Blackwater blues
Remember I said that I was picking up anger among Army officers about Blackwater CEO Erik Prince’s recent assertion in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that his employees in Iraq should be considered as volunteers in a noble cause, just like American soldiers? Here is a note I got from Col. Gian Gentile, who ...
Remember I said that I was picking up anger among Army officers about Blackwater CEO Erik Prince's recent assertion in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that his employees in Iraq should be considered as volunteers in a noble cause, just like American soldiers?
Remember I said that I was picking up anger among Army officers about Blackwater CEO Erik Prince’s recent assertion in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece that his employees in Iraq should be considered as volunteers in a noble cause, just like American soldiers?
Here is a note I got from Col. Gian Gentile, who commanded a battalion in south Baghdad in 2006 and now teaches at West Point. I believe he speaks for many. At no point in the Journal piece, Gentile notes, does Prince “mention the many, many Iraqi civilians that his people gunned down on the streets and roads of Iraq”:
No question that American soldiers have too. But at least we had accountability. How many Blackwater staff members, after killing Iraqi civilians from an ‘escalation of force’ incident found the relatives of the victims, went to their homes, looked them in the eyes and told them that we did it?
“I still remember looking at a 45 year old Iraqi woman who was riding in the back of a taxi on Route Irish and her taxi driver who got too close to a Blackwater convoy had his car shot up by them, they kept going, but the poor woman in the back of the car was shot 2-3 times in the legs and back. Through my interpreter, she asked if I could do anything to help her, that she had 3 children at home without a husband. But since it was a private security company who did it, I had no provision within regulation to give her financial compensation.
“Prince could have at least had the decency to admit that even though his people often act bravely, through the carrying out of their contracts for money they have ruined hundreds, no thousands, of Iraqis lives. Where was that acknowledgment in his infuriating oped? He is right that most of us have not known ‘personally’ his employees, but how many families of Iraqis that his people have killed has he got to know ‘personally?'”
Photo of Erik Prince via TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images
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