[NYTr] The Mercenary Revolution: a World Awash in "Contractor" War

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The Indypendent - Aug 15, 2007 issue
http://www.indypendent.org/?p=1230

The Mercenary Revolution: 

Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors 
See a World of Business Opportunities. 

By Jeremy Scahill

If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.

With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness,
the Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S.
occupation through the use of private war companies.

There are now almost 200,000 private “contractors” deployed in Iraq by
Washington. This means that U.S. military forces in Iraq are now
outsized by a coalition of billing corporations whose actions go
largely unmonitored and whose crimes are virtually unpunished.

In essence, the Bush administration has created a shadow army that can
be used to wage wars unpopular with the American public but extremely
profitable for a few unaccountable private companies.

Since the launch of the “global war on terror,” the administration has
systematically funneled billions of dollars in public money to
corporations like Blackwater USA , DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Erinys and
ArmorGroup. They have in turn used their lucrative government pay-outs
to build up the infrastructure and reach of private armies so powerful
that they rival or outgun some nation’s militaries.

“I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to
outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in
support of its foreign policy or national security objectives,” says
veteran U.S. Diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last U.S.
ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War.

The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, Wilson
argues, “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?”

Precise data on the extent of U.S. spending on mercenary services is
nearly impossible to obtain — by both journalists and elected
officials—but some in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every
tax dollar spent on the war goes to corporate war contractors. At
present, the United States spends about $2 billion a week on its Iraq
operations.

While much has been made of the Bush administration’s “failure” to
build international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, perhaps that
was never the intention. When U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq in March
2003, they brought with them the largest army of “private contractors”
ever deployed in a war. The White House substituted international
diplomacy with lucrative war contracts and a coalition of willing
nations who provided token forces with a coalition of billing
corporations that supplied the brigades of contractors.

‘THERE’S NO DEMOCRATIC CONTROL’

During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors
was about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S.
forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war
contracting companies working in Iraq for the United States. Composed
of some 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100
countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official U.S. military
presence of 160,000 troops.

In all, the United States may have as many as 400,000 personnel
occupying Iraq, not including allied nations’ militaries. The
statistics on contractors do not account for all armed contractors.
Last year, a U.S. government report estimated there were 48,000 people
working for more than 170 private military companies in Iraq. “It masks
the true level of American involvement,” says Ambassador Wilson.

How much money is being spent just on mercenaries remains largely
classified. Congressional sources estimate the United States has spent
at least $6 billion in Iraq, while Britain has spent some $400 million.
At the same time, companies chosen by the White House for rebuilding
projects in Iraq have spent huge sums in reconstruction funds —
possibly billions on more mercenaries to guard their personnel and
projects.

The single largest U.S. contract for private security in Iraq was a
$293 million payment to the British firm Aegis Defence Services, headed
by retired British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who has been dogged by
accusations that he is a mercenary because of his private involvement
in African conflicts. The Texas-based DynCorp International has been
another big winner, with more than $1 billion in contracts to provide
personnel to train Iraqi police forces, while Blackwater USA has won
$750 million in State Department contracts alone for “diplomatic
security.”

At present, an American or a British Special Forces veteran working for
a private security company in Iraq can make $650 a day. At times the
rate has reached $1,000 a day; the pay dwarfs many times over that of
active duty troops operating in the war zone wearing a U.S. or U.K.
flag on their shoulder instead of a corporate logo.

“We got [tens of thousands of] contractors over there, some of them
making more than the Secretary of Defense,” House Defense
Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Penn.) recently
remarked. “How in the hell do you justify that?” In part, these
contractors do mundane jobs that traditionally have been performed by
soldiers. Some require no military training, but involve deadly
occupations, such as driving trucks through insurgent-controlled
territory.

Others are more innocuous, like cooking food or doing laundry on a
base, but still court grave risk because of regular mortar and rocket
attacks.

These services are provided through companies like KBR and Fluor and
through their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But many other private
personnel are also engaged in armed combat and “security” operations.
They interrogate prisoners, gather intelligence, operate rendition
flights, protect senior occupation officials and, in at least one case,
have commanded U.S. and international troops in battle.

In a revealing admission, Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing Bush’s
troop “surge,” said earlier this year that he has, at times, been
guarded in Iraq by “contract security.” At least three U.S. commanding
generals, not including Petraeus, 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 Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio),
a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which
has been investigating war contractors.

“Maybe the precedent was the British and the Hessians in the American
Revolution. Maybe that’s the last time and needless to say, they lost.
But I’m thinking that there’s no democratic control and there’s no
intention to have democratic control here.”

The implications are devastating. Joseph Wilson says, “In the absence
of international consensus, the current Bush administration relied on a
coalition of what I call the co-opted, the corrupted and the coerced:
those who benefited financially from their involvement, those who
benefited politically from their involvement and those few who
determined that their relationship with the United States was more
important than their relationship with anybody else. And that’s a real
problem because there is no underlying international legitimacy that
sustains us throughout this action that we’ve taken.”

Moreover, this revolution means the United States no longer needs to
rely on its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to
implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically
untenable.

‘AN ARM OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’

During his confirmation hearings in the Senate this past January,
Petraeus praised the role of private forces, claiming they compensate
for an overstretched military. Petraeus told the senators that combined
with Bush’s official troop surge, the “tens of thousands of contract
security forces give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish
the mission.”

Taken together with Petraeus’s recent assertion that the surge would
run into mid-2009, this means a widening role for mercenaries and other
private forces in Iraq is clearly on the table for the foreseeable
future.

“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, whose organization has sued private
contractors for alleged human rights violations 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. Think about Rome
and its increasing need for mercenaries.”

Privatized forces are also politically expedient for many governments.
Their casualties go uncounted, their actions largely unmonitored and
their crimes unpunished. Indeed, four years into the occupation, there
is no effective system of oversight or accountability governing
contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law —
military or civilian being applied to their activities. They have not
been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent
congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military
Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts. And no
matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi
courts because in 2004 the U.S. occupying authority granted them
complete immunity.

“These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and
its policies,” argues Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all
U.S. contractors from Iraq. “They charge whatever they want with
impunity. There’s no accountability as to how many people they have, as
to what their activities are.”

That raises the crucial question: what exactly are they doing in Iraq
in the name of the U.S. and U.K. governments? Rep. Jan Schakowsky
(D-Ill.), a leading member of the House Select Committee on
Intelligence, which is responsible for reviewing sensitive national
security issues, explained the difficulty of monitoring private
military companies on the U.S. payroll: “If I want to see a contract, I
have to go up to a secret room and look at it, can’t take any notes,
can’t take any notes out with me, you know — essentially, I don’t have
access to those contracts and even if I did, I couldn’t tell anybody
about it.”

‘A MARKETPLACE FOR WARFARE’

On the Internet, numerous videos have spread virally, showing what
appear to be foreign mercenaries using Iraqis as target practice, much
to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Despite these incidents and
the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq, only two
individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged
with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to
possessing child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib
prison.

Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed — 64 on
murder-related charges alone — but not a single armed contractor has
been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where
contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly
incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.

U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: “What happens
here today, stays here today.” International diplomats say Iraq has
demonstrated a new U.S. model for waging war; one which poses a
creeping threat to global order.

“To outsource security-related, military related issues to
non-government, non-military forces is a source of great concern and it
caught many governments unprepared,” says Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year
veteran U.N. diplomat, who served as head of the U.N. Iraq mission
before the U.S. invasion.

In Iraq, the United States has used its private sector allies to build
up armies of mercenaries many lured from impoverished countries with
the promise of greater salaries than their home militaries can pay.
That the home governments of some of these private warriors are opposed
to the war itself is of little consequence.

“Have gun, will fight for paycheck” has become a globalized law.

“The most worrying aspect is that these forces are outside
parliamentary control. They come from all over and they are answerable
to no one except a very narrow group of people and they come from
countries whose governments may not even know in detail that they have
actually been contracted as a private army into a war zone,” says von
Sponeck.

“If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue
rather than a political issue involving a debate in the countries.

You are also marginalizing governmental control over whether or not
this should take place, should happen and, if so, in what size and
shape. It’s a very worrying new aspect of international relations. I
think it becomes more and more uncontrollable by the countries of
supply.”

In Iraq, for example, hundreds of Chilean mercenaries have been
deployed by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite
the fact that Chile, as a rotating member of the U.N. Security Council,
opposed the invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq.
Some of the Chileans are alleged to have been seasoned veterans of the
Pinochet era.

“There is nothing new, of course, about the relationship between
politics and the economy, but there is something deeply perverse about
the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries,”
says Chilean sociologist Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who
was tortured under Pinochet’s regime.

“This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower
costs — third world mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts
from the developed world — and maximize benefits. In other words, let
others fight the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi
people do not matter at all.”

NEW WORLD DISORDER

The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit
the world’s poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the
conflict, and use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This
allows the conquering power to hold down domestic casualties — the
single-greatest impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed,
in Iraq, more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation
have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American
citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll
at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties.

In Iraq, many companies are run by Americans or Britons and have
well-trained forces drawn from elite military units for use in
sensitive actions or operations. But down the ranks, these forces are
filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals. Indeed, some 118,000 of
the estimated 180,000 contractors are Iraqis, and many mercenaries are
reportedly ill-paid, poorly equipped and barely trained Iraqi nationals.

The mercenary industry points to this as a positive: we are giving
Iraqis jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a
private corporation hired by a hostile invading power.

Doug Brooks, the head of the Orwellian named mercenary trade group, the
International Peace Operations Association, argued from early on 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-fiftieth 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, it is the same corporate model of relying on cheap labor
in destitute nations to staff their uber-profitable operations. The
giant multinationals also argue they are helping the economy by hiring
locals, even if it’s at starvation wages.

“Donald Rumsfeld’s masterstroke, and his most enduring legacy, was to
bring the corporate branding revolution of the 1990s into the heart of
the most powerful military in the world,” says Naomi Klein, whose
upcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,
explores these themes.

“We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army. Much as with
so-called hollow corporations like Nike, billions are spent on military
technology and design in rich countries while the manual labor 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, the U.S. and U.K. governments could give the public perception
of a withdrawal of forces and just privatize the occupation. Indeed,
shortly after former British Prime Minister 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.”

THE SPY WHO BILLED ME

While Iraq currently dominates the headlines, private war and
intelligence companies are expanding their already sizable footprint.
The U.S. government in particular is now in the midst of the most
radical privatization agenda in its history. According to a recent
report in Vanity Fair, the government pays contractors as much as the
combined taxes paid by everyone in the United States with incomes under
$100,000, meaning “more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well
remit everything they owe directly to [contractors] rather than to the
[government].”

Some of this outsourcing is happening in sensitive sectors, including
the intelligence community. “This is the magnet now. Everything is
being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and
expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence
community,” says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin
Goodman. “My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of
responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It’s
outrageous.”

RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of
private contractors and U.S. intelligence, recently obtained documents
from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI)
showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private
intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000. Currently
that spending represents 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget
going to private companies.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that the current head of the DNI is Mike
McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and
National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry’s
lobbying arm. Hillhouse also revealed that one of the most sensitive
U.S. intelligence documents, the Presidential Daily Briefing, is
prepared in part by private companies, despite having the official seal
of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

“Let’s say a company is frustrated with a government that’s hampering
its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and
spinning intelligence on that government’s suspected collaboration with
terrorists would quickly get the White House’s attention and could be
used to shape national policy,” Hillhouse argues.

MUTLINATIONAL MERCENARIES

Empowered by their new found prominence, mercenary forces are
increasing their presence on other battlefields: in Latin America,
DynCorp International is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other
countries under the guise of the “war on drugs” — U.S. defense
contractors are receiving nearly half the $630 million in U.S. 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 U.N. peacekeeping budget (this has been true since at least
the early 1990s and probably much earlier). Heavily armed mercenaries
were deployed to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
while proposals are being considered to privatize the U.S. 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 U.N. and African Union peace
operations than all but a handful of countries.” Von Sponeck says he
believes the use of such companies in warfare should be barred and has
harsh words for the institution for which he spent his career working:
“The United Nations, including the U.N. Secretary General, should react
to this and instead of reacting, they are mute, they are silent.”

This unprecedented funding of such enterprises, primarily by the U.S.
and U.K. governments, means that powers once the exclusive realm of
nations are now in the hands of private companies with loyalty only to
profits, CEOs and, in the case of public companies, shareholders. And,
of course, their client, whoever that may be. 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. This could allow corporations or nations with cash to
spend but no real military power to hire squadrons of heavily armed and
well-trained commandos.

“It raises very important issues about state and about the very power
of state. The one thing the people think of as being in the purview of
the government — wholly run and owned by — is the use of military
power,” says Rep. Jan Schakowsky. “Suddenly you’ve got a for-profit
corporation going around the world that is more powerful than states,
can effect regime possibly where they may want to go, that seems to
have all the support that it needs from this administration that is
also pretty adventurous around the world and operating under the cover
of darkness.

“It raises questions about democracies, about states, about who
influences policy around the globe, about relationships among some
countries. Maybe it’s their goal to render state coalitions like NATO
irrelevant in the future, that they’ll be the ones and open to the
highest bidder. Who really does determine war and peace around the
world?”

                                         ***

The Indypendent - Aug 15, 2007 issue
http://www.indypendent.org/?p=1229

Blackwater in a Grey World

By Jeremy Scahill 

While Blackwater and other firms reject the label “mercenary” firms,
Blackwater executives have even turned the grey area in which they
operate into a brand asset. Blackwater 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, VIP, invite-only
Greystone “inauguration” at the swank Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington,
D.C. The guest list for the seven-hour event was a revealing mix of
representatives from foreign embassies, weapons manufacturers, oil
companies and the International Monetary Fund.

The diplomats were from countries like Uzbekistan, Yemen, the
Philippines, Romania, Indonesia, Tunisia, Algeria, Hungary, Poland,
Croatia, Kenya, Angola and Jordan. Several of those countries’ defense
or military attachés attended.

Greystone’s promotional pamphlet told attendees, “It is more difficult
than ever for your country to successfully protect its interests
against diverse and complicated threats in today’s grey world where the
solutions to your security concerns are no longer as simple as black
and white.”

The pamphlet continued: “Greystone is an international security
services company that offers your country or organization a complete
solution to your most pressing security needs. We have the personnel,
logistical support, equipment, and expertise to solve your most
critical security problems.”

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, among
other functions, could be employed for personal security operations,
surveillance, and countersurveillance. Greystone’s Proactive Engagement
Teams could be hired “to meet emergent or existing security
requirements for client needs overseas. Our teams are ready to conduct
stabilization efforts, asset protection and recovery, and emergency
personnel withdrawal.” It also offered a wide range of training
services, including in “defensive and offensive small group operations.”

Greystone boasted that it “maintains and trains a workforce drawn from
a diverse base of former special operations, defense, intelligence, and
law enforcement professionals ready on a moment’s notice for global
deployment.”

While Blackwater portrays itself as an all-American operation, even
Greystone’s name is a play on the moral and legal ambiguity of its
mission and modern warfare, one backed up by its recruitment efforts.

The countries from which Greystone claimed to draw recruits included
the Philippines, Chile, Nepal, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador,
Honduras, Panama and Peru. It asked applicants 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 qualifications it sought: 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,” it is by no means the biggest or most profitable of these
companies. In some ways it is like a small, high-end boutique on a
strip with several mammoth Wal-Marts. In fact, experts say there are
now more private military companies operating internationally than
there are member nations at the U.N., a symbolically harrowing
statistic.