... He reportedly was concerned that there would not be an Iraqi parliament-approved Status of Forces Agreement. Iraqi PM Maliki subsequently pursued ruinous sectarian measures – orchestrating legal charges against the Sunni Arab Vice President and his security detail, and later targeting the Sunni Arab Finance Minister and a prominent Sunni Arab parliamentarian. He returned to Iraqi military and police units abusive Iraqi leaders whom General Petraeus had insisted be removed before US support would be provided, then had those forces put down peaceful Sunni demonstrations very violently. He stopped honoring agreements to provide ...
... seem analytically distorting, for example, to think of a Colombian national working for an American PMSC in Afghanistan as anything other than a mercenary. This example is neither fictitious, nor rare. As of July 2013, 83% of the private military and security contractors working for the US Department of Defense in Iraq, and 10% in Afghanistan, are third-country nationals, i.e. neither US citizens, nor local nationals. The fact that a corporate business entity – equally profit-seeking – intermediates between the individual pecuniary motives of its employees ...
... number of companies identified themselves as “military companies”, but after the negative publicity attracted by the activities of companies like Executive Outcomes in the Angolan civil war during the early 1990’s and Blackwater in Iraq, the term “security company” became dominant among PMSCs, in an effort to stress the allegedly defensive nature of their missions and present a more benign public image. But a play on semantics did little to address the concerns raised over the operations ...
