Senator McCaskill Asks White House to Ensure Contractors are Accountable Under U.S. Law

February 27, 2008 -- WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill today raised concerns about the possibility that the Administration’s negotiations on a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq – an accord formed between the U.S. and another country in an effort to provide a formal framework for the presence of U.S. military forces in the foreign country – may include immunity from Iraqi law for American contractors. In a letter to President Bush and in a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, McCaskill urged the White House to ensure that U.S. contractors remain fully accountable while completing their work in Iraq.

Incidents during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have brought into question the legal status of contractors performing work for U.S. agencies in the war zones. U.S. contractors are currently immune from Iraq law, as a result of a unilateral declaration by the U.S. shortly after the invasion of Iraq. Additionally, during the U.S. occupation, it was discovered that some U.S. contractors may also be outside the jurisdiction of U.S. or military courts in certain instances, leaving them completely unaccountable under the law.

Congress has taken repeated action to ensure that Department of Defense contractors are subject to either U.S. courts or to military courts under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, although the Department has yet to implement certain parts of the law. In her letter, McCaskill took the President to task on the Department of Defense’s inaction. Meanwhile, concerns remain over the legal status of some State Department contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan, possibly requiring new legislative action, a point raised by McCaskill in her letter.

“Contactors who are receiving federal dollars to carry out work in Iraq need to be fully and definitively subject to U.S. or Iraqi criminal law, if not both, in order to ensure that any criminal misconduct by the contractors leads to full, legal accountability,” McCaskill said. “The idea that contractors might fall through the cracks in terms of the law is unacceptable.”

Source: Senator Claire McCaskill

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