Trigger happy drive by media hits Blackwater

Ben Ryan:

"They are immature shooters and have very quick trigger fingers," says an anonymous lieutenant colonel.

"Why are we creating new vulnerabilities by relying on what are essentially mercenary forces?" asks a nameless intelligence officer. "They often act like cowboys over here," says an unidentified commander.

Ever since a recent shootout in downtown Baghdad, newspapers have been ablaze with charges that private security contractors in Iraq are trigger-happy.

This rush to pass judgment is hardly surprising. Frequently derided as "mercenaries" and "rent-a-cops," security contractors make an easy target for war opponents.

As a former employee of a major Blackwater competitor, I find this categorical smearing of contractors to be starkly at odds with my experience. I served as an officer in the Navy SEALs for six years. After I left, I joined a private security firm and was promptly sent to Iraq.

Contrary to the popular belief that Blackwater contractors are "thugs for hire," most are highly professional and well trained. Blackwater operates the world's largest private military training facility. Its 1,000 contractors working in Iraq are drawn from the ranks of former military and law enforcement officials. Many of its workers are former SEALs or veterans of other special-operations units.

The risks these workers assume are underscored by the infamous 2004 ambush in Fallujah, in which four Blackwater contractors were murdered and mutilated. To date, Blackwater has lost 30 contractors. For all anyone knows, last month's incident could have turned into another Fallujah had Blackwater's contractors reacted differently. The details are still terribly unclear.

The contractors--and the U.S. diplomats they were escorting--claim they were ambushed. Yet Iraq's Ministry of Interior almost immediately issued a report declaring that the contractors were "100% guilty." Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has charged that the operators killed "in cold blood."

With conflicting reports, condemnations should not be made until the joint Iraqi-U.S. investigation is completed. The media, however, has accepted the Ministry of Interior's version of events, all but writing off the accounts of both Blackwater and the State Department.

...

One of the reasons these guys still have jobs in Iraq is because the Ministry of the Interior is still not up to its job of providing security. If it were the diplomats wouldn't need private security guards. The job of the guards is also compounded by the enemy's war crime of camouflaging himself as a civilian which puts all civilians at risk. He also sometimes camouflages himself as an employee of the Ministry of the Interior, i.e. Iraqi police. If civilians were killed in the incident at issue, it is this enemy war crime that is primarily responsible. The media and the Ministry of the Interior also largely ignore the car bomb which proceeded the incident. It is not unusual for these car bombs to trigger small arms and RPG attacks on people in convoys. This would make the guards hyper sensitive to any gunfire which they perceived to be direct toward them.

Peter McHugh bring some balance to the story in his commentary.