Iraq plans raids on US backed 'beyond the law private security firms'

The Iraqi Interior Minister showing his resolve, will take risky actions against US sponsored terrorist also known as `beyond the law private security firms'.

His plan is to `raid' these firms to see if they are complying with new gun registration laws. The operative word being `raid.' The question of how many American lives will be lost, might be the point the the Interior Minister wants to get across to the American public - for undoubtedly the confrontations will pit American soldiers against American contractors.

The US leadership in Iraq blundered when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the American commander in Iraq, was in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces and `lost' 190,000 fire arms. Maybe they ended up free of charge in the hands of the contractors? With the missing millions?

The Iraqi leadership's goal of `gun control' through registration seems a smart move, but `raiding' the lawless Western contractors- or even just threatening to do so, is not. The contractors should be removed, and reparations should be made for their bad behavior.




November 8, 2007
Iraq Plans to Confront Security Firms on Guns
By JAMES GLANZ

BAGHDAD, Nov. 7 — The Iraqi interior minister said Wednesday that he would authorize raids by his security forces on Western security firms to ensure that they were complying with tightened licensing requirements on guns and other weaponry, setting up the possibility of violent confrontations between the Iraqis and heavily armed Western guards.

The tightening of the requirements followed a shooting in September by one of those firms, Blackwater, that Iraqi authorities said left 17 Iraqis dead.

“Every company will be subject to such examination, and any company that does not follow the law will lose its license,” the minister, Jawad al-Bolani, said of the planned raids. “They are called security companies. They are not called violate-the-law companies.”

During a tour of the Interior Ministry compound in eastern Baghdad, Iraqi government officials also said for the first time that they accepted estimates by American oversight officials that some 190,000 pistols and automatic rifles supplied by the United States to Iraqi forces in 2004 and 2005 were unaccounted for.

Iraqi officials have created an elaborate computerized database to help recover the weapons and ensure that no more are lost, and officials took great pains on Wednesday to show the system to this reporter and his interpreter.

“We have 190,000 lost weapons because they were not distributed properly,” said Maj. Gen. Abdul Karim Khalaf, an Interior Ministry spokesman. “So we built this database.”



Many of those weapons were distributed when Gen. David H. Petraeus, now the American commander in Iraq, was in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005. General Petraeus has said that he decided to arm the Iraqi forces as quickly as possible, before tracking systems were fully in place.

On Wednesday, Iraqi officials delicately placed blame for the loss of the weapons on the American military, saying that it had been impossible for the Iraqis to account for the weapons when they were not given necessary tracking information, such as serial numbers.

Within Baghdad’s relatively safe and heavily guarded Green Zone, there have been early indications of a battle over who controls Iraqi streets. Private security guards say that Iraqi police officers have already descended on Western compounds and stopped vehicles driven by Westerners to check for weapons violations in recent weeks.



Any extension of those measures into the rest of the country, known as the Red Zone, could quickly turn into armed confrontation. Westerners are wary of Interior Ministry checkpoints, some of which have been fake, as well as of ministry units, which are sometimes militia-controlled and have been implicated in sectarian killings. Western convoys routinely have to choose between the risk of stopping and the risk of accelerating past what appear to be official Iraqi forces.

And because Western convoys run by private security companies are often protecting senior American civilian and military officials, the Iraqi government’s struggle with the companies has in some cases become a sort of proxy tug-of-war with the United States.

That dynamic was laid bare in the weeks immediately after the shooting on Sept. 16 in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The Iraqi government at first suggested that it would ban Blackwater, which has a contract to protect American diplomats, from working in Iraq. But the government was embarrassed when it discovered that its legal options were limited, and the United States — after placing a few new restrictions on the company — quickly sent it back onto the streets.

Based on its own investigation, the Iraqi government has concluded that the Blackwater guards who opened fire committed murder. An American investigation led by the F.B.I. has not yet publicly announced any results.

The outlines of a struggle for primacy on the streets also seem apparent in what the Interior Ministry says is a decision to insist that weapons carried by members of Shiite-controlled militias that protect certain neighborhoods must also be registered. Asked about the vast areas of Baghdad patrolled by the powerful Mahdi Army, which was founded by the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, General Khalaf said that it too would be challenged.




“In the near future there is a campaign that will happen,” General Khalaf said. “We are delaying this campaign until we finish this database.”

Privately, Interior Ministry officials say that they had been surprised that the Iraqi investigators’ findings of culpability by the Blackwater guards had found such a sympathetic hearing elsewhere in the world, where for years there had been questions about the loyalties and capability of Interior Ministry officials.

In one sense, by emphasizing the new steps it is taking to control weapons, the Interior Ministry seems determined to leverage the respect shown for its investigators in such a high-profile case into an improved image over all. The strategy appears to be to concede that both American and Iraqi security forces have made mistakes in the past but that both were taking steps to put those problems behind them.

During one remarkable session on Wednesday, an administrative official at the ministry said that it had had problems with “ghost payrollers,” or fictitious employees, and political pressure in the past. But the official, Maj. Gen. Jihan Hussein, said that the ministry was squarely facing those problems.

“If you knew the pressures we have from members of Parliament to have their relatives employed by the ministry, you wouldn’t believe it,” General Hussein said.

But he said the ministry would not bow to those pressures. In a similar vein, Mr. Bolani said that the ministry’s strict new approach to weapons licenses would try to redress past mistakes.

And Mr. Bolani said he believed that legal action against Blackwater in Iraq was still possible in spite of immunity given to Western security contractors under Iraqi law. He said that third parties like nongovernmental organizations or the Iraqi Bar Association could bring suits on behalf of the victims of the Sept. 16 shootings.

“We are fully aware that the people must be given their rights, and there are cases that will be brought against the criminals,” Mr. Bolani said.

Ahmad Fadam contributed reporting.

Iraq War : Is it Time for a Time Table? The arguments from both sides

In a cliffhanger vote — 218 to 212 — the House of Representatives defied a White House veto threat and passed an emergency war-funding bill requiring that most U.S. forces be out of Iraq no later than August 2008.


Just an hour after the bill passed, President Bush fired back from a White House event, where he stood ringed by military veterans. He derided the House vote, calling it an act of political theater.

Senator Trent Lot Critical of Timetable Plan

Meanwhile, the Senate's No. 2 Republican leader harshly criticized Democrats
in the House of Representatives for setting an "artificial date" for withdrawing troops from Iraq and said he believes Republicans have enough votes to prevent passage of a similar bill in the Senate.

"We need to put that kind of decision in the hands of our commanders who are
there on the ground with the men and women," said Senator Trent Lott,
(R-Miss.). "For Congress to impose an artificial date of any kind is totally
irresponsible."

Lott said setting withdrawal dates is a futile because Bush has made
clear he will veto any such legislation.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi explains her view of the situation

1. Returning Soldgiers poorly cared for: "And when they come home, they are not being honored as the heroes they are. The revelations of appalling conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital and VA facilities across the nation remind us once again that our troops have been sent into war with no plan to care for them when they come home."

2. Bush is NOT listening to his commanders on the ground :"Our commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, recently said: 'There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq.' "The Department of Defense has finally admitted that 'elements of a civil war do exist in Iraq.' In fact, it is even worse than that.

Yet the President's response to escalating levels of violence is to deploy more troops -- a strategy that has been tried without success on three previous occasions .

3. Troops Not Ready: "The admission by General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he is "not comfortable" with the readiness of Army
units in the United States.

4. US war effort marked by poor planning, coordination and oversight. "The
conclusion by the special inspector general that the failure of the reconstruction effort in Iraq was caused by a lack of planning, coordination and oversight.

Senator Chuck Hagel stopped short of calling for Bush's impeachment

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a frequent critic of the war, stopped short of calling for Bush's impeachment. But he made clear that some legislators viewed that as an option should Bush choose to push ahead despite public sentiment against the war.

"Any president who says, I don't care, or I will not respond to what the people of this country are saying about Iraq or anything else, or I don't care what the Congress does, I am going to proceed - if a president really believes that, then . . . there are ways to deal with that," said Hagel, who is considering a 2008 presidential run.

Bush is Accountable

In the April edition of Esquire magazine, Hagel described Bush as someone who doesn't believe he's accountable to anyone. "He's not accountable anymore, which isn't totally true. You can impeach him, and before this is over, you might see calls for his impeachment. I don't know. It depends on how this goes," Hagel told the magazine.

In his weekly address Saturday, Bush accused Democrats of partisanship in the House vote and said it would cut the number of troops below a level that U.S. military commanders say they need. Vice-President Dick Cheney also accused Democrats of undermining U.S. troops in Iraq and of sending a message to terrorists that America will retreat in the face of danger.

"We have clearly a situation where the president has lost the confidence of the American people in his war effort," Hagel said. "It is now time, going into the fifth year of that effort, for the Congress to step forward and be part of setting some boundaries and some conditions as to our involvement.

"This is not a monarchy," he added, referring to the possibility that some legislators may seek impeachment. "There are ways to deal with it. And I would hope the president understands that."

Senator Dianne Feinstein - the people have spoken

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said "People of this country have spoken overwhelmingly. It's been constant now," Feinstein said. "They want us out. It is time for the Senate to weigh in. I hope we will have the votes."

Army Gen. David Petraeus takes command of U.S. forces in Iraq

New U.S. commander in Iraq says 'barbarians' must be defeated
By Tina Susman, Times Staff Writer
9:09 AM PST, February 10, 2007


BAGHDAD -- Army Gen. David Petraeus took command of U.S. forces in Iraq today with a sober assessment of the job he faces and a warning that Iraq will be doomed if "barbarians" fueling violence across the country are not defeated.

As Petraeus took over the reigns from Gen. George Casey, who is leaving to become the new Army chief of staff, new reports of U.S. and Iraqi deaths illustrated the challenges cited by both men during the handover ceremony. U.S. military officials announced that at least three American troops had died in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad, when a blast went off in a building they were scouring for weapons. In Baghdad, two car bombs went off, killing at least seven civilians.

The U.S. deaths brought to 36 the number of American troops killed in the first 10 days of February, representing one of the highest daily death rates since the war's start in March 2003. A brief military statement said in addition to the three killed, four soldiers from Task Force Lightning were killed in the Diyala incident, which occurred Friday.

U.S. and Iraqi forces mounted an offensive last month in Diyala, which hugs the Iranian border northeast of Baghdad. The military says it is a hotbed of Sunni Muslim extremists with ties to Al Qaeda. The leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was killed in a U.S. air strike in June in Diyala, a region so notorious for insurgent attacks that Iraqi forces have refused to venture into much of it without U.S. backing.

At least 3,121 U.S. troops have died since the invasion of Iraq, according to the web site icasualties.org, which tracks civilian and military casualties in the war.

In comments made before he handed control to Petraeus, Casey said no obvious mistakes on his part sprang to mind.

"It might seem a little trite, but for me, it's too close in time to judge the mistakes, because if I thought I was making a mistake I would have changed it," said Casey, speaking to journalists before the ceremony.

Instead, Casey said he went away "with a great feeling of pride, because I really feel we've laid the foundation for Iraq's success."

Casey predicted that Iraqi forces would be ready to take control of the country's security by the end of summer or early fall, a seemingly optimistic view given what appears to be the sluggish start to a much-vaunted, U.S.-Iraqi security plan aimed at bringing violence under control. The plan was announced in January and is to put an additional 21,500 U.S. troops, as well as thousands more Iraqi soldiers and national police, in Baghdad and in Al Anbar province.

So far, only 3,000 more Americans and 2,000 Iraqis have been put in place, a schedule that U.S. military officials say is on target at least for the Americans. They have said all the new U.S. troops should be in place by May.

Petraeus appeared to take a more tempered note in his first comments as commander, calling the situation he had inherited "extremely challenging."

"However, hard is not hopeless," he said in speech to coalition forces and Iraqi and U.S. political leaders. "The prospects for success are good. Failing that, Iraq will be doomed to continuing violence and civil strife."

There was no letup in that strife as the handover unfolded in the mosaic and marble rotunda of one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.

In Baghdad's mainly Shiite Karrada neighborhood, a suicide bomber parked his car near a bakery and crowded market shortly after noon. The explosion killed at least four civilians and injured 10, Iraqi police said. In Kamaliya, another mainly Shiite district in eastern Baghdad, a car bomb tore through a street lined with auto parts and repair shops, killing at least three civilians and injuring six.

A 15-year-old girl died in a cross-fire between rival groups in a street battle typical of Baghdad's neighborhoods. Across Baghdad, at least six other people were found dead, apparent victims of sectarian violence.

Twenty-four additional bodies were reported in the area around Kut, south of Baghdad. In Mussayib, also to the south of Baghdad, mortars slammed into civilian homes overnight, killing two women and a man, and a man died when a roadside bomb exploded.


susman@latimes.com

Special correspondents in Baghdad contributed to this report.