Officials said that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was adopting "immediately" the recommendations of a review panel that exposed a worrying legal impunity for security guards working in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The panel was led by Patrick Kennedy, the State Department's director of management policy, who denied that the new guidelines could compromise the safety of US government staffers in the hostile environment of Iraq.

"The issue is to do the job in such a way that you minimize the risk to protectees and to any innocent Iraqis who happen to be in the area that a convoy is moving through," he said on a media conference call.

In an implicit admonishment, the Kennedy panel stressed that private contractors should open fire only with "due regard for the safety of innocent bystanders."

On September 16, Blackwater guards protecting a State Department convoy unleashed a hail of bullets in a crowded Baghdad square and killed as many as 17 civilians.

Blackwater boss Erik Prince has rejected an official Iraqi report that said the killings were unprovoked, insisting that his men were fired upon.

The shootings laid bare a lack of accountability for US contractors working for the State Department rather than the Pentagon, whose private employees are covered by US military law.

The panel said the State Department should "urgently engage" with the Department of Justice and Congress "to establish a legal basis for holding contractors accountable under US law."

Kennedy said that his four-member panel, which included retired NATO commander George Joulwan, had considered if it was feasible to do away with the services of the controversial contractors entirely.

But he noted that the State Department had less than 1,500 of its own security agents around the world, compared to 700 private security employees in Iraq alone.

"There's simply not enough trained (government) personnel," he said, adding that the US military was itself too stretched to take on the job of diplomatic protection.

The September incident prompted Rice to promise a "serious, probing and comprehensive" review of all operations involving security companies contracted to the State Department in war zones.

The panel also called for better coordination between State Department staff and the Pentagon. Kennedy said radios compatible with US military frequencies were being shipped out to State security officers.

The US embassy in Baghdad will establish a "joint incident review board" to examine all past incidents involving deadly force against Iraqi civilians, the official said.

Each of the contractors' vehicles will have an identification number painted clearly on its rear, and the companies are now expected to hire more Arabic speakers.

And after any incident involving a killing or property damage, a State Department team will work with local US commanders to visit the affected Iraqi family "to express condolences and offer appropriate compensation."

The New York Times said that another audit by the US government's Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction had focused on 1.2 billion dollars in contracts given by the State Department to DynCorp International.

Financial records were in such disarray that the department cannot say "specifically what it received" for most of the money it has paid the company since 2004 to train Iraqi police officers, the report said.

Spokesman Sean McCormack insisted that the State Department had already seized the initiative in the DynCorp case.

He said the department had already recouped "well over 100 million dollars in the costs of the contract, and we are on a pathway to attain 100 percent reconciliation of all these accounts."

"This is an example of the State Department policing itself," McCormack said, while declining to say how much of the money recouped might have been due to DynCorp overcharging or defrauding the US taxpayer.

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