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The incident drew an angry response from Iraqi officials, who often complain private foreign guards kill civilians with impunity
A $243 million program led by the United States Army Corps of Engineers to build 150 health care clinics in Iraq has in some cases produced little more than empty shells of crumbling concrete and shattered bricks cemented together into uneven walls.
Oil and gas production, which fuels Iraq's fragile economy, has yet to return to levels before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
In Baghdad, the United States is now building a monument to rank with Grand Coulee Dam, the Pentagon, Disney World and the Mall of America. It has elements of all four, plus a 15-foot stone wall and surface-to-air missiles.
A watchdog agency sees poor oversight in a defunct U.S. program to let private firms train Iraqis to guard oil and power infrastructure.
At the request of the U.S. State Department, the agency is providing a petroleum advisor to Iraq from February to June through its contract with BearingPoint, USAID spokesman David Snider told Dow Jones Newswires in an e-mail.
In two weeks seven Fijian men serving as security guards in Iraq have died, leaving behind grieving wives and children with no fathers. But these are the risks they are willing to take, especially when you get to earn between $3000 to $6000 a month.
For most people, the gruesome killings of four private security contractors were the first they had ever heard of Blackwater USA, a small, North Carolina-based private security company. Since the Falluja incident, and also because of it, Blackwater has emerged as one of the most successful and profitable security contractors operating in Iraq.
CorpWatch is set to release our new report on Afghanistan reconstruction next Tuesday. Advance copies are available now upon request.
This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan. Fariba Nawa, an Afghan-American who returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction, uncovers some examples of where the money has (and hasn't) gone, how the system of international aid works (and doesn't), and what it is really like in the villages and cities where outsiders are rebuilding the war-torn countryside.
Click here to download the complete report.
An HTML text version of the report is also available.
Listen, watch or read an interview with Fariba Nawa on Democracy Now! about reconstruction, security, and life in Afghanistan five years after the invasion.
The project's demise would seriously damage the American-led effort to restore Iraq's oil system and enable the country to pay for its own reconstruction.
Military investigators will not file charges after completing a investigation into an incident in Iraq last May in which a group of Marines alleged they had been fired on by U.S. security contractors.
It has been long in coming. The Pentagon is now demanding that contractors fight labor trafficking and lousy working conditions in Iraq endured by tens of thousands of low-paid south Asians working under US-funded contracts in Iraq.