds to the chaos of the situation and increases the number of unnecessary civilian and military deaths. I kind of think it’s a sign of the continued decline of western civilization that we need mercenaries in order to persecute a war.
I disagree with the whole notion that the media continually tries to present of a clean, no collateral damage type of war is what is expected from modern armies. War is messy, chaotic and is intended to “break things and kill people”. These operations reports just confirm what anybody with any sense would tell you, people get killed in a war zone, BIG SURPRISE! Who would have thought?
We never should have invaded Iraq, there was no real threat and Bush knew that. We had a real reason for getting into Afghanistan but mucked that up horribly by using proxies at first, letting Osama get away. OK we’ve screwed it all up so why are we still in these hell holes? Oil is the reason for Iraq but as wimpy as we’ve been acting I don’t see that our being forward positioned is going to do us much good in the future. I see this ending just like Vietnam, we’ll get tired and slink off leaving our “allies” holding the bag in a few years. Sucks, we should have just nuked the Taliban after 9/11 and be done with it, probably would have resulted in less deaths and would have scared the crap out of anyone even thinking about attacking the US. Instead what we’ve done makes us look as weak as we are and will only encourage more attacks in the future.
Do the docs go past Jan 2009?
American citizens, contracted by the US Government to provide security in a war in which America is a belligerent, are not mercenaries.
I tend to doubt that any docs will turn up that embarrass the current administration.
I agree too, and the use of such contractors is a direct result of the BRACs/RIfs of the Clinton years. I clearly remember DoD making all kinds of wonderful promises that civilians could easily replace military personnel in "non-critical" security and support missions, thereby justifying the layoff of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors, who of course were long gone when they were sorely needed to stabilize Iraq in 2003-2004.
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