"Jackasses with Guns": Mercenaries Terrorize Iraq

Out of the dozens upon dozens of reports of abuses by private contractors as part of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only one prosecution of a contractor has taken place.

This, says a new report from Human Rights First, epitomizes the woefully insufficient response by the U.S. government to hold private contractors accountable for abuses against local nationals.

"Holding contractors responsible for criminal abuses has not been a high priority of the U.S. government," said the report, "Private Security Contractors at War: Ending the Culture of Impunity," which is based on interviews, court records, government reports, declassified documents and other documentary sources. "At times the government has appeared to view this issue with shocking indifference."

"There was little in the way of standards for hiring and training security contractors. There was no oversight of their activities. And most glaring of all, there was absolutely no legal accountability for misconduct," said Congressman David Price of North Carolina at a press conference to launch the report last week.

The report said that while the legal framework to deal with abuses by private security contractors is already in place, the U.S. Justice Department and in some cases the Defense Department have done little to respond to such charges, often forgoing investigations, let alone prosecutions.

"The Justice Department bears primary responsibility for this inaction," said the report. "Today most private security contractors operate in an environment where systems of criminal accountability are rarely used. This has created a culture of impunity." The now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein issued CPA Order No. 17 which gave contractors immunity from the Iraqi justice system, but the report says that this does not affect the ability of the U.S. government to go after its own citizens.

Speakers at the press conference and the report itself both said that the military does take some steps to curb criminal activity in Iraq. More than 60 U.S. military personnel have been court marshaled for deaths of Iraqi nationals through the pre-existing internal military criminal justice system.

However, just one contractor has been tried for violence or abuse towards local nationals, says the report, which examined over 600 classified Serious Incident Reports (SIRs) on incidents involving the use of force by or attacks upon private security contractors in Iraq over a nine-month period in 2004-2005.

Contractors have emerged in recent years as a critical part of the war effort. In previous wars, contractors played a much smaller role, but now they make up a major part of the U.S. force in Iraq.

Even following President George W. Bush's troop surge, private contractors working for the U.S. still outnumber military personnel in Iraq, with roughly 160,000 soldiers and 180,000 contractors.

The shift was part of former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's doctrine of fighting wars with fewer troops but has its origins in the "peace dividend" of the early 1990s that saw the end of the Cold War thereby allowing for less defense spending.

The vast numbers of contractors in the forefront of wars, however, has not been accompanied by a bureaucratic system to deal with accountability. The U.S. Code of Military Justice, a Pentagon Criminal Investigations Unit and the military chain of command do not exist for contractors.

When the incidents of alleged contractor abuse began to publicly surface -- largely focused on the role of contractors carrying out interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison -- Rumsfeld said that the contractors were largely responsible for policing themselves.

"Contractors should not be responsible for law enforcement," said Columbia University law professor Scott Horton, noting that this is the primary function of the Justice Department. "The bottom line is that the Justice Department has gone AWOL."