Irish-Americans target Iraq
contract By Tom Griffin
LONDON - In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib
prison scandal, the role of private security contractors
in Iraq has come under increasing scrutiny.
There was widespread surprise, therefore, when
the US Army announced in June that it was to award a
major security contract to Aegis Defense Services, the
company run by British mercenary Lieutenant-Colonel Tim
Spicer. Under the US$293 million deal, Aegis will
coordinate the work of up to 50 other private security
companies in Iraq, and provide security teams for the US
Project Management Office.
The deal faces opposition
on a number of fronts. Rival US military contractor
Dyncorp has submitted a formal protest to the US
Congress's Government Accountability Office over the way
the contract was awarded. More widespread concerns center
on Spicer's past involvement in a number of conflict
zones.
In the late 1990s, he was a director
of Sandline, the company that contravened a United Nations
embargo to ship 30 tons of arms into Sierra Leone during
that country's civil war. He later said he had acted
with British government approval, a claim that
threatened to bring down Prime Minister Tony Blair for
some weeks in 1998.
A year earlier,
Spicer's involvement in Papua New Guinea had led to the
downfall of a prime minister. His arrival in the country with
60 mercenaries hired to end the rebellion in
Bougainville instead provoked a military revolt that ousted Sir
Julius Chan.
But it may not be Spicer's
mercenary career that provokes the most serious
opposition to the Aegis deal in Washington, but his
British military record. Irish-Americans are actively
campaigning against the contract because of Spicer's
role as commanding officer of the Scots Guards in
Belfast in 1992, when two of his soldiers shot dead
18-year-old Peter McBride.
The killers,
Mark Wright and James Fisher, were convicted of murder,
but were released early and allowed to rejoin their
regiment after a lobbying campaign in which Spicer
featured prominently.
"Despite numerous
court rulings that held that the soldiers under his
command murdered an unarmed 18-year-old boy and concocted
lies to cover up their actions, Spicer has continued to
claim that his soldiers should not have been prosecuted,"
said a spokesman for Irish human-rights group the Pat
Finucane Center. "By his own admission he wanted to send
Guardsmen Wright and Fisher back on patrol immediately
after the murder."
The US decision to work with
Spicer prompted an emotional appeal to Irish-Americans
last month from the dead man's mother, Jean McBride. "We
are asking our supporters in the US to raise this
directly with [Democratic presidential candidate] John
Kerry and call for a congressional hearing into Tim
Spicer's track record," she said. "Given the involvement
of private security firms in torture and murder in Iraq
I shudder to think that Spicer has been awarded a
contract to create the world's largest private army. As
commanding officer of the Scots Guards he told a pack of
lies about Peter's murder and dragged his name through
the dirt. God knows what his own private army will do in
Iraq."
McBride's plea has now been answered by
the Capitol Hill-based Irish National Caucus (INC).
"This issue is our kind of issue: Should US dollars be
subsidizing a contractor with a record of human-rights
violation in Northern Ireland? And we mean to raise
ructions about it," INC president Father Sean McManus
said.
On July 21, McManus raised the issue
during a briefing at the State Department by Mitchell
Reiss, President George W Bush's envoy for Northern
Ireland. "Dr Reiss acknowledged he had concerns about
the contract," McManus said.
McManus has also
written to Bush, Kerry and other members of Congress.
"We are calling on them to denounce the awarding of the
contract to Spicer and demanding that it be canceled,"
he said. "We are determined to make this an election
issue. This contract is dripping in the blood of young
McBride. Irish-Americans can't have this on their
conscience. It is an outrage against the Irish and
long-suffering Iraq. Ireland did not need Spicer, and
Iraq certainly does not need the likes of him."
Concerns about the potential political fallout
from the Spicer contract have, ironically, led the
British government to distance itself from the deal. For
one thing, new publicity around the McBride case can
only highlight the British decision to send two
convicted murderers, Guardsmen Wright and Fisher, to
take part in the occupation of Iraq.
With the
coalition's human-rights record already under scrutiny,
that fact may prove a most uncomfortable one.
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