CSC corporation’s torture flights scandal

From Computer Weekly in Britain:

NHS seeks explanation over CSC role in ‘torture flights’

Mark Ballard

Monday 30 July 2012 12:15

The Department of Health is seeking an explanation from CSC over allegations the supplier was involved in the illegal rendition of European citizens in the US “war on terror”.

CSC has been accused of organising the flights of people between secret prisons where they were alleged in some cases to have been tortured.

“We are concerned by these allegations and plan to seek clarification from CSC,” said the Department for Health in a statement to Computer Weekly.

The department and the UK Cabinet Office are in the middle of protracted negotiations with CSC over its failure to deliver IT systems to the NHS National Programme for IT. The coalition government had been trying to scrap the NHS programme but has been unable to renegotiate the contract with CSC. A resolution is expected in August – although previous deadlines for an agreement have been missed.

Human rights charity Reprieve is writing to CSC customers after it unearthed documents it claims prove the IT supplier managed rendition flights for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Invoices allegedly show CSC was contracted to charter flights in one case, where the CIA transported German citizen Khaled El-Masri after his abduction from Europe and secret imprisonment in Afghanistan.

But other CSC customers are choosing to disregard the allegations.

“It’s not our policy to comment on things like that,” said a spokesman for ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer, which outsourced its IT to CSC in July 2011.

Transport for London (TfL), which in January renewed a CSC contract on which it has spent £100m since 2006, said: “TfL was not aware of the allegations made against CSC.”

Reprieve has written to TfL and its chairman, London mayor Boris Johnson. TfL has so far declined the opportunity to respond to further questions from Computer Weekly.

A spokesman for Royal Mail, which has outsourced its IT to CSC since 2003, said: “We do not comment on our commercial relationships with our customers and suppliers.”

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it had sought an explanation from CSC after giving it a seven-year, £400m contract in April to run the British Service Personnel and Veterans Agency system, which handles approximately £14bn in pay and pensions every year.

The procurement process included a “good standing” assessment, to tell if bidders had committed criminal offences or acts of grave professional misconduct that might bar them from working with UK armed forces.

An MoD spokesman said: “We looked for assurances from CSC following these allegations from Reprieve.

“They provided an assurance that CSC has a robust corporate responsibility programme that includes an affirmative human rights statement.”

The MoD was led to believe the allegations centred on DynCorp, a company CSC acquired in 2003 and sold in 2005.

Dr Crofton Black, a researcher for Reprieve, said the charity had discovered invoices connecting CSC with likely rendition flights up to mid-2006, after it sold DynCorp.

CSC acquired DynCorp along with 40 subsidiaries and 26,000 staff for $950m in 2003. CSC subsequently won a contract to supply DynCorp security personnel to support the US invasion of Iraq and became the fourth largest contractor to occupying US forces. But CSC sold part of DynCorp subsidiary DynPort for $850m after it was rebuked by the US State Department for the aggressive behaviour of its guards protecting Afghan leader Hamid Karzai.

CSC remained the 92nd largest contractor in Iraq after the sale and retained parts of DynCorp including DynPort, which produces biological warfare vaccines under contract to the Ministry of Defence and US Department of Defense.

Reprieve claims CSC also retained its rendition contracts.

CSC said in a statement that it retained the name DynCorp but subsumed its retained divisions, particularly DynCorp Technical Services, which became CSC Applied Technologies, and provides security and operates test ranges for US military bases. Other DynCorp subsidiaries were sold or discontinued.

USA: How should we mark the 10th anniversary of the effort by the Bush administration to justify torture? By ensuring it never happens again: here.

Secret trials to cover up Britain’s role in torture: here.

Mercenaries problem growing

This video is called Blackwater Mercenaries Murdering Unarmed Civilians – Testimonies Iraq.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Use of mercenaries ‘out of control,’ warns watchdog

Wednesday 11 July 2012

by Our Foreign Desk

Watchdog Global Policy Forum warned on Tuesday that the United Nations is using too many private military and security companies.

The forum said that the increasing UN use of these companies is “dangerous,” may increase rather than reduce threats and attacks on UN buildings and personnel and suggests the system is “unaccountable and out of control.”

Even incomplete UN data shows a steady rise in the number of security contracts, with the value increasing from $44 million (£28.8m) in 2009 to $76m (£48.8m) in 2010, the latest data available.

UN spokesman Martin Nesirky claimed that it is appropriate to use armed private security contractors if the organisation ensures “due diligence” in its operations.

…

But the forum insisted that, “in the absence of guidelines and clear responsibility for security outsourcing, the UN has hired companies well-known for their misconduct, violence and financial irregularities – and hired them repeatedly.”

The forum said that the UN insists that most companies are used for unarmed security services, but warned that contractors are increasingly being used for risk assessment, security training and logistical support.

This effectively allows the companies to define the UN security strategy “and even its broader posture and reputation.”

It also urged a UN reassessment of its dealings with such firms to assess whose interests contractors serve and if they help the UN promote democracy, the rule of law and human rights.

Blackwater mercenaries for UAE dictatorship

This video, recorded in the UAE, says about itself:

WAXWORD.COM – Footage from a visit by Sharon Waxman to a labor camp in Dubai.

From the New York Times in the USA:

Blackwater Founder Forms Secret Army for UAE

Sunday 15 May 2011

by: Mark Mazzetti and Emily B. Hager, The New York Times News Service

Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates – Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African

South African veterans of the armed forces of the now defunct apartheid regime have been recruited as mercenaries for the US occupation of Iraq as well

and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.

In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.

“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”

Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.

See also here.

Blackwater Founder Supplying Mercenaries for Gulf Regimes: here.

Erik Prince, You’re No Indiana Jones: here.

Official Blackwater Video Game Trailer: here.

US mercenaries in Afghan pedophile prostitution scandal

This video says about itself:

16 April 2010 — Award-winning Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi investigates a sexual exploitation ring. The film exposes the lack of support from those in authority and explores possible responses to the plight of children in this conflict zone.

From daily The Guardian in Britain:

Foreign contractors hired Afghan ‘dancing boys’, WikiLeaks cable reveals

Episode fuelled Afghan demands that private security firms be brought much more under government control

* Jon Boone
* Thursday 2 December 2010 21.30 GMT

Hanif Atmar was Afghanistan‘s interior minister until his resignation on 6 June this year WikiLeaks cables show Afghan interior minister Hanif Atmar was in a panic over the scandal involving foreign contractors. Atmar resigned in June this year. Photograph: Massoud Hossaini/AFP/Getty Images

A scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young “dancing boys” to entertain them in northern Afghanistan caused such panic that the interior minister begged the US embassy to try and “quash” the story, according to one of the US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.

In a meeting with the assistant US ambassador, a panicked Hanif Atmar, the interior minister at the time of the episode last June, warned that the story would “endanger lives” and was particularly concerned that a video of the incident might be made public.

The episode helped to fuel Afghan demands that contractors and private security companies be brought under much tighter government control. However, the US embassy was legally incapable of honouring a request by Atmar that the US military should assume authority over training centres managed by DynCorp, the US company whose employees were involved in the incident in the northern province of Kunduz.

There is a long tradition of young boys dressing up as girls and dancing for men in Afghanistan, an activity that sometimes crosses the line into child abuse with Afghans keeping boys as possessions.

Although rarely discussed or criticised in Afghanistan, it is conceivable that the involvement of foreigners could have turned into a major public scandal. Atmar himself warned about public anger towards contractors, who he said “do not have many friends” and said they needed far greater oversight.

He also said tighter control was needed over Afghan employees of such companies as well.

“He was convinced that the Kunduz incident, and other events where mentors had obtained drugs, could not have happened without Afghan participation,” the cable said.

Two Afghan policemen and nine other Afghans were arrested as part of investigations into a crime described by Atmar as “purchasing a service from a child”, which the cable said was against both sharia law and the civil code.

He insisted that a journalist looking into the incident should be told that the story would endanger lives, and that the US should try to quash the story. But US diplomats cautioned against an “overreaction” and said that approaching the journalist involved would only make the story worse.

“A widely-anticipated newspaper article on the Kunduz scandal has not appeared but, if there is too much noise that may prompt the journalist to publish,” the cable said.

The strategy appeared to work when an article was published in July by the Washington Post about the incident, which made little of the affair, saying it was an incident of “questionable management oversight” in which foreign DynCorp workers “hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party”.

In fact, the episode was causing palpitations at the top of government, including in the presidential palace.

The cable records: “Atmar said that President Karzai had told him that his (Atmar’s) ‘prestige’ was in play in management of the Kunduz DynCorp matter and another recent event in which Blackwater contractors mistakenly killed several Afghan citizens. The President had asked him ‘Where is the justice?’”

According to a separate cable both incidents helped fuel Afghan government demands “to hold a tighter rein over [private security companies]” – a demand that also led Atmar to offer that the overstretched police should take over protection for military convoys in the south of Afghanistan.

Earlier this year Karzai issued a decree calling for the dissolution of all private security companies by the end of the year, an edict that has since been slightly watered down.

In a meeting between Atmar and the assistant ambassador Joseph Mussomeli, the US diplomat said he was deeply upset by the incident and that the embassy was considering Afghan demands that the US military should beginning overseeing the DynCorp operations.

Privately, however, they knew that such an arrangement was not “legally possible under the DynCorp contract”.

WikiLeaks cables: Karzai pushed Nato to end Afghanistan night raids: here.

RED Cross president Jakob Kellenberger warned yesterday that the intensifying conflict in Afghanistan has led to rising civilian casualties and kept millions of Afghan people in rural areas from reaching basic health care this year: here.

With President Obama on the ground in Afghanistan Friday, Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) declared the U.S.-led war in that country unwinnable: here.

Jodi Jacobson, RH Reality Check: “In an act that Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said ‘brought shame to Capitol Hill’ last night, the House Republican leadership banded together at the last minute, and on purely specious grounds, to defeat a piece of legislation six years in the making aimed at preventing child marriage worldwide. The bill was supported by a wide-ranging coalition of groups including the International Women’s Health Coalition and CARE-USA”: here.

Related articles

• Afghan court slaps prison time on Kabul Bank execs (metronews.ca)
• Nato troops kill two Afghan boys (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)

New Ken Loach movie on Iraq war

This video is called “Route Irish” Trailer (of the Ken Loach film).

A different film about the Iraq war, not Ken Loach‘s new film, but with the same title, says about itself:

‘Route Irish‘, a feature length verité/essay film on the campaign(s) against Irish facilitation of the US/UK Invasion of Iraq. This is a vérite documentation of the emergence between 2002 and 2004 of a broad popular opposition to the US military use of Shannon Airport in the buildup to, invasion of, and occupation of Iraq.

It follows a loose network of politicians, activist groups and individuals through the story of the rise, fracturing and sudden decline and disappearance of this movement and retraces the way in which their combined efforts, energies and strategies served to effectively tear away the Irish States’ veneer of neutrality and non-alignment in the post September 11th era of the ‘War on Terror’.

Secondly it is a essayistic reflection asking, from the perspective of one Irish individual caught up in the cycle of protests here, why the international pre-war wave of opposition to the invasion of Iraq appeared so suddenly, peaked so quickly, and failed to sustain itself despite the fact that, in historical terms, all of the predictions of that movement (and worse) were proved right in the course of the ongoing US/UK occupation.

Thirdly it has, because of the progress of political events in Ireland, become a strange and surreal portrait of the Green Party pre their elevation to government. It’s production was made possible by the existence of a pretty comprehensive video archive of the period which was produced by a loose network of Indymedia Ireland related videographers, and which was collected over the course of the events by the editor of the film.

By David Walsh from the USA:

Ken Loach’s Route Irish: the Iraq war comes home

21 October 2010

This is the seventh and final part of a series of articles devoted to the recent Toronto film festival (September 9-19). Part 1 was published on September 23, Part 2 on September 28, Part 3 on October 1, Part 4 on October 6, Part 5 on October 14, and Part 6 on October 18.

British director Ken Loach has been a significant figure in filmmaking for more than 40 years. He first came to prominence in the late 1960s, directing television work such as Cathy Come Home (1966)—recently voted number two on a list of the “100 Greatest British Television Programmes”—and The Big Flame (1969) and films that included Poor Cow (1967) and, especially, Kes (1969).

Loach became identified with a sympathy for and interest in the condition of the working class, and the larger fate of socialism in our time. …

One needs to contrast his evolution forcefully with the spectacle represented by so many formerly “extreme left” filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard and others) who, to borrow the words of André Breton, “radically change their opinions and renounce in a masochistic and exhibitionist manner their own testimony, becoming champions of a cause quite contrary to that which they began serving with great fanfare.”

The British establishment recognizes Loach as a thorn in its side. In 2006, following the release of The Wind That Shakes the Barley, an account of the Irish war of independence (1919-1921) and civil war (1922-1923), Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty came under ferocious attack. The film depicts in graphic detail the brutality of British repression against the Irish population, including scenes of massacres and torture.

The violent response of the media in 2006 was both an effort to conceal the bloody history of British imperialism and to defend its present neo-colonial operations in Iraq, to which the film clearly made implicit reference.

Michael Gove, the current education secretary in Britain’s coalition government, wrote a venomous piece in the Times (a Rupert Murdoch publication) when The Wind That Shakes the Barley took the top prize at the Cannes film festival, denouncing Loach and others “who rubbish their own countries.” Gove falsified history, claiming that films like Loach’s “glamourise the IRA,” a movement “which used murderous violence to achieve its ends, even though the democratic path was always open to it.”

On the same occasion, the Times’s Tim Luckhurst went even further in excoriating “the committed Marxist director,” suggesting that while pro-Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl merited a degree of understanding because she “did not fully understand the evil cause to which her work contributed…Ken Loach does not deserve such indulgence.”

As the WSWS noted at the time, another Murdoch newspaper, the Sun, called The Wind That Shakes the Barley “pro-IRA.” The Daily Mail termed the film “a travesty.” Simon Heffer, in the Telegraph, denouncing the movie as “poisonous,” acknowledged that he had not seen it and declared he did not need to “any more than I need to read Mein Kampf to know what a louse Hitler was.”

On the other hand, I have regularly asked film directors over the past 17 years which contemporary figures in cinema they admired the most. As I told Ken Loach in our conversation in Toronto, the name that has come up most often among serious people (from France, Iran, Greece, Spain and elsewhere) has been his.

That being said, it is not necessary to agree with or admire everything about his filmmaking. …

A new film

Ken Loach was in Toronto this year for screenings of his new film, Route Irish, written by Paul Laverty. The film’s title refers to the US military’s nickname for the stretch of highway connecting the International Zone in Baghdad with the city’s airport (“the most dangerous road in the world”).

Set in 2007, the film centers on Fergus (Mark Womack), a former member of the British military’s elite SAS and later a private contractor-mercenary in Iraq. Now back in Liverpool, he learns that his friend since childhood, Frankie (John Bishop), whom he persuaded to join his security team in Baghdad (at £10,000 a month, tax-free), has been killed on “Route Irish.”

Fergus rejects the official explanation of Frankie’s death and begins his own investigation, ultimately with the collaboration of his friend’s widow, Rachel (Andrea Lowe). He uncovers war crimes committed against Iraqis and a conspiracy to cover up those crimes. When the apparent perpetrator of the atrocity returns to Britain, Fergus takes violent action. Haunted by the Iraq experience, guilt over Frankie’s death, and the blood on his own hands, Fergus’ options narrow down to one.

In his notes on the film, writer Paul Laverty explains something about the privatization of war. He writes that one commentator has “estimated that there were around 160,000 foreign contractors in Iraq at the height of the occupation, many of whom—perhaps as many as 50,000—were heavily armed security personnel.…

“Thanks to Paul Bremer, the US appointed head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, each and every one of those contractors was given immunity from Iraqi law in the shape of Order 17 which was imposed on the new Iraqi Parliament.”

Laverty continues: “Nobody is interested in counting how many Iraqi civilians have been killed or injured by private contractors, but there is a vast body of evidence to suggest that there has been widespread abuse. Blackwater’s massacre of 17 civilians in the middle of Baghdad was the most notorious incident, but there were many more that went unreported.…

“Order 17 may have been revoked in Iraq but its spirit still reigns supreme: the stink of impunity, the lies, the contempt for international law, the undermining of the Geneva conventions, the secret prisons, the torture, the murder…the hundreds of thousands of dead.”

Route Irish is grim and dense and angry, and treats entirely legitimate subject matter. The terrible events in Iraq on which the drama hinges ring true. Laverty and Loach have chosen an unusual and artistically quite ambitious means of approaching the Iraq war and occupation, through focusing on a hardened mercenary, who has to come to terms in part with his own history.

In a number of his recent scripts, Laverty has centered his story on less than endearing figures—in It’s a Free World, a working class woman who operates a firm that exploits desperate immigrants; in Even the Rain, a cynical film producer determined to complete a film at no matter whose expense. Correctly, I think, the screenwriter has determined that working through the destinies of such complex and initially unappealing characters may bring him and his audience closer to the objective social contradictions at work.

However, Fergus, a former SAS man, with extensive and well-paid service in Iraq, is a bird of another feather. Here is someone seriously damaged, who has inflicted serious damage on others. Is such a human being beyond reach? No, but Laverty and Loach have not dramatized the kind of internal revolution that would have to take place for such a figure to face honestly what he and others have done.

It’s never entirely clear, as a matter of fact, what Fergus thinks of the war, of himself, of the mercenary profession. The filmmakers, perhaps in the name of psychological realism, have their central character enter into a conflict with his former employers without shedding his old skin. Is it likely that a mercenary would take on the contractor-military establishment simply out of devotion to a longtime friend? We don’t see enough of their friendship, except a few glimpses, to be convinced. We’re asked to take Fergus’s change of heart on faith, and that is not enough to go on.

It is entirely possible for the spectator to shift his attitudes toward a film’s protagonist, depending on the latter’s behavior. But, in this case, we are never quite certain of the filmmakers’ own attitude. And instead of sharply delineating the different sides of Fergus’s character, toward which one could have various feelings, the film tends to present him in a dull, grey light, as though the spectator should infer from this the intensity of his internal conflict.

Another review of that film is here. Yet another one is here.

Ken Loach’s film Kes is a film that resonates with the childhood experiences of many from a working-class background: here.

What the US Undid for Women in Iraq: here.

David Walsh speaks on “Socialism and Cinema”: here.

Veteran actor Tony Curtis died on September 29 at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada. He was 85. Always a talented and energetic performer, Curtis appeared in more than 100 films and television shows during a career which spanned six decades: here.

German mercenaries in Somalia war

This is a German WDR TV video about sending German mercenaries to the civil war in Somalia.

From Der Spiegel in Germany:

05/25/2010

‘Shadow Foreign Policy’

Somali Warlord Hires German Mercenaries to Provide Security Services

Politicians have reacted angrily to reports that a German firm has signed a deal with a Somali warlord to provide security services. Former members of German special forces and an elite police unit could soon be working as bodyguards and trainers in the lawless country.

For years, German politicians and pundits have been taking the moral high ground over the activities of the American private security contractor Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, in places such as Iraq. “The US government has allowed private security firms to develop into an omnipresent, uncontrollable apparatus in the war zones of this world,” wrote one German newspaper back in 2007.

That moral outrage is now looking distinctly shabby, however, in the light of revelations that a German security company is planning to supply mercenaries to a Somali warlord. On Monday, Thomas Kaltegärtner, CEO of Asgaard German Security Group, confirmed a report by the German public broadcaster ARD that his company plans to send former German soldiers to Somalia.

In a December 2009 press release, Asgaard announced it had signed an “exclusive agreement on security services” with Abdinur Ahmed Darman. Darman, a Somali warlord who styles himself as the country’s president, does not recognize the legitimacy of the United Nations-backed transitional government of Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. The agreement, the company said, would cover “all necessary measures to reintroduce security and peace to Somalia.” The country has not had a functioning central government since 1991.

According to Kaltegärtner, himself a former Bundeswehr soldier, Asgaard employees would provide security for Darman and train police and military forces. He stressed, however, that combat operations were not planned. He said that over 100 mercenaries could be involved in operations. Although negotiations were not yet complete, it was possible that Asgaard employees would be operating in Somalia in the near future, Kaltegärtner told the Tagesspiegel newspaper. Kaltegärtner also told the newspaper that his company employed former members of the German army’s special forces, the KSK, and Germany’s elite GSG-9 police force.

Privatizing State Violence

Several German politicians have reacted angrily to the news that former soldiers could soon be in action on the Horn of Africa. “In my opinion, this is not acceptable,” Rainer Arnold, the defense expert of the center-left Social Democrats, told the Tuesday edition of the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper. He called for new legislation to “clearly limit” such operations, adding: “One cannot privatize state violence.”

Speaking to the same newspaper, Green Party politician Omid Nouripour accused the German government of not doing enough in the past to regulate private security firms. Paul Schäfer of the far-left Left Party and Rainer Stinner of the liberal Free Democratic Party, which governs in coalition with Merkel’s conservatives, also criticized the deal, with Schäfer talking of a “shadow foreign policy.”

Observers warn that German employees of the firm could be killed or targeted for kidnapping in Somalia.

German mercenaries have a sorry history. German princes used to put up their subjects for rent as mercenaries to warmongers in other countries.

In the 1960s, ex members of Hitler’s infamous SS fought as mercenaries for neo-colonialism in Congo, other African countries, and elsewhere.

The German armed forces have a history of anti-African racist incidents.

Der Spiegel suggests that German critics of US mercenary firm Blackwater should decrease their criticisms. Quite the contrary, critics of Blackwater, whether from Germany, from the USA, or wherever, should increase their criticism of those merchants of death.

However, the same goes for the German colleagues of Blackwater.

Asgaard is an ominous name for a mercenary business. According to ancient Germanic mythology, it was the abode of the gods. Germanic mythology was popularized during the nineteenth century by (anti-Semitic) composer Richard Wagner. During the twentieth century and later, especially Hitler’s nazis and neonazis tried to revive ancient Germanic religion (in a way that Germanic tribes of two thousand years ago would not recognize it, but that is another story). Neonazi skinheads often use the word Asgaard.

USA: A secret directive issued by Gen. David Petraeus empowers the US military to expand covert operations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa: here.

UN revises DRC [Congo] ‘genocide’ report: Document detailing attacks by Rwandan and Ugandan troops against civilians toned down: here.

Blackwater mercenaries’ boss on trial?

This video is called Blackwater, America’s Private Army.

By Daniel Schulman in the USA:

AP: Ex-Blackwater Pres Faces Possible Indictment

Tue Mar. 23, 2010 8:58 AM PDT

The AP is reporting that the Justice Department may be preparing to indict a trio of ex-Blackwater officials on weapons charges, including the company‘s former president, Gary Jackson. The potential charges are connected to a June 2008 raid on the company’s North Carolina compound by federal agents, who seized nearly two dozen automatic weapons from Blackwater‘s armory. The guns, which included 17 Romanian AK-47s, had been purchased by Blackwater but were technically owned by the local sheriff’s office, which had inked an agreement with the company to store the weapons.

More Blackwater: here.

Blackwater Ex-President Indicted: here.

Bipartisan Mercs?: Blackwater Hires Powerful Democratic Lobbyist: here.

Coming soon: Blackwater Pro Shops with indoor firing ranges: here.

9-year old Iraqi boy killed by Blackwater/Xe

This video about Ali Kinani in Iraq is called Blackwater’s Youngest Victim.

From Democracy Now! in the USA:

Today a Democracy Now! exclusive report from Jeremy Scahill about a nine year old boy, shot in the head and killed by Blackwater in the infamous Nisour Square massacre. His father, who is suing the private military contractor, provides the most detailed eyewitness account of the massacre to date. Scahill has conducted an in-depth investigation of the massacre and of nine-year old Ali Kinani’s death. He files an exclusive report with Rick Rowley of Big Noise Films.

U.S. Examines Whether Blackwater Tried Bribery [in Iraq]: here.

Britain: Attempt at citizen’s arrest as Blair leaves Iraq war inquiry.

Former minister Clare Short has claimed that Prime Minister Gordon Brown was “marginalised” throughout most of the build-up to the war on Iraq: here.

Clare Short: Tony Blair lied and misled parliament in build-up to Iraq war: here. And here. And here.

Former minister Clare Short has launched a broadside against Tony Blair and former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, accusing them of deliberate deception and misleading the Cabinet in the run-up to war: here.

[British] Ministers were warned of a “serious risk” that the military would not have all the equipment it needed to invade Iraq because of the rush to war, the head of the armed forces has said: here.

Blackwater mercenaries told to leave Iraq within a week: here.

Claim: Blackwater billed US for ‘Morale Welfare Recreation’ provided by prostitute: here.

When Senator Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and his staff briefed reporters Tuesday on their six-month investigation into Blackwater subsidiary Paravant, ahead of a hearing on the topic scheduled for this morning, the chairman of the armed services committee was asked whether the findings of the probe had given him any ideas about strengthening the contracting “procedures” currently in place: here.

The Republican National Committee plans to hold an April fundraiser at a Moyock, N.C. compound owned by the military contracting firm formerly known as Blackwater, Politico reports: here.

Blackwater/Xe murder suspects above the law?

This video from the USA is called Blackwater Guards Indicted for Role in Nisour Square Massacre; Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now.

Happy New Year to all readers of this blog!

Unfortunately, 2010 starts with the not so happy news from the last hours of 2009 of Blaclwater/Xe mercenaries going scot free for kiling Iraqi civilians.

From Jeremy Scahill’s blog in the USA:

Apparently there is one set of rights for Blackwater mercenaries and another for the rest of us. Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down 17 civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But that is not what the Blackwater operatives involved in the September 16 Nisour Square shooting in Iraq were told. Most of the Blackwater shooters were questioned by State Department Diplomatic Security investigators with the understanding that their statements and information gleaned from them could not be used to bring criminal charges against them, nor could they be introduced as evidence. In other words, “Anything you say can’t and won’t be used against you in a court of law.”

See also here.

The Iraqi government on Friday criticized the dismissal of charges against five Blackwater security guards, saying they murdered 17 innocent civilians: here.

The Iraqi government has declared that it will take legal action against the mercenary company Blackwater after a US judge rejected charges against gunmen accused of the massacre of 17 people in Baghdad: here.

Blackwater/Xe’s assassinations in Pakistan

This video from Pakistan is called Civilians caught up South Waziristan fighting – 20 Oct 09.

From Al Jazeera:

US firm ‘runs covert Pakistan ops’

A new report has accused the US private security firm formerly known as Blackwater of operating a covert assassination and kidnapping programme against suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda members in northwest Pakistan.

In an article published on Monday, The Nation magazine alleged that the firm, now known as Xe, is also involved in running a US military drone bombing campaign out of Pakistan.

Jeremy Scahill, the investigative journalist who broke the story, told Al Jazeera on Tuesday that the programme was so secretive that senior officials in the administration of Barack Obama, the US president, were likely unaware of it.

“What I learned is that for years there has been a covert operation of the US military inside Pakistan‘s borders … and that Blackwater operatives are at the centre of not only the drone bombing campaign but also planning snatch-and-grab operations of high value targets.”

Hunting bin Laden

Scahill, citing military intelligence sources and a former Blackwater official, said the programme began with an agreement between the US and Pakistani governments.

“In 2006, the Bush administration struck a deal with the government in Islamabad that would allow US special forces to actually enter Pakistani territory if what they were doing was hunting Osama bin Laden or his top deputies.

“The agreement was such that the Pakistanis said that they would have the right to deny that they had given permission.”

There was no immediate comment from Islamabad on the story, and Scahill said that the White House also failed to respond to his request for comment.

But he said the office of Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had contacted him to reject the allegations.

“I did not call them, they called me and told me that the [allegations] did not stand up to reality,” Scahill said.

“I’ve talked to my sources though, and they say that its possible that officials within the military chain of command are simply not in what [they] called ‘the circle of love’ on this programme.”

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Blackwater blamed

The northwest tribal region, and in particular Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), have borne the brunt of attacks perpetrated by the Taliban in recent weeks.

The attacks are in apparent retaliation for a military offensive launched in the country’s semi-autonomous tribal region of South Waziristan against members of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, one of the main anti-government groups.

But a spokesman for the Taliban last week blamed Blackwater for at least two of the recent bombings.

Azam Tariq posted a video statement on the internet, saying the Taliban attacks never aimed to target civilians and that the explosions were linked to Blackwater activities in the country.

Xe has denied having any contracts in Pakistan.

The North Carolina-based firm provides security for diplomats around the world, but it is facing charges of human rights violations stemming its part from a 2007 shooting in Iraq that left 17 civilians dead.

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan: Jeremy Scahill Reveals Private Military Firm Operating in Pakistan Under Covert Assassination and Kidnapping Program: here. See also here.

Violence against Afghan, Pakistani women escalates in 2009: here.