US to discuss military control of armed contractors
A Pentagon recommendation has suggested that the US Congress should place all armed contractors operating in combat zones under military control.
The Senate this month included such a requirement in its 2008 defence spending bill but the recommendation is expected to run into resistance at the State Department.
Democratic Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters yesterday he is confident the House will go along with the idea and include it in a final bill sent to President George Bush.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is due to testify about the subject today before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
She has ordered new rules for the private guards who are hired to protect US diplomats.
They include increased monitoring and explicit rules on when and how they can use deadly force.
The steps were recommended by a review panel that Rice created after a deadly September 16 shooting involving Blackwater USA guards.
Rice also urged better coordination with the military, but did not explicitly act on a suggestion by Defence Secretary Robert Gates that combatant commanders have control over the contractors.
Levin said he was not sure if Rice expressly opposed the idea. “Whether she likes it or not, we expect to get this language” to emerge in the compromise with the House.
“It’s not slapdash” and “is something we’ve been working on a long time”, Levin said.
The Blackwater shooting provoked an outcry from the Democratic-led Congress and the Iraqi government, which is demanding that it have the right to prosecute the contractors.
In more fallout, the State Department’s security chief resigned yesterday.
Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, made no mention of the furor in his resignation letter to Bush and Rice. But it came just one day after a study commissioned by Rice found serious lapses in the department’s oversight of private guards, who are employed by Griffin’s bureau and report to it.
Rice accepted the resignation, which is effective on November 1, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
Griffin will be replaced on an acting basis by one of his deputies, Gregory Starr.
Griffin, who was previously deputy director of the US Secret Service and inspector general for the Veterans Affairs Department, had been in his current job since June 2005.
