[NYTr] Bush Reich's Concealed Hiring of Foreign Mercenaries Condemned

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Agencia Cubana de Noticias (ACN)
http://ainch.ain.cu/mailman/listinfo/ingles


US Government Uses Private Companies to Conceal Hiring of Mercenaries

Havana, Nov 16 (acn) The use by the government of the United States of 
private companies to conceal the hiring of mercenaries, mainly among 
minorities and immigrants, was denounced on Thursday during the final 
session of the 5th International Seminar-Workshop on International 
Humanitarian Law that began in Havana last Wednesday.

Alexander Martinez Castellanos, a professor at the Higher Institute of 
the Interior Ministry in the central Cuban province of Villa Clara, 
told ACN that these companies are commercially registered in the United 
States and Great Britain although they have subsidiaries in the Third 
World.

Martinez Castellanos noted that the disproportionate use of military 
force has become another business that has been privatized and added 
that this new industry reached a value of $100 billion in 2006 and it 
is estimated that this figure will have doubled by 2010.

He added that during the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Angola, 
Colombia and Sierra Leone, the proportion of the use of mercenaries 
compared with the military troops was one per every 50.

The so-called 'soldiers of fortune' work in the areas of security, 
espionage, cooking, guarding facilities and in computer-related tasks, 
he said.

Martinez stressed that the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the 
post-war instability in these countries have caused a boom in this kind 
of security and military private companies, a situation that conceals 
violations of humanitarian international law such as the maltreatment 
of prisoners, he added.

He recalled that some of US private companies that hire mercenaries 
include CACI, Titan, Blackwater, ID SYSTEM And Dynconp.