100 Orders

From Wikipedia:

The Coalition Provisional Authority under Bremer issued 100 Orders, which they define as “binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people that create penal consequences or have a direct bearing on the way Iraqis are regulated, including changes to Iraqi law”. The economic policies are largely based on free market ideas, emphasizing protection for foreign investors and contractors, while replacing the tax system with a highly regressive structure.[citation needed]

* Order #39 allows for the following:

1. privatization of Iraqs 200 state-owned enterprises;
2. 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses;
3. national treatment of foreign firms;
4. unrestricted, tax-free remittance of all profits and other funds; and
5. 40-year ownership licenses.

* Order #40 turns the banking sector from a state-run to a market-driven system overnight by allowing foreign banks to enter the Iraqi market and to purchase up to 50% of Iraqi banks.
* Order #49 drops the tax rate on corporations from a high of 40% to a flat rate of 15%. The income tax rate is also capped at 15%.
* Order #12 enacted on June 7, 2003 and renewed on February 24, 2004, suspended all tariffs, customs duties, import taxes, licensing fees and similar surcharges for goods entering or leaving Iraq, and all other trade restrictions that may apply to such goods.
* Order #17 grants foreign contractors, including private security firms, full immunity from Iraq’s laws.
* Order # 81 prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq.[citation needed]

Some claim these orders violate the Hague regulations of 1907 (the companion to the 1949 Geneva conventions, both ratified by the United States) and the U.S. Army’s Law of Land Warfare by fundamentally altering Iraq’s existing laws.

From Newsweek in 2006:

Order 17 applies not only to soldiers but to the rest of that vast, motley array of foreigners that originally came in with Bremer and stayed, under different guises and in ever-growing numbers, after he left: consultants, contractors and the “security contractors,” known in other places and times as mercenaries. Under Order 17, as long as they’re working on U.S. government contracts and subcontracts they are immune to arrest and prosecution, taxes and duties imposed by Iraqi law. (I would invite readers to look at the text.) Implicitly and in fact, Order 17 has given these characters a license to kill.

He told you so:

What Lawrence actually said was, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

Neither are mercs subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice:

In other words, if the government contract controlling the individual’s services does not require the act in question, then Order 17 does not give immunity for that act. Unlike his military counterpart, the contractor in Iraq is immune from Iraqi civil or criminal liability only when the act occurs as a necessary part of carrying out the official duty. Garden-variety criminal acts (a robbery, rape or bar fight) or full-on war crimes are, by definition, not part of the “terms and conditions” of the government contract.

Perhaps most tellingly, the ‘shocking’ and ‘unprecedented’ Order 17 rule that the U.S. shall have jurisdiction over contractor acts in the line of duty is similar to the contractor provisions of SoFAs in other nations. For example, the NATO SoFA provides in Article VII that the U.S. “shall have the primary right to exercise jurisdiction” over its contractors (defined there as the “civilian component”) for “offences arising out of any act or omission done in the performance of official duty.” The two structures are not identical, but Order 17 is hardly the stunning departure from common practice often touted.

Should you care to go deep, The White Rabbit discusses the most recent challenge to The Pinkerton Act:

Meet Brian X. Scott. Army veteran of nearly 13 years, albeit drummed out for corresponding with the Soviet government during the height of the cold war. Former government civil-service bureaucrat, having worked as a procurement analyst with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Apparently semi-retired on a government pension now, Mr. Scott ran as a write-in anti-war Congressional candidate in 2006, reportedly promising U.S. taxdollar payments (intentional ones, that is) to Iraqi insurgents a/k/a freedom fighters. Perhaps that last plank had something to do with his garnering a total of 12 votes.