What's Next: The Tonton Macoutes Working at the TSA?

Courtesy of The Whiskey Bar, comes this depressing news:

In its effort to relieve overstretched U.S. troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has hired a private security company staffed with former henchmen of South Africa’s apartheid regime.

The reliance on apartheid enforcers was highlighted by an attack in Iraq last month that killed one South African security officer and wounded another who worked for the subsidiary of a firm called Erinys International. Both men once served in South African paramilitary units dedicated to the violent repression of apartheid opponents.

François Strydom, who was killed in the January 28 bombing of a hotel in Baghdad, was a former member of the Koevoet, a notoriously brutal counterinsurgency arm of the South African military that operated in Namibia during the neighboring state’s fight for independence in the 1980s. His colleague Deon Gouws, who was injured in the attack, is a former officer of the Vlakplaas, a secret police unit in South Africa.

“It is just a horrible thought that such people are working for the Americans in Iraq,” said Richard Goldstone, a recently retired justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.

The South Africans are also appalled at the CPA's sloppy vetting of the contracting:

South African security companies working outside the country are required by law to register with the National Conventional Arms Control Committee. According to South African lawmaker Raenette Taljaard, however, the committee did not receive an authorization application from Erinys International. “A lot of the South Africans doing mercenary work or working for private military companies were involved in Apartheid-era repression,” she said. “This is a big concern and it is just bad for South Africa’s reputation.” The chairman of the committee said in a statement after the January 28 incident that any violation of the law would be referred to prosecutors for further investigation.

To no one's surprise, the Pentagon and the CPA did not comment on this.

Comments

[akaky]

this doesnt surprise me, randy. i just read in the new republic [at least i think it was the new republic; i'll have to check] that the military and the cpa in iraq barely talk to each other and that each of them regards the other will no small measure of contempt.

[akaky]

and if we're going to hire out of work butchers why are we bothering with the south africans? pinochet is too old for the work but rios montt is available, as are any number of salvadorans