Check this out: Pretty disgusting:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6947745/

U.S. contractors in Iraq allege abuses

Four men say they witnessed the shooting of unarmed civiliansBy Lisa Myers & the NBC investigative unit

Updated: 6:34 p.m. ET Feb. 15, 2005. There are new allegations that heavily armed private security contractors in Iraq are brutalizing Iraqi civilians. In an exclusive interview, four former security contractors told NBC News that they watched as innocent Iraqi civilians were fired upon, and one crushed by a truck. The contractors worked for an American company paid by U.S. taxpayers. The Army is now looking into the allegations.


The four men are all retired military veterans: Capt. Bill Craun, Army Rangers; Sgt. Jim Errante, military police; Cpl. Ernest Colling, U.S. Army; and Will Hough, U.S. Marines. All went to Iraq months ago as private security contractors.

"I went there for the money," says Hough.

"I'm a patriot," says Craun.

"You can't turn off being a soldier," says Colling.

They worked for an American company named Custer Battles, hired by the Pentagon to conduct dangerous missions guarding supply convoys. They were so upset by what they saw, three quit after only one or two missions.

"What we saw, I know the American population wouldn't stand for," says Craun.

They claim heavily armed security operators on Custer Battles' missions — among them poorly trained, young Kurds, who have historical resentments against other Iraqis — terrorized civilians, shooting indiscriminately as they ran for cover, smashing into and shooting up cars.

On a mission on Nov. 8, escorting ammunition and equipment for the Iraqi army, they claim a Kurd guarding the convoy allegedly shot into a passenger car to clear a traffic jam.

"[He] sighted down his AK-47 and started firing," says Colling. "It went through the window. As far as I could see, it hit a passenger. And they didn't even know we were there."

Later, the convoy came upon two teenagers by the road. One allegedly was gunned down.

"The rear gunner in my vehicle shot him," says Colling. "Unarmed, walking kids."

In another traffic jam, they claim a Ford 350 pickup truck smashed into, then rolled up and over the back of a small sedan full of Iraqis.

"The front of the truck came down," says Craun. "I could see two children sitting in the back seat of that car with their eyes looking up at the axle as it came down and pulverized the back."

"I said, 'Wow, what hit this car?'" remembers Hough.

Could anyone have survived?

"Probably not. Not from what I saw," says Hough.

The men assume that in all three incidents the Iraqis were seriously hurt or killed. But they can't be sure.

"It was chaos and carnage and destruction the whole day," says Craun.

Two of the men — Craun and Colling — say they quit immediately.

Craun, in an e-mail two days later to a friend at the Pentagon, wrote: "I didn't want any part of an organization that deliberately murders children and innocent civilians."

Errante says he also quit after witnessing wild, indiscriminate shootings on two other missions.

"I said I didn't want to be a witness to any of these, what could be classified as a war crime," says Errante.

Once back in the U.S., Craun — recipient of the Bronze Star — took the allegations to Army criminal investigators. The Army tells NBC News it's looking into the matter.

This is not the firm’s first brush with controversy. Custer Battles is a relatively new company in the booming field of so-called "private military companies" in Iraq providing veteran soldiers from around the world for various security jobs. Named for founders Michael Battles and Scott Custer, who are military veterans, the company quickly nabbed lucrative contracts in Iraq, where U.S. authorities needed firms who were willing to accept high-risk assignments.

The company is already under criminal investigation for allegations of fraud centering on the way it billed the government. Those allegations are also at the heart of a lawsuit by former associates. In September, the military banned the firm and its associates from obtaining new federal contracts or subcontracts.

Custer Battles denies it committed any fraud, and says the company has been the target of "baseless allegations" made by "disgruntled former employees" and competitors. It has said it hopes that the government will overturn the suspension on new contracts.

In any case, the ban didn’t stop the company from fulfilling its old contracts, such as the missions performed by Craun, Hough, Colling and Errante.

"These aren't insurgents that we're brutalizing," says Craun. "It was local civilians on their way to work. It's wrong."

Anyone who's been there says Iraq is a brutal, deadly place. So why do the men blame Custer Battles?

"Simply, they're negligent," says Colling. "[Just] throwing people out there and then forcing us to use these brutal tactics. They're responsible, absolutely."

Custer Battles declined to be interviewed on camera. The CEO calls the allegations "completely baseless and without merit" and says there's "no evidence" to support them. He adds that the Kurds worked for a subcontractor, not Custer Battles.

The company provided conflicting information about the crushed car, but arranged for NBC News to talk to the man who who oversaw the mission on Nov. 8, 2004. Shawn Greene, who still works for Custer Battles in Iraq, spoke by phone with NBC News. He acknowledges that during the mission a pickup truck did roll over the bumper and tail light area of a sedan, which he says refused to move out of the way. Greene denies anyone was injured in the incident.

"There were no children in that vehicle," he insists.

As the leader of the mission, Greene ordered the lead driver to push the vehicle since there had been attacks against convoys in that area in the past.

"He came directly in front of my lead vehicle," says Greene. "That is how that car got in our path. And why he had to be pushed out the way when he refused to move. It wasn't that we went out of our way in any way looking for a car to hit. We don't do that."

But because of the dangers on Iraqi roads, Greene says employees of Custer Battles do sometimes push Iraqi civilian vehicles out of their way if they refuse to move.

"Usually, you know, we give them a tap at about 20 miles an hour or so," he says.

The company also arranged for a phone conversation with its country manager in Iraq, Paul Christopher. The company points out that Christopher is a retired lieutenant colonel who authored a book on the ethics of war and ran the philosophy program at West Point. Christopher maintains the Nov. 8 mission was the only case where a civilian car was damaged by the company in Iraq.

The company provided a photo to NBC News, which it says is the car in question, to prove that the damage was not that severe. In the photo, the passenger compartment of the car seems to be intact.

Craun, Colling and Hough say it's not the same car.

As for the incidents of allegedly wild shooting, Greene also disputes that any innocent Iraqis were killed by gunfire during the mission, although he agrees there were warning shots fired on several legs of the mission.

Likewise, Christopher insists "there has absolutely never been a case of anyone being hurt or killed to my knowledge, except for people who were actively engaged in shooting at us first."

Certainly the company does experience genuine combat conditions. In fact, on one leg of the November mission, the convoy came under a serious attack by Iraqi insurgents. First, the pickup truck driven by Will Hough was struck by an Improvised Explosive Device, or IED, which killed one of the Iraqi Kurd guards. Then the men fought a pitched firefight against insurgents until the U.S. military arrived.

However, Custer Battles claims all these men are "disgruntled" former employees, who believe the company still owes them money. It says Will Hough was fired and that Bill Craun once confided to a colleague that he knew the company didn't really kill any children.

So why are these men going public with these allegations now? They say because they care about American soldiers and about winning the war.

"If we continue to let this happen, those people will hate us even more than they already do," says Craun.

And they say that only makes Iraq more dangerous for American soldiers.

You know what's so damn annoying about that article...not that there are bad Kurds...there are! Everyone's got that kind of thug amongst them now don't they? But two things get me. When all of the Kurds over the past two years have been killed and had notes cursing all Kurds as traitors and scum and other choice Arabic cursewords I won't repeat here, the media reported them as "10 iraqs were found dead today"...but let one Kurd or five Kurds do something wrong and they aren't Iraqis anymore....they're Kurds!! Then, these Arab Ba'athists can go around beheading people, dragging an 80 year old father of a policeman down the street and putting people's hands in boiling water, butchering women by taking them apart piece by picece and kill a major humanitarian worker Margaret Hasan....and pretty much...they get a pass! They do this kind of thing EVERY DAY!!! But now the media finally decides that the Kurds are not Arabs and not Iraqis after all cause they did something wrong and you guys are all over them.

Let me ask you a question. If you were going to downtown inner city USA with some cargo, and you wanted to make it safely through their...would you hire a gang that looked like they just stepped out of prison...BIG, THUGISH LOOKING, ARMED...or would you hire some mild mannered average people? Be real! You and I would hire the biggest, baddest looking bunch of sharpshooters we could find and you know what? They would not be representative of their population, but I can bet you they would act like thugs!!!!!

And you thought they would all be angels? C'mon, put the blame where it belongs okay...leave the local thugery out of it, everyone's got em.

I would swear I'm reading Semper or Fly, the reason for your obfuscation being completely relative of course.

This story was featured on Countdown. Listening to the whistleblowers was a stomach turner.

[quote=heart,Feb 15 2005, 09:59 PM]

All I can say is that at this point, I'm REALLY tired of worrying about what's going on in Iraq. I really am. I'd like to get back to worrying about what's going on in the inner cities in the US of A.
This is why:

Gimme A Piece of the Pie!
Letter from an American Citizen to an Anonymous Iraqi Woman

Dear Anonymous Iraqi Woman,

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, but I happened to see your 15 seconds of fame on the local news last night—and you’ve been on my mind ever since. You were protesting, together with your fellow Iraqi citizens, on the streets of my home town in Chicago, IL.--contesting the results of recent elections in your country, which, according to most reports, turned out fairly well—as I’m sure you must be aware, a +/- 60% turnout in the first free elections in 50 years is not bad for any country--even for a “mature” democracy like ours, where voter turnout was about the same (60%) in the 2004 general elections, up from 51% in 2000, 49.1% in 1996 and 55.1% in 1992.

I congratulate you—you and your people defied the odds, and even managed to upset the applecart by putting the Bush-backed Allawi in third place. You are better “democrats” than we—we’ve been trying to get our Bush-backed regime out of office for two election cycles, to no avail. And there are at least 58 million of us who are extremely unhappy—indeed devastated—by the results. Many of those 58 million are equally convinced that neither this election, nor the previous one, was conducted fairly or squarely, and certainly—even with a 60% turnout—does not reflect the will of citizens of this country. There’s a word for people like us: they call us “sore losers”—it’s an epithet for “Democrat.” And some of us have been out protesting—but our protests have not been deemed newsworthy by the media. So you’ve got us beat on two counts—at the polls and in the press.

There you were on the 6 o’clock news, purple pointer-finger clenched around the protest sign in your hand, demanding that the United States government “help” you, that you be given a “piece of the pie.” I’m assuming your candidate lost and that was why you came out to protest, and I am surprised no one dared to call you a “sore loser.” Hell no, the picture the media portrays is that of the American dream—live in all its purple-tipped blood, guts and glory! You are the American dream—we, the American nightmare.

How I wish the citizens of my country had the wherewithal to take the streets of this city as valiantly as you—how I wish the 50 to 60 million of us who “lost” our elections were out there screaming “gimme a piece of the pie!” just like you. Better yet, I wish those 50 to 60 million fellow-citizens of mine were out there screaming, “Forget your piece of pie—gimme the whole goddamned bakery,” just like we used to do in Germany when we hit the barricades on behalf of causes that moved us deeply. The bakery, you see, used to be ours. We built it. We bought it. We stole it from the Indians fair and square. Founders, keepers. The bakery is ours—to hell with the "expletive deleted"ing piece of the pie.

I was impressed with your English: you spoke with an impeccable American accent—in any other context, I’d have assumed you were a native-born American: one of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, all come to look for America at a time when strangers were welcome here. At any rate, it was clear that you’ve already spent most of your 20 or so years on this planet in this country, not in Iraq. And who could fault you for that, considering the state of affairs “over there”—a place where even white (neo-colonialist) men now fear to tread.

I know it’s not your fault that most Americans can’t muster the same degree of passion for the democratic process as you and prefer not to wonder where, when, how and whether their votes are counted once they’ve been cast, but I wonder if you realize just how big a piece of our pie you have already gotten and how, to the average “sore-loser” citizen like me, your protest might be seen as insult added to injury.

As of October 2004, the estimated cost of this war was already cited at $150 billion. According to statistics published by the National Priorities Project, about $1.5 billion of that has come from the taxpayers of the city of Chicago—that is, from me and my neighbors: from our paychecks and our budgets. And we’ve been feeling the crunch. School budgets—from the elementary to the university level have been cut drastically in this city and this state, the Chicago Park District is experiencing similar slashing, and let’s not even talk about the job losses in the private sector, about the record number of bankruptcies, or how many soldiers from this city have lost life or limb guaranteeing you the right to vote and to protest on the Magnificent Mile. People are losing their jobs, their homes, their savings, their lives—so that you can enjoy the right to vote by absentee ballot in the first free elections in your country from the relative safety and comfort of wherever you live in our fair city.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I begrudge you that right, but it’s not the reason $150 billion of our hard-earned money was spent. No one asked us if Iraqi “freedom” was worth $150 billion to us. Your democracy was not the issue: ours was at stake. We were told our very way of life was at risk. Perhaps, if +/-40 million people were not without health insurance in this country, if 35.9 million did not live below the poverty line, if between 9-10 million Americans weren’t unemployed and many more underemployed, if record numbers of Americans weren’t losing long-term unemployment benefits, if the country weren’t $374 billion in debt, if 150 social programs benefiting the poorest Americans weren’t now slated to be downsized even further in order to guarantee your right not only to vote, but to WIN and to protest on our city streets when you don’t, I’d be more than happy to give you that big a piece of my pie. Honey—I’d be happy to give you more pie than you could eat in a lifetime. Make the pie higher. And higher and higher. I’d be happy to hire you as a plum-picker in my bakery and let you stick your fingers in the pie, the cake, the fresh-baked corn bread and even the cookie jar! But, frankly, I know too many people living within a ten-mile radius of my own home who cannot afford to buy a piece of pie at the local grocery store, and who will never, ever get their hands on the cookie jar. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I can no longer afford to worry about your piece of pie! We have starving minions of our own—unlike you, though, they’re not getting their 15 seconds of fame. Quite the opposite: they’re being swept under the carpet, wiped off the record and scrubbed from the stats. You won’t see them on TV, and neither will I.

Like most Americans, I never gave much thought to the conditions in your country prior to the Gulf War of 1991. I was living in Germany then, and, together with hundreds of thousands of Europeans, took to the streets for days on end to protest the brutal invasion of your country: we marched under a sky blackened by soot from the flames burning just a few thousand miles to the south of us, probably about the time you were boarding a plane to take refuge here in my home. At the time, my concern was more for the human cost of the war than for the billions of American dollars that were being blown to smithereens in the blazing oil fields of that war. Why should I have cared? I was a product of the American welfare system who rose up from poverty and was living high on the hog in Germany at the time: universal health insurance with full prescription coverage and no such thing as “pre-existing conditions,” a solid high-salaried position with 6 weeks paid vacation per year (mandated by law), with labor laws to protect me from being laid off and a guarantee for long-term unemployment benefits should it ever come to that—in the postwar economic miracle brought about by the Marshall Plan. I hadn’t had so much as a brush with poverty in years, so I really didn’t care what my government did with tax dollars, as long as it didn’t infringe on my freedom or assault my sense of right and wrong. Well, the Gulf War was a major assault on that sense of what is right and wrong—and that was why I protested: because I cared, and because I lived in a country that afforded me the luxury to care.

Since then--that’s going on 14 years now--I’ve been forced to confront the situation in your country on an almost daily basis. And it is right that I, as an American citizen, should concern myself with your problems. I firmly believe this is our obligation as good citizens of the world. But at this point, it’s becoming an assault on more than my sense of right and wrong. It’s not only costing me money, it’s infringing on my freedom, it’s costing me sleep, it’s costing me tears and taking a toll on my health, my well-being, my sanity, my life—just the other day, I had the bad sense to take a look at these photographs, sent to me by an “oversea visitor” via Internet:

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/01467.htm

Those images are now printed indelibly on my mind. Right beside your picture framed by the 26-inch screen in my living room, not far from the front page of today’s NYT, with a picture of an Iraqi family sitting in front of a TV set the same make and model as mine, watching the results of the election I bought them come in:


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/internat...ast/14iraq.html?


It encroaches, daily, on my ability to do my job. I am distracted by it. Day in, day out. It cuts into my sleep: for nights after viewing that slideshow, I tossed and turned. The images disturbed me more than those of Old Glory-draped coffins, of Arab men stripped of dignity, electrodes attached to their privates and bags tied over their heads—all of it done in my name, all of it done on my dime. These images, more than any others have weighed heavily on my heart, on my mind. My own personal price tag. The cost of opening my eyes, of daring to look. Of daring to see. Of daring to care.

And last night was no different, I couldn’t sleep. Today is no different. I cannot work: your words, “gimme a piece of the pie” just keep running like ticker-tape alongside images of the homeless guy down on 57th street, of the kids I meet in the park who have no mittens on their hands. Of Indians on Pine Ridge and Rosebud Reservations freezing to death in their homes because they cannot pay the heat bill, of single-mothers losing their jobs because they cannot afford the bus ticket to get to work, of babies turning up in dumpsters because their mothers cannot afford another mouth to feed--and last but not least, of voters standing in 10-hour lines on the rain-drenched streets of Ohio, of elections officials locking down the elections board office and “counting” votes in secret, not to mention the hundreds I’ve shelled out of my own pocket in my attempt to deal with the “cognitive dissonance syndrome” wrought by the travesty of this past year on my mind. I can’t help but continue to calculate the cost of “doing business”—democracy’s collateral damage.

I gotta hand it to you, lady--you managed, in a 15 second news blurb, to bring it all home: I have come to appreciate the value of a clear plastic box, a paper ballot and a purple pointer finger like never before: it’s a lesson that cost me $150 billion, 1,500 flag-draped coffins and 10,000 wounded who will never be the same. If I could, I would let you cast 100,000 ballots: on behalf of the fellow Iraqis who paid the price for your right to vote on American soil. But, dear, if you want to protest the results: do me the favor, go back to Iraq and take up your cause with the government there—you can take my TV and my subscription to the Times with you when you go.

Kind regards,

The Lady who paid to bring you the best democracy money can buy

© Apathetics Anonymous (aka Dr. Lilian Friedberg)

"They worked for an American company named Custer Battles"

[This is the contractor that has been banned by the Air Force (and US government) from doing work in Iraq because they are accused of fraud.]

"Named for founders Michael Battles and Scott Custer, who are military veterans, the company quickly nabbed lucrative contracts in Iraq, where U.S. authorities needed firms who were willing to accept high-risk assignments.

The company is already under criminal investigation for allegations of fraud centering on the way it billed the government. Those allegations are also at the heart of a lawsuit by former associates. In September, the military banned the firm and its associates from obtaining new federal contracts or subcontracts."

[what are they still doing in Iraq??]

[quote=tombstoned,Feb 16 2005, 04:41 AM]
[quote=heart,Feb 15 2005, 09:59 PM]

All I can say is that at this point, I'm REALLY tired of worrying about what's going on in Iraq. I really am. I'd like to get back to worrying about what's going on in the inner cities in the US of A.
This is why:

Gimme A Piece of the Pie!
Letter from an American Citizen to an Anonymous Iraqi Woman

Dear Anonymous Iraqi Woman,

Kind regards,

The Lady who paid to bring you the best democracy money can buy

© Apathetics Anonymous (aka Dr. Lilian Friedberg)

[/quote]


That's deep. Thanks for posting this.

[what are they still doing in Iraq??]

What was that the Shrub was saying before the results came in, when he was probably thinking someone had "taken care of the counting" for him and Allawi was going to win? Did he not say, If they ask us to leave, we will?

I'm just waiting for them to tell us to the EXPLETIVE DELETED out.

The Pentagon's lying WMD informant, Chalabi, is expected to be Prime Minister even though the Shiite's won 49% of the vote.

Allawi's group came in third, but some say he will still be in the government also.

What good was that election?

From the looks of it, a helluva lot more "good" than ours. At least the losers got a piece of the pie.

Gee, who came in third here, Cobb or Nader? Do they also get to have a say? If you look at the pie graph (for example the one Jon Stewart showed on tonight's show), even the losers came out  with something. Let's apply the same standards: give Kerry half of the pie.