Boy, so the paragraph that jumps up at me in this article, is this one:
But the question of whether Iraqis could use the agreement to prosecute contractors for previous incidents wasn’t addressed in the new agreement. When security company officials asked Thursday, “We told them that’s a question we don’t know the answer to,” said a State Department official, who spoke to reporters about the meetings under the condition of anonymity.
My guess is that they do know the answer, and they have been withholding that information to insure there wasn’t any real protest by the companies. Especially Blackwater, because if the Iraqis can go back in time and prosecute contractors for previous incidents, well then that will cause a stampede of litigation. Obviously the Iraqis would want to go after those implicated in the Nisour Square incident as the first case. But where would it stop, and how far will they go back? This smells.
To me, I think the companies were pretty much in wait and see mode, with what they ‘thought’ was the SOFA. Hell, I even posted the copy that was released over at Fox News. But if this paragraph up top is an indicator of the holes in this thing, then I think all of us in this industry deserve a full explanation of what really is going to happen? And why is there an Arabic draft available only to Iraqi lawmakers, yet no official copy of the final draft in English for the rest of us to read?
The other thing that gets me, is that the companies should not be surprised about anything. If they would have had the guts to confront the client about this matter, and demand to be included in the loop, then we wouldn’t be playing this guessing game right now. How many of us have died in defense of the client/Coalition? There are 230,000 plus civilian contractors in this world wide war, and we continue to be treated like the elephant in the room that no one wants to acknowledge. –Head Jundi
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US-Iraq Pact Ends Contractor Immunity
November 21, 2008
Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON – Contractors working for the United States in Iraq, including armed security outfits such as Blackwater Inc., will be subject to Iraqi law under the new U.S.-Iraq security pact. Not only that, they could face Iraqi prosecution for acts committed when they supposedly had immunity from Iraqi law, U.S. officials said Nov. 20.
A new U.S.-Iraq security agreement doesn’t specifically prevent Iraqi officials from bringing criminal charges retroactively in cases such as the September 2007 shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians by contractors protecting a State Department convoy, officials told security company officials during meetings in Washington Thursday.
The news caught company officials by surprise.
“We are still trying to make sense of it,” said Anne E. Tyrrell, a spokeswoman for Blackwater Inc., whose security guards have been involved in some of the most controversial incidents in Iraq, including the Sept. 16, 2007, shooting at al Nisoor Square in Baghdad.
