Weazl received a BA in Economics with an emphasis on developing countries from Yale University in the late 80's, then received his JD from Columbia Law School in the early 90's. He has practiced as both a corporate lawyer and as a criminal lawyer for nearly a decade, but currently tries to balance an interest in the esoteric with a need to decipher the moment, howling to the moon that the ship is sinking.
Ugandans who want a career in the United States military, can sign up at the annual convention of the Uganda North American Association, organisers say.
American military recruiters will set up a booth at this year's UNAA convention in Orlando, Florida, and seek out professional Ugandans, said Lt. Frank Musisi, himself an officer in the US Army.
Lt. Musisi, who comes from Kalangala District on Lake Victoria, is the current president of UNAA. He said the US military would also advise Ugandans on the "proper channels" to follow in enlisting. The announcement, which is also on the UNAA website (www.unaa.net), is set to cause a rush to this year's convention that takes place from August 29 to September 1.
UNAA is encouraging interested Ugandans to book flights to Orlando and take a shot at joining the US military. The organisation says it has made a deal with Kenya Airways/KLM for a discounted return ticket at $1,200 (Sh74,400). The conference fee is $190 (Sh11,700).
"All registered Kampala travel agents have been authorised to book intending members," Lt. Musisi said in an email interview.
The tour firm Let's Go Travel confirmed to Saturday Monitor that UNAA had circulated a notice of the discounts. Applicants are being asked to carry their curriculum vitae (CV) suggesting that the recruitment exercise will be a main attraction at the convention.
Public interest in jobs abroad in Uganda is intense. Recruitment and job placement companies which advertise are often flooded with thousands of applications.
Blamed in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the private security firm has long ties to the White House and prominent Republicans, including Ken Starr.
By Ben Van Heuvelen
Kenneth Starr argues his case during a reenactment of the 1857 Dred Scott case at Harvard Law School, Saturday, April 7, 2007, in Cambridge, Mass.
Oct. 2, 2007 | When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on September 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm. Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since 2005, the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported 195 "escalation of force incidents"; in 156 of those cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in shooting incidents.
On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will be holding a hearing on the U.S. military's use of private contractors. When Waxman announced plans for the hearing last week, the State Department directed Blackwater not to give any information or testimony without its sign-off. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
But the attempt to shield Prince was apparently not the first time State had protected Blackwater. A report issued by Waxman on Monday alleges that State helped Blackwater cover up Iraqi fatalities. In December 2006, State arranged for the company to pay $15,000 to the family of an Iraqi guard who was shot and killed by a drunken Blackwater employee. In another shooting death, the payment was $5,000. As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also allowed a Blackwater employee to write State's initial "spot report" on the September 16 shooting incident -- a report that did not mention civilian casualties and claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a convoy.
The ties between State and Blackwater are only part of a web of relationships that Blackwater has maintained with the Bush administration and with prominent Republicans. From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual federal contracts from less than $1 million to more than $1 billion, all while employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the administration, several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the security company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater's luminaries with their professional -- and political -- resumes.
Erik Prince, founder and CEO: How did Blackwater go from a small corporation training local SWAT teams to a seemingly inseparable part of U.S. operations in Iraq? Good timing, and the connections of its CEO, may be the answer.
Prince, who founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-the-scenes role in the company until after 9/11, has connections to the Republican Party in his blood. His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in the creation of the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration. At his funeral in 1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian conservative movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince's widow Elsa, who remarried after her husband's death, has served on the boards of the FRC and another influential Christian right organization, Dobson's Focus on the Family. She currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where, according to IRS filings, her son Erik is a vice-president. The foundation has given lavishly to some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to Focus on the Family.
Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Dobson. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave the CNP $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006.
The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister -- married into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. ("I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party," Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 op-ed in Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband Dick ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006.
Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees. Through his Freiheit Foundation, he also gave $500,000 to Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in 2000. In the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the American Entreprise Institute, a conservative think tank. During college, he interned in George H.W. Bush's White House, and he also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.). Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Congressman John Doolittle have visited Blackwater's Moyock, N.C. compound, on a trip arranged by the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm founded by former aides of then-House Majority Leader Tom Delay. ASG partner Paul Behrends is a long-time associate of Prince.
Prince's connections seem to have paid off for Blackwater. Robert Young Pelton, author of "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," has reported that one of Blackwater's earliest contracts in the national arena was a no-bid $5.4 million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan that came after Prince made a call to then CIA executive director Buzzy Krongard. Harper's Magazine's Ken Silverstein has also reported that Prince has a security pass for CIA headquarters and "meets with senior people" inside the CIA. But Prince's most important benefactor was fellow conservative Catholic convert L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government in Iraq. Bremer. In August 2003, Blackwater won a $27.7 million contract to provide personal security for Bremer. In charge of the Blackwater team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who had provided personal security for former secretary of state Henry Kissinger when Bremer was managing director of Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s.
By 2005, Blackwater was earning $353 million annually from federal contracts. Blackwater's benefits from government largesse haven't ended at Iraq. The company was recently one of five awarded a Department of Defense counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as much as $15 billion. Blackwater also became involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and profited handsomely. According to Jeremy Scahill, the author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," Blackwater had made roughly $73 million for Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less than a year after the hurricane hit.
Joseph Schmitz, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel: In 2002, President Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon's military contracts as the Defense Department's Inspector General. Schmitz presided over the largest increase of military-contracting spending in history: as of 2005, 77 companies were awarded 149 "prime contracts" worth $42.1 billion, with hundreds of millions going to Blackwater. Unlike previous IGs, Schmitz reported directly to the Secretary of Defense -- a setup that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers objected to, given Schmitz's oversight responsibility. Schmitz even carried Donald Rumsfeld's "twelve principles" for the Pentagon in his lapel pocket. The first principle read, "Do nothing that could raise questions about the credibility of DoD."
Schmitz has many ties to the Republican party establishment. His father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican Congressman, and his brother, Patrick Schmitz, served as George H.W. Bush's deputy counsel from 1985 to 1993. Joseph himself worked as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic and Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal investigations into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to conflicts of interest and other failures of oversight. According to an October 2005 article in Time Magazine, Schmitz showed the White House the results of his staff's multi-year investigation into a contract in which the Air Force leased air-refueling tankers from Boeing for more than it would have cost to buy them, then agreed to redact the names of senior White House staffers involved in the decision before sending the final report to Congress. Schmitz informed his staff on August 26, 2005 that he was leaving the Pentagon; in September of that year, he went to work for Blackwater.
J. Cofer Black, Vice Chairman: Black spent most of his 28-year CIA career running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, where he worked with Rob Richer (below). At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC). There he was former CIA Director George Tenet's ace in the hole when it came to convincing Bush the CIA should lead initial U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11. Black is, according to published accounts, a man with a flair for the dramatic, the kind of briefer President Bush likes. In one briefing, according to several reports, Black told the president, "When we're through with [terrorists in Afghanistan], they will have flies walking across their eyeballs." (Black also ordered CIA field officer Gary Schroen to bring back Osama bin Laden's head packed in dry ice so Black could show it to Bush.) Black's Afghanistan presentation earned him "special access" to the White House, the Washington Post's Dana Priest reported in December 2005.
Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush administration's interrogation and extraordinary rendition policies. In a famous moment, Black told Congress in 2002, "after 9/11, the gloves came off." And the group within the CIA responsible for extraordinary renditions -- operations in which covert agents grab terror suspects and take them to secret prison facilities for interrogations that would normally be prohibited as torture -- fell under Black at the CTC, Priest has reported.
Black later went to the State Department, where one of his roles was to begin coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. In 2003, the State Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic security teams.
In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part of what Harper's Magazine's Ken Silverstein termed a "revolving door to Blackwater" from the CIA. In addition to his work with Blackwater and his own company, Total Intelligence Solutions, Black also recently joined the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, where he serves the Republican hopeful as senior adviser for counterterrorism and national security.
Rob Richer, Vice President for Intelligence: Richer was head of the CIA's Near East division -- and the agency's liaison with King Abdullah of Jordan -- from 1999 to 2004. In 2003, he briefed President Bush on the nascent Iraqi insurgency. In late 2004, he became the associate deputy director in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, making him the second-ranking official for clandestine operations. He left the agency for Blackwater in the fall of 2005, effectively taking the agency's relationship with Abdullah with him. The CIA had invested millions of dollars in training Jordan's intelligence services. There was an obvious quid pro quo: in exchange for the training, Jordan would share information. Jordan has now hired Blackwater's intelligence division -- headed by Richer -- to do its spy training instead. The CIA isn't happy, writes Silverstein: "People [at the agency] are pissed off," says Silverstein's source. "Abdullah still speaks with Richer regularly and he thinks that's the same thing as talking to us. He thinks Richer is still the man."
Fred Fielding, former outside counsel: After four Blackwater employees were tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004, their families brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater, charging that the company had not provided adequate arms, armor, or backup. Blackwater feared that, if it were found liable for its employees' deaths, a floodgate of future litigation could be opened. To fight the suit, Blackwater hired Fielding, the consummate Republican insider. Dan Callahan, a lawyer representing the families, told Salon he was shocked when he learned Fielding would be representing the company. "How the hell," Callahan says he wondered at the time, "did I draw Fred Fielding on this case?"
Fielding has had a long career as a lawyer to prominent Republicans. From 1970 to 1972, he was an associate White House counsel in the Nixon administration; from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the denouement of that administration as deputy White House counsel. Under President Ronald Reagan, he served as White House Counsel from 1981 to 1986, where he was the boss of a young assistant counsel named John Roberts, now the Chief Justice of the United States. After the 2000 election, he served the current administration as transition counsel, and he also held a spot on the 9/11 Commission. In January of 2007, Bush chose him as White House counsel.
Ken Starr, outside counsel: According to Dan Callahan, Fred Fielding represented Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months beginning in February of 2005. After Fred Fielding left the case, the law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home to Jack Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount, represented Blackwater till October 2006. Blackwater then hired another high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials -- Ken Starr, now the dean of Pepperdine Law School in California. Starr was appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan, was U.S. Solicitor General under George H. W. Bush, and was on Bush's short list to replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court. He is best known, however, as the Independent Counsel who investigated Bill Clinton. He revealed the intimate details of Clinton's affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton's impeachment by Congress.
Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks jurisdiction in the contractor's lawsuit. On October 18, 2006, Starr petitioned Chief Justice John Roberts on behalf of Blackwater, asserting that the company was "constitutionally immune" to the lawsuit. "If companies such as Blackwater must factor the defense costs of state tort lawsuits into [their] overall costs," argued Starr, "Blackwater will suffer irreparable harm." Roberts denied the petition on October 24. In December, Starr filed a motion to bring the matter before the entire Supreme Court. The motion was denied in February.
BAGHDAD (AP) - Iraqi investigators have a videotape that shows Blackwater USA guards opened fire against civilians without provocation in a shooting last week that left 11 people dead, a senior Iraqi official said Saturday. He said the case was referred to the Iraqi judiciary.
Iraq's president, meanwhile, demanded that the Americans release an Iranian arrested this week on suspicion of smuggling weapons to Shiite militias. The demand adds new strains to U.S.-Iraqi relations only days before a meeting between President Bush and Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Interior Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Abdul-Karim Khalaf said Iraqi authorities had completed an investigation into the Sept. 16 shooting in Nisoor Square in western Baghdad and concluded that Blackwater guards were responsible for the deaths.
He told The Associated Press that the conclusion was based on witness statements as well as videotape shot by cameras at the nearby headquarters of the national police command. He said eight people were killed at the scene and three of the 15 wounded died in hospitals.
Blackwater, which provides most of the security for U.S. diplomats and civilian officials in Iraq, has insisted that its guards came under fire from armed insurgents and shot back only to defend themselves.
Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said Saturday that she knew nothing about the videotape and was contractually prohibited from discussing details of the shooting.
Khalaf also said the ministry was looking into six other fatal shootings involving the Moyock, N.C.-based company in which 10 Iraqis were killed and 15 wounded. Among the shootings was one Feb. 7 outside Iraqi state television in Baghdad that killed three building guards.
"These six cases will support the case against Blackwater, because they show that it has a criminal record," Khalaf said.
Khalaf said the report was "sent to the judiciary" although he would not specify whether that amounted to filing of criminal charges. Under Iraqi law, an investigating judge reviews criminal complaints and decides whether there is enough evidence for a trial.
Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh denied that authorities had decided to file charges against the Blackwater guards and said Saturday that decision had been taken whether to seek punishment.
"The necessary measures will be taken that will preserve the honor of the Iraqi people," he said in New York, where al-Maliki arrived Friday for the U.N. General Assembly session. "We have ongoing high-level meetings with the U.S. side about this issue."
Al-Maliki is expected to raise the issue with Bush during a meeting Monday in New York.
It is doubtful that foreign security contractors could be prosecuted under Iraqi law. A directive issued by U.S. occupation authorities in 2004 granted contractors, U.S. troops and many other foreign officials immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law.
Security contractors are also not subject to U.S. military law under which U.S. troopers face prosecution for killing or abusing Iraqis.
Iraqi officials have said in the wake of the Nisoor Square shooting that they will press for amendments to the 2004 directive.
A senior aide to al-Maliki said Friday that three of the Blackwater guards were Iraqis and could be subject to prosecution. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Shortly after the Sept. 16 shooting, U.S. officials said they "understood" that there was videotape, but refused to give more details. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not supposed to release information to the media.
Following the Nisoor Square shooting, the Interior Ministry banned Blackwater from operating in Iraq but rolled back after the U.S. agreed to a joint investigation. The company resumed guarding a reduced number of U.S. convoys on Friday.
The al-Maliki aide said Friday that the Iraqis were pushing for an apology, compensation for victims or their families and for the guards involved in the shooting to be held "accountable."
Hadi al-Amri, a prominent Shiite lawmaker and al-Maliki ally, also said an admission of wrongdoing, an apology and compensation offered a way out of the dilemma.
"They are always frightened and that's why they shoot at civilians," al-Amri said. "If Blackwater gets to stay in Iraq, it will have to give guarantees about its conduct."
Allegations against Blackwater have clouded relations between Iraq and the Americans at a time when the Bush administration is seeking to contain calls in Congress for sharp reductions in the 160,000-strong U.S. military force.
Adding to those strains, President Jalal Talabani demanded the immediate release of an Iranian official detained Thursday by U.S. forces in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah.
The U.S. military said the unidentified Iranian was a member of the Quds force - an elite unit of Iran's Revolutionary Guards accused of arming and training Shiite militias in Iraq.
A statement issued Saturday by Talabani's office said the arrest was carried out without the prior knowledge or the cooperation of the Kurdish regional government.
"This amounts to an insult and a violation of its rights and authority," said the statement, quoting a letter Talabani sent to Gen. David Petraeus and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Talabani, a Kurd, is one of Washington's most reliable partners in Iraq.
Talabani said Iran had threatened to close the border with the Kurdish region if the official were not freed - a serious blow to the economy in the president's political stronghold.
"I want to express to you our dismay over the arrest by American forces of this official civilian Iranian guest," Talabani wrote to Petraeus and Crocker.
Five Iranians said to be linked to the Quds force were arrested in the Kurdish city of Irbil and remain in U.S. custody.
Also Saturday, the U.S. military announced the death of two more American soldiers - one of an unspecified non-combat related injury and another in a vehicle accident in Diyala province.
Making a killing: how private armies became a $120bn global industry
By Daniel Howden and Leonard Doyle in Washington
In Nigeria, corporate commandos exchange fire with local rebels attacking an oil platform. In Afghanistan, private bodyguards help to foil yet another assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai. In Colombia, a contracted pilot comes under fire from guerrillas while spraying coca fields with pesticides. On the border between Iraq and Iran, privately owned Apache helicopters deliver US special forces to a covert operation.
This is a snapshot of a working day in the burgeoning world of private military companies, arguably the fastest-growing industry in the global economy. The sector is now worth up to $120bn annually with operations in at least 50 countries, according to Peter Singer, a security analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington.
"The rate of growth in the security industry has been phenomenal," says Deborah Avant, a professor of political science at UCLA. The single largest spur to this boom is the conflict in Iraq.
The workings of this industry have come under intense scrutiny this week in the angry aftermath of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US-owned Blackwater corporation in Baghdad. The Iraqi government has demanded the North Carolina-based company is withdrawn. But with Blackwater responsible for the protection of hundreds of senior US and Iraqi officials, from the US ambassador to visiting congressional delegations, there is certainty in diplomatic and military circles that this will not happen.
The origins of these shadow armies trace back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War, Bob Ayers, a security expert with Chatham House in London, explains: "In the good old days of the Cold War there were two superpowers who kept a lid on everything in their respective parts of the world."
He likens the collapse of the Soviet Union to "taking the lid off a pressure cooker". What we have seen since, he says, is the rise of international dissident groups, ultranationalists and multiple threats to global security.
The new era also saw a significant reduction in the size of the standing armies, at the same time as a rise in global insecurity which increased both the availability of military expertise and the demand for it. It was a business opportunity that could not be ignored.
Now the mercenary trade comes with its own business jargon. Guns for hire come under the umbrella term of privatised military firms, with their own acronym PMFs. The industry itself has done everything it can to shed the "mercenary" tag and most companies avoid the term "military" in preference for "security". "The term mercenary is not accurate," says Mr Ayers, who argues that military personnel in defensive roles should be distinguished from soldiers of fortune.
There is nothing new about soldiers for hire, the private companies simply represent the trade in a new form. "Organised as business entities and structured along corporate lines, they mark the corporate evolution of the mercenary trade," according to Mr Singer, who was among the first to plot the worldwide explosion in the use of private military firms.
In many ways it mirrors broader trends in the world economy as countries switch from manufacturing to services and outsource functions once thought to be the preserve of the state. Iraq has become a testing ground for this burgeoning industry, creating staggering financial opportunities and equally immense ethical dilemmas.
None of the estimated 48,000 private military operatives in Iraq has been convicted of a crime and no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed by private military forces, because the US does not keep records.
According to some estimates, more than 800 private military employees have been killed in the war so far, and as many as 3,300 wounded.
These numbers are greater than the losses suffered by any single US army division and larger than the casualties suffered by the rest of the coalition put together.
A high-ranking US military commander in Iraq said: "These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There's no authority over them, so you can't come down on them hard when they escalate force. They shoot people."
In Abu Ghraib, all of the translators and up to half of the interrogators were reportedly private contractors.
Private soldiers are involved in all stages of war, from training and war-gaming before the invasion to delivering supplies. Camp Doha in Kuwait, the launch-pad for the invasion, was built by private contractors.
It is not just the military that has turned to the private sector, humanitarian agencies are dependent on PMFs in almost every war zone from Bosnia to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Which raises the next market the industry would like to see opened: peacekeeping. And the lobbying has already begun.
As suspected, Blackwater thugs in Iraq were not responding to “militants” when they killed Iraqi motorists a few days ago. “A preliminary Iraqi report on a shooting involving an American diplomatic motorcade said Tuesday that Blackwater security guards were not ambushed, as the company reported, but instead fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman’s call to stop, killing a couple and their infant,” reports the New York Times.
“The report, by the Ministry of Interior, was presented to the Iraqi cabinet and, though unverified, seemed to contradict an account offered by Blackwater USA that the guards were responding to gunfire by militants.
The report said Blackwater helicopters had also fired. The Ministry of Defense said 20 Iraqis had been killed, a far higher number than had been reported before.”
But of course. After all, Blackwater’s slogan is: “Providing a new generation of capability, skills, and people to solve the spectrum of needs in the world of security,” that is to say killing people in lands invaded and occupied, even lands hit by natural disaster, specifically New Orleans after Katrina.
Blackwater was formed by two former Navy Seals, one a “billionaire right-wing fundamentalist Christian from a powerful Michigan Republican family. A major Republican campaign contributor, he interned in the White House of President George H.W. Bush and campaigned for Pat Buchanan in 1992. He founded the mercenary firm Blackwater USA in 1997 with Gary Jackson, another former Navy SEAL,” according to an NNDB profile.
It is a good idea to link when writing about Blackwater, as they like to sue their critics. Back in 2006, Blackwater threatened to sue journalist Mike Whitney.
“The shooting, which took place on Sunday, has angered Iraqi officials and touched off a harsh debate about private security companies, which operate outside Iraqi law, a privilege extended to them by Americans officials while Iraq’s government was still under American administration,” the New York Times continues. “Blackwater, which guards all top American officials here, had its work suspended, and Iraqi officials agreed to rewrite the rules to make the companies accountable.” In other words, Blackwater’s trigger-happy thugs, politely called “security guards,” are an embarrassment and will now be asked to play by the “rules,” although one might conclude that any such “rules” in an invaded and occupied country where around a million people have died is nothing short of a sick joke.
Blackwater, however, is not going anywhere. In fact, it is the way of the future, as a “number of senior CIA and Pentagon officials have taken top jobs at Blackwater, including firm vice chairman Cofer Black, who was the Bush Administration’s top counterterrorism official at the time of the 9/11 attacks,” Ken Silverstein writes for Harpers. In other words, the bogus GWOT is now privatized, a for-profit enterprise. You may recall Cofer’s infamous remark after the nine eleven inside job that “the gloves came off,” i.e., a lot of people will die, as indeed over a million Iraqis and an undetermined number of Afghans have died.
As it turns out, according to Silverstein’s sources, Eric Prince, Blackwater’s founder, has a “green badge” at the CIA and “regularly, probably once a month or so” meets “with senior people, especially in the D.O.,” that is to say the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, now part of the National Clandestine Service. In addition, Blackwater has recruited Rob Richer, the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director of Operations, who is now Blackwater’s Vice President of Intelligence, and at the time of Silverstein’s writing was “aggressively recruiting Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s current top spy as director of the National Clandestine Service. Rodriguez has a number of former agency friends at Blackwater, most notably Rick Prado, with whom he served in Latin America and who is now Blackwater’s Vice President of Special Programs.” A well-informed grade schooler can tell you what the CIA did in Latin America.
As for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, we are told it will concentrate on “overseas” intelligence gathering. But then, as recently reported, the CIA “violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents,” the National Security Archive announced on June 21. Of course, none of this is revelatory, even news, as Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA illegal domestic operations with a front page story in the New York Times on December 22, 1974, writing that “a check of the CIA’s domestic files ordered last year… produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities… beginning in the nineteen fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail.”
Of course, the CIA’s charter is null and void. “The CIA has assigned dozens of case officers and analysts to work with FBI agents throughout the USA in the most extensive deployment of intelligence officers on domestic soil in the spy agency’s history,” USA Today reported back on November 7, 2004. “Officials at both agencies say the deployment, which pairs CIA officers with FBI agents in the bureau’s offices to assist with terror-related investigations, also represents the CIA’s broadest association with federal law enforcement since the CIA was created after World War II,” despite the fact the agency is “prohibited by law from participating in intelligence-gathering operations against U.S. citizens. It also has no law-enforcement powers.” Even so, “CIA analysts have conducted briefings for local police to help identify potential terrorist threats,” no doubt as previously categorized by the CIA, resulting in the “family jewels” embarrassment (see previous paragraph).
Lest you think Blackwater is something only Iraqis need worry about, consider the fact the for-profit private army is currently training police in Illinois. “Surrounded by pristine farmland, down a series of bumpy rural roads, ‘Blackwater North’ took over an existing 80-acre shooting range” near Mount Carroll. “On the day ABC7 visited, officers from several departments including Chicago and Rockford were in a tactical hostage exercise.” Det. Steve Stoball of the Freeport Police Department said there “are new techniques that the criminals are using so we have to be updated with our techniques. Coming out to Blackwater, these guys have seen it all,” including “firing on innocent civilians,” as Amnesty International notes. Blackwater, of course, has competition, as other “security” corporations, including DynCorp, Zapata, and Custer Battles, also engaged in random mass murder “in efforts to clear roads.” Be afraid, very afraid, that these people are now training local cops, already employing “pain compliance” on students asking one-worlders the wrong questions.
All of this is quite natural, considering. “In many ways, Blackwater represents the life’s work of the neoconservative core that has guided the Bush Administration since it first took power in 2000,” writes Jeremy Scahill. “We’re talking about a company that was founded by a man named Erik Prince, who comes from a family that was one of the top bank rollers of, not only the ‘Republican revolution’ of the 1990s that brought Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America to power, but also the rise of what we now know as the religious right or the Christian conservative movement. Erik Prince’s family helped James Dobson found Focus on the Family. Erik Prince’s family gave the seed money for Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Erik Prince himself is a major bank roller of President Bush, his allies, and the Christian conservative movement in this country…. Someone who is deeply linked to the Christian right, and to the current Administration, has turned around and started what has become the world’s most powerful private mercenary army. These guys are like neo-Crusaders. To have them on the government payroll to the tune of $750 million, operating in a Muslim country, should be frightening to everyone who understands that.”
Frightening, indeed, although wholly predictable, as the “Christian right,” i.e., the Muslim-hating Christian Zionists, are now in control of the horizontal and vertical when it comes down to U.S. foreign policy—and are now training local police departments.
But it should be even more frightful for Americans, usually oblivious to the mass murder of Iraqis. “When Hurricane Katrina hit, Blackwater started a domestic operations division of its company, and it began seeking greater contracting opportunities domestically inside of the United States. At one point, the federal government was paying Blackwater about $240,000 a day for Hurricane Katrina. The company was billing the government $950 per day, per Blackwater man deployed in the hurricane zone. They had about 600 guys stretched from Texas all the way through the Gulf region,” Scahill continues.
Now Blackwater’s been in negotiations with several state governments in the United States. Blackwater met recently with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about doing disaster response in California. They’re opening up a new private military base in San Diego. Another one is in Mount Carroll, Illinois. They have applied for operating licenses in every coastal U.S. state. This is the expansion of a privatized army.
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, speaks boldly about Blackwater being the FedEx of the national security apparatus. They’re manufacturing surveillance blimps and trying to market them to the Department of Homeland Security to use to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Blackwater and its executives continue to pour money into these Christian conservative causes, conservative politicians’ campaign coffers. This is really the embodiment of everything that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, when he talked about the dangers of unchecked power of the private sector, and the rise of the military-industrial complex.
Again, be afraid, very afraid, especially if you live in a coastal state hit by a hurricane.
In Iraq, Blackwater “initiated the shooting when a car did not heed a police officer and moved into an intersection.” Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for Iraq’s puppet government, said the “traffic policeman was trying to open the road for them. It was a crowded square. But one small car did not stop. It was moving very slowly. They shot against the couple and their child. They started shooting randomly,” the New York Times continues. As noted above by Amnesty International, shooting up cars seems to be the preferred method of traffic control in Iraq, that is when a “security” corporation, i.e., mercenaries, is in control.
“Among the rank and file of security contractors, Blackwater guards are regularly ridiculed as cowboys who are relentlessly and pointlessly aggressive, carry excessive weaponry and do not appear to have top-of-the-line training,” the New York Times notes. “Passing Blackwater convoys sometimes intimidates even Westerners, who fear coming under attack if they make a wrong move.”
And now Blackwater is passing this less than “top-of-the-line training” on to local police here in the United States.
Incidentally, the characterization of Blackwater as “thugs” above in the first paragraph is my opinion, based on the facts that follow. It is not slander. Last time I checked, opinion was protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Of course, that may have changed since the last time I checked, as our decider and commander guy considers the Constitution “just a goddamned piece of paper” and has vested himself with all manner of dictatorial power contrary to what that “goddamned piece of paper” states, not that it matters as the average American cannot be bothered, what with Britney running around in her underwear.
Ewen MacAskill in Washington Thursday September 20, 2007 The Guardian
The US and Iraqi governments were yesterday planning to announce a joint investigation into Sunday's shooting of eight civilians in Baghdad that led to the suspension of the private American security firm Blackwater.
The inquiry offers a face-saving way out of an awkward standoff between the two governments. The US, which heavily relies on Blackwater for protection of its diplomatic staff and other western workers, was forced for a second day in a row to order all state department employees not to venture outside the relative safety of Baghdad's fortified green zone other than by helicopter.
The Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, yesterday urged the US to stop using Blackwater and transfer the work to other firms. "We will not allow Iraqis to be killed in cold blood ... what happened was a crime," he told a news conference in Baghdad.
He disputed the Blackwater version of the shooting.
"It is in our interests to freeze the work of this company and the embassy can travel with other companies," Mr Maliki said.
Blackwater is the biggest of three private security firms employed by the state department. Private security staff involved in controversial incidents are often hastily withdrawn but a US embassy spokeswoman, Mirembe Natongo, said those involved were still in Iraq.
The proposed US-Iraqi inquiry comes amid conflicting accounts about what happened on Sunday. Blackwater said its employees had acted "lawfully and appropriately" after coming under attack. But the Iraqi government insisted Blackwater had opened fire on innocent civilians.
The deputy press secretary at the US state department, Tom Casey, said: "We're in conversations with the Iraqis on how we can find some mechanisms for looking at this issue in a joint way. There have been a number of questions that have been raised and we want to make sure that both we and the Iraqis have a common set of facts that we're working from and also that we can hopefully come to some common conclusions on how to proceed."
The US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who is on a trip to the Middle East, told journalists that she wanted to "work with the Iraqi government to make certain that this sort of thing doesn't happen". Original article posted here.
Iraq blames U.S. security firm for gunfight that killed eight civilians
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater Security Consulting, an American firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead.
U.S. soldiers talk with Iraqi shopkeepers while patrolling Sunday in Baghdad.
The firefight took place near Nisoor Square about noon, an Interior Ministry official said Sunday. In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, the official said.
Details were sketchy, but the official said witnesses reported that one side of the gunbattle involved Westerners driving sport utility vehicles, which security contractors often use. The state television network al-Iraqiya reported that a Western security company was involved in the shootout, but it did not identify the firm.
An official with the U.S. Embassy told The Associated Press that a State Department motorcade came under small-arms fire near Nisoor Square, and one of the vehicles was disabled.
The official said no State Department officials were injured but provided no information on Iraqi casualties, the AP reported.
Blackwater is one of many security firms contracted by the U.S. government during the Iraq war. An estimated 25,000-plus employees of private security firms are working in Iraq, guarding diplomats, reconstruction workers and government officials. As many as 200 are believed to have been killed on the job, according to U.S. congressional reports.
"We have revoked Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq," Interior Ministry spokesman Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf said Monday. "The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday's killing will be referred to Iraqi justice."
In a statement carried Sunday on al-Iraqiya, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said his government would punish those responsible and bar the company involved from working in Iraq.
Iraqi authorities have issued previous complaints about shootings by private military contractors, but Iraqi courts do not have the authority to bring contractors to trial, according to a July report from the Congressional Research Service.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee estimated in February that nearly $4 billion had been spent on security contracts amid the insurgency that followed the U.S. invasion in 2003 -- costs that have forced the delay, cancellation or scaling back of some reconstruction projects.
Meanwhile, seven people were killed and 31 others were detained Monday in U.S.-led coalition raids across Iraq, the U.S. military said.
The fatalities occurred west of Yusufiya, southwest of the capital, as coalition forces targeted two buildings used by al Qaeda in Iraq militants, who organize suicide attacks.
Armed men at one building drew weapons as troops approached, and the troops "engaged" the two and killed them, the statement said.
They killed four others who were apparently acting as lookouts and another who wouldn't surrender when ordered. Nineteen people were detained, the military said.
Troops arrested other suspects in regions north of the capital -- north of Taji, near Balad, in Baiji and near the Syrian border.
In Baghdad, three people were killed and 11 others were wounded Monday when a parked car detonated near a Shiite mosque on the edge of a densely populated Shiite neighborhood, an Interior Ministry official said. Original article posted here.
Commentary: Risk, rewards in military duty for illegal aliens
By Ruben Navarrette Jr.
SAN DIEGO, California (CNN) -- What if we offered illegal immigrants a path to citizenship that included a stint in the U.S. military?
Ruben Navarrette: Be wary of offering military service as a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The idea has been trumpeted by thoughtful people such as Max Boot, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who thinks this is the time for a "freedom legion." He's talking about a unit of the military made up entirely of the foreign-born -- including illegal immigrants -- where the compensation would include U.S. citizenship.
About 70,000 foreign-born men and women serve in the U.S. armed forces, or about 5 percent of the total active-duty force, according to the Pentagon. Of those, nearly 30,000 -- or about 43 percent -- are not U.S. citizens.
Roping illegal immigrants into military service could accomplish two goals at once: helping alleviate the military's recruitment worries while giving the undocumented a chance to prove that their commitment to this country extends beyond a paycheck.
We're already talking about requiring illegal immigrants to learn English, pay fines, and return to their home countries to earn legal status. Why not, some say, raise the stakes and require men and women between 18 and 42 to serve a couple of years in the military to earn something even more precious: U.S. citizenship for themselves and their children?
The idea appealed to a reader in upstate New York who called me to gauge my reaction. I told him that I hadn't made up my mind, but that the concept did fit with my view that any conferring of legal status be laden with onerous conditions so that it really is earned. To earn it, illegal immigrants should have to do everything but walk across broken glass.
Still, I told him, I'm not sure how those who oppose comprehensive reform but support turning illegal immigrants into cannon fodder go about squaring that circle. Restrictionists and racists have argued that illegal immigrants are invading this country, and that they're a dangerous menace to society that is prone to all sorts of violent and criminal behavior.
Of course, many native-born U.S. citizens are just as menacing. But for those who believe that illegal immigrants are inherently violent, do they really want to give these folks military training and a M-16, to help them graduate from menacing to lethal? After all, assuming they survive their stint in the military, they eventually have to return stateside. Then they're our problem.
Consider the ghastly events in Newark, New Jersey, where three African-American students were killed execution-style and a fourth was shot in the head but survived. The accused ringleader is Jose Carranza, an illegal immigrant from Peru, who was previously charged with raping a 5-year-old girl and threatening her parents.
Twice indicted by grand juries, Carranza slipped through the cracks and was released on bail. Authorities say that the 28-year-old construction worker led at least four other individuals in attacking the youths with a gun and a machete. If convicted, Carranza could get the death penalty.
Glad to hear it. If half the things they say about this creep are true, Carranza belongs on death row. But guess what? He sure doesn't belong on an Army recruitment poster, or handling heavy artillery.
Ruben Navarrette Jr. is a member of the editorial board of The San Diego Union-Tribune and a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group.
US has naturalized 32,000 immigrant soldiers since Iraq war
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Dressed in US military uniforms, an Iraqi, a Mexican and a Colombian stand proudly at their naturalization ceremony, each clutching a miniature American flag in one hand and a copy of the constitution in the other.
"You are part of the most exclusive club in the world," director of US citizenship and immigration services Emilio Gonzalez told them Tuesday at the ceremony, which included 25 new citizens — mostly soldiers — from 14 nations.
"You've accepted to defend the principles of the greatest country in the world," said Gonzalez, who is himself a naturalized American.
Each year the United States naturalizes more than 700,000 immigrants. Once they join the armed forces, immigrants who usually have residency based on a green card, are able to fast track their citizenship because they are serving in a "time of war".
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001 the option has been offered to all immigrants who have enlisted in the military. And since the start of the war in Iraq in March 2003, 32,500 immigrant soldiers have been naturalized.
This is "one of the happiest days in my life," said Javier Tegada, 32, a native of Colombia who was outfitted in a white marines uniform.
Tegada arrived in the United States four years ago but obtained his citizenship in six months. Normally one must have five years of residence in order to gain American citizenship.
"I hope that one day Iraq will be similar to America with the rights of freedom and religion," said Sona Bani, a 21-year-old Iraqi who has lived in the United States since the age of 10.
"Eventually I'll get deployed. I'm ready for that," she said with a note of hesitation. "If they want me to go to Iraq, I'll go."
For Bayando Andino, 20, a marine from Nicaragua who obtained his US nationality in less than four months, the process made him even more fond of his adopted country.
"You pretty much can do anything you have the ability to do. Nobody can stop you," he said.
Fellow marine Gamanuel Jean, a 23-year-old from Haiti joined simply to "straighten out my life," and had "no idea about the citizenship" but he chose to become a citizen so that he could serve at a higher rank.
"It's an opportunity," he said. "I want to become an officer in the military." Soldiers do not have to be US citizens but officers do.
Despite the image often portrayed in the media, the US military is not overwhelmed by people who are minorities in the nation as a whole: 35 percent of the US army is classified as "minority," versus 33 percent in the country.
"Historically, Hispanics have a relatively low rate of high school graduation," said David Segal, sociology professor at American University.
"If you have a population that tends not to finish school they tend not to be represented in the military," he said, adding that "at this point we are pretty close to a representative force."
The US army has around 40,000 immigrants, and does not enlist those who do not have papers.
A debate is raging over whether the armed services should change standards in order to boost recruitment amid overstretched forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A recent bill on immigration failed to make it through Congress, but the notion of offering citizenship to enlistees who arrived in the United States before the age of 16 is often tossed about in political and military circles.
"People talk about it a lot, it's pretty controversial as well," said Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Segal noted that the military has not explicitly used citizenship as a recruiting appeal, but thinks it would be a successful tactic.
"If the army wanted to use it as a motivation for enlistment they could get far more than they are getting."
The U.S. government now outsources a vast portion of its spying operations to private firms -- with zero public accountability.
More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.
On May 14, at an industry conference in Colorado sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. government revealed for the first time how much of its classified intelligence budget is spent on private contracts: a whopping 70 percent. Based on this year’s estimated budget of at least $48 billion, that would come to at least $34 billion in contracts. The figure was disclosed by Terri Everett, a senior procurement executive in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the agency established by Congress in 2004 to oversee the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence infrastructure. A copy of Everett's unclassified PowerPoint slide presentation, titled "Procuring the Future" and dated May 25, was obtained by Salon. (It has since become available on the DIA's Web site.) "We can't spy ... If we can't buy!" one of the slides proclaims, underscoring the enormous dependence of U.S. intelligence agencies on private sector contracts.
The DNI figures show that the aggregate number of private contracts awarded by intelligence agencies rose by about 38 percent from the mid-1990s to 2005. But the surge in outsourcing has been far more dramatic measured in dollars: Over the same period of time, the total value of intelligence contracts more than doubled, from about $18 billion in 1995 to about $42 billion in 2005.
"Those numbers are startling," said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on the U.S. intelligence budget. "They represent a transformation of the Cold War intelligence bureaucracy into something new and different that is literally dominated by contractor interests."
Because of the cloak of secrecy thrown over the intelligence budgets, there is no way for the American public, or even much of Congress, to know how those contractors are getting the money, what they are doing with it, or how effectively they are using it. The explosion in outsourcing has taken place against a backdrop of intelligence failures for which the Bush administration has been hammered by critics, from Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction to abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Aftergood and other experts also warn that the lack of transparency creates conditions ripe for corruption.
Trey Brown, a DNI press officer, told Salon that the 70 percent figure disclosed by Everett refers to everything that U.S. intelligence agencies buy, from pencils to buildings to "whatever devices we use to collect intelligence." Asked how much of the money doled out goes toward big-ticket items like military spy satellites, he replied, "We can't really talk about those kinds of things."
The media has reported on some contracting figures for individual agencies, but never before for the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise. In 2006, the Washington Post reported that a "significant majority" of the employees at two key agencies, the National Counterterrrorism Center and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, were contractors (at CIFA, the number was more than 70 percent). More recently, former officers with the Central Intelligence Agency have said the CIA's workforce is about 60 percent contractors.
But the statistics alone don't even show the degree to which outsourcing has penetrated U.S. intelligence -- many tasks and services once reserved exclusively for government employees are being handled by civilians. For example, private contractors analyze much of the intelligence collected by satellites and low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles, and they write reports that are passed up to the line to high-ranking government officials. They supply and maintain software programs that can manipulate and depict data used to track terrorist suspects, both at home and abroad, and determine what targets to hit in hot spots in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such data is also at the heart of the National Security Agency's massive eavesdropping programs and may be one reason the DNI is pushing Congress to grant immunity to corporations that may have cooperated with the NSA over the past five years. Contractors also provide collaboration tools to help individual agencies communicate with each other, and they supply security tools to protect intelligence networks from outside tampering.
Outsourcing has also spread into the realm of human intelligence. At the CIA, contractors help staff overseas stations and provide disguises used by agents working under cover. According to Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who was the inspiration for the character played by George Clooney in the film "Syriana," a contractor stationed in Iraq even supervises where CIA agents go in Baghdad and whom they meet. "It's a completely different culture from the way the CIA used to be run, when a case officer determined where and when agents would go," he told me in a recent interview. "Everyone I know in the CIA is leaving and going into contracting whether they're retired or not."
The DNI itself has voiced doubts about the efficiency and effectiveness of outsourcing. In a public report released last fall, the agency said the intelligence community increasingly "finds itself in competition with its contractors for our own employees." Faced with arbitrary staffing limits and uncertain funding, the report said, intelligence agencies are forced "to use contractors for work that may be borderline 'inherently governmental'" -- meaning the agencies have no clear idea about what work should remain exclusively inside the government versus work that can be done by civilians working for private firms. The DNI also found that "those same contractors recruit our own employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."
A Senate Intelligence Committee report released on Thursday spells out the costs to taxpayers. It estimates that the average annual cost for a government intelligence officer is $126,500, compared to the average $250,000 (including overhead) paid by the government for an intelligence contractor. "Given this cost disparity," the report concluded, "the Committee believes that the Intelligence Community should strive in the long-term to reduce its dependence upon contractors."
The DNI began an intensive study of contracting last year, but when its "IC Core Contractor Inventory" report was sent to Congress in April, DNI officials refused to release its findings to the public, citing risks to national security. The next month, a report from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence rebuked the DNI in unusually strong language, concluding that U.S. officials "do not have an adequate understanding of the size and composition of the contractor work force, a consistent and well-articulated method for assessing contractor performance, or strategies for managing a combined staff-contractor workforce."
U.S. intelligence budgets are classified, and all discussions about them in Congress are held in secret. Much of the information, however, is available to intelligence contractors, who are at liberty to lobby members of Congress about the budgets, potentially skewing policy in favor of the contractors. For example, Science Applications International Corp., one of the nation's largest intelligence contractors, spent $1,330,000 in their congressional lobbying efforts in 2006, which included a focus on the intelligence and defense budgets, according to records filed with the Senate's Office of Public Records.
The public, of course, is completely excluded from these discussions. "It's not like a debate when someone loses," said Aftergood. "There is no debate. And the more work that migrates to the private sector, the less effective congressional oversight is going to be." From that secretive process, he added, "there's only a short distance to the Duke Cunninghams of the world and the corruption of the process in the interest of private corporations." In March 2006, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., who had resigned from Congress several months earlier, was sentenced to eight years in prison after being convicted of accepting more than $2 million in bribes from executives with MZM, a prominent San Diego defense contractor. In return for the bribes, Cunningham used his position on the House appropriations and intelligence committees to win tens of millions of dollars' worth of contracts for MZM at the CIA and the Pentagon's CIFA office, which has been criticized by Congress for spying on American citizens. The MZM case deepened earlier this month when Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the former deputy director of the CIA, was indicted for conspiring with former MZM CEO Brent Wilkes to steer contracts toward the company.
U.S. intelligence agencies have always relied on private companies for technology and hardware. Lockheed built the famous U-2 spy plane under specifications from the CIA, and dozens of companies, from TRW to Polaroid to Raytheon, helped develop the high-resolution cameras and satellites that beamed information back to Washington about the Soviet Union and its military and missile installations. The National Security Agency, which was founded in the early 1950s to monitor foreign communications and telephone calls, hired IBM, Cray and other companies to make the supercomputers that helped the agency break encryption codes and transform millions of bits of data into meaningful intelligence.
By the 1990s, however, commercial developments in encryption, information technology, imagery and satellites had outpaced the government's ability to keep up, and intelligence agencies began to turn to the private sector for technologies they once made in-house. Agencies also turned to outsourcing after Congress, as part of the "peace dividend" that followed the end of the Cold War, cut defense and intelligence budgets by about 30 percent.
When the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency was created in 1995 as the primary collection agency for imagery and mapping, for example, it immediately began buying its software and much of its satellite imagery from commercial vendors; today, half of its 14,000 workers are full-time equivalent contractors who work inside NGA facilities but collect their paychecks from companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin. In the late 1990s, the NSA began outsourcing its internal telecommunications and even some of its signals analysis to private companies, such as Computer Services Corp. and SAIC.
Outsourcing increased dramatically after 9/11. The Bush administration and Congress, determined to prevent further terrorist attacks, ordered a major increase in intelligence spending and organized new institutions to fight the war on terror, such as the National Counterterrorism Center. To beef up these organizations, the CIA and other agencies were authorized to hire thousands of analysts and human intelligence specialists. Partly because of the big cuts of the 1990s, however, many of the people with the skills and security clearances to do that work were working in the private sector. As a result, contracting grew quickly as intelligence agencies rushed to fill the gap.
That increase can be seen in the DNI documents showing contract award dollars: Contract spending, based on the DNI data and estimates from this period, remained fairly steady from 1995 to 2001, at about $20 billion a year. In 2002, the first year after the attacks on New York and Washington, contracts jumped to about $32 billion. In 2003 they jumped again, reaching about $42 billion. They have remained steady since then through 2006 (the DNI data is current as of last August).
Because nearly 90 percent of intelligence contracts are classified and the budgets kept secret, it's difficult to draw up a list of top contractors and their revenues derived from intelligence work. Based on publicly available information, including filings from publicly traded companies with the Securities and Exchange Commission and company press releases and Web sites, the current top five intelligence contractors appear to be Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, General Dynamics and L-3 Communications. Other major contractors include Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, DRS Technologies and Mantech International. The industry's growth and dependence on government budgets has made intelligence contracting an attractive market for former high-ranking national security officials, like former CIA director George Tenet, who now earns millions of dollars working as a director and advisor to four companies that hold contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and do big business in Iraq and elsewhere.
Congress, meanwhile, is beginning to ask serious questions about intelligence outsourcing and how lawmakers influence the intelligence budget process. Some of that interest has been generated by the Cunningham scandal. In another recent case, Rep. Rick Renzi, a Republican from Arizona, resigned from the House Intelligence Committee in April because he is under federal investigation for introducing legislation that may have benefited Mantech International, a major intelligence contractor where Renzi's father works in a senior executive position.
In the Cunningham case, many of MZM's illegal contracts were funded by "earmarks" that he inserted in intelligence bills. Earmarks, typically budget items placed by lawmakers to benefit projects or companies in their district, are often difficult to find amid the dense verbiage of legislation -- and in the "black" intelligence budgets, they are even harder to find. In its recent budget report, the House Intelligence Committee listed 26 separate earmarks for intelligence contracts, along with the sponsor's name and the dollar amount of the contract. The names of the contractors, however, were not included in the list.
Both the House and Senate are now considering intelligence spending bills that require the DNI, starting next year, to provide extensive information on contractors. The House version requires an annual report on contractors that might be committing waste and fraud, as well as reviews on its "accountability mechanisms" for contractors and the effect of contractors on the intelligence workforce. The amendment was drafted by Rep. David Price, D-N.C., who introduced a similar bill last year that passed the House but was quashed by the Senate. In a statement on the House floor on May 10, Price explained that he was seeking answers to several simple questions: "Should (contractors) be involved in intelligence collection? Should they be involved in analysis? What about interrogations or covert operations? Are there some activities that are so sensitive they should only be performed by highly trained Intelligence Community professionals?"
If either of the House or Senate intelligence bills pass in their present form, the overall U.S. intelligence budget will be made public. Such transparency is critical as contracting continues to expand, said Paul Cox, Price's press secretary. "As a nation," he said, "we really need to take a look and decide what's appropriate to contract and what's inherently governmental."
Editor's Note: Jeremy Scahill, bestselling author and investigative reporter for The Nation, testified May 10 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense on the impact of private military contractors on the conduct of the Iraq War. This is the full text of his remarks.
My name is Jeremy Scahill. I have submitted my full remarks and request they be entered into the record. I am an investigative reporter for The Nation magazine and the author of the book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. I have spent the better part of the past two and a half years researching privatized warfare. I have interviewed scores of sources, filed many Freedom of Information Act requests, obtained government contracts and private company documents of firms operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
As this Committee is well aware, we are now in the midst of the most privatized war in the history of our country. This is hardly a new phenomenon, but it is one that has greatly accelerated since the launch of the "global war on terror" and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Many Americans are under the impression that the US currently has about 145,000 active duty troops on the ground in Iraq. What is seldom mentioned is the fact that there are at least 126,000 private personnel deployed alongside the official armed forces. These private forces effectively double the size of the occupation force, largely without the knowledge of the US taxpayers that foot the bill.
But despite the similarity in size of these respective forces in Iraq, there are key differences with the way our government approaches the active-duty military and these private war contractors. For instance, we know that nearly 3,400 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq and more than 25,000 wounded. We do not know the exact number of private contractors killed or wounded. Through the US Department of Labor, we have been able to determine that at least 770 contractors had been killed in Iraq as of December 2006 along with at least 7,700 wounded. These casualties are not included in the official death count and help to mask the human costs of the war. More disturbing is what this means for our democracy: at a time when the administration seems unwilling to subject its war strategy to oversight by the Congress, we face the widespread use of private forces seemingly accountable to no effective system of oversight or law.
While tens of thousands of these contractors provide logistical support, thousands are heavily armed private soldiers roaming Iraq. We do know that there are some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq alone.
These forces work for US companies like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp as well as companies from across the globe. Some contractors make in a month what many active-duty soldiers make in a year. Indeed, there are private contractors in Iraq making more money than the Secretary of Defense and more than the commanding generals. The testimony about private contractors that I hear most often from active duty soldiers falls into two categories: resentment and envy.
They ask what message their country is sending them. While many soldiers lack basic protective equipment--facts well-known to this committee--they are in a war zone where they see the private soldiers whiz by in better vehicles, with better armor, better weapons, wearing the corporate logo instead of the American flag and pulling in much more money. They ask: Are our lives worth less?
Of course, there are many cases where war contractors have hoarded the profits at the top and money has not filtered down to the individual contractors on the ground or the armor to protect them.
The second reaction is that the active-duty soldiers see the "rock star" private contractors and they want to be like them. So we have a phenomenon of soldiers leaving active duty to join the private sector.
There is slang in Iraq now for this jump. It is called "Going Blackwater." To put it bluntly, these private forces create a system where national duty is outbid by profits. And yet these forces are being used for mission-critical activities. Indeed, in January Gen. David Petraeus admitted that on his last tour in Iraq, he himself was protected not by the active-duty military but by private "contract security."
Just as there is a double standard in pay, there is a double standard in the application of the law. Soldiers who commit crimes or acts of misconduct are prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. There have been some 64 courts martial on murder-related charges in Iraq alone. Compare that to the lack of prosecution of contractors. Despite the fact that tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, have streamed in and out of Iraq since March of 2003, only two private contractors have faced any criminal prosecution. Two. One was a KBR employee alleged to have stabbed a co-worker, the other pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. In four years, there have been no prosecutions for crimes against Iraqis and not a single known prosecution of an armed contractor.
That either means we have tens of thousands of Boy Scouts working as armed contractors or something is fundamentally wrong with the system. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst of the 3rd Infantry Division became so outraged by contractor unaccountability that he began tracking contractor violence in Baghdad. In just two months he documented twelve cases of contractors shooting at civilians, resulting in six deaths and three injuries. That is just two months and one general.
They have not been prosecuted under the UCMJ, under US civilian law or under Iraqi law. US contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today." That should be chilling to everyone who believes that warfare, above all government functions, must be subject to transparency, accountability and the rule of law.
These are forces operating in the name of the United States of America. Iraqis do not see contractors as separate from soldiers--understandably, they see them all as "the occupation." Contractor misconduct is viewed as American misconduct.
While there is currently a debate in Congress about how to hold these private forces accountable, the political will to act remains shockingly absent.
Given the vast size of this private force, spread across the most dangerous war zone in the world, it is not at all clear how effective oversight would work. We already know that auditors cannot visit many reconstruction sites because of security concerns. Journalists are locked in the Green Zone. The army is stretched to the max. So what entity then is supposed to have the capacity or ability to oversee the men who have been brought to Iraq to go where no one else will?
Members of Congress tell me they have been stonewalled in their attempts to gain detailed information about the activities of these companies. I think it is a disturbing commentary that I have received phone calls from several Congress members asking me for government documents on war contractors and not the other way around.
In the current discussion in the Congress on this issue, what is seldom discussed is how this system, the privatization of war, has both encouraged and enabled the growth and creation of companies who have benefited and stand to gain even more from an escalation of the war.
In closing, while I think this Congress needs to take urgent action on issues of oversight, accountability and transparency of these private forces operating with our tax dollars and in the name of the United States, there is a deeper issue that often gets overlooked. This war contracting system has intimately linked corporate profits to an escalation of war and conflict. These companies have no incentive to decrease their footprint in the war zone and every incentive to increase it.
As the country debates current and future Iraq policy, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that often act in the name and on the payroll of the people of this country. Thank you for your time. I am prepared to answer any questions.
On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a “war on terror,” Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting–many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation–Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war.
“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld thundered. “It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” He told his new staff, “You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world…. [But] the adversary’s closer to home,” he said. “It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience, “I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”
The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757–American Airlines Flight 77–smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn’t take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war–laid out just a day before–on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. “We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists,” Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled “Transforming the Military.”
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the “most sweeping transformation of America’s global force posture since the end of World War II.” Indeed, Rumsfeld’s trademark “small footprint” approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare–the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization. From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld’s tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq–an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a “road map for change” at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the “Department’s Total Force” as “its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors–constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions.” This formal designation represented a major triumph for war contractors–conferring on them a legitimacy they had never before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover, allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces shrouded in secrecy. The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been indicted for crimes or violations. “We have over 200,000 troops in Iraq and half of them aren’t being counted, and the danger is that there’s zero accountability,” says Democrat Dennis Kucinich, one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term, leading Democrats were announcing investigations of runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha, chair of the Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Defense, after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said, “We’re going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly what’s going on with contractors. They don’t have a clear mission and they’re falling all over each other.” Two days later, during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared, “This is a rent-an-army out there.” Webb asked Casey, “Wouldn’t it be better for this country if those tasks, particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost and accountability?” Casey defended the contracting system but said armed contractors “are the ones that we have to watch very carefully.” Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar, Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and protection within the US war apparatus. This company’s success represents the realization of the life’s work of the conservative officials who formed the core of the Bush Administration’s war team, for whom radical privatization has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has repeatedly cited Rumsfeld’s statement that contractors are part of the “Total Force” as evidence that it is a legitimate part of the nation’s “warfighting capability and capacity.” Invoking Rumsfeld’s designation, the company has in effect declared its forces above the law–entitled to the immunity from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also not bound by the military’s court martial system. While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically connected private army that has become the Bush Administration’s Praetorian Guard.
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince–the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince’s private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was “to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training.” In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party’s takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the “war on terror” that the company’s glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. “I’ve been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security,” Prince told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shortly after 9/11. “The phone is ringing off the hook now.”
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of US operations there. In the ensuing years the company has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the “war on terror,” winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts, many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres, making it the world’s largest private military base. Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries, with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing surveillance blimps and target systems.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans, where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day–at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day. At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division. Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The company has applied for operating licenses in all US coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.
Its largest obtainable government contract is with the State Department, for providing security to US diplomats and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with the company’s $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad, as well as other diplomats and occupation offices. Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. According to the latest government contract records, since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there. In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan’s regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training the south’s security forces soon.
Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11, and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General, who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater during much of the “war on terror”–something he stood accused of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz’s tenure, powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had “quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations” of senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire, Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.
Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja. A mob then burned the bodies and dragged them through the streets, stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates. In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned. US forces laid siege to Falluja days later, killing hundreds of people and displacing thousands, inflaming the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. For most Americans, it was the first they had heard of private soldiers. “People began to figure out this is quite a phenomenon,” says Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat, who said he began monitoring the use of private contractors after Falluja. “I’m probably like most Congress members in kind of coming to this awareness and developing an interest in it” after the incident.
What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja, Blackwater executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the company’s newfound recognition. The day after the ambush, it hired the Alexander Strategy Group, a K Street lobbying firm run by former senior staffers of then-majority leader Tom DeLay before the firm’s meltdown in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal. A week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its chair, John Warner. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting, which included Warner and two other key Republican senators–Appropriations Committee chair Ted Stevens of Alaska and George Allen of Virginia. This meeting followed an earlier series of face-to-faces Prince had had with powerful House Republicans who oversaw military contracts. Among them: DeLay; Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter, chair of the House Armed Services Committee; and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House Appropriations Committee. What was discussed at these meetings remains a secret. But Blackwater was clearly positioning itself to make the most of its new fame. Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of the government’s most valuable international security contracts, worth more than $300 million.
The firm was also eager to stake out a role in crafting the rules that would govern mercenaries under US contract. “Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater’s] visibility and need to communicate a consistent message has elevated here in Washington,” said Blackwater’s new lobbyist Chris Bertelli. “There are now several federal regulations that apply to their activities, but they are generally broad in nature. One thing that’s lacking is an industry standard. That’s something we definitely want to be engaged in.” By May Blackwater was leading a lobbying effort by the private military industry to try to block Congressional or Pentagon efforts to place their forces under the military court martial system.
But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in the “war on terror” within the Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, the families of the four men killed at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater as they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their loved ones were killed. After what they allege was months of effort to get straight answers from the company, the families filed a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater in January 2005, accusing the company of not providing the men with what they say were contractually guaranteed safeguards. Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja mission that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles. This case could have far-reaching reverberations and is being monitored closely by the war-contractor industry–former Halliburton subsidiary KBR has even filed an amicus brief supporting Blackwater. If the lawsuit is successful, it could pave the way for a tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors find themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured in war zones.
As the case has made its way through the court system, Blackwater has enlisted powerhouse Republican lawyers to defend it, among them Fred Fielding, who was recently named by Bush as White House counsel, replacing Harriet Miers; and Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater prosecutor investigating President Clinton, and the company’s current counsel of record. Blackwater has not formally debated the specific allegations in the suit, but what has emerged in its court filings is a series of legal arguments intended to bolster Blackwater’s contention that it is essentially above the law. Blackwater claims that if US courts allow the company to be sued for wrongful death, that could threaten the nation’s war-fighting capacity: “Nothing could be more destructive of the all-volunteer, Total Force concept underlying U.S. military manpower doctrine than to expose the private components to the tort liability systems of fifty states, transported overseas to foreign battlefields,” the company argued in legal papers. In February Blackwater suffered a major defeat when the Supreme Court declined its appeal to hear the Falluja case, paving the way for the state trial–where there would be no cap on damages a jury could award–to proceed.
Congress is beginning to take an interest in this potentially groundbreaking case. On February 7 Representative Henry Waxman chaired hearings of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. While the hearings were billed as looking at US reliance on military contractors, they largely focused on Blackwater and the Falluja incident. For the first time, Blackwater was forced to share a venue with the families of the men killed at Falluja. “Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of the military’s chain of command and can literally do whatever they please without any liability or accountability from the US government,” Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee. “Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government without having to answer a single question about its security operators.”
Citing the pending litigation, Blackwater’s general counsel, Andrew Howell, declined to respond to many of the charges levied against his company by the families and asked several times for the committee to go into closed session. “The men who went on the mission on March 31, each had their weapons and they had sufficient ammunition,” Howell told the committee, adding that the men were in “appropriate” vehicles. That was sharply disputed by the men’s families, who allege that in order to save $1.5 million Blackwater did not provide the four with armored vehicles. “Once the men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East, Blackwater treated them as fungible commodities,” Helvenston told lawmakers in her emotional testimony, delivered on behalf of all four families.
The issue that put this case on Waxman’s radar was the labyrinth of subcontracts underpinning the Falluja mission. Since November 2004 Waxman has been trying to pin down who the Blackwater men were ultimately working for the day of the ambush. “For over eighteen months, the Defense Department wouldn’t even respond to my inquiry,” says Waxman. “When it finally replied last July, it didn’t even supply the breakdown I requested. In fact, it denied that private security contractors did any work at all under the [Pentagon’s contracting program]. We now know that isn’t true.” Waxman’s struggle to follow the money on this one contract involving powerful war contractors like KBR provides a graphic illustration of the secretive nature of the whole war contracting industry.
What is not in dispute regarding the Falluja incident is that Blackwater was working with a Kuwaiti business called Regency under a contract with the world’s largest food services company, Eurest Support Services. ESS is a subcontractor for KBR and another giant war contractor, Fluor, in Iraq under the Pentagon’s LOGCAP contracting program. One contract covering Blackwater’s Falluja mission indicated the mission was ultimately a subcontract with KBR. Last summer KBR denied this. Then ESS wrote Waxman to say the mission was conducted under Fluor’s contract with ESS. Fluor denied that, and the Pentagon told Waxman it didn’t know which company the mission was ultimately linked to. Waxman alleged that Blackwater and the other subcontractors were “adding significant markups” to their subcontracts for the same security services that Waxman believes were then charged to US taxpayers. “It’s remarkable that the world of contractors and subcontractors is so murky that we can’t even get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step of the subcontracting process,” says Waxman.
While it appeared for much of the February 7 hearing that the contract’s provenance would remain obscure, that changed when, at the end of the hearing, the Pentagon revealed that the original contractor was, in fact, KBR. In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors’ using private forces for security instead of US troops, KBR had entered into a subcontract with ESS that was protected by Blackwater; those costs were allegedly passed on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning a markup of more than $17 million was ultimately passed on to the government. Three weeks after the hearing, KBR told shareholders it may be forced to repay up to $400 million to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.
It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to a simple question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services? But, as the Falluja lawsuit shows, it is not just money at issue. It is human life.
A Killing on Christmas Eve
While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems from Falluja, another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny. On Christmas Eve inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, an American Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior Iraqi official. For weeks after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated around the Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the contractor was spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted. Media inquiries got nowhere–the US Embassy refused to confirm that it was a Blackwater contractor, and the company refused to comment.
Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing. As the session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich raced back into the room with what he said was a final question. He entered a news report on the incident into the record and asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater had flown the contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting. “That gentleman, on the day the incident occurred, he was off duty,” Howell said, in what was the first official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater. “Blackwater did bring him back to the United States.”
“Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder, and if not, why not?” Kucinich asked.
“Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that there’s currently an investigation,” Howell replied. “We are fully cooperating and supporting that investigation.”
Kucinich then said, “I just want to point out that there’s a question that could actually make [Blackwater’s] corporate officers accessories here in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who’s committed a murder.”
The War on the Hill
Several bills are now making their way through Congress aimed at oversight and transparency of the private forces that have emerged as major players in the wars of the post-9/11 period. In mid-February Senators Byron Dorgan, Patrick Leahy and John Kerry introduced legislation aimed at cracking down on no-bid contracts and cronyism, providing for penalties of up to twenty years in prison and fines of up to $1 million for what they called “war profiteering.” It is part of what Democrats describe as a multi-pronged approach. “I think there’s a critical mass of us now who are working on it,” says Congressman Price, who represents Blackwater’s home state. In January Price introduced legislation that would expand the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA) to include all contractors in a war zone, not just those working for or alongside the armed forces. Most of Blackwater’s work in Iraq, for instance, is contracted by the State Department. Price indicated that the alleged Christmas Eve shooting could be a test case of sorts under his legislation. “I will be following this and I’ll be calling for a full investigation,” he said.
But there’s at least one reason to be wary of this approach: Price’s office consulted with the private military lobby as it crafted the legislation, which has the industry’s strong endorsement. Perhaps that’s because MEJA has been for the most part unenforced. “Even in situations when US civilian law could potentially have been applied to contractor crimes, it wasn’t,” observed P.W. Singer, a leading scholar on contractors. American prosecutors are already strapped for resources in their home districts–how could they be expected to conduct complex investigations in Iraq? Who will protect the investigators and prosecutors? How will they interview Iraqi victims? How could they effectively oversee 100,000 individuals spread across a dangerous war zone? “It’s a good question,” concedes Price. “I’m not saying that it would be a simple matter.” He argues his legislation is an attempt to “put the whole contracting enterprise on a new accountable footing.”
This past fall, taking a different tack–much to the dismay of the industry–Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve lawyer and former reserve judge, quietly inserted language into the 2007 Defense Authorization, which Bush signed into law, that places contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), commonly known as the court martial system. Graham implemented the change with no public debate and with almost no awareness among the broader Congress, but war contractors immediately questioned its constitutionality. Indeed, this could be a rare moment when mercenaries and civil libertarians are on the same side. Many contractors are not armed combatants; they work in food, laundry and other support services. While the argument could be made that armed contractors like those working for Blackwater should be placed under the UCMJ, Graham’s change could result in a dishwasher from Nepal working for KBR being prosecuted like a US soldier. On top of all this, the military has enough trouble policing its own massive force and could scarcely be expected to monitor an additional 100,000 private personnel. Besides, many contractors in Iraq are there under the auspices of the State Department and other civilian agencies, not the military.
In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama introduced comprehensive new legislation in February. It requires clear rules of engagement for armed contractors, expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to “arrest and detain” contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over to civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the Justice Department to submit a comprehensive report on current investigations of contractor abuses, the number of complaints received about contractors and criminal cases opened. In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors are “operating with unclear lines of authority, out-of-control costs and virtually no oversight by Congress. This black hole of accountability increases the danger to our troops and American civilians serving as contractors.” He said his legislation would “re-establish control over these companies,” while “bringing contractors under the rule of law.”
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House intelligence committee, has been a leading critic of the war contracting system. Her Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act, introduced in February, which bolsters Obama’s, boils down to what Schakowsky sees as a long overdue fact-finding mission through the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among other provisions, it requires the government to determine and make public the number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are employed in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country’s, international or US laws that have been broken by contractors; disciplinary actions taken against contractors; and the total number of dead and wounded contractors. Schakowsky says she has tried repeatedly over the past several years to get this information and has been stonewalled or ignored. “We’re talking about billions and billions of dollars–some have estimated forty cents of every dollar [spent on the occupation] goes to these contractors, and we couldn’t get any information on casualties, on deaths,” says Schakowsky. “It has been virtually impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war and so when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks, they have not been part of this whatsoever. This whole shadow force that’s been operating in Iraq, we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at arm’s length from the American people what this war is all about.”
While not by any means a comprehensive total of the number of contractor casualties, 770 contractor deaths and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December 31, 2006, were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only counts those contractors whose families applied for benefits under the government’s Defense Base Act insurance. Independent analysts say the number is likely much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least twenty-seven men in Iraq. And then there’s the financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds have been paid for private security forces in Iraq, according to Waxman. Yet even with all these additional forces, the military is struggling to meet the demands of a White House bent on military adventurism.
A week after Donald Rumsfeld’s rule at the Pentagon ended, US forces had been stretched so thin by the “war on terror” that former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared “the active Army is about broken.” Rather than rethinking its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with plans for a troop “surge” in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan to supplement the military with a Civilian Reserve Corps in his January State of the Union address. “Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them,” Bush said. The President, it seemed, was just giving a fancy new title to something the Administration has already done with its “revolution” in military affairs and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while Bush’s proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress and among the public, the Administration’s increasing reliance on private military contractors has gone largely undebated and underreported.
“The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say ‘mercenaries’ makes wars easier to begin and to fight–it just takes money and not the citizenry,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has sued contractors for alleged abuses in Iraq. “To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire.”
With talk of a Civilian Reserve Corps and Blackwater promoting the idea of a privatized “contractor brigade” to work with the military, war critics in Congress are homing in on what they see as a sustained, undeclared escalation through the use of private forces. “‘Surge’ implies a bump that has a beginning and an end,” says Schakowsky. “Having a third or a quarter of [the forces] present on the ground not even part of the debate is a very dangerous thing in our democracy, because war is the most critical thing that we do.”
Indeed, contractor deaths are not counted in the total US death count, and their crimes and violations go undocumented and unpunished, further masking the true costs of the war. “When you’re bringing in contractors whom the law doesn’t apply to, the Geneva Conventions, common notions of morality, everything’s thrown out the window,” says Kucinich. “And what it means is that these private contractors are really an arm of the Administration and its policies.”
Kucinich says he plans to investigate the potential involvement of private forces in so-called “black bag,” “false flag” or covert operations in Iraq. “What’s the difference between covert activities and so-called overt activities which you have no information about? There’s no difference,” he says. Kucinich also says the problems with contractors are not simply limited to oversight and transparency. “It’s the privatization of war,” he says. The Administration is “linking private war contractor profits with warmaking. So we’re giving incentives for the contractors to lobby the Administration and the Congress to create more opportunities for profits, and those opportunities are more war. And that’s why the role of private contractors should be sharply limited by Congress.”
Jeremy Scahill reports on the Bush Administration’s growing dependence on private security forces such as Blackwater USA and efforts in Congress to rein them in. This article is adapted from his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Nation Books).
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