15 replies to this topic

[Cheshire Fox]

http://www.cnn.com/2...9/17/iraq.main/

The above article was all I could find quickly, but some facts they seem to have left out include that eyewitnesses, including a Police officer, report the bomb went off 30 minutes before the convoy came anywhere close to the area. And the bomb went off around 1500 feet away from the site of the shooting. It also completely leaves out any mention of what Iraqi eyewitnesses saw.

The issue of the Blackwater shootings has greatly interested and disturbed me. According to the US officials and the Blackwater corporation, a diplomatic convoy was bombed abd fired upon with heavy machine guns and small arms, including from men dressed as Police. Blackwater mercenaries returned fire, killing eight and wounding about 14.

According to everyone else who saw the event, including an Iraqi policemen, Blackwater just started shooting. On NPR (National Public Radio) a man said from his hospital bed that black water has suddenly told him and the rest of the cars near him to turn around and drive the other way. As soon as he turned, Blackwater mercenaries shot him. They fired twelve bullets, but only 4 hit him in the back and thigh. The policeman said he watched a man and his mother burn to death in a bullet ridden car.

Let's see, who has more reason to lie? A bunch of civilians or the company being accused of senselessly gunning down a number of people. Or the government who employs these hired killers. Do a quick google search of Blackwater and a number of interesting links show up.

But what I find most disturbing about the entire thing is not the direct incident, but the presence of these men in the US at all. They benefit most directly from the war, they are paramilitary private armies. They are paid to be soldiers. We can all agree on this board that war, in general, is a bad thing. No matter our views, we can all agree that the less war, the better. Yet these men live off of the wars. They exist for war. And what's worse, they operate outside of both Iraqi and US military jurisdiction. The only people left to punish them for their actions...the very people paying them. Is this the future of war? Yet another privatized industry?

[Soul]

This is just terrible, I believe the civilians more then Blackwater.

These people sicken me, attacking civilians like that with no reason what so ever and lying about it after.

Edited by Soul, 19 September 2007 - 12:04 AM.

[Hostile]

This is just terrible, I believe the civilians more then Blackwater.

These people sicken me, attacking civilians like that with no reason what so ever and lying about it after.

Grow up, you read a post from someone, that includes a source from CNN (totally left wing anti-Bush) and than you feed on it like a pig at a trough.

Don't feed into alot of this crap. There needs be more than "those witnesses"

The ministry said the incident began around midday, when a convoy of sport utility vehicles came under fire from unidentified gunmen in the square. The men in the SUVs, described by witnesses as Westerners, returned fire, the ministry said.

Can you blame them for being very skitish?

Some Blackwater personnel died in a grisly attack in Iraq more than three years ago that sparked shock and outrage in the United States.

Four Americans working as private security personnel for Blackwater, all of whom were military veterans, were ambushed, killed and mutilated in March 2004 in Falluja, west of Baghdad.

Let's let the investigation find the truth first. Innocent till proven guilty. Coming here and posting in my blog is somewhat bold when you know how things run here. I don't mind people posting here. But the scrutinity will be very high.

[duke_Qa]

hmm, so thats what this part of the forum was, never really noticed anything that said "hostile's blog" before you said it now. figured it was some sort of strange partition of the international discussions.
isnt there a blog 'department' of these forums that have all the other blogs? (if not, then i would also have liked to have my own sub-forum for political climate discussions in my perspective )

anyways, security companies that can practically do whatever they want? they get better paid than US-soldiers, they don't have to follow the same rules as US-soldiers, and they can't be brought to court like US-soldiers? no wonder that people get angry at them. the very basics for these 'private army' security companies should put them into the spotlight.
responsibility for one's actions, especially in such a violent setting, should be mandatory.

the question that has not been answered is ofcourse if they did it. though as said, what does the civillians have to lose on saying what they saw? if it wasnt what happened, they can probably be arrested for being insurgents spreading lies about it, and i can't really see anyone coming forward to do that.


And CNN being "totally left wing anti-Bush"? what the hell is wrong with that? i could go find some powellpoint if you want some proper evidence /sarcasm.
in my eyes, media these days are totally braindead, probably because thats apparently what sells. celebrities gone wild, useless articles about "computer hardware might become illegal!(if this vague suggestion for a ratification of a law that some nutcase in his mother basement wrote yesterday on some toiletpaper becomes ratified)". if you go to Fox or CNN or whatever local news-station you prefer, its mostly soap in reality tv-formatting that comes out.

in the end, its personal opinions that bends the way you interpret news, so if you think CNN is not 'you' then fine, but there might be info in there that has been conveniently left out of other articles in more 'you' oriented newssites. both sides of the medal and all that.

Edited by duke_Qa, 20 September 2007 - 06:53 AM.

[chemical ali]

I don't know why everyone is so up in arms, we need to outsource more wars its far cheaper in the long run and you aren't tied down to the old fashioned rules.

[Hostile]

Now there is more info. Witnesses now number quite abit. So there may have been an abuse of force here

And the reason why my politcal blog is here and not in the blogs is because no one goes to the blogs section.

Also Duke you are formally invited to co-host this blog and it'd be nice to have an offical counterpoint to my own opinion. I always considered you an (unoffical) host anyway.

[duke_Qa]

Mm, it seems apparent that there is more weight against blackwater than there is for them. the good thing about this though is that the other security companies probably will be real careful for a while, and people will hopefully have an easier time with them until the next situation. secondly, as BBC says in this article.
"But security guards in Iraq are not civilians, and they are not soldiers. So will they ever have to face justice?"

There has to be a clearer definition for the laws that private security companies can be charged with. if they arent civillians and they arent soldiers, there has to be some law that can judge them for their wrongs in a fair manner.


hehehe, i figured that it was something like that, i've never really noticed the blogs as they are hidden relatively well. though i wouldnt define this as a personal blog but more a current world events blog, so it fits better other definitions.

mm, sounds like a good enough deal. a counterpoint indeed

[Hostile]

CNN is run by Ted Turner, a seriously left wing person who married Jane Fonda. Remember her? She's the one who visited N Vietnam during the Vietnam war and called American soldiers war criminals.

http://www.apfn.org/apfn/turner.htm Sounds like a hell of a guy till you read further.

And some more...
http://www.ajc.com/o...ss_america.html

And his wife is so far left she could actually end up on the other side of right!

We were Jane Fonda's "war criminals." When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with Jane Fonda. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POW'S were receiving, which was far different from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as "humane and lenient." Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on knees with outstretched arms with a piece of steel rebar placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane every time my arms dipped. Jane Fonda had the audacity to say that the POW's were lying about our torture and treatment.

Taken from this article.
http://www.grunt.com...vietnam/pow.asp

Main stream media is so far left in my country that Fox News (slightly right of center) is called far right! Now talk radio here is far right. People like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

And don't even get me started on New York Times...

[narboza22]

Main stream media is so far left in my country that Fox News (slightly right of center) is called far right! Now talk radio here is far right. People like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin.

And don't even get me started on New York Times...

Oh please, everyone knows that Fox News is just neo con propaganda that Bush and his evil posse make up

[Soul]

We were Jane Fonda's "war criminals." When Jane Fonda was in Hanoi, I was asked by the camp communist political officer if I would be willing to meet with Jane Fonda. I said yes, for I would like to tell her about the real treatment we POW'S were receiving, which was far different from the treatment purported by the North Vietnamese, and parroted by Jane Fonda, as "humane and lenient." Because of this, I spent three days on a rocky floor on knees with outstretched arms with a piece of steel rebar placed on my hands, and beaten with a bamboo cane every time my arms dipped. Jane Fonda had the audacity to say that the POW's were lying about our torture and treatment.

Wow I never knew about that, then again I'm not an American so I guess it makes sense I don't.

[Byakuya Kuchiki]

I read this article in the NYT.

The ministry said the incident began around midday, when a convoy of sport utility vehicles came under fire from unidentified gunmen in the square. The men in the SUVs, described by witnesses as Westerners, returned fire, the ministry said.

Ok, yeah, I could see this happening. Doesn't mean they go into a frenzy and fire at everything they see. You've got to be rational, logical. Most of the people in the square are normal every day people.

I read the portion about the man who was driving his mom to pick up his dad, how both of them died, leaving behind the father and a younger son. This is what *from what I've read* sparked most of the rest of the incident.

The driver, being shot through the head, had slumped against the steering wheel. His weight had been kept on the accelerator.

Ok, not a direct quote, just what I remember from the article. The car went out of control, on a collision course with the convoy, sparking the shooting.

I find it ironic how this happened extremely close to a hospital.

And besides, it doesn't matter if you're american or not, it has nothing to do with us. It's a world new event, not just the United States. I'm siding with the witnesses against Blackwater, they should have been more rational and logistical, even in a frenzied state.

Witnesses reported hearing one of the Blackwater men screaming "Stop! STOP!"

Wow. That's taked right from the NYT. Alright, yeah, Blackwater is almost full blame. Sure, I realize that there was a faction that had fired shots at them, doesn't mean they get to go on a rampage.

Just my two cents

[Cheshire Fox]

Yeah, I heard about that. They said in the NYT that in one Blackwater shooting incident, I believe this one, an officer pulled a gun on one of his own men when the guy wouldn't stop shooting...

[Hostile]

When I was in the military for 6 years, I was a "push button." I never engaged any enemies, never killed anyone. I fired weapons but only in training, even abroad. I was never in a wartime situation. I got the National Defense ribbon because I served while during the 1st Gulf War, I was in Russia getting laid.

I don't know how I'd react in that situation. I'd probably shoot myself in the foot.

Being in a combat situation, even as Blackwater employee, I'd not handle it well. How these people do it (all people in the field who fire weapons) is beyond me.

[MSpencer]

Can you blame them for being very skitish?

Some Belgian franc-tireurs shot German soldiers advancing on their villages in 1914. The Germans responded by decimating those villages involved, and all those around them, and if anything happened on the road between two villages, as it often did, both villages would be practically destroyed.
How is this any different?
Partisan attacks happen. Resistance movements begin in countries which have been invaded by a hostile nation. Sometimes, resistance movements get violent and cause casualties. Does this mean we should write off massacres of civilians as the natural consequence of a combat zone? Civilian casualties do happen, but when unarmed civilians are essentially gunned down in a populated area in broad daylight, I find it very hard to find any justification for such a thing, and to say that they were just rightly on guard and made a mistake is preposterous. Have you heard of any mass murders by Coalition troops in the country? They've taken quite a few more losses, and most of the time they're reacting to enemy fire, not just firing into rush hour traffic.

Just some more media, before my opinion.
http://www.latimes.c...-opinion-center

One particularly infuriating time, I was in the town of Irbil in northern Iraq, being driven to a meeting with a Kurdish political leader. We were on a narrow stretch of highway with no shoulders and foot-high barriers on both sides. The lead Suburban in our convoy loomed up behind an old, puttering sedan driven by an older man with a young woman and three children.

As we approached at typical breakneck speed, the Blackwater driver honked furiously and motioned to the side, as if they should pull over. The kids in the back seat looked back in horror, mouths agape at the sight of the heavily armored Suburbans driven by large, armed men in dark sunglasses. The poor Iraqi driver frantically searched for a means of escape, but there was none. So the lead Blackwater vehicle smashed heedlessly into the car, pushing it into the barrier. We zoomed by too quickly to notice if anyone was hurt.

http://www.tpmmuckra...ives/004398.php

The Blackwater guard who drunkenly shot a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi in December 2006 was back working for a Department of Defense contractor by February, CNN reported this morning.

Oh, and a more recent perspective:
http://www.reuters.c...763321420071007

Iraq said on Sunday security guards from the U.S. firm Blackwater "deliberately killed" 17 Iraqis in last month's shooting incident in Baghdad and that it would take legal steps against them.

Meaning they'll fight to get them extradited to Iraq for the next thirty years. Or, they'll try to arrest them, something which will be blocked by both the US State Department and, if need be, the US military.


http://edition.cnn.c...ckwater.report/

This was an extremely interesting article...
"Blackwater most often shoots first"
I guess that's fitting, considering they're hired to do the things that the DoD and the administration don't really want the general staff knowing about. Things like executions. Isn't it interesting that we have thousands, tens of thousands of contractors in Iraq, all of whom are completely free of any binding article of the UCMJ, and who are completely exempt in every way of government legislation (Besides the cancellation of their contract, and who is in charge of that anyways?), any kind of government investigation, and who work completely independently of the United States military, and who at the same time have been accused previously of selling arms on the black market in Iraq? These people answer to nobody, they do what they like, and clearly they can get away with murdering innocent people. And who would dare to defend them? Why Condoleezza Rice, of course!
Blackwater is in no way different from the Einsatzgruppen of the German military in Russia, 1941-45. They are independent of the governing military body, Petraeus can no more order around Blackwater any more than Paulus, v. Reichenau, v. Bock, v. Rundstedt, v. Leeb, v. Kluge, or v. Manstein could order any of the Einsatzgruppen to cease or ramp up their methods of destruction. They follow their own agenda, Blackwater simply performs tasks for the US government, where do these tasks come from? This seems very similar to the method in which, naturally, the Nazis employed the Einsatzgruppen, using paramilitary units to further a political means. Who is to say that Blackwater doesn't occasionally drag a minister out of his home and terrify him into agreeing with US policies and politics, or, perhaps more rarely, shoot one of them and throw them into the Tigris? We don't know, simply because no information is being published about them.
The activities of Blackwater are more shrouded in secrecy than the activities of the SS. Shouldn't we demand a bit of transparency from our government, or are we going to continue trusting them to execute our wishes faithfully? It's clear that nothing will happen to the Blackwater goons responsible for this atrocity, nothing will happen now, nothing will happen tomorrow, nothing will happen ever. They will stay there as long as US troops, they will do whatever the US government tells them to do (We hear that they just do convoy escort and security operations; that's just too good to be true), and they will continue killing civilians as long as they're there. It might be an accident, it might not, but ultimately, seventeen Iraqis are dead. It doesn't matter who is culpable, they were shot by Blackwater operatives in a zone where no recognized combat was occuring. They were, in all senses of the word, murdered, and some of you defend them. Atrocious, really; the defenders of atrocity are as much bathed in the blood of the dead as the perpetrators.
My scathing words and contempt will not bring back the dead though, so I do ask that you remember that people have died. This is not an abstract concept, this is not a number in a war game, this is not a sprite in an RTS; these are human lives that were ended in a zone where they had every reasonable expectation of safety. It's time for justice.

Edited by MSpencer, 09 October 2007 - 06:40 AM.

[Cheshire Fox]

In a completely areligious sense, amen.

[Hostile]

http://news.bbc.co.u...ope/7044019.stm

The most famous french mercen... erm I mean contractor, as they are now called, has died.