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Feds probe Blackwater links to arms smuggling - Sept 21, 2007
Related content - Newsweek: Blackwater and the Bush legacy -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/
Reports: Weapons linked to employees may have gone to terrorist
groups.
BAGHDAD - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of
the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq
weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in
the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said
Friday.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the
investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors,
who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the
officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock,
N.C.
The U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, George
Holding, and a spokeswoman for Blackwater did not return calls seeking
comment Friday. Pentagon and State Department spokesmen declined to
comment.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a review of
security practices for U.S. diplomats in Iraq following a deadly
incident involving Blackwater USA guards protecting an embassy convoy.
Rice's announcement came as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad resumed
limited diplomatic convoys under the protection of Blackwater outside
the heavily fortified Green Zone after a suspension because of the
weekend incident in that city.
Early stages of investigation.
Officials with knowledge of the case said it is active, although at an
early stage. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the
sensitivity of the matter, which has heightened since 11 Iraqis were
killed Sunday in a shooting involving Blackwater contractors
protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad.
The officials could not say whether the investigation would result in
indictments, how many Blackwater employees are involved or if the
company itself, which has won hundreds of millions of dollars in
government security contracts since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is
under scrutiny.
In Saturday's editions, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that
two former Blackwater employees - Kenneth Wayne Cashwell of Virginia
Beach, Va., and William Ellsworth "Max" Grumiaux of Clemmons, N.C. -
are cooperating with federal investigators.
Cashwell and Grumiaux pleaded guilty in early 2007 to possession of
stolen firearms that had been shipped in interstate or foreign
commerce, and aided and abetted another in doing so, according to
court papers viewed by The Associated Press. In their plea agreements,
which call for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000
fine, the men agreed to testify in any future proceedings.
Calls to defense attorneys were not immediately returned Friday
evening, and calls to the telephone listings for both men also were
not returned.
The News & Observer, citing unidentified sources, reported that the
probe was looking at whether Blackwater had shipped unlicensed
automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq without a license.
The paper's report that the company itself was under investigation
could not be confirmed by the AP.
Turkish complaint led to internal probe.
In the United States, officials in Washington said the smuggling
investigation grew from internal Pentagon and State Department
inquiries into U.S. weapons that had gone missing in Iraq. It gained
steam after Turkish authorities protested to the U.S. in July that
they had seized American arms from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers
Party, or PKK, rebels.
The Turks provided serial numbers of the weapons to U.S.
investigators, said a Turkish official.
The Pentagon said in late July it was looking into the Turkish
complaints and a U.S. official said FBI agents had traveled to Turkey
in recent months to look into cases of missing U.S. weapons in Iraq.
Investigators are determining whether the alleged Blackwater weapons
match those taken from the PKK.
It was not clear if Blackwater employees suspected of selling to the
black market knew the weapons they allegedly sold to middlemen might
wind up with the PKK. If they did, possible charges against them could
be more serious than theft or illegal weapons sales, officials said.
The PKK, which is fighting for an independent Kurdistan, is banned in
Turkey, which has a restive Kurdish population and is considered a
"foreign terrorist organization" by the State Department. That
designation bars U.S. citizens or those in U.S. jurisdictions from
supporting the group in any way.
Probe perhaps accidently made public.
The North Carolina investigation was first brought to light by State
Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it,
perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly
blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Krongard was accused in a letter by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.,
chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of
politically motivated malfeasance, including refusing to cooperate
with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large,
unidentified State Department contractor.
In response, Krongard said in a written statement that he "made one of
my best investigators available to help Assistant U.S. Attorneys in
North Carolina in their investigation into alleged smuggling of
weapons into Iraq by a contractor."
His statement went further than Waxman's letter because it identified
the state in which the investigation was taking place. Blackwater is
the biggest of the State Department's three private security
contractors.
The other two, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy, are based in Washington's
northern Virginias suburbs, outside the jurisdiction of North
Carolina's attorneys.
MSNBC.com - Hirsh: Blackwater and the Bush Legacy
How Bush has created a moral vacuum in Iraq in which Americans can
kill for free.
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/page/0/
Sept. 20, 2007 - Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and
children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to
justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary
killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in
nightmarish dystopian fiction, like "1984," or in fevered passages
from Dostoevsky-or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist
purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is
called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.
The moral vacuum of Iraq-where Blackwater USA guards can kill 10 or 20
Iraqis on a whim and never be prosecuted for it-did not happen by
accident. It is yet another example of something the Bush
administration could have prevented with the right measures but simply
did not bother about as it rushed into invading and occupying another
country. With America's all-volunteer army under strain, the Pentagon
and White House knew that regular military cannot be used for guarding
civilians. As far back as 2003, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
convened a task force under Undersecretary of Defense David Chu to
consider new laws that might be needed to govern the privatization of
war. Nothing was done about its recommendations. Then, two days before
he left Iraq for good, L. Paul Bremer III, the Coalition Provisional
Authority administrator, signed a blanket order immunizing all
Americans, because, as one of his former top aides told me, "we wanted
to make sure our military, civilians and contractors were protected
from Iraqi law." (No one worried about protecting the Iraqis from us;
after all, we still thought of ourselves as the "liberators," even
though by then the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib and other places were
known.)
Nor can these private armies even be prosecuted in America under U.S.
law. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, which
permits charges to be brought in U.S. courts for crimes abroad,
apparently applies only to Defense Department contractors (and even
then the administration has rarely used it). Blackwater and other
security firms work for the State Department. Even today, despite the
crucial role of Blackwater and other private security firms-who employ
up to 30,000 operatives in keeping the civilian side of the U.S.
occupation going-Iraqis can do nothing if they are abused or killed by
them. While many Blackwater operatives are brave and honorable-the
company has lost some 30 of its employees in Iraq-many of these
paramilitaries have long been known to be cowboys who act as if they
are free to commit homicide as they please. And according to numerous
Iraqi witnesses, they sometimes do.
Take the case of the Blackwater guard who got drunk at a Green Zone
party last Christmas Eve and reportedly boasted to his friends that he
was going to kill someone. According to both Iraqi and U.S. officials,
he stumbled out and headed provocatively over to the "Little Venice"
section, a lovely area of canals where Iraqi officials live. He had an
argument with an Iraqi guard, then shot him once in the chest and
three times in the back. The next day Blackwater put him on a private
plane out of the country-probably only because the incident involved a
rare killing inside the Green Zone and the victim was a security guard
for a high-ranking politician. That was it. The company has refused to
disclose his name. (Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell did not return
phone calls seeking comment.) Then there was last week's incident,
when Blackwater guards killed between 10 and 20 Iraqis at a traffic
stop, including a woman and a child. The company later said in a
statement that "the 'civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater
professionals were in fact armed enemies ... Blackwater professionals
heroically defended American lives in a war zone on Sunday." However,
even President Bush acknowledged at a news conference Thursday that
"evidently" innocent lives were lost in the incident.
As anyone who has been in Iraq (like me) knows, on the ground the
unspoken rule of Bush's counterinsurgency efforts over the past four
years has been that almost all Iraqis, at least the males, are guilty
until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings at the
hands of security firms and sometimes U.S. military units are
arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis have
no recourse whatever to justice except in a few cases like Haditha.
Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of
treatment. Apply three years of it and you have a furious, traumatized
population. And a country out of control.
And now we have the awful absurdity of U.S. diplomats going out to
make allies among Iraqis and build civil society-winning "the
battlefield of the mind," Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone told The
Washington Post-surrounded by security guards who operate in an amoral
universe and are hated by Iraqis. The Blackwater phenomenon undermines
the Petraeus surge, which applies counterinsurgency principles that
require winning over the local population, and isolating the bad guys
from them. Instead, Blackwater is seen by Iraqis as the face of a
malignant occupation. Remember the scene at the beginning of the movie
"Braveheart," when the evil English lord claims droit du seigneur-the
right to deflower Mel Gibson's bride-over the powerless Scots? Well,
that medieval reality is something like what Iraqis are living with
today. This is the "model" George W. Bush will bequeath to the world.
Morality begins when people take responsibility for their actions. But
no one in the Bush administration has taken responsibility for one
disaster after another in Iraq. Nor does anyone seem to care. As
Maureen Dowd has pointed out, so pass
Feds probe Blackwater links to arms smuggling - Sept 21, 2007
Related content - Newsweek: Blackwater and the Bush legacy -
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/
Reports: Weapons linked to employees may have gone to terrorist
groups.
BAGHDAD - Federal prosecutors are investigating whether employees of
the private security firm Blackwater USA illegally smuggled into Iraq
weapons that may have been sold on the black market and ended up in
the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, officials said
Friday.
The U.S. Attorney's Office in Raleigh, N.C., is handling the
investigation with help from Pentagon and State Department auditors,
who have concluded there is enough evidence to file charges, the
officials told The Associated Press. Blackwater is based in Moyock,
N.C.
The U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina, George
Holding, and a spokeswoman for Blackwater did not return calls seeking
comment Friday. Pentagon and State Department spokesmen declined to
comment.
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered a review of
security practices for U.S. diplomats in Iraq following a deadly
incident involving Blackwater USA guards protecting an embassy convoy.
Rice's announcement came as the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad resumed
limited diplomatic convoys under the protection of Blackwater outside
the heavily fortified Green Zone after a suspension because of the
weekend incident in that city.
Early stages of investigation.
Officials with knowledge of the case said it is active, although at an
early stage. They spoke on condition of anonymity due to the
sensitivity of the matter, which has heightened since 11 Iraqis were
killed Sunday in a shooting involving Blackwater contractors
protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad.
The officials could not say whether the investigation would result in
indictments, how many Blackwater employees are involved or if the
company itself, which has won hundreds of millions of dollars in
government security contracts since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is
under scrutiny.
In Saturday's editions, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that
two former Blackwater employees - Kenneth Wayne Cashwell of Virginia
Beach, Va., and William Ellsworth "Max" Grumiaux of Clemmons, N.C. -
are cooperating with federal investigators.
Cashwell and Grumiaux pleaded guilty in early 2007 to possession of
stolen firearms that had been shipped in interstate or foreign
commerce, and aided and abetted another in doing so, according to
court papers viewed by The Associated Press. In their plea agreements,
which call for a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a $250,000
fine, the men agreed to testify in any future proceedings.
Calls to defense attorneys were not immediately returned Friday
evening, and calls to the telephone listings for both men also were
not returned.
The News & Observer, citing unidentified sources, reported that the
probe was looking at whether Blackwater had shipped unlicensed
automatic weapons and military goods to Iraq without a license.
The paper's report that the company itself was under investigation
could not be confirmed by the AP.
Turkish complaint led to internal probe.
In the United States, officials in Washington said the smuggling
investigation grew from internal Pentagon and State Department
inquiries into U.S. weapons that had gone missing in Iraq. It gained
steam after Turkish authorities protested to the U.S. in July that
they had seized American arms from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers
Party, or PKK, rebels.
The Turks provided serial numbers of the weapons to U.S.
investigators, said a Turkish official.
The Pentagon said in late July it was looking into the Turkish
complaints and a U.S. official said FBI agents had traveled to Turkey
in recent months to look into cases of missing U.S. weapons in Iraq.
Investigators are determining whether the alleged Blackwater weapons
match those taken from the PKK.
It was not clear if Blackwater employees suspected of selling to the
black market knew the weapons they allegedly sold to middlemen might
wind up with the PKK. If they did, possible charges against them could
be more serious than theft or illegal weapons sales, officials said.
The PKK, which is fighting for an independent Kurdistan, is banned in
Turkey, which has a restive Kurdish population and is considered a
"foreign terrorist organization" by the State Department. That
designation bars U.S. citizens or those in U.S. jurisdictions from
supporting the group in any way.
Probe perhaps accidently made public.
The North Carolina investigation was first brought to light by State
Department Inspector General Howard Krongard, who mentioned it,
perhaps inadvertently, this week while denying he had improperly
blocked fraud and corruption probes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Krongard was accused in a letter by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif.,
chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, of
politically motivated malfeasance, including refusing to cooperate
with an investigation into alleged weapons smuggling by a large,
unidentified State Department contractor.
In response, Krongard said in a written statement that he "made one of
my best investigators available to help Assistant U.S. Attorneys in
North Carolina in their investigation into alleged smuggling of
weapons into Iraq by a contractor."
His statement went further than Waxman's letter because it identified
the state in which the investigation was taking place. Blackwater is
the biggest of the State Department's three private security
contractors.
The other two, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy, are based in Washington's
northern Virginias suburbs, outside the jurisdiction of North
Carolina's attorneys.
MSNBC.com - Hirsh: Blackwater and the Bush Legacy
How Bush has created a moral vacuum in Iraq in which Americans can
kill for free.
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek - http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20892483/site/newsweek/page/0/
Sept. 20, 2007 - Imagine a universe where a man can gun down women and
children anytime he pleases, knowing he will never be brought to
justice. A place where morality is null and void, and arbitrary
killing is the rule. A place that has been imagined hitherto only in
nightmarish dystopian fiction, like "1984," or in fevered passages
from Dostoevsky-or which existed during the Holocaust and Stalinist
purges and the Dark Ages. Well, that universe exists today. It is
called Iraq. And the man who made it possible is George W. Bush.
The moral vacuum of Iraq-where Blackwater USA guards can kill 10 or 20
Iraqis on a whim and never be prosecuted for it-did not happen by
accident. It is yet another example of something the Bush
administration could have prevented with the right measures but simply
did not bother about as it rushed into invading and occupying another
country. With America's all-volunteer army under strain, the Pentagon
and White House knew that regular military cannot be used for guarding
civilians. As far back as 2003, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld
convened a task force under Undersecretary of Defense David Chu to
consider new laws that might be needed to govern the privatization of
war. Nothing was done about its recommendations. Then, two days before
he left Iraq for good, L. Paul Bremer III, the Coalition Provisional
Authority administrator, signed a blanket order immunizing all
Americans, because, as one of his former top aides told me, "we wanted
to make sure our military, civilians and contractors were protected
from Iraqi law." (No one worried about protecting the Iraqis from us;
after all, we still thought of ourselves as the "liberators," even
though by then the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib and other places were
known.)
Nor can these private armies even be prosecuted in America under U.S.
law. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, which
permits charges to be brought in U.S. courts for crimes abroad,
apparently applies only to Defense Department contractors (and even
then the administration has rarely used it). Blackwater and other
security firms work for the State Department. Even today, despite the
crucial role of Blackwater and other private security firms-who employ
up to 30,000 operatives in keeping the civilian side of the U.S.
occupation going-Iraqis can do nothing if they are abused or killed by
them. While many Blackwater operatives are brave and honorable-the
company has lost some 30 of its employees in Iraq-many of these
paramilitaries have long been known to be cowboys who act as if they
are free to commit homicide as they please. And according to numerous
Iraqi witnesses, they sometimes do.
Take the case of the Blackwater guard who got drunk at a Green Zone
party last Christmas Eve and reportedly boasted to his friends that he
was going to kill someone. According to both Iraqi and U.S. officials,
he stumbled out and headed provocatively over to the "Little Venice"
section, a lovely area of canals where Iraqi officials live. He had an
argument with an Iraqi guard, then shot him once in the chest and
three times in the back. The next day Blackwater put him on a private
plane out of the country-probably only because the incident involved a
rare killing inside the Green Zone and the victim was a security guard
for a high-ranking politician. That was it. The company has refused to
disclose his name. (Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell did not return
phone calls seeking comment.) Then there was last week's incident,
when Blackwater guards killed between 10 and 20 Iraqis at a traffic
stop, including a woman and a child. The company later said in a
statement that "the 'civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater
professionals were in fact armed enemies ... Blackwater professionals
heroically defended American lives in a war zone on Sunday." However,
even President Bush acknowledged at a news conference Thursday that
"evidently" innocent lives were lost in the incident.
As anyone who has been in Iraq (like me) knows, on the ground the
unspoken rule of Bush's counterinsurgency efforts over the past four
years has been that almost all Iraqis, at least the males, are guilty
until proven innocent. Arrests, beatings and sometimes killings at the
hands of security firms and sometimes U.S. military units are
arbitrary, often based on the flimsiest intelligence, and Iraqis have
no recourse whatever to justice except in a few cases like Haditha.
Imagine the sense of helpless rage that emerges from this sort of
treatment. Apply three years of it and you have a furious, traumatized
population. And a country out of control.
And now we have the awful absurdity of U.S. diplomats going out to
make allies among Iraqis and build civil society-winning "the
battlefield of the mind," Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone told The
Washington Post-surrounded by security guards who operate in an amoral
universe and are hated by Iraqis. The Blackwater phenomenon undermines
the Petraeus surge, which applies counterinsurgency principles that
require winning over the local population, and isolating the bad guys
from them. Instead, Blackwater is seen by Iraqis as the face of a
malignant occupation. Remember the scene at the beginning of the movie
"Braveheart," when the evil English lord claims droit du seigneur-the
right to deflower Mel Gibson's bride-over the powerless Scots? Well,
that medieval reality is something like what Iraqis are living with
today. This is the "model" George W. Bush will bequeath to the world.
Morality begins when people take responsibility for their actions. But
no one in the Bush administration has taken responsibility for one
disaster after another in Iraq. Nor does anyone seem to care. As
Maureen Dowd has pointed out, so pass