From: Biniam Haile \(SWE\) (eritrea.lave@comhem.se)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2008 - 21:17:27 EDT
The Return of U. S. Death Squads From Afghanistan to Africa
By CONN HALLINAN
Thu, 2008-09-11 09:42.
United Nations officials charge that secret "international intelligence
services" are conducting raids to kill Afghan civilians, then hiding the
perpetuators behind an "impenetrable" wall of bureaucracy.
Philip Alston of the UN Human Rights Council said that "heavily armed
internationals" leading local militias have killed scores of Afghan
civilians. Coalition forces have killed more than 200 Afghan civilians
since January.
He called the raids, which operate independent of the US and NATO
military commands, "unacceptable." Alston pointed to a specific incident
last January in which two brothers were killed during a raid in the
southern city of Kandahar, an area where the Taliban have a strong
presence.
"The [two] victims are widely acknowledged, even by well informed
government officials, to have no connection to the Taliban, and the
circumstance of their deaths is suspicious," he said.
When Alston tried to investigate the murders, however, he hit a
stonewall. "Not only was I unable to get any international military
commander to provide their version of what took place, but I was unable
to get any military commander to even admit that their soldiers were
involved," the UN official told the Financial Times.
Suspicion has fallen on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),
which led such teams into Afghanistan during the 1990s in an attempt to
capture or kill Osama bin Ladin, and again during the 2001 invasion.
According to Alston, the shadow units work out of two bases: U.S. Camp
Ghecko near Kandahar, and a base in the province of Nangarhar. "It is
absolutely unacceptable for heavily armed internationals, accompanied by
heavily armed Afghan forces, to be wondering around conducting dangerous
raids that too often result in killings without anyone taking
responsibility for them," he wrote in a recent UN report.
Something very similar may be going on in Iraq. In his latest book, "The
War Within," Bob Woodward writes that the U.S. military has a program to
"locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups." Last
month U.S. Special Forces killed the son and nephew of the governor of
Salahuddin Province north of Baghdad. Unlike the shootings at roadblocks
by U.S. troops, a common occurrence, Iraqi investigators say the two men
were essentially executed.
A U.S. spokesman said the raid was conducted to capture a "suspected Al
Qaeda in Iraq operative," and that the man was injured when he "charged"
the American troops. The other "suspected terrorist" was wounded and
arrested. "Both men were armed and presented hostile intent," the
spokesman said.
But according to a spokesman for Governor Hamed al-Qaisi, U.S. troops
broke into the house at 3 AM and shot the governor's 17-year old son to
death while he slept. The nephew, hearing the commotion, tried to enter
the room and was gunned down as well.
The killings are similar to one near Karbala in June, where a cousin of
current Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was killed. In both
cases, Iraqi authorities were kept in the dark about the impending
raids.
The question is: are Special Forces in Iraq and CIA units in Afghanistan
carrying out clandestine hits? In most places in the world, those groups
are called "death squads."
* * *
Mercenaries are on a roll. Last month's Associated Press story that the
infamous mercenary firm Blackwater Worldwide was getting out of the
private army business was a mistake. A company spokesman said the
reporter had misunderstood him. Indeed, as the Iraq war winds down,
firms like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp are finding new markets
to exploit, many of them in Africa.
As conservative military analyst David Isenberg points out in his
column, "Dogs of War," mercenaries are, in a sense, returning to their
modern roots. "The progenitor for many of today's private security firms
was the South-Africa-based Executive Outcomes, which fought in Angola
and Sierra Leone," says Isenberg.
Executive Outcomes and the South African Army were routed by Angolan and
Cuban troops during Angola's long and bloody civil war, a conflict that
was fueled in large part by apartheid Pretoria and the US, along with
help from Zaire and the People's Republic of China.
But the defeat was hardly a major setback for the mercenary industry.
It's hard to keep jackals down.
Cold War conflicts created a growth market, and, coupled with the Reagan
Administration's passion for privatization, mercenary organizations like
the U.S. Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) and DynCorp became
players in Latin America and the Balkans conflict.
While Ronald Reagan's and George W. Bush's administrations generally get
the credit for this privatization drive, as Tim Shorrock points out in
his book, "Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence
Outsourcing," it was Bill Clinton who really brought private enterprise
into the business of gathering intelligence and fighting wars.
According to Shorrock, Clinton "picked up the cudgel where the
conservative Reagan left off," and by the end of his last term, had cut
360,000 federal jobs, while spending on private contractors had jumped
44 percent over 1993.
The right-wing Heritage Foundation, a major force in the current Bush
Administration, called Clinton's 1996 budget the "boldest privatization
agenda put forth by any president to date."
One obvious advantage to hiring Blackwater, DynCorp, MPRI, and Triple
Canopy was that it short circuits Congressional oversight, bypasses
pesky obstacles like the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and hides the
cost of the wars.
Now the mercenaries are returning to their old haunts in Africa to train
"peacekeepers." The problem is that today's "peacekeeper" may become
tomorrow's thug. An examination of training programs by the U.S. Army's
Strategic Studies Institute found that "Every armed group that plundered
Liberia over the past 25 years had at its core" U.S. trained soldiers.
Addressing the current training of Liberian soldiers by DynCorp, the
study warns there is a definite downside "to creating an armed elite."
If the U.S. withdraws its training funds, "Liberia will be sitting on a
time bomb; a well-trained and armed force of elite soldiers who are used
to good pay and conditions of service, which may be impossible for the
government of Liberia to sustain on its own."
MPRI is training militaries in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mali,
Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda and Senegal. DynCorp is doing the same in Darfur
and Somalia. While the cover story is fighting terrorism and ensuring
stability, U.S. military intervention-direct and through mercenaries and
its client state, Ethiopia-has thoroughly destabilized Somalia, creating
a crisis that rivals Darfur.
While the malnutrition rate in Darfur is 13 percent, in some areas of
Somalia it is 19 percent. The UN considers 15 percent to be the
"emergency threshold.
"The situation in Somalia is the worst on the continent," says the UN's
top official in Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah.
According to Eric Laroche, the head of the UN's humanitarian services in
Somalia, conditions were much better under the Islamic Courts Union that
the U.S-sponsored invasion overthrew. "It was much more peaceful and
much easier for us to work. The Islamist s didn't cause us any
problems," he said.
In spite of Blackwater's reputation as trigger-happy cowboys who gunned
down 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians last year, the company may soon see
action in the Sudan. Actress and Darfur activist Mia Farrow recently met
with the corporation's owner, Erik Prince, to discuss using the company
in a military role in the western Sudan.
According to a 2007 study by the industrial College of the Armed Forces,
"Africa may do for the [mercenary] industry in the next 20 years what
Iraq has done in the past four years, provide a significant growth
engine."
Behind that growth, says Nicole Lee of TransAfrica, "is nothing short of
a sovereignty and resource grab." The National Energy Policy Development
Group estimates that by 2015, a quarter of U.S. oil imports will come
from Africa. Most of these will come from the Gulf of Guinea and the
western regions of North Africa, but Sudan has the second largest
reserves on the continent.
The U.S. has established a military command for the region-Africom-but
no nation has agreed to host it yet. While suspicions about U.S. goals
in Africa run high, those doubts apparently don't extend to U.S.-based
mercenary organizations. While countries are holding Africom at arm's
length, those same countries are embracing Blackwater, DynCorp. Triple
Canopy, and MPRI.
Mercenaries are not just an American phenomena. Israel has begun
privatizing its security checkpoints using the Israeli mercenary company
Modiin Ezrahi According to a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, "By
the end of the year all the people [guards] at the checkpoints will be
civilians."
Israel claims it is replacing the army with mercenaries because it wants
to demilitarize the checkpoints, but peace activists say that argument
is nonsense. Hanna Barag of the human rights organization Machsom Watch
says the civilian security guards are "Rambos" who behave no differently
than Israeli soldiers.
The UN reports an increase in "significant difficulties" since the
mercenaries took over.
Daniel Levy, a former advisor to current Israeli Defense Minister Ehud
Barak, says the real reason is that it walls off the Israeli population
from the burdens of trying to control 2.5 million Palestinians. "It
separates [the occupation] from Israeli society," he told the Financial
Times, "these guys [mercenaries] don't go home and tell their mothers
what they are doing."
In the end, the bottom line is the bottom line. Private contractors in
Iraq-190,000 strong-will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $100 billion
by the end of 2008.
<http://eldib.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/deathsquad.jpg?w=386&h=419>
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