by David Phinney
Friday March 29th 2024

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UPDATE: Rough Draft on Detained Contractors in Iraq

The word is that at least some of the security contractors detained by Marines under suspicion of shooting at guard tower in Fallujah are returning to the United States as early as Tuesday.


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The private security convoy barreling through the battle-scarred streets of Fallujah may not have had a clue that the U.S. Marines holding the city were especially jumpy and on edge. Insurgency attacks had reached a new peak in Iraq and three hours earlier, leathernecks of Regimental Combat Team-8 reported taking small arms fire in the city from gunman riding in several late-model trucks and sport utility vehicles. Marines had also witnessed passengers in vehicles firing at and near civilian cars on the street.
Unaware of these incidents, the security convoy working for Army contractor Zapata Engineering also heard gun blasts from unknown locations after swerving through traffic on their destination route. Then the convoy of white Ford trucks and an Excursion SUV veered left on the way leading to a Marine checkpoint. The convoy crossed over the spike strip in the road near the guard house and a tire went flat. The anxious contractors jumped into action, put on a spare. Within minutes, they began rolling again.
A Marine captain brought the convoy to a halt. Had anyone in the convoy shot at the guard tower? Negative, said a convoy member.
The captain was unconvinced.
Here is where the fog of war takes over and details get sketchy. The military has always had to cope with friendly fire incidents where soldiers of the same flag find themselves in confused conflict or friendly fire, but wartime conditions become even blurrier with an estimated 20,000 armed civilian security contractors cruising around a country teeming with non-uniformed insurgents. Not only does the legal status of private security forces remain uncertain, the chains of commands and rules between private companies and the military have multiplied — as has the confusion.
What is known is that the 16 American and three Iraq security workers in the convoy were suspected of shooting at the Marine tower and thrown in jail on the evening of May 28. All 19 sat there in small, 6 ft. by 8 ft. cells dressed in orange prison garb for three days without charges or legal counsel. Night and day, several sources said they listened to suspected Iraqi insurgents through the walls held nearby. The detained gunslingers under Army contract urinated in bottles in their cells and they say the food they were first served – Arab meals for the prisoners — was poor.
Stories then diverge. The Marines roughed up the security contractors before taking them to jail, according to some. They slammed the contractors one by one on the concrete. Some may have been bruised pretty badly.
One contractor said a Marine put a knee on his neck with his full body weight as another cut his boots off and stripped him of his wedding ring and religious ornaments. Twenty or 30 other Marines watched on, laughing as a uniformed woman with a military dog at her side snapped photographs, and taunts were made about the large salaries of private security contractors, often more than $100,000 a year – sometimes more than $200,000, he said.
The gathering crowd of Marines was saying things like “how is that contractor money now,” he said.
The Marines tell a different story.
“The contract personnel were treated professionally and appropriately the entire time they were in the custody of military personnel,” said Marines public affairs officer, Lt. Col. Dave Lapan, in an e-mail statement from Camp Fallujah. The series of events remain under investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the contractors’ weapons and vehicles were impounded, he said.
The suggestion that the contractors were publicly ridiculed is “categorically untrue,” he added. “Before they were taken to the detention facility, they were placed on the ground, flex-cuffed and searched per standard practice. They were not thrown to the ground.”
During their detention, the contactors were provided three meals a day and given access to unlimited amounts of bottled water and given allow visits from a chaplain, he said. No phone calls were allowed and they were detained for approximately 72 hours in accordance with “standard procedures.”
The contractors say they were never charged, they always maintained their innocence, and believe their treatment was unjust and humiliating. Although released from jail on May 31, several security workers wanting to return to the United States were still waiting to leave five days later.
“They were trying to railroad us,” said one, believing that the Marines had mistaken the Zapata convoy for the vehicles reported to have been “shooting up the town” an hour earlier.
Several wives of the security contractors back in the United States waiting for their daily phone calls from their husbands began thinking the worst when the calls stopped ringing from Iraq. They wondered if their loved ones might be dead, helplessly wounded or taken hostage. Zapata, the Charlotte, N.C., employer of the imprisoned contractors, never contacted them until a friend located the company president begging for news, they say.
“There were all these families sitting at home not knowing what’s going on,” says Jana Crowder, who runs the Web site, www.americancontractorsiniraq.com, from her home in Johnson City, Tenn. The Web site is a volunteer support network for wives of American contractors in Iraq.
“This worries me about our damn military. Here in America, you have the right to a phone call.”
The contractors and their wives are now lining up lawyers back in the United States. One wife of a contractor (who asked not to be identified until her husband returns to the United States) says her husband lost seven pounds while imprisoned. She believes the Marines were letting off steam over the rising tensions between armed contractors and the military.
“My husband is a former Marine and he loved this job,” she said, saying that many of the detained contractors also served in the Marine Corps. “It’s killing them knowing that Marines are doing this to them. These guys are putting their lives on the line, too.”
But very few battle lines are clearly drawn in the sand in this war pitting non-uniformed insurgents against civilian Iraqis, the coalition forces and contractors. Attacks occur anywhere. Add in an independently operated and uncoordinated force of heavily armed security guards protecting contractors buzzing around the country as they work on billions of dollars in reconstruction projects and military support and the battle lines become even more elusive.
This is not the first time that private military guards have been accused of shooting on the streets of Iraq, nor would it be the first time that two groups of heavily armed civilians working for the occupation forces have come mistakenly in conflict with the military or at each other.
Four former security contractors and retired military veterans told NBC News in February that they watched as innocent Iraqi civilians were fired upon, and one was crushed by a truck, by their colleagues who were employed by an American company named Custer Battles.
In late November 2004 soldiers in a U.S. Humvee fired ”six or seven rounds” at the tires of a vehicle was carrying foreign security guards on the road to the Baghdad airport. The day before an Iraqi police cruiser opened fire on a white sedan near the Babylon Hotel in central Baghdad. The occupants of the sedan, who are believed to be British private security guards, fired back killing one police officer and seriously wounding another.
Triple Canopy, which boasts of more elite special operations professionals than any other private security firm, also has had several friendly fire incidents with military in Iraq, said Joe Mayo, spokesman for the Lincolnshire, Ill., company. He says incidents sometimes can only be averted in just 30 to 35 seconds. “They call it the fog of war.”
Some private military contractors claim that the Iraqi resistance may even be masquerading as private security convoys in their attacks, in part, to inflame hostility toward coalition forces occupying Iraq.
An alert, dated mid-May, distributed by a large security contractor to its employees and clients notes several recent incidents north of Fallujah where citizens were being shot at from SUVs including two occasions of four white “GMC Suburban-type” trucks firing “well-aimed shots at vehicles on the side of the road.”
“There is speculation that foreign fighters are disguising themselves,” says the alert. “Insurgent involvement is entirely possible….This situation is of great concern.”
Hoping to better coordinate these private security companies operating in Iraq, The U.S. Army awarded a $293 million security contract last May to a controversial British firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd. Responsible for directing security efforts for 10 prime contractors in Iraq, the company has met with mixed reviews.
“There is no assurance that Aegis is providing the best possible safety and security for government and reconstruction contractor personnel and facilities,” the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction asserted in an audit released this April.
What makes the situation lethal is the fact that neither the private military guards, working for the occupation forces and the reconstruction companies, nor their enemies, wear military uniforms or travel in military vehicles.
Detaining the Zapata contractors only reflects what many say is the growing confusion and tension caused by placing armed private security forces in the same areas of combat as military personnel. The two groups often follow different rules and objectives and lack clear lines of communication.
“When you multiply the kinds of forces, you complicate the chains of command and the relationships among them,” notes Peter Singer, a defense expert and senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, who is a leading critic of private military companies. “The decisions that contractors make on their own, often make the military’s job harder. That tension is now bubbling to the surface.”
Journalist and author, Robert Pelton Young, who has spent months with private military contractors in Iraq and who is writing a book on the use of contractors in the war on terror said that detaining the Zapata contractors strikes him as the “first blatant example of contractors being treated as criminals.”
“Animosity seems to be building between Bush’s contractors and Bush’s war,” he observed.
But the treatment of Zapata’s people has no legal basis since security contractors operate with very little legal jurisdiction hanging over them, he said. “Contractors have carte blanche over there,” he said. “The Marines knew who those people are. There’s no reason to hold them for 72 hours.”
Even those actively engaged with the operations of private security companies in Iraq seem to be in disagreement over legal jurisdiction.
In the final days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, CPA administrator Paul Bremer issued an order, known as Memorandum 17, requiring all private security companies to register with Iraq’s Ministries of Trade and Interior. The order mandated that contractors licensed, subject to audits and that weapons be registered and licensed. Contractors were also expected to follow engage in force only in self-defense and the defense of civilians.
Despite ambiguous language of the order about those companies under contract with the U.S. military, Lawrence Peter, Director for Private Security Company Association of Iraq, believes if a private security company is not registered, then it operates illegally.
“I can say without a shadow of a doubt that there is no company named Zapata that is a licensed Private Security Company under the terms of CPA Memorandum 17,” he said. “I do not know under what legal authority those men thought they were operating, but whatever it was, it was not in keeping with the law of Iraq nor consistent with what professional, responsible and law-abiding private security companies are doing here.”
The Army Corps of Engineers, which has awarded multi-million-dollar contracts to Zapata Engineering to dispose of seized enemy munitions and explosives, disagrees. “They are not a security contractor,” said Corps spokeswoman Kim Gillespie, but “under the provisions of their task order, they can subcontract or direct hire qualified security personnel as needed.”
Gillespie said it is her understanding that the Marines in Fallujah are in the process of returning any government property to the Corps, but could not comment on what legal grounds the Zapata contractors had been detained. “You will need to check with the Marine Corps,” she said.

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One Response to “UPDATE: Rough Draft on Detained Contractors in Iraq”

  1. Remy says:

    Having served in the US Navy for four (4) years specifically Naval Air from 74-78 and having gone through schools and other events with “Grunts”, I can easily see them beating the shit out of these guys and saying exactly what they’re qouted as saying. It takes a certain “type” to be a Marine and if you’re a Lord of the Flies type guy, and a bully at heart, you’ll LOVE the Marines…OORAH!

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