Tuesday, July 22, 2008 - Posts
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The reviews are in:
Obama’s trip to Iraq
came off without a hitch. John McCain, meanwhile, has managed to attract relentlessly
negative
coverage.
His only break was Drudge touting
his rejected New York Times op-ed,
which wasn’t exactly flattering either. And it’s not just quality of
coverage; it’s quantity, too. Just one
reporter showed up as McCain’s plane landed in Manchester last night.
But it’s hard to complain when Obama’s trip was your
idea in the first place. Back in May, John McCain chided Obama for only
having traveled to Iraq
once. “He could meet Gen. Petraeus and he could meet Ambassador [Ryan] Crocker,
and he could see — he could see the fact that Sadr City
is quiet,” McCain said. “He could see that the Maliki government has taken
control of Basra.
He could see that the Iraqi military is leading the fight in these places with
the support of American troops.” McCain also approved
of a joint trip to Iraq
with Obama.
The RNC piled on, too. “Obama has done shockingly little to
educate himself firsthand about the war in Iraq,” said RNC Chairman Mike
Duncan at the time. “Obama’s failure to visit Iraq, listen and learn firsthand
and witness the surge’s progress demonstrates weak leadership that disqualifies
him from being commander in chief.”
That’s not to say Obama wouldn’t
have taken the trip without pressure from McCain. But the Arizona
senator’s challenge, coming from someone who has visited Iraq eight
times since 2003, surely played a role.
So if the McCain camp is “frustrated”
by the attention being lavished on Obama, you can see why.
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Over the past year, Barack Obama has spoken out aggressively against private security contractors in Iraq. He proposed legislation to hold these firms accountable for their actions eight months before Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a square in Haditha. Since then, Obama has acknowledged that groups like Blackwater aren’t going anywhere in the short term. A foreign policy adviser to Obama even said the senator could not "rule out" using private firms in Iraq as president. (If you want to know the ins and outs of private security contracts, The Nation's Jeremy Scahill has written the book, literally, on Blackwater. He has also been pushing hard for Obama to take a stronger stance on the issue.)
So, the $64,000 question: Did Obama rely on private security firms this week during his trip through Afghanistan and Iraq? Apparently not.
When congressional delegations travel to Iraq, they're almost always protected by private security contractors provided by the State Department's Diplomatic Security division. In 2005, the department's Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) program awarded contracts to three security firms—Blackwater, DynCorps, and Triple Canopy—to protect high-level officials traveling to hot spots like Jerusalem, Kabul, Bosnia, Baghdad, and Kirkuk. WPPS does the vast majority of its business with Blackwater—about $340 million of the $400 million spent annually by WPPS goes to Blackwater, according to one State Department document.
But Obama isn't just any globetrotting senator. He's a presidential nominee, which means all his security arrangements at home and abroad are made not by the State Department but by the Secret Service. The Obama campaign refused to discuss his security detail, but a spokesman for the Secret Service told me that private contractors were not accompanying Obama in Iraq or Afghanistan. "We don't utilize contractors," said spokesman Ed Donovan. "We use military law enforcement and Secret Service."
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