BEREFT BELFAST MOTHER CHARGES PRIVATE SECURITY FIRM WITH
WANTON MURDER IN IRAQ
By Eamon McCannThe mother
of a teenager shot dead by British soldiers in Belfast
has launched a campaign for an inquiry into alleged
killing of civilians by private consultants in Iraq.
The woman is Jean McBride, the mother of 18-year-old
Peter McBride, shot dead by members of the Scots Guards
regiment in the New Lodge Road area in September, 1992.
The mens commander, Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, now heads
the company at the centre of the Iraq allegations.
In June, the Pentagon announced that an inquiry had
cleared Spicers company, Aegis Defence
Sevices, of shooting up civilian vehicles in Baghdad.
However, a former British paratrooper working for Aegis
at the time says that the inquiry was a whitewash. He
claims that, although he had witnessed the shooting and
possessed video-tape of it, repeated offers of evidence
were refused.
Now, Jean McBride has written to a United Nations working
group on the use of mercenaries asking for a new
investigation. The former para who worked for Aegis, Rod
Stoner, says that he will testify to any new inquiry.
UK-based Aegis is the largest private security company
operating in Iraq. Stoner resigned from the company last
October last year following a dispute over an Aegis
employees website which Spicer claimed was damaging
the company. In an e-mail to Spicer at the time, Stoner
denied that he intended to post videos taken by
your teams showing innocent Iraqis being shot up and in
some cases killed. However, after leaving the
company, he posted the video on the website.
Stoner says he was the team leader in the
sports utility vehicle from which the shooting took
place.
The three-and-a-half minute video contains four clips in
which automatic fire is directed at civilian cars
travelling behind the SUV. One clip shows a white car
apparently drifting out of control and then coming to a
stop as it is raked with machine-gun fire. Another shows
bullets splattering the bonnet and windshield of a
Mercedes which crashes into another car. A number of
people are seen running from the other car. No one
emerges from the Mercedes.
The video is shot from inside the SUV as it travels along
Route Irish, the eight-mile carriageway
between Baghdad airport and the city. A sound-track
features Elvis Presley singing Mystery Train.
The Derry-based human rights group, the Pat Finucane
Centre, learned of the Pentagon inquiry in May from
Mitchell Reiss, the Bush administrations special
envoy on the North. The Centres director Paul
OConnor and Jean McBride had met with Reiss in
Belfast to protest against the Pentagons employment
of Spicers company.
Said Jean McBride afterwards: "I told the ambassador
that his government would not take kindly to the Irish or
British governments doing business with someone who
justified the murder of a US citizen, and that I didn't
take kindly to the US government doing business with
someone who has justified the shooting, in the back, of
my unarmed 18-year-old son. When we then brought up
the Iraq video, Reiss told us there was a Pentagon
investigation into it already under way and that I would
be informed of the outcome.
The video had been shown on More4 News in Britain on
March 30 . The More4 bulletin also included an interview
with Stoner. In the High Court in London on April 6,
Aegis obtained an injunction compelling Stoner to take
down the website.
Following coverage of the Finucane Centres meeting
with Reiss the following month, Stoner contacted the
Derry group by e-mail, saying that he had made
repeated requests [to Aegis] to be put in contact
with those within the Pentagon responsible for the
investigation, but had had no response. He said
that he believed that none of the other occupants of the
SUV had been interviewed, either: these included the
alleged shooter, a South African ex-British Army soldier.
On June 1, the Centre e-mailed Reiss: This man has
informed us that he is a former Aegis employee, Mr. Rod
Stoner. He has informed us that he was present in the
vehicle when the shooting occurred and that he was
responsible for posting it on the website. Mr. Stoner has
informed us that it is his understanding that none of
those present in the vehicle have been contacted by the
Pentagon, or indeed by any official investigating the
video. Stoner was available to give evidence, the
PFC added. The e-mail was copied to the Inspector General
of the US Army, Lt. Gen. Stanley Green.
On June 9, a Margaret Baines of Lt. Gen. Greens
office acknowledged receipt of the e-mail.
In Baghdad the following day, June 10, the Criminal
Investigation Division (CID) of Greens department
announced that its inquiry had been completed and had not
found any potential criminality that falls within
CIDs investigative purview...No further
investigative effort...was warranted.
Aegis issued a statement in London on June 11 welcoming
the verdict and referring to its own, earlier
investigation which, it said, had concluded that,
The films were recorded during Aegis
legitimate operations....and the incidents recorded were
within the rules for the use of force. Aegis had
not previously published these finding but said now that
it had passed them to the US investigators.
Stoner has told the PFC that Aegis showed no
interest in interviewing him during its
investigation, and had not interviewed any of his
colleagues who had been in the SUV.
Jean McBride said last week: The truth seems to be
that there was no inquiry. If you dont interview
people who are offering eye-witness evidence, you
arent inquiring.
Mrs. McBride and the PFC wrote last week to Armanda
Benavides de Perez, Colombian chairwoman of the UNs
new Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries (WGUM),
asking her to consider whether the issues arising from
the Aegis video come within the working groups
remit. The WGUM was established on June 16 at the
inaugural meeting in Geneva of the Human Rights Council,
(presided over by Kofi Annan,) which has replaced the
long-standing UN Human Rights Commission.
Quizzed on the issue at Prime Minister's
Questions, Tony Blair said: "I think what
the foreign secretary is saying, rather, is that
the use of mercenaries has to come within some
proper system of regulation. "Up until
now that has not been the case and that is why it
is important that we make sure there are proper
rules in the use of mercenaries." BBC
Feb.2002
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We are not letting go of this, says Jean
McBride. A man who praised the murderers of my son
and who has since been involved in very dubious
activities around the world is now running an operation
for the US in Iraq in which more innocent people are
seemingly being gunned down.
We will be actively seeking support for an inquiry
by Ms. De Perez from politicians and others in Ireland,
Britain, the US and elsewhere. How can we talk about
human rights and the rule of law if people like Tim
Spicer are allowed to defend murder in Northern Ireland
and then go on to inflict the same attitudes
elsewhere?
Eighteen-year-old father-of-two Peter McBride was shot in
the back by Scots Guardsmen Mark Wright and James Fisher
in north Belfast on September 4th 1992. In February 1995,
Wright and Fisher were convicted of murder and sentenced
to life. The High Court and Court of Appeal in Belfast
and the House of Lords upheld the verdicts. The pair was
freed by Northern Secretary Mo Mowlam in September 1998,
in advance of releases under the Belfast Agreement.
In November 1998, an army board accepted Wright and
Fisher back into the regiment. The mens commander,
Col. Spicer, told the board that hed arrived at the
scene shortly after the shooting and that: It was
my inclination that (the soldiers) should be rearmed,
re-zero their weapons and in my view return to the
streets. Tne soldiers, he added, had been
acting entirely in good faith and, in my view, in
complete accordance with the Rules of Engagement.
Jean McBride has campaigned to expose what she says is
retrospective complicity by the British authorities in
her sons death. She and the Pat Finucane Centre
have lobbied the Dublin Government and parliamentarians
in Europe and traveled to the US seeking support from
members of Congress.
In December 2000, a motion condemning the return of
Wright and Fisher to their regiment was passed
unanimously in the Irish parliament, Dail Eireann.
In June 2003, Peter McBrides sister, Kelly, stood
in a by-election in Brent East, London, to highlight the
case. Lib Dem Sarah Teather, who won the seat, has since
been a vocal supporter of the campaign.
In April 2005, Ms. Teather and London Mayor Ken
Livingstone were among politicians who condemned the
award of Iraq contracts to Aegis, citing Spicers
role in the McBride killing.
After leaving the British Army in 1994, Spicer, with
former Scots Guards colleague Simon Mann and others, set
up Executive Outcomes, providing security for business
and government interests. Executive Outcomes won
contracts in countries including Angola, Rwanda, Burundi
and Sierra Leone.
In October 1996, Spicer and Mann established Sandline
International, which was hired the following year by the
government of Papua New Guinea to suppress a revolt on
Bougainville, site of the worlds largest copper
mine. However, the revolt spread, the government fell and
Spicer was briefly jailed. Backed by the British
Government, SI collected an $18 million fee from the new
government.
In 1998,
Sandline organised an arms shipment to Sierra Leone in
defiance of a UN embargo. It later emerged that British
and US officials had secretly given Sandline the
go-ahead. Britains High Commissioner in Sierra
Leone, Peter Penfold, resigned.
In September
2004, Mann was sentenced to seven years in prison in
Zimbabwe for attempting to buy arms to overthrow the
government of Equatorial Guinea.
Spicer had meantime, in 2002, founded Aegis Defence
Services. The company won a number of contracts in Iraq
following the April 2003 occupation. In May 2004, the US
Army gave Aegis a $293 contract to coordinate all PSC
operations in Iraq: this followed the lynching of four US
contractors who had strayed into Fallujah. Last year,
Aegis was hired by the UN to provide security during the
October referendum and December elections. Aegiss
current Iraqi contracts total more than $400 million.
Spicer stepped down late last year as Aegis chairman, but
remains CEO and owns 40 percent of the company.
There are 25,000 private security contractors involved in
the Iraq occupation---the second-biggest contingent after
the Americans. Many earn $1,000 a day: 341 have been
killed. They operate under rules of engagement drafted by
the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in 2003. CPA
Order No. Seven guarantees them immunity
under Iraqi law.
US Brigadier-General Karl Horst told the Sunday Times
last October: These guys run loose in this country
and do stupid stuff. Theres no authority over
them...They shoot people and someone else has to deal
with the aftermath. It happens all over the place.
Fatal incidents have been reported. In February, French
agency AFP reported two unarmed Iraqis killed in a
passing taxi by contractors guarding a US office in
Kirkuk. No overall figures are available of casualties of
PSC actions.
Last years UN contracts significantly boosted
Aegiss standing, and may have helped attract new
board members announced in November. These include
leading British figures Field Marshall Lord Inge, former
Chief of the Defence Staff, who took over as chairman,
Brigadier James Ellery, former UN administrator in Sierra
Leone, Nicholas Soames MP, former Armed Forces Minister,
General Sir Roger Wheeler, former Chief of the General
Staff and Sir John Birch, former deputy UK ambassador to
the UN. Robert McFarlane, national security adviser to
President Ronald Reagan, now advisor to the government of
Vladimir Putin, also joined the Aegis board.
The
Route Irish video can be viewed at www.patfinucanecentre.org:
scroll to Under the Aegis.This article was
first produced in Counterpunch
Eamonderry@aol.com
http://www.counterpunch.org/mcann08222006.html
wikipedia
Tim Spicer is a former Lieutenant-Colonel in the Scots
Guards and CEO of the private military
contractor (PMC) Aegis Defence Services.
He is a veteran of the Falklands War and served with
the British
Army in Northern Ireland. He is a
former employee of Sandline International,
a PMC which closed in April 2004.
When employed by Sandline, Lt Col Spicer was involved
in military operations in Sierra Leone, which included
importing weapons in apparent violation of the UN arms embargo. Sandline
was also involved in attempts to prop up the government
of Prime Minister Chan in Papua
New Guinea. This is known as the so-called Sandline
affair in the United Kingdom. There was
speculation that the British and the US governments may
have lent tacit approval to Sandline's activities.
Sandline also had ties to the South
African PMC Executive Outcomes.
Lt Col Spicer was involved in a controversial incident
while serving in Northern Ireland in 1992.
British Soldiers of the Scots Guards under Spicer's
command, shot and killed an unarmed Catholic civilian
named Peter McBride on the streets of West Belfast that
year. Despite substantial evidence that the teenage
McBride was unarmed and not a threat, Spicer stood by his
soldiers even after they were indicted. According to
British news reports the Provisional IRA placed a
bounty on Spicer's head and he was promptly removed from
Northern Ireland by British Army command to save him from
possible assassination.
Lt Col Spicer is Chief Executive of Aegis Defence Services,
a PMC based in London.
The Chairman is Field-Marshal Lord Inge,
former Chief of the Defence
Staff and the Board of Directors include: General Sir Roger Wheeler,
former Chief of the General
Staff, and Sir John Birch, former British ambassador
to the UN.
It is rumoured that Spicer continues to have common
interests with Northbridge Services Group, widely
believed to be the successor organisation to the South
African PMC Executive Outcomes.
Spicer was featured in The Guardian of May 20, 2006. The newspaper
article, entitled The enforcer, said:
- "Spicer is effectively in charge of the
second largest military force in Iraq
some 20,000 private soldiers. Just don't
call him a mercenary."
Lt Col Spicer has published his biography, An
Unorthodox Soldier ISBN 1840183497.
Their
bodies as weapons
Rapes in
conflict zones result from the idea that violence is
erotic, and it pervades the US military
Robin
Morgan
Monday August 21, 2006
The Guardian
When news surfaced that four GIs allegedly
stalked, gang-raped and killed an Iraqi woman, the US
tried to minimise this latest atrocity. Now article 32
hearings - the military equivalent of a grand jury - have
ended at Camp Liberty, a US base in Iraq. In September, a
general will rule whether the accused should be
court-martialled. The defence already pleads
post-traumatic stress disorder: in four months preceding
the crime, 17 of the accused GIs' battalion were killed.
The victim's name was Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi.
Abeer means "fragrance of flowers". She was 14
years old. According to a statement by one of the
accused, the soldiers first noticed her at a checkpoint.
On March 12, after playing cards while slugging whisky,
they changed into civvies and burst into Abeer's home.
They killed her mother, father and five-year-old sister
and "took turns" raping Abeer. Finally,
according to the statement, they murdered her, drenched
the bodies with kerosene, and set them on fire. Then the
GIs grilled chicken wings.
The US military is now a mercenary force. In addition
to hired militias and "independent
contractors", we have a draft: a poverty draft.
That's why the army is disproportionately comprised of
ethnic minorities seeking education, healthcare, housing.
But there are other perks. Teenage males, hormones
surging, are taught to confuse their bodies with weapons,
and relish it.
One training song (with lewd gestures) goes:
"This is my rifle, this is my gun; one is for
killing, one is for fun." The US air force admits
showing films of violent pornography to pilots before
they fly bombing raids. Feminist scholars have been
exposing these phallocentric military connections for
decades. When I wrote The Demon Lover: The Roots of
Terrorism, I presented evidence on how the terrorist
mystique and the hero legend have the same root: the
patriarchal pursuit of manhood. How can rape not be
central to the propaganda that violence is erotic - a
pervasive message affecting everything from US foreign
policy to "camouflage chic" and glamorised
gangsta styles?
Atrocity fatigue has set in. Wasn't rape a staple of
war long before the Iliad? Weren't thousands of women and
girls raped and killed in death camps in the former
Yugoslavia? And weren't early reports of gang rape
attacks from another small troubled country ignored? It
was merely about women, and hardly anyone had heard of
the place: Rwanda.
Yet the Pentagon is shocked. Have we already forgotten
Abu Ghraib? Photographs of sexually tortured men leaked,
but those of abused women are still classified for fear
of greater outrage. So many military rapes have occurred
in Okinawa, Korea, and the Philippines that feminists
organised movements in protest. Incidents keep occurring
near US bases, including hundreds of reported rapes of
female soldiers by their fellow GIs.
In 1998, a landmark United Nations decision recognised
rape as a war crime. The international tribunals for
Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia issued indictments and
convictions on sexual violence grounds.
Sometimes, a few "nice American guys" are
found guilty. Then all returns to normal. They are
sacrificed to save those who train them to do what they
did, and to save the careers of politicians who sermonise
obscenely about "moral values" while issuing
moral waivers.
· Robin Morgan's new book, Fighting Words: A
Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right, is published
next month; she is a co-founder of The Women's Media
Center, where a longer version of this article first
appeared www.womensmediacenter.com
www.robinmorgan.us
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