Is Blackwater Untouchable?
There’s been a lot of wringing of hands lately with regard to military contractors in Iraq, particularly how to rein in what increasingly amounts to a private army, answerable to no one, running amok with high calibre weaponry. Sprinkled throughout news coverage of the most recent Blackwater shooting spree in Baghdad, and peppered throughout the Congressional testimony of Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, was the gathering realization that as serious a problem as these rogue contractors are, they’re somehow immune from being brought to justice because of their odd hybrid status. Not quite military, because they’re civilian contractors, and not quite civilians because they’re military contractors, they exist in a legal limbo, able to tear off rounds of automatic weapons fire with seeming impunity. Quite a dangerous conundrum, that. Except for the fact that it’s just not true. As Marc Lindemann makes clear in an article for Parameters, the Army War College’s quarterly, the US military code has
