Congress passes bill to govern private armies

It's about time this happened:

Despite strong opposition from the Bush administration, the House of Representatives has overwhelmingly approved a Bill that would make Blackwater and other private security contractors in Iraq and other countries subject to US law.

The bill, passed by 389 to 30 with massive bipartisan support, is the most tangible action yet by Congress to rein in the contracting companies, which hitherto have operated with legal immunity in Iraq, exempted from prosecution in Iraqi courts yet not subject to the military law that governs the conduct of regular US troops in the field.

The idea that Blackwater or any other militia could act with impunity from the law was always an obscenity; an obscenity which Bush, for reasons I simply cannot fathom, was anxious to retain.

Things came to a head last month when Blackwater were involved in a deadly shooting incident in central Baghdad, in which at least 14 Iraqi civilians were killed and 18 injured after a convoy of Blackwater vehicles opened fire.

Blackwater have claimed that it acted "appropriately" after coming under hostile fire, but that version of events was dismissed by the Iraqi Authorities who insisted that Blackwater should no longer operate in Iraq and asked them to leave.

The Washington Post yesterday reported that even the US Army believes that Blackwater was responsible for the incident.

"It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong," an unnamed military official told the paper. "The civilians that were fired upon, they didn't have any weapons to fire back at them, and none of the IP [Iraqi police] or local security forces fired back at them." The Post also reported that the first incident in Nisoor Square was followed by another minutes later, when guards on the same convoy shot into a traffic jam, killing one Iraqi and wounding two others.

The bill, which will be followed by a similar measure in the Senate, is opposed by the Bush administration who claim it will have "unintended and intolerable consequences for crucial ... national security activities."

As usual with this bunch of charlatans there is no hint of what these "intolerable consequences" might be. We are simply asked, once again, to "trust us".

Given the very wide bipartisan support the bill has received it appears almost impossible that Bush will manage to stop this becoming law. But the question is, why would he want to stop private militias from being held responsible for their own actions? Why would he want incidents like the one at Nisoor Square to be out with the reach of the law?

It seems to me to be impossible to claim that he has the best interests of the Iraqi people at heart and to simultaneously argue that no-one should ever be punished for the slaughtering of Iraqi civilians.

Once again, this man who claims to be all for the sanctity of life, is stating that the deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians should be beyond the reach of prosecutors. It's a simply bizarre stance; indeed, it's so bizarre that even his own party have backed away from his nuttiness.

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Tags: Blackwater, Congress, new laws, Bush, Nisoor Square, innocent Iraqi deaths, Iraq war