[NYTr] The Mercs: A Very Private War

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Guardian - Aug 1, 2007
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2138917,00.html

[An extract from Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful
Mercenary Army (published by Serpent's Tail, price £12.99). © 2007
Jeremy Scahill. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to
guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.]

A very private war

There are 48,000 'security contractors' in Iraq, working for private
companies growing rich on the back of US policy. But can it be a good
thing to have so many mercenaries operating without any democratic
control? 

by Jeremy Scahill

It was described as a "powder keg" moment. In late May, just across the
Tigris river from Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, a heavily armed
convoy of American forces was driving down a street near the Iraqi
Interior Ministry. They were transporting US officials in what is known
widely among the occupation forces as the "red zone" - essentially, any
area of Iraq that does not fall inside the US-built "emerald city" in
the capital. The American guards were on the look-out for any threat
lurking on the roads. Not far from their convoy, an Iraqi driver was
pulling out of a petrol station. When the Americans encountered the
Iraqi driver, they determined him to be a potential suicide car bomber.
In Iraq it has become common for such convoys to fire off rounds from a
machine gun at approaching Iraqi vehicles, much to the outrage of Iraqi
civilians and officials. The Americans say this particular Iraqi
vehicle was getting too close to their convoy and that they tried to
warn it to back off. They say they fired a warning shot at the car's
radiator before firing directly into the windshield of the car, killing
the driver. Some Iraqi witnesses said the shooting was unprovoked.

In the ensuing chaos, the Americans reportedly refused to give their
names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense
standoff between the Americans and Iraqi forces, both of which were
armed with assault rifles. It could have become even more bloody before
a US military convoy arrived on the scene.

A senior US adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry's intelligence
division told the Washington Post that the incident threatened to
"undermine a lot of the cordial relationships that have been built up
over the past four years. There's a lot of angry people up here right
now."

While there is ongoing outrage between Iraqis and the military over
such deadly incidents, this one came with a different, but increasingly
common, twist: The Americans involved in the shooting were neither US
military nor civilians. They were operatives working for a secretive
mercenary firm based in the wilderness of North Carolina. Its name is
Blackwater USA.

It was hardly the company's first taste of action in Iraq, where it has
operated almost since the first days of the occupation. Its convoys
have been ambushed, its helicopters brought down, its men burned and
dragged through the streets of Falluja, giving the Bush administration
a justification for laying siege to the city. In all, the company has
lost about 30 men in Iraq. It has also engaged in firefights with the
Shia Mahdi Army, and succeeded by all means necessary in keeping alive
every US ambassador to serve in post-invasion Iraq, along with more
than 90 visiting US congressional delegations.

Just one day before the May shooting, in almost the exact same
neighbourhood, Blackwater operatives found themselves in another gun
battle, lasting an hour, that drew in both US military and Iraqi
forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. The
shoot-out was reportedly spurred by a well-coordinated ambush of
Blackwater's convoy. US sources said the guards "did their job",
keeping the officials alive.

In another incident that has caused major tensions between Baghdad and
Washington, an off-duty Blackwater operative is alleged to have shot
and killed an Iraqi bodyguard of the Shia vice-president Adil
Abdul-Mahdi last Christmas Eve inside the Green Zone. Blackwater
officials confirm that after the incident they whisked the contractor
safely out of Iraq, which they say Washington ordered them to do. Iraqi
officials labelled the killing a "murder". The company says it fired
the contractor but he has yet to be publicly charged with any crime.

Iraqi officials have consistently complained about the conduct of
Blackwater and other contractors - and the legal barriers to their
attempts to investigate or prosecute alleged wrongdoing. Four years
into the occupation, there is absolutely no effective system of
oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations.
They have not been subjected to military justice, and only two cases
have ever reached US civilian courts, under the Military
Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which covers some contractors
working abroad. (One man was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor,
in a case that has yet to go to trial, while the other was sentenced to
three years for possession of child-pornography images on his computer
at Abu Ghraib prison.) No matter what their acts in Iraq, contractors
cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts, thanks to US-imposed edicts
dating back to Paul Bremer's post-invasion Coalition Provisional
Authority.

The internet is alive with videos of contractors seemingly using Iraqi
vehicles for target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms
involved. Yet, despite these incidents, and although 64 US soldiers
have been court-martialled on murder-related charges, not a single
armed contractor has been prosecuted for any crime, let alone a crime
against an Iraqi. US contractors in Iraq reportedly have a motto: "What
happens here today, stays here today."

At home in America, Blackwater is facing at least two wrongful-death
lawsuits, one stemming from the mob killings of four of its men in
Falluja in March 2004, the other for a Blackwater plane crash in
Afghanistan in November 2004, in which a number of US soldiers were
killed. In both cases, families of the deceased charge that
Blackwater's negligence led to the deaths. (Blackwater has argued that
it cannot be sued and should enjoy the same immunity as the US
military.) The company is also facing a mounting Congressional
investigation into its activities. Despite all of this, US State
Department officials heap nothing but words of praise on Blackwater for
doing the job and doing it well.

There are now 630 companies working in Iraq on contract for the US
government, with personnel from more than 100 countries offering
services ranging from cooking and driving to the protection of
high-ranking army officers. Their 180,000 employees now outnumber
America's 160,000 official troops. The precise number of mercenaries is
unclear, but last year, a US government report identified 48,000
employees of private military/security firms.

Blackwater is far from being the biggest mercenary firm operating in
Iraq, nor is it the most profitable. But it has the closest proximity
to the throne in Washington and to radical rightwing causes, leading
some critics to label it a "Republican guard". Blackwater offers the
services of some of the most elite forces in the world and is tasked
with some of the occupation's most "mission-critical" activities,
namely keeping alive the most hated men in Baghdad - a fact it has
deftly used as a marketing tool. Since the Iraq invasion began four
years ago, Blackwater has emerged out of its compound near the Great
Dismal Swamp of North Carolina as the trendsetter of the mercenary
industry, leading the way toward a legitimisation of one of the world's
dirtiest professions. And it owes its meteoric rise to the policies of
the Bush administration.

Since the launch of the "war on terror", the administration has
funnelled billions of dollars in public funds to US war corporations
such as Blackwater USA, DynCorp and Triple Canopy. These companies have
used the money to build up private armies that rival or outgun many of
the world's national militaries.

A decade ago, Blackwater barely existed; and yet its "diplomatic
security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone,
total more than $750m (£370m). It protects the US ambassador and other
senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations;
it trains Afghan security forces, and was deployed in the oil-rich
Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" centre just
miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect
emergency operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 (£120,000) a day from the American
taxpayer, billing $950 (£470) a day per Blackwater contractor.

Yet this is still just a fraction of the company's business. It also
runs an impressive domestic law-enforcement and military training
system inside the US. While some of its competitors may have more
forces deployed in more countries around the globe, none have organised
their troops and facilities more like an actual military.

At present, Blackwater has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts
a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more
than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's
largest private military facility - a 7,000-acre compound in North
Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois (Blackwater
North) and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic
facility near San Diego (Blackwater West) by the Mexican border. It is
also manufacturing an armoured vehicle (nicknamed the Grizzly) and
surveillance blimps.

The man behind this empire is 38-year-old Erik Prince, a secretive,
conservative Christian who once served with the US Navy's special
forces and has made major campaign contributions to President Bush and
his allies. Among Blackwater's senior executives are J Cofer Black,
former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former
deputy director of operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former
Pentagon inspector general; and an impressive array of other retired
military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently
announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, Total
Intelligence, to be headed by Black and Richer. Blackwater executives
boast that some of their work for the government is so sensitive that
the company cannot tell one federal agency what it is doing for another.

In many ways, Blackwater's rapid ascent to prominence within the US war
machine symbolises what could be called Bush's mercenary revolution.
Much has been made of the administration's "failure" to build
international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, but perhaps that was
never the intention. Almost from the beginning, the White House
substituted international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts. When
US tanks rolled into Iraq in March 2003, they brought with them the
largest army of "private contractors" ever deployed in a war.

While precise data on the extent of American spending on mercenary
services is nearly impossible to obtain, Congressional sources say that
the US has spent at least $6bn (£3bn) in Iraq, while Britain has spent
some £200m. Like America, Britain has used private security from firms
like ArmorGroup to guard Foreign Office and International Development
officials in Iraq. Other British firms are used to protect private
companies and media, but UK firms do their biggest business with
Washington. The single largest US contract for private security in Iraq
has for years been held by the British firm Aegis, headed by Tim
Spicer, the retired British lieutenant-colonel who was implicated in
the Arms to Africa scandal of the late 1990s, when weapons were shipped
to a Sierra Leone militia leader during a weapons embargo. Aegis's Iraq
contract - essentially coordinating the private military firms in Iraq
- was valued at approximately $300m (£1147m) and drew protests from US
competitors and lawmakers.

At present, a US or British special forces veteran working for a
private security company in Iraq can make $650 (£320) a day, after the
company takes its cut. At times the rate has reached $1,000 (£490) a
day - pay that dwarfs that of active-duty troops. "We got [tens of
thousands of] contractors over there, some of them making more than the
secretary of defense," John Murtha, chairman of the House defense
appropriations subcommittee, recently said. "How in the hell do you
justify that?"

In part, these contractors do mundane jobs that traditionally have been
performed by soldiers, from driving trucks to doing laundry. These
services are provided through companies such as Halliburton, KBR and
Fluor and through their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But
increasingly, private personnel are engaged in armed combat and
"security" operations. They interrogate prisoners, gather intelligence,
operate rendition flights, protect senior occupation officials -
including some commanding US generals - and in some cases have taken
command of US and international troops in battle. In an admission that
speaks volumes about the extent of the privatisation, General David
Petraeus, who is implementing Bush's troop surge, said earlier this
year that he has, at times, not been guarded in Iraq by the US military
but "secured by contract security". At least three US commanding
generals are currently being guarded in Iraq by hired guns.

"To have half of your army be contractors, I don't know that there's a
precedent for that," says Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a member of the
House oversight and government reform committee, which has been
investigating war contractors. "There's no democratic control and
there's no intention to have democratic control here."

The implications, still unacknowledged by many US lawmakers and world
leaders four years into this revolution, are devastating. "One of the
key tenets of managing international crises in the aftermath of the
cold war was established in the first Gulf war," says a veteran US
diplomat, Joe Wilson, who served as the last US ambassador to Iraq
before the 1991 Gulf war. "It was that management of these crises would
be a coalition of like-minded nation states under the auspices of a
United Nations Security Council resolution which gave the exercise the
benefit of international law." This time, "there is no underlying
international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this action that
we've taken."

Moreover, this revolution means the US no longer needs to rely on its
own citizens and those of its nation-state allies to staff its wars,
nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq
war politically untenable. Just as importantly, perhaps, it reduces the
figure of "official" casualties. In Iraq alone, more than 900 US
contractors have been killed, with another 13,000 wounded. The majority
of these are not American citizens and these numbers are not counted in
the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly
disturbed by their losses.

In Iraq, many contractors are run by Americans or Britons and have
elite forces staffed by well-trained veterans of powerful militaries
for use in sensitive actions or operations. But lower down, the ranks
are filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals. Hundreds of Chilean
mercenaries, for example, have been deployed by US companies such as
Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that Chile opposed the
invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the
Chileans are alleged to be seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.

Some 118,000 of the estimated 180,000 contractors in Iraq are Iraqis.
The mercenary industry points to this as encouraging: we are giving
Iraqis jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a
private corporation hired by a hostile invading power. As Doug Brooks,
the head of the Orwellian-named mercenary trade group, the
International Peace Operations Association, argued early in the
occupation, "Museums do not need to be guarded by Abrams tanks when an
Iraqi security guard working for a contractor can do the same job for
less than one-50th of what it costs to maintain an American soldier.
Hiring local guards gives Iraqis a stake in a successful future for
their country. They use their pay to support their families and
stimulate the economy. Perhaps most significantly, every guard means
one less potential guerrilla."

In many ways, however, it is the exact model used by multinational
corporations that depend on poorly paid workers in developing countries
to staff their highly profitable operations. This keeps prices down in
the industrialised world and consumers numb to the reality of how the
product ends up in their shopping basket.

"We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army," says Naomi Klein,
whose forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism, explores these themes. "Much as with so-called hollow
corporations such as Nike, billions are spent on military technology
and design in rich countries while the manual labour and sweat work of
invasion and occupation is increasingly outsourced to contractors who
compete with each other to fill the work order for the lowest price.
Just as this model breeds rampant abuse in the manufacturing sector -
with the big-name brands always able to plead ignorance about the
actions of their suppliers - so it does in the military, though with
stakes that are immeasurably higher."

In the case of Iraq, what is particularly frightening is that the US
and UK governments could give the public the false impression that the
occupation was being scaled down, while in reality it was simply being
privatised. Indeed, shortly after Tony Blair announced that he wanted
to withdraw 1,600 soldiers from Basra, reports emerged that the British
government was considering sending in private security companies to
"fill the gap left behind".

Outsourcing is increasingly extending to extremely sensitive sectors,
including intelligence. The investigative blogger RJ Hillhouse, whose
site TheSpyWhoBilledMe.com regularly breaks news on the clandestine
world of private contractors and US intelligence, recently established
that Washington spends $42bn (£21bn) annually on private intelligence
contractors, up from $18bn in 2000. Currently, that spending represents
70% of the US intelligence budget.

But the mercenary forces are also diversifying geographically: in Latin
America, the massive US firm DynCorp is operating in Colombia, Bolivia
and other countries as part of the "war on drugs" - US defence
contractors are receiving nearly half the $630m in US military aid for
Colombia; in Africa, mercenaries are deploying in Somalia, Congo and
Sudan and increasingly have their sights set on tapping into the hefty
UN peacekeeping budget; inside the US, private security staff now
outnumber official law enforcement. Heavily armed mercenaries were
deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while there are
proposals to privatise the US border patrol. Brooks, the private
military industry lobbyist, says people should not become "overly
obsessed with Iraq", saying his association's member companies "have
more personnel working in UN and African Union peace operations than
all but a handful of countries".

Most worryingly of all, perhaps, powers that were once the exclusive
realm of national governments are now in the hands of private companies
whose prime loyalty is to their shareholders. CIA-type services,
special operations, covert actions and small-scale military and
paramilitary forces are now on the world market in a way not seen in
modern history.

While the private military/security industry rejects the
characterisation of their forces as mercenaries, Blackwater executives
have turned the grey area in which they operate into a brand asset. The
company has been quietly marketing its services to foreign governments
and corporations through an off-shore affiliate, Greystone Ltd,
registered in Barbados.

In early 2005, Blackwater held an extravagant, invitation-only
Greystone "inauguration" at the swanky Ritz-Carlton hotel in
Washington, DC. The guest list for the seven-hour event included
weapons manufacturers, oil companies and diplomats from the likes of
Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Romania, Indonesia, Tunisia,
Algeria, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Kenya, Angola and Jordan. Several of
those countries' defence or military attaches attended. "It is more
difficult than ever for your country to successfully protect its
interests against diverse and complicated threats in today's grey
world," Greystone's promotional pamphlet told attendees. "Greystone is
an international security services company that offers your country or
organisation a complete solution to your most pressing security needs."

Greystone said its forces were prepared for "ready deployment in
support of national security objectives as well as private interests".
Among the "services" offered were mobile security teams, which could be
employed for personal security operations, surveillance and
countersurveillance. Applicants for jobs with Greystone were asked to
check off their qualifications in weapons: AK-47 rifle, Glock 19, M-16
series rifle, M-4 carbine rifle, machine gun, mortar and shoulder-fired
weapons. Among the skills sought were: Sniper, Marksman, Door Gunner,
Explosive Ordnance, Counter Assault Team.

While Blackwater has become one of the most powerful and influential
private actors in international conflict since the launch of the war on
terror, in many ways it is like a small, high-end boutique surrounded
by megastores such as DynCorp, ArmourGroup and Erynis, operating in a
$100bn industry. In fact, experts say, there are now more private
military companies operating internationally than there are member
nations at the UN.

"I think it's extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to
outsource its monopoly on the use of force ... in support of its
foreign policy or national security objectives," says Wilson. The
billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, he says, "makes
of them a very powerful interest group within the American body politic
and an interest group that is, in fact, armed. And the question will
arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?"

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat and a leading member of the
House select committee on intelligence, echoes those fears. "The one
thing the people think of as being in the purview of the government is
the use of military power. Suddenly you've got a for-profit corporation
going around the world that is more powerful than states".

At war with the Pentagon

How Rumsfeld paved the way for Blackwater

The world was a very different place on September 10 2001, when Donald
Rumsfeld stepped on to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his
first major addresses as defense secretary under President George W
Bush. For most Americans, there was no such thing as al-Qaida, and
Saddam Hussein was still the president of Iraq. Rumsfeld had served in
the post once before - under President Gerald Ford, from 1975 to 1977 -
and he returned to the job in 2001 with ambitious visions. That
September day, in the first year of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld
addressed the Pentagon officials in charge of overseeing the
high-stakes business of defence contracting - managing the
Halliburtons, DynCorps and Bechtels. The secretary stood before a
gaggle of former corporate executives from Enron, Northrop Grumman,
General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation whom he had tapped as his
top deputies at the department of defense, and he 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.
"This adversary is one of the world's last bastions of central
planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single
capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones,
continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free
thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defence of the United
States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk."

Pausing briefly for dramatic effect, Rumsfeld - himself a veteran cold
warrior - told his new staff, "Perhaps this adversary sounds like the
former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle
and implacable today. You may think I'm describing one of the last
decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past,
and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The
adversary's much closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy."

Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon,
supplanting the old department of defense bureaucracy with a new model,
one based on the private sector. The problem, Rumsfeld said, was that
unlike businesses, "governments can't die, so we need to find other
incentives for bureaucracy to adapt and improve." The stakes, he
declared, were dire - "a matter of life and death, ultimately, every
American's."

That day, Rumsfeld announced a major initiative to streamline the use
of the private sector in the waging of America's wars and predicted his
initiative would meet fierce resistance. "Some might ask, 'How in the
world could the secretary of defense attack the Pentagon in front of
its people?'" Rumsfeld told his audience. "To them I reply, 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 literally be attacked as American
Airlines Flight 77 - a Boeing 757 - smashed into its western wall.
Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from
the rubble. But it didn't take long for him to seize the almost
unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war on
the fast track.