Maybe They'll Unionize

It's about time somebody went on strike against the War.

Via Noah Shachtman at Wired:

...The United Nations report disclosing the presence of Filipino mercenaries in Iraq will be formally made public in March. But it is now known that the mainly American companies that have been recruiting the mercenary fighters have not done the right thing.

Now that's understatement if I've ever heard it.

Many of the recruits come from police and military forces in the Philippines, Peru and Ecuador.

The security personnel recruited are not adequately prepared to face the rigors of serving in the vast and unending civil-war front that is Iraq.

The chief of the UN working-group on the use of mercenaries, Jose Luis Gomez del Prado, who gave the press advance knowledge of the report, speak of the recruits being “trained quickly” and coming out of the training “unprepared for armed conflict situations.”

“They are sent there, they receive M16 [assault rifles] and are placed in very dangerous areas like the Green Zone [in Baghdad], convoys and embassies,” del Prado, according to Agence France-Presse, said. He also said that sometimes the recruits do “important and honorable tasks like protecting humanitarian organization convoys.”

But del Prado also warns that, not having been given the necessary physical, combat and psychological training to be in the hazard posts that they are in the recruits could end up violating human rights, injuring or killing innocent civilians. Without being properly armed psychologically they could finish their mission as mentally damaged as many American soldiers have been.

Del Prado is also worried about the participation of these recruits in destroying the ecology of the places they police or do explosives work at. He is especially concerned about those working for western mining companies.

These private security guards serving western companies in Iraq make up the second highest number of armed forces now in that country after the US military. There are more of these recruits than the British troops.

Del Prado is also worried about the labor rights of these mercenaries.

The recruits are entitled to the worker’s rights applied in the country where the company hiring them has is headquarters, but the UN expert pointed out that it is hard to imagine “a poor Peruvian filing suit in an American court.”

Their assignments and activities do not fall exactly under the strict definition of “mercenary” found in the UN-sponsored 1989 “International Convention Against the Use, Recruitment, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.” Del Prado finds that not being truly covered by the definition, the recruits are in a legal vacuum. They can of course sue their companies. Obviously, they can’t go to an Iraqi court. If any suing is to be done it has to be in the United States for an American company or the UK for a British company. Del Prado can’t imagine a poor Peruvian or Ecuadorian going to the United States and hiring lawyers there...

I can, just before the Immigration Service handed him or her off to a private prison camp to do slave labor [thanks to Xenophon, where you can get the gist of the article if the L.A. Times link goes bad].

You want outrage? Click through the Photo Gallery on the family prisons for immigrants and read the captions.