Our Mercenaries

The U.S. increasingly relies on thousands of heavily armed private contractors to do security work in Iraq. In "Private Security Guards in Iraq Operate With Little Supervision," T. Christian Miller of the Los Angeles Times reports that none of these contractors have been prosecuted despite improperly shooting at civilian Iraqis. Miller uses military incident reports combined with interviews of Iraqi civilians and U.S. officials to reveal a system that suffers from a lack of accountability for deadly actions. Miller deserves credit for doing difficult investigative reporting in a war zone. Borzou Daragahi, Saad Fakhrildeen and Asmaa Waguih also contributed to this story.
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-guards4dec04,0,6399889.story?page=1&track=tottext