The
Paid (and Protected) Terrorists
By Ghali Hassan
07 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
On
Sunday 16 September 2007, at least 28 innocent Iraqi civilians, including
women and children, were murdered by Blackwater mercenary army. The
cold-blooded massacre was an unprovoked violence designed to terrorise
and strike fear among the Iraqi population living under murderous Occupation.
According to Iraqi police,
survivors of the massacre and numerous witnesses, the Sunday attack
at al-Nisoor Square was unprovoked and deliberate. It is just one of
countless cold-blooded massacres of Iraqi civilians by U.S. forces and
foreign mercenaries (“private security contractors”). These
massacres were not isolated “incidents”, a euphemism used
by the U.S. Government and Western media to describe the murder of innocent
Iraqi civilians by U.S. forces and foreign mercenaries. These crimes
are virtually an every day unprovoked occurrence, and have inflicted
“significant casualties and property damage” on the Iraqi
civilian population.
There are more foreign mercenaries
than foreign soldiers. Their number range from 160,000 to 180,000, working
in more than 180 mercenary firms. Some of the mercenary firms (e.g.
Titan and CACI International) involved in torture, abuses and even murder
of Iraqi prisoners and Iraqi detainees at U.S.-run prisons, including
Abu Ghraib.
Of the mercenary firms, Blackwater
is the largest of the U.S. State Department mercenary firms –
the others are DynCorp and Triple Canopy -, with an additional contract
worth $15 billion from the Pentagon. Blackwater is deeply embedded in
the Bush Administration through its strong ties to the Republican Party
and the Evangelical Christians. Blackwater mercenaries are America’s
Brownshirts, and according to author Naomi Wolf; “most [Americans]
don't know that Blackwater has a mandate to start operating in the U.S.,
and in fact they have already done” so in hurricane-ravaged New
Orleans.
In addition to foreign mercenaries,
the U.S. Administration has created, armed and finance local militias
to foment civil strife and divert public attention and the Resistance
away from the Occupation. The U.S. administration encourages and uses
the violence to destabilise not only Iraq, but also the entire region
and justify U.S. military presence and the ongoing Occupation of Iraq.
According to a memorandum
prepared by U.S. congressional House Committee on Oversight and Government
Reform, Blackwater’s mercenaries have been involved in 195 acts
of violence from 01 January 2005 through 12 September 2007 (citing Blackwater’s
“incidents reports”). This is an average of 1.4 shooting
per week. However, a former Blackwater mercenary who spent three years
in Iraq, told NBC News, his 20-man team averaged “four or five”
deliberate shootings a week, or several times the rate of 1.4 shootings
a week reported by the company. The Memorandum noted that, in most cases
(84 per cent), Blackwater mercenaries were found to have acted unprovoked
and deliberately murdered Iraqi civilians.
Almost all Blackwater crimes
against Iraqi civilians went unnoticed and most of the crimes were covered-up
and forgotten. According to the House Committee memorandum: “The
State Department's primary response was to ask Blackwater to make monetary
payments [and] to put the ‘matter behind us’ rather than
to insist upon accountability or to investigate Blackwater personnel
for potential criminal liability”. Blackwater is also involved
in writing-up the Sate Department’s initial report “investigating”
the September 16th cold-blooded massacre of Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.
The aim seemed to cover-up and conceals the murder of innocent Iraqi
civilians by foreign mercenaries protecting Occupation officials.
The U.S. (Bush) Government
pays Blackwater $1,222 per day for one Blackwater “Security Specialist”,
which “amounts to $445,891 per contractor” per year. In
addition, mercenaries use the latest and most lethal weapons. According
to Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s
Most Powerful Mercenary Army, foreign mercenaries in Iraq are even using
“experimental ammunition” that U.S. forces are not allowed
to us. The bullets which made of “blended metal” are designed
to shatter on impact, creating “untreatable wounds” and
completely destroying that section of the victim’s body. Foreign
mercenaries are not subjected to any Iraqi laws, and immune from prosecution.
Immunity from prosecution
for crimes committed in Iraq, including killing Iraqi civilians, is
not coincident. The so-called Order 17, issued by U.S. Proconsul, Paul
Bremer in June 2004 – as a reminder of Iraq’s fake sovereignty
under murderous Occupation –, grants sweeping immunity to foreign
mercenaries and outlaws working for the Occupation in Iraq. Order 17
is simply a licence to kill. With a U.S.-installed puppet government
in Baghdad, the murderers of Iraqis civilians will remain unpunished
and protected, unless Order 17 and the likes are abolished. The puppet
government has acknowledged that “Iraqis do not understand how
a foreigner could kill an Iraqi and return a free man to his own country”.
What a shameful country?
In April 2004, Blackwater
mercenaries were involved in indiscriminate shooting of peaceful Iraqi
protesters in Najef. The crimes weren’t even reported. A video
(America’s Private Army) on YouTube
shows a Blackwater thug describing Iraqi civilians they are murdering
as “fuckin' niggers”. In a 2005 video
posted on GlobalResearch, British mercenaries were shown shooting at
Iraqi civilians “for entertainment”. So far, no one has
been brought to justice for killing Iraqi civilians, and all those who
committed crimes against Iraqi civilians have been smuggled out of Iraq.
Furthermore, in March 2003,
Iraqis killed four Blackwater mercenaries in Fallujah in retaliation
for the killing of 18 Iraqi civilians, the U.S. army took revenge. In
April 2004, the City of 300,000 people was besieged by U.S. marines
and their collaborators. As a result of subsequent U.S. attacks lasted
several months and a violent invasion in November, Fallujah was deliberately
destroyed. More than 6,000 innocent civilians were murdered in cold
blood by U.S. marines and collaborators. Today, the City, like many
Iraqi cities and towns, remains a ghost town and most of its population
are displaced refugees.
Iraqi civilians have become
preys for “trigger happy” foreign mercenaries and U.S. troops.
The murder of innocent Iraqi civilians has been normalised, and murder
charges against U.S. soldiers and mercenaries accused of killing Iraqi
civilians have been dropped in order to encourage recruitment of soldiers
and foreign mercenaries. More than a million innocent Iraqi civilians,
mostly women and children have been killed as a result of this illegitimate
murderous Occupation and the 2003 illegal act of aggression perpetuated
by war criminals aiming at dominating the world by force. Lets’
not forget that the war on Iraq is a war crime against humanity.
As I write these lines, U.S.
occupying troops backed by aircraft attacked a town north of Baghdad
at dawn on Friday (05 October 2007), killing at least 25 innocent civilians
and injuring more than 28. On Thursday, the U.S. military admitted that
it had killed five women and four children in a raid by fighter jets
on a house in the small Iraqi village of Babahani. The Pentagon had
initially reported the killing of “seven suspected insurgents”
in the airstrike on the civilian neighbourhood. Two days earlier, U.S.
helicopter gunships attacked a neighbourhood in Baghdad and killed at
least seven civilians. The U.S. army in Iraq is in itself a foreign
mercenary army differing only from other foreign mercenary armies in
that it provides the soldiers with uniforms and use them to protect
state power.
Finally, Blackwater’s
mercenaries and other foreign mercenaries are part of U.S. military
Occupation and therefore are accountable by the Uniform Code of Military
Justice. If not; they should be prosecuted in U.S. courts. If Iraq is
a “sovereign” state, then any one committed crimes in Iraq
should be subject to prosecution in Iraqi courts.
Under the U.S. Federal Criminal
Code, which also defines terrorism, the massacres of innocent Iraqi
civilians by foreign (Blackwater) mercenaries in Iraq were deliberate
acts of terrorism not different from other acts of terrorism.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.
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