Big risks and rewards for Iraq's "Dogs of War"

[seemslikeadream]

Mon 20 September, 2004 04:29

By Ed Cropley

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Geoff Harries didn't know his son Andrew was even in Iraq when the call came through saying the former British soldier had been killed in an ambush near the northern city of Mosul.
"It was a complete shock because I had no idea he was there," Harries told the BBC in May. "I am shattered, as if I'm in a bad dream. I want to wake up and find it's not right."

Unfortunately, his is a nightmare all too familiar to the parents of many ex-soldiers lured to hotspots such as Iraq by the prospect of a fast fortune in return for their military and security expertise.
With the official U.S. body count over the past 18 months now topping 1,000, and the Iraqi death toll in the unrecorded thousands, another tally is quietly creeping up.

Since April 2003, at least 151 foreign contractors, ranging from Nepalese cooks to South African bodyguards, have died in Iraq, according to Iraq Coalition Casualties (icasualties.org), a website which tracks the body count.

Of these deaths, recorded via monitoring of international and local media, nearly a third are 'security consultants' -- essentially ex-soldiers hired to guard anything from oil installations, to diplomats, politicians or foreign businessmen.

Some of the deaths hit the headlines, such as that of Fabrizio Quattrocchi, an Italian security adviser executed by his kidnappers in April this year.

STAY ALIVE, GET RICH

Unfortunately, for some like Herman "Harry" Pretorius, a South African who worked as a bodyguard for American security company DynCorp, theirs was a one-way ticket.

more
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=586806§ion=news

[sattahipdeep]

1. Contractor's bag full of explosives at JFK

A medic for defense contractor DynCorp....

NEW YORK -- A government contractor brought highly explosive Soviet
munitions on his trip home from Afghanistan that were not detected until he
arrived at John F. Kennedy airport, federal officials said.
....
A search of his bags by federal screeners found what police bomb technicians
described in an FBI complaint as a Soviet "projectile point detonating fuse"
and a "surface-to-air and air-to-air cartridge."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Explosives%20On%20Board

Curious trades. Curious connections. No public release of AN investigative
findings...And no one talks abou it anymore. ALL coincidence?



Special Operations Command Stuttgart.

Naval Special Warfare Unit TWO outside of Stuttgart.

[Aidoneus]

2. aw, poor mercenaries..

I feel bad for the families, but besides that, boo-fucking-hoo. Assassins for hire, or even plain flunkies for hire in this context, are not honourable positions. The campaign they provide support to is responsible for immeasurable atrocities, of course there will be a variety actions taken against them.

Bush himself endorsed the latter when he laid out what is then referred to as "The Bush Doctrine":--if you feed a turist, you're a turist.. if you wash a turist's cammo, you're a turist.. if you ride next a turist in battle, you're a turist.

Whatever this "turist" is, hell if I know, but it sounds sticky.