-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- September 23, 2007 Risky Business The Deadly Game of Private Security By JOHN F. BURNS CAMBRIDGE, England ON a stifling summer's day in Baghdad a couple of years ago, a senior American officer bound for a visit to troops in the Iraqi hinterland was preparing to board an army Black Hawk at the helicopter landing zone in Baghdad's Green Zone command compound. With undisguised disdain, he fixed his gaze across the concrete toward two smaller helicopters taking off from a hangar operated by Blackwater USA - the private security company whose men, while guarding an American diplomatic convoy, were involved last week in a Baghdad shootout that killed at least eight people and, according to an Iraqi government report, as many as 20. In a style now familiar to many living beneath Baghdad's skies, a Blackwater sharpshooter in khaki pants, with matching T-shirt and flak jacket, sat sideways on the right side of each chopper, leaning well outside the craft. With their automatic weapons gripped for battle, their feet planted on the helicopter's metal skids, and only a slim strap securing them to the craft, the men looked as if they were self-consciously re-creating the movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme. Blackwater defends its low-flying, ready-to-shoot posture as a powerful deterrent to attacks on American officials being moved through the capital's streets. But that posture has become, to the company's critics, a hallmark of its muscle-bound showiness. As the Blackwater machines cleared the landing zone's fence that day, the American officer leaned toward a companion and, over the thwump-thwump of the Black Hawk's rotors, voiced his contempt. "If I've got one ambition left here," he said, "it's to see one of those showboats fall out." >From the moment Blackwater arrived in Iraq in 2003, on the heels of the >American invasion, much about its operations has seemed tinged with an >aggressive machismo that has led its critics, including many in the American >military, to dismiss its operatives - and counterparts from at least 25 other >private security companies, with a combined manpower estimated between 20,000 >and 30,000 - as "cowboys," "hired guns," and other, still harsher, terms. Partly, the disparagement stems from the contempt with which professional military men have traditionally viewed mercenaries - especially those who earn, like some contractors in Baghdad, as much as $1,000 a day for skills and risks that bring about the lowest-paid American soldier a tenth of that. Not even four-star generals earn as much. The security contractors' advocates counter by pointing to the guards' expertise. The highest-paid learned their skills in units like the Navy Seals, the Army's Delta Force, and equivalent units in the British, Australian, South African and other militaries. With rare exceptions, the men look and sound the part, with tattooed forearms, close-cropped hair or shaven heads, and a taciturn manner that discourages any but the most cryptic exchanges with outsiders. The value of their skills, their proponents say, is indicated by the Pentagon's willingness to pay Special Forces' re-enlistment bonuses of as much as $150,000. But that much and more can be a single year's salary with companies like Blackwater. There is no avoiding the fact that these bodyguards do work that is both extremely hazardous, and indispensable. Blackwater's involves a State Department contract to protect American officials, including the ambassador. Such officials are among the most endangered individuals in Iraq; nevertheless, no senior American officials have been assassinated, while the murder of senior Iraqi officials has become almost commonplace. Together with other security contractors - notably the American companies DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, and the British-run Aegis Security and Erinys International - Blackwater operates in a nightmarish landscape. No trip outside the Green Zone is remotely safe. The enemy lurks everywhere among the population. Attackers show no mercy for innocent bystanders, who commonly outnumber intended targets. Each mission carries the threat of roadside bombs, suicide attacks by explosives-packed cars and trucks, and ambushes by insurgents. Reliable figures are elusive, but figures quoted by security industry insiders suggest that more than 100 contractors in Iraq have been killed, and scores of others wounded. Against this, critics point to a pattern of recklessness in the use of deadly force, of a kind that the Iraqi government, and some Iraqi witnesses, have alleged - and Blackwater has denied - in the episode last Sunday in Baghdad's Nisour Square. While Blackwater armored vehicles accompanying diplomats were sent to close off traffic into the square, a car entering it failed to heed an Iraqi policeman's signal to stop, and it came under fire that killed the driver, a passenger and a baby in her arms. There is dispute over the ensuing gunfight, and whether Blackwater personnel, insurgents or nearby Iraqi troops caused the deaths. An Iraqi government probe later found Blackwater "100 percent guilty" in the killings, and government leaders demanded an end to Blackwater activities. Blackwater responded that its contractors fired in self-defense. After a four-day suspension, a compromise on Friday allowed Blackwater to resume "essential missions" while an Iraqi-American commission investigates. To those who have watched the private security companies' operations for the past four years, the only real surprise was that the crisis was so long in coming. The seeds were sown in the first year of the American occupation, when a decree by the American administrator L. Paul Bremer III exempted security companies and their employees from accountability under Iraqi law for deaths and injuries caused in the execution of their duties. Although Congress in 2005 instructed the Pentagon to bring contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, no action has been taken, leaving the contractors in a legal no-man's land - in effect, at liberty to treat all Iraq as a free-fire zone. No official records have been made public of how many innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed by contractors. But a glimpse at the scale was offered by one American general who kept his own tally, Brig. Gen. Karl R. Horst of the Third Infantry Division; he told The Washington Post in 2005 that he had tracked at least a dozen shootings of civilians in Baghdad between May and July that year, with six Iraqis killed. "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff," the paper quoted the general as saying. "There's no authority over them." But critics say the heart of the problem lies in an attitude that the security contractors share with the American military, one that elevates "force protection" to something approaching an absolute. This, the critics say, has the effect of valuing the saving of American lives above avoiding risk to innocent Iraqis. The attitude has its origins in Vietnam, where the appalling American combat losses left succeeding generations of American commanders with an instinct to apply rapid increments of firepower - what the military calls "escalation of force" - with the goal of sparing American casualties. After some of the most damaging incidents in Iraq, especially the killing by marines of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha in November 2005, the American command ordered new restraints on force escalation that had the effect of sharply cutting incidents in which troops opened fire on civilians. But the change appeared to have scant impact on security contractors, whose attitudes, unconstrained by concern at being held accountable under law, continued to cast a pall of fear and resentment among Iraqis. This has had the effect - as officers like General Horst have said - of undermining Iraqi trust in the American forces, and in the wider American enterprise in Iraq, since many Iraqis who survive or witness negligent shootings make no distinction between an American in uniform and one in the paramilitary guise of a contractor. Contractors say the high profile of their armored convoys, coupled with the covert nature of the insurgents, places a premium on high mobility and rapid response - driving at high speed and in a bullying manner through city traffic and driving on the wrong side of boulevards and expressways, always ready to resort instantly, at the first hint of threat, to heavy firepower. It is a formula fraught with potential for error. To be overtaken on Baghdad's airport road by a private security convoy driving at 120 miles an hour, with contractors leaning out of windows or part-opened doors with leveled weapons, waving their fists in a frantic pantomime, is a heart-stopping experience even for other Westerners in armored cars with guards of their own. For ordinary Iraqis, with no weapons and no armoring, it can be pure terror. At their worst, some contractors have made Iraq into a grim playground for acting out tendencies that have gone beyond bullying. In a Virginia civil court case against Triple Canopy last month, two former employees claimed that their supervisor - like his accusers, a veteran of the United States military - shot randomly into two Iraqi civilian vehicles on the airport road in Baghdad last year, after telling them that he wanted to "kill somebody" before leaving the country on vacation. The supervisor denied it. Just why some contractors resort to such extremes is a study in war and the ways in which it plumbs the darker sides of human nature. In the military units where they acquired their weapons and tactical skills, the men who cause mayhem on the streets and highways of Iraq were subject to tight constraints - as one former soldier who does security work in Iraq and did not want to be identified expressed it in a private note to this reporter: "Being motivated, and also somehow restrained, by the trappings of history, and by being part of something large, collective, and, one hopes, right," this man wrote. "But being a security contractor strips much of this sociological and political upholstery away, and replaces it with cash."
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