Military contractors lose their "get out of jail free" cards

Here's how the change works: In the past, contractors could only be tried in military courts if war had officially been declared. Since the U.S. has not declared war in 65 years, contractors were able to run amok, with little chance of being brought to justice. But the new law adds military jurisdiction under the new classification of “contingency operation.” Singer explains:

This is great news!
No longer can the folks at Dyncor and other scumbag merc
operations run child prostitution rings in the countries
the US uses them in to control and suppress the poor
and displaced victims of corporate hegemony.

This is a very important development.

BHN:thumbsup:
Thanks for posting this news.

Another K&R for this from me. The burgeoning corporate mercenary industry needs to be excised from the United States and the surest path to that goal is to make the business unprofitable. This is a small step, but a welcome one indeed.

:kick:

this sounds great.

I'm always disappointed that news items don't make it do the greatest threads pages. I'd much rather see items like this climb up than yet another semi-coherent rant.

Keep it up.

I know, it feels a lot like pushing a boulder up the mountain sometimes...
heh.
BHN

for everyone involved, well, except for mercenaries etc. I suppose they will be a bit upset. ;)

It will be hard for them to get used to not acting above the law.
Poor things...
NOT~!

BHN

There are some bad security contractors who have murdered people, usually on the pretext of protecting their vehicles from attack, but raped and pillaged? Remember, the Iraqi civilians are heavily armed, too; the security contractors duck from secure place to secure place at high speed; they don't get much swaggering room.

Abu Ghraib would be an example of raping. As for the pillaging, I don't know of any grunts working for contractors that have been accused, but the contractors themselves are pillaging both the US & Iraqi treasuries.

I'd say the military contractors (at least the bosses who are raking in the real money) are still pretty safe from prosecution. A handful of mouth-breathers, in over their heads for way more than they bargained for, might get tried for abusing the locals, but the big crimes will still go merrily (and profitably) on their way.

I'm ecstatic.

I hope it will end up with greater accountability for those weasels.

hopefully the corporation can be charged with crimes and shutdown. does anyone know if that will be possible?

I doubt there are solid precendents to try corporate leash-holders, and so, only the mercs will be caught up in this.

There's a whole process built up around reporting and prosecuting UCMJ violations by military members. There's nothing like that for contractors. A contractor would have to be caught in the act of murdering someone, with a particularly knowledgeable and motivated JAG in the loop, before there's any chance they would get charged.

Considering how incredibly frequent murder is in Baghdad (10-100 murders a day, not counting bombings), the security contractors don't significantly contribute to the death toll. It would be nice if somebody held the bad ones to account, but this change in the law probably won't do it, unless there's additional regulation that comes down from the Pentagon.

The military is one thing, but these private, Murder, Inc. companies should be outlawed. In most states in this country, people who kill for personal profit receive much harsher sentences than "crimes of passion." Apparently, their real crime is either thinking to small or, perhaps, they're "guilty" of not sharing the profits (with the Right people).

Anyway you slice it, the fact that we allow such private businesses to regard war as a legitimate profit center shames us all...and insures there will be no end to killing. At least, not until we start holding those with the most to gain accountable for their crimes against humanity.

but contractors have been subjected to UCMJ since day one. Before we deployed in 02 to Afghanistan we had all the contractors that were going with our brigade (about 500 peeps) go through the rules of war classes we all had to go through and sign all the paperwork that we had. that paperwork stated that we acknowledged we had completed the training and understood that all personnel signing were subject to UCMJ. UCMJ will never be used against contractors as they are not military personnel. The Defense Bill will say one thing and commanders on the ground in theater will do what they please. As they always do. Many of those commanders are eyeing contracting jobs themselves. When I was in Iraq last year my Platoon leader (1LT) was the contracting officer for the battalion, we had to do all the paperwork for all the guys that came to support our unit. We had KBR road builders and truck drivers, L-3 Communication systems specialists, basically civilians that help the Intel and targeting cells decide on which raids to conduct as well as who was guilty and who was innocent vis a vis our holding cells to Digital Master Gunners from Mantech whose job was to build the IT networks and maintain the databases. Most of these guys had booze, Iraqi hookers, you name it. Not one of them was charged because when the issues went to JAG and then up to division the Division Commander dropped the charges and just sent the guys home early.

Anyway my point is this law is nice, but the corruption at the top of the chain makes it hard to believe this will change anything.

The paralegal in me wonders if all that paperwork you saw the contractors signing was unenforcible exactly because of the technicality described above?

The problem may have been that when the cases got to the JAG, the JAG would have to recommend dismissal for lack of jurisdiction. So the division commander shakes his head and tells the offenders to just go home.

Seems to me it might just be the Army Way to make the contractors sign the paperwork anyhow, in the hopes that some of them would think they really were under the jurisdiction of the UCMJ.

Who sneaked it in?

:kick:

If they are held accountable, it will be just as in the Military.. The small fish will be tried while the big ones get away....

creating the chaos we see in Iraq today.