Washington, February 24: The US Army’s careless supervision of private security firm Blackwater allowed its employees to use weapons without authorization in Afghanistan, a Senate inquiry says.
Following a month-long probe, the Senate’s Armed Service Committee revealed Tuesday that the US Army had put a blind eye to the activities of Blackwater now known as Xe Services in Afghanistan.
“Blackwater operated in Afghanistan without sufficient oversight or supervision and with almost no consideration of the rules it was legally obligated to follow,” Senator Carl Levin, the committee’s chairman said.
The panel added that it has also found several cases of “reckless” use of weapons by the company’s personnel, which had resulted in the killing of Afghan civilians.
The committee has also criticized Blackwater’s hiring process.
According to the inquiry some of the guards employed by the controversial security firm are violent drug users who have serious criminal records.
In May 2009, two employees of a Blackwater subsidiary, Paravant, opened fire during a drunken brawl in Kabul, killing two unarmed Afghan civilians and wounding three others.
The pair identified as Justin Cannon and Christopher Drotleff, both have lengthy criminal records including assault, battery and cocaine use.
They were also both former army personnel — Drotleff being a Marine.
In another incident on December 2008, Paravant employees were seen perusing a street sitting atop a rolling vehicle, with AK-47 assault rifles in hand. A bump in the road made one of the arms unload a volley of bullets, seriously wounding one employee in the head.
This is while under their mandate, Blackwater-Paravant employees, who have been sent to Afghanistan to help train the Afghan army, were not authorized to bear arms.
However investigators found that the company obtained weapons from a warehouse which was under US military control.
The US Army’s officials who were responsible for the contractors and Blackwater representatives are now expected to testify before the panel.
The secretive Blackwater was thrown into the spotlight after five of its members who were tasked to guard US diplomats in Iraq opened fire on civilians in Baghdad in September 2007, killing 17 people.
The case again caused controversy after a US District Court dropped all charges against the guards in last December, saying the defendants’ constitutional rights had been violated.
Following the acquittal, the Iraqi government expelled some 250 former Blackwater employees from the country.
——–Agencies