Posted on 10/31/2007 11:41:39 AM PDT by Bokababe
Focusing on Blackwater while neglecting MPRI is like investigating Ivan Demjanjuk for years on end, but allowing Adolf Eichmann to live peacefully in Buenos Aires.
Up to 17 Iraqis were killed on September 16 by mercenaries working for the security company Blackwater USA, in what Iraqi and some U.S. officials say was unprovoked murder. Earlier this week two Armenian Christian women were killed by Unity Resources Group hired guns. A devastating report by the House Oversight Committee accused Blackwater of acting like murderous cowboys, but the firm still operates with impunity—unaccountable under either U.S. or Iraqi law. Yet while exposing the misdeeds of “security contractors” is necessary and long overdue, it is curious that the media have neglected the work of a far more sinister mercenary outfit, one that has caused thousand-fold more death and suffering over the years.
Since time immemorial kings and governments have hired militarily skilled men and groups to do their fighting and provide security services. In the two decades since the Iran-Contra scandal, however, a few major “international security firms” and “private military contractors” have come into being to satisfy a particular requirement of the U.S. government: to provide military training, logistics, arms, equipment and advice to foreign clients whenever it is desirable for Washington to be able to plausibly deny direct American involvement.....
(Excerpt) Read more at chroniclesmagazine.org ...
This is a hit piece on a company htat conducts training for U.S. forces.
.....Bob
htat = that
Iraqis called it murder so that makes it murder. BS. They were fired upon and they returned it. None of these guys want to end up like the four guys in Fallujah.
By they way, what ever happened to the five brit secuirty huys who were kiddmapped by people dressed as Iraqi security?
“This is a hit piece on a company that conducts training for U.S. forces.”
It does more than that. It trains foreign militias and armies, as well. For all we know, they could be training both sides — our boys, as well as the enemies who kill them. This is “a business enterprise” that Americans are paying for and we have a right to know who the hell these people are and what they do.
“Iraqis called it murder so that makes it murder. BS.”
I am not debating whether or not Blackwater was guilty or innocent in that incident. Frankly, I am on the side of anyone who kills our enemies.
But it is about time that we start debating whether or not a private company of mercenaries that can be used anywhere and anytime without necessary Congressional approval is in America’s best interests. We are footing the bill for them, don’t you think that we should know who they are and what they do as it affects our foreign policy and our own military?
I have read stories about how the US Military’s best and brightest are recruited by MMPI, Blackwater & others at salaries that are 5 times what the US military pays — so we train them and then mercenary companies hire them away. Shouldn’t this be a concern?
Privatizing our military capabilities worries me and it should worry all of us because it alters the balance of power between the President, Congress, the Military and our citizenry, whether we realize it yet or not. The President and Congress have always had to depend on a willing citizenry to make and fight wars. Privatizing the training and fighting makes it far too easy to start wars that our boys will have to finish and we will have to pay for. And these companies are in the business of making wars, not making peace — so whose side are they really on? Their own! And they profit from war, not peace —that is a huge difference from the aims of our own military.
I’ll listen to people like you when you come up with problems that are more than “theoretical.”
Until then, you’re just engagging in agit-prop!
bump for later
MPRI were wonderful to deal with and are excellent Americans. May God bless them.
Hey, wanna have some fun?
We could deconstruct her post the same way she deconstructs the contractor’s role.
They may pay them more but contractors DO NOT get any benefits whatsoever, they don’t get sick time, insurance, loans, healthcare, housing, vacation pay, tuition, their families receive nothing, etc. (BTW, I believe the military earns every one of those benefits and then some.) You only get paid when you are on the clock. You take on this job at your own risk. And why is wrong for soldiers who have had years of training not be able to apply them in the private sector? Some of the skills they are proficient at don’t necessarily carry over to civilian jobs. Besides that, there are some men who love to live life on the edge. A desk job would never do for them. And as for training foreigners, our own government has been doing it forever. Remember Manuel Noriega? He trained at Fort Benning and Fort Bragg.
Hard as this is to believe, this is not about you personally, Expat. Nor is this about “ganging up” on anyone.
It is about the fact that most Americans were not even aware of our use of mercenaries before this Blackwater incident or how it affects our country.
“As for trained soldiers getting out and going to work for these companies, so what, if you can make two or three times as much money doing contract work why not. People get out of the military everyday and go to work for companies to make more money. I was a contractor (mercenary if you like)and damn proud of it.”
That may be true, retired military have always left, often for the “greener” pastures of private business, but as taxpayers, we weren’t continuing to foot the bill for it either.
Yes, you may make “two or three times as much money doing contract work” but add on your companies profit and the US government through our taxes may be paying as much as ten times what what we would have paid you in the military. Good reason to give our own soldiers a raise — hell, yes! But not to hire contractors and give our own guys crap weapons and shielding to make up for what we are paying the contractors.
“Most of the guys I worked with were retirees or former military guys. All of our guys were American patriots first.”
OK, that may be true at the moment. But what guarantees that down the line? Nothing. And you don’t vote on your missions, Congress doesn’t vote on your missions, we don’t vote on your missions. The president can send you anywhere he wants for as long as we wants without any checks and balances on his power that are in place for our own military. Contractors are wild cards in the political process and in the balance of power that has kept our government in check.
Whether you want to see it or not, military contractors like MMPI and others have made it way too easy for our government to go to war for no good reason. Americans not willing to send enough of their sons to die for a foreign war that some DC bureaucrat dreams up? No problem. They just send MMPI or Blackwater and as long as we are willing to pay the tax bill or endure an enormous government deficit, no problem.
And we wonder why there is a disconnect between DC and us citizens? Because DC no longer needs us for anything other than paying taxes and voting some idiot in every four years (and they don’t even need all of us to vote)! They don’t need us for anything else, especially any input on foreign policy because they have guys like you to die for their foreign policy blunders upfront for a few dollars more, before our guys have to go in! All they need from us to shut up, work and pay taxes so that their cronies can profit from war. Is that really what America should be about? I don’t think so.
Blackwater employees DO NOT GET BENEFITS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Why, because they helped you with that dirty little ethnic cleansing operation for you in Croatia? Yes, we are real proud of them for that. Not!
Bull****.
These aren’t anywhere near the traditional mercenary that you seem to want to convince yourself that that they are.
Blackwater personnel are heavily vetted. The organization operates under contract to the US gov, as per design during the “draw downs” of the “peace dividend” restructuring.
It was decided at that time that there was no reason to continue the practice of long term employment in gov agencies for highly trained personnel that would only be needed during specific periods of conflict.
Most of the persons employed by Blackwater are former US spec ops and heavily secure in their loyalties.
Just because the mouth-breeders and their useful idiot snot-gobblers liable them as mercs and try to slather them with crap accusations, doesn’t make them so.
How many times do you have to get lied to, mislead and maliciously misinformed by the same agitpropers in the msm before you start to catch on to their pattern?
This smells like Serbiam propaganda to me, and any argument that includes the words “as far as we know” isn’t factual, it’s an opinion.
That's why we kicked ass in less than 96 hours.
What “ smacks of Serbian propaganda”? MPRI was hired by the Croat government to train them to do exactly what happened in the Medak pocket. That’s a fact, not propaganda. So where is the question mark?
These companies have been around longer than you think. When I was in Vietnam back in the mid sixties there were guys getting out and going to work for Raytheon and others to train the Saudi and other troops in the Middle East.
As far as it being about me personally I took it so because of your questioning the loyalties of these men and since I was one of them me too.
What crap weapons are you talking about anyway?
They're free to work where they choose once they leave military service. Good for them if they get paid well for an extremely difficult and dangerous job.
I repeat, Serb propaganda.
Obviously you have an ax to grind against MPRI, but that does not make it everybody else’s problem.
MPRI conducts training. Does it make sense to take highly trained and experienced active duty personnel out of the force and make them trainers? To do that, you first have to teach them to teach. That takes a year alone. Second it reduces the skills of the overall force. and last, it costs a hell of a lot more than what MPRI is paid. If you pay a contractor to do the training, you have continuity, the same training for all the troops, and combat skills are passed to the troops.
You asked “Why, because they helped you with that dirty little ethnic cleansing operation for you in Croatia?” MPRI conducted the military training, they did NOT do the ethnic cleansing. To blame them for the ethnic cleansing is like blaming the gun makers for all bank robberies.
.....Bob
The only way the president can send anyone anywhere is with congressionally approved funds. Congress allotted specific money to fund Blackwater’s contract in Iraq.
The bigger question is what would prevent a large multi national corporation from hiring this type of contractor for (say) if some two bit dictator nationalized their assets. I think we may see something like that in the future.
It’s not outside our military tradition. Letters of marque and reprisal come to mind...
You are full of sh*t, as much as you are ignorant.
Really? Section 8 says differently.
The Congress shall have Power To .....grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,
Today we call them "Contracts".
By the way the civilian contractors and private security firms have been used at least since World War II and probably before.
No, I brought up MPRI specifically in response to Diocletian’s statement, having known that he was referring to their training of the Croats prior to Operation Storm, because he is a Croat.
“MPRI conducts training. Does it make sense to take highly trained and experienced active duty personnel out of the force and make them trainers? To do that, you first have to teach them to teach. That takes a year alone. Second it reduces the skills of the overall force. and last, it costs a hell of a lot more than what MPRI is paid.”
Got the point about continuity, but how can MPRI be a for-profit company and continually lose money by giving away more than they earn on this?
And how are these companies able to pay “2 or 3 times the military pay” for the same job, plus make a profit for themselves, out of the same budget that we pay our troops? Doesn’t that mean that we should be paying our own troops more to keep them with us?
I am asking questions, because I cannot reconcile something as important as our national defense and something as time-honored as our military with the idea of contracting it out like we hire Manpower Temps If that pisses some people off, sorry but too bad. But as a citizen, I have every right to ask it!
“It’s not outside our military tradition. Letters of marque and reprisal come to mind...”
A Quick Wiki search yielded this, for those not familiar with Letters of Marque and Reprisal:
letter of marque and reprisal is an official warrant or commission from a government authorizing the designated agent to search, seize, or destroy specified assets or personnel belonging to a party which has committed some offense under the laws of nations against the assets or citizens of the issuing nation, and has usually been used to authorize private parties to raid and capture merchant shipping of an enemy nation.
The formal statement of the warrant is to authorize the agent to pass beyond the borders of the nation (”marque” or frontier), and there to search, seize, or destroy an enemy’s vessel or fleet not necessarily a nation. It is considered a retaliatory measure short of a full declaration of war, and, by maintaining a rough proportionality, has been intended to justify the action to other nations, who might otherwise consider it an act of war or piracy. As with a domestic search, arrest, seizure, or death warrant, to be considered lawful it needs to have a certain degree of specificity to ensure that the agent does not exceed one’s authority and the intent of the issuing authority.
In the past, a ship operating under a letter of marque and reprisal was privately owned and was called a “private man-of-war” or “privateer.” The French sometimes used the term lettre de course for its letters of marque, giving rise to the term corsair.
Letters of Marque were abolished in France by the 1856 Declaration of Paris, which was an annex to the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Crimean War. The United States was one of the main states not to ratify the Declaration.
United States
Article 1 of the United States Constitution lists issuing letters of marque and reprisal in Section 8 as one of the enumerated powers of Congress. One question is whether Congress can issue such a letter to the President, as an authorization for limited offensive warlike operations outside the territory of the United States. In 2002, Douglas Kmiec, then dean of the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that:
“ Letters of Marque and Reprisal are grants of authority from Congress to private citizens, not the President. Their purpose is to expressly authorize seizure and forfeiture of goods by such citizens in the context of undeclared hostilities. Without such authorization, the citizen could be treated under international law as a pirate. Occasions where one’s citizens undertake hostile activity can often entangle the larger sovereignty, and therefore, it was sensible for Congress to desire to have a regulatory check upon it. Authorizing Congress to moderate or oversee private action, however, says absolutely nothing about the President’s responsibilities under the Constitution.[1] ”
Because the difference between a privateer and a pirate was a subtle (often invisible) one, in 1856 the issuance of Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private parties was banned for signatories of the Declaration of Paris. The United States was not a signatory to that Declaration and is not bound by it. During the 1861-65 American Civil War and the 1898 Spanish-American War, however, the United States issued statements that it would abide by the principles of the Declaration of Paris for the duration of the hostilities. (The Confederate States of America issued Letters of Marque and Reprisal during the Civil War.)
The issue of Marque and Reprisal was raised before Congress by Rep. Ron Paul of Texas after the September 11, 2001 attacks[2], and again on July 21, 2007. Paul, defining the attacks as an act of “air piracy,” introduced the Marque and Reprisal Act of 2001, which would have granted the president the authority to use Letters of Marque and Reprisal against the specific terrorists, instead of warring against a foreign state. Paul compared the terrorists to pirates in that they are difficult to fight by traditional military means.[3]
Bokababe scores an embarassing own goal.
You aren’t an American, Diocletian and I am, born & bred. This isn’t your problem or your issue — except as having been a beneficiary of Clinton’s idiotic support of Islamo-fascists and lock-step Nazis in the Balkans. So go fly a kite...in a thunderstorm.
You have your sights aimed wrong. Truck drivers in Iraq (contractors) are paid $90-100K too. Cooks, in Iraq are apid $75-100K. The life of an expatriate is not an easy one. They have no PX privileges, no medical care, and pay for their chow in the mess hall.
But really think about it... we invest $250K in a young man to take him through basic training, advanced individual training, and give him millions of $$$ in equipment. He still has no training in the specific warfare.
We do not want to put all those dollars into cooks, and truck drivers. That role can be filled with a contractor.
BTW, we also hire Iraqis, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, and all sorts of contractors.
When you start putting the USA before Serbia, I’ll believe that you’re an American.
“You have your sights aimed wrong. Truck drivers in Iraq (contractors) are paid $90-100K too. Cooks, in Iraq are apid $75-100K. The life of an expatriate is not an easy one. They have no PX privileges, no medical care, and pay for their chow in the mess hall.”
I am not faulting the contract employees, I am trying to discover the economics of this. Private companies like Blackwater or MPRI do not continually function at “a loss” and stay in business. They are making money or they wouldn’t stay in business.
It sucks that you have no health insurance and have to pay for your food. But I’d like to know what the hell we are paying per head for each one of you and why you should be on their payroll (with no benefits) rather than on ours, with them. Because, I think chances are that while you are making far more as a private contractor than you would in our military, some people at the top of your company are getting really rich off of your sacrifice and we taxpayers are filling the bosses pockets instead of yours or our fighting men’s.
If “Truck drivers in Iraq (contractors) are paid $90-100K too. Cooks, in Iraq are apid $75-100K.”, what are we paying for them?
My background is in Human Resources and Personnel Planning. I’d hire a contract employee and pay $135 an hour for them, while the employee themselves got only $40 or $50 an hour for their work and the rest went to their company. I’d assume that it is the same or similar for you and other contractors.
I am trying to look at this issue from a variety of sides — economics being only one of them.
Also some gringos who were FFL and loved it.
I was recruited by Mad Mike Hoar once, passed on it.
I don’t give a rat’s ass what you believe, Diocletian.
I make no apologies whatever for trying to keep Americans from having to die for your frigging “country” or any other country in the Balkans. It was your problem and you made it ours. And for what? So the 9/11 bombers could jihad training in Bosnia? Or that Europe supply of sex-slaves and narcotics could keep flowing through Kosovo? Yeah, gee, thanks! You are a real “friend of America”. Maybe you’ll get an invite for the neo-Nazi “Thompson Tour” your guy is doing over here now, you sick bastard.
I have never, ever set foot in Serbia, not even once. I was in Croatia and in Montenegro, once, back in 1977 for a month visit of family there. (It was my father’s first visit there since he left in 1926. Dad later served in the US Army during WWII. My mother was born her in the US. ) My best friend wore a T-shirt on that visit with the words “F*ck Communism” and he got thrown out of Yugoslavia — while I agreed with the sentiment, I knew that the outcome for him was predictable so I didn’t wear my similar t-shirt there.
So save the bull for someone who doesn’t know better. I still see no value whatever to America for our involvement in Balkan politics and an enormous amount of harm done to America for it.
Americans didn’t die for Croatia nor did we make it America’s problem. Croatian-American relations are excellent and are only getting better. Jealousy will kill you :)
“Cry Havoc” against Islam, about time.
After I retired from the Army I found a position with an Air Force contractor. Due to personnel freezes laid on by the Congress, the Air Force could not hire any civil service people, but , they could contract out the position to a private company. Altho our salary's were slightly more than the equivalent Civil Service rates, the company did not have to equal the Civil Service retirement plan. I filled that position. BTW, I have no idea what they pay civil service employees in Iraq, but I would bet it is a grundle.
One type of contract the U.S. lets is a performance contract. It works like this:
The company is given a task to accomplish, for example, train military personnel on proper road guard procedures. The company uses Government resources, vehicles, weapons and salary's all paid for by the Government. They must accomplish their assigned tasks within budget, and within time constraints. All of that is paid for by the government. Once a year (I have seen 6 month evaluations) the company is paid an award fee based upon how well they performed. The contracting officer gets input from all levels of the command (in this case, road guard supervisors) on how well the troops were trained before they entered Iraq. The company then gets a numerical grade based on that score. Lets say the company has a $6 million contract for road guards and it is a 6 year contract. that means they (the company, not the troops)can get $1 million a year for this training. Remember this is the reward, not the employees salary's. If the company has accomplished 90% of the assigned tasks, they get only 90% of the award fee. That is not unrealistic, either. It takes only one security guard complaint for the contracting officer to dock the company big time. You also have to remember that the company has to come in under budget, in regards to employees and equipment.
In this performance based contract, the companies award is not based on how much they spend, but how well they do. NASA is famous for a cost plus contract, where the contractor adds its profit to the cost of the item or service.
....Bob
Dio: Are you referring to 'Operation Storm' (August 4, 1995) where "US-trained" Croation forces attacked Knin which led to many deaths and a massive population flight of up to 300,000 Serbs?
If so, then you're referring to the largest example of ethnic cleansing during the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Three Cheers Ole Boy!
"Be jealous of Diocletian" -- a Croat who lives in Bosnia under Muslim rule while I live on a ranch in California after just having returned from a month-long vacation in Italy. Right! LOL!
"Croatian-American relations are excellent and are only getting better."
Maybe it's because you are sending us your "best musical talent", but then again, I guess that no one sent you the memo about your beloved rock group, Thompson's appearances here in the US:
But then again, you have said that your dad was "a proud Ustashe", so what the hell!
Ditto, ditto, and ditto.
I know what you mean. During Nam I was trained to drop H-Bombs from B-52s. When I got out I couldn't find a comparable job in the civilian sector.
From what I saw in Afghanistan, concur.
You should have looked for a more compatable military specialty. As a tank gunner, combat engineer vehicle crewman and sometime evac section medic, I had no such problems whatsoever.
Spoken like a true nanny-stater. What's next Henny Penny, ground the helicopters that happen to be black?
I trust George Bush and AMERICAN contractors a hell of a lot more than I trust self-styled amateur pundits from the Art Bell School of Law and Government. The democrat's greatest wet-dream is for people like you to be taken seriously.
I'll start worrying about Posse Comitatus violations with Blackwater when I see a reason to think they are anything OTHER than what the administration is claiming...not to mention a few hundred thousand employees added to their payroll.
There is quite a bit of difference between claiming there is no threat when there manifestly is, and claiming there is a threat when there is none.
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