Private Security Firms Need Better Pentagon Oversight, GAO Says
- Watchdog cites need to avoid repeat of 2007 Iraqi massacre
- Oversight framework set up in 2009 must be monitored, GAO says
An Iraqi woman walks past at a burnt car on the site where Blackwater guards opened fire in the western Baghdad neighbourhood of Yarmukh in Sept. 2007.
Photographer: Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty ImagesThe Pentagon must improve its tracking and accounting of private security contractors operating alongside military and U.S. civilian agencies or risk a repeat of a 2007 massacre of Iraqi citizens that stained the American counterinsurgency effort, according to Congress’s watchdog agency.
“If the department does not improve its means of identifying, recording, tracking, and assessing its use of PSC contracts and personnel, the associated negative strategic impacts the U.S. government experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan are at risk of reoccurring,” the Government Accountability office said in a report Thursday.