[NYTr] Blackwater Blues for Dead Civilians - More on USA's Mercenary Goons

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[Both articles below talk about the theocon-infested Blackwater and 
the Jeremy Scagill book on the Mercenaries R US corporation.

Counterpunch - Sep 19, 2007
http://www.counterpunch.org/smith09192007.html

Blackwater in Iraq

The New Private Warriors

By Sgt. MARTIN SMITH

Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: the Rise of the World's Most Powerful
Mercenary Army is a tour de force of investigative journalism and a
work that should be read throughout the antiwar and emerging GI
resistance movements. Currently, the employees of the 180 "private
contractor" companies operating in Iraq, who supply everything from
logistical support to security services, comprise more employees than
U.S. combat troops. While American forces have relied on mercenaries in
previous wars, the government's campaign to privatize the war effort is
distinctly new and has grave implications.

Scahill points out that the current push towards "guns for hire" is
neither an accident nor the flawed strategy of an errant president.
Rather, the use of private contractors dates back to the early 1990s
with the downsizing and restructuring of the armed forces. Both
Republican and Democratic administrations have taken part in it. The
military began a massive privatization drive under then-Secretary of
Defense Dick Cheney during Bush Sr.'s administration. According to
Scahill, "The idea was to free up the troops to do the fighting while
private contractors handled the backend logistics.... More contractors
meant fewer troops, and a much more politically palatable troop count."
By August 1992, Halliburton, soon to be headed by Cheney himself, led
the support work for the military for the next five years, during Bill
Clinton's presidential tenure. Clinton continued the privatization
agenda, and Halliburton received lucrative contracts for services
during the Balkans and the Kosovo conflicts. The Clinton years helped
open the door for the Rumsfeld Doctrine, which promoted the use of
private contractors for all aspects of war, including combat.

Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL from a wealthy establishment family,
saw financial opportunity in these developments and formed Blackwater
USA in 1997. While privatization schemes for the military crossed party
lines, Prince and the crew at Blackwater are decisively partisan.
Prince is a participant in and major donor to fundamentalist religious
and right-wing causes, while the upper echelons of Blackwater's staff
reads like a who's who of the extremist theocon Right, including Paul
Behrends and Joseph Schmitz.

What began as a training facility for law enforcement personnel and
special operation forces in North Carolina has become a corporation
providing the world's most powerful mercenary army, what Scahill terms
the "Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's 'global war on
terror.'" Blackwater currently has forces deployed in at least nine
countries, including over 2,300 mercenaries. Moreover, private
contractor companies are now hiring the most notorious global thugs,
including Chilean commandos who served under General Augusto Pinochet
and white apartheid-era South African Special Forces.

Blackwater's success, Scahill writes, has grown from two key factors.
One, through Prince's connections with Christian/Republican causes, he
has garnered a powerful lobbying arm composed of well-connected former
federal officials and military brass. Through these ties, Blackwater
has been able to win key government contracts and shift its services to
meet the cutting-edge needs of a growing security-industrial-complex.
Two, Blackwater has benefited from the post-9/11 geopolitical climate.
Scahill explains how the "war on terror" has proven to be a boon for
Blackwater and a "key ideological underpinning of legitimating private
contractors and security."

Beyond this, the instability in Iraq has benefited the entire mercenary
industry, diverting expenditures away from reconstruction. The more
effective the Iraqi resistance becomes against U.S. regular forces, the
greater the call for increased private security services. On March 31,
2004, four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and their bodies
mutilated by an angry mob in Fallujah. To date, Blackwater has evaded
prosecution for its negligence in how their employees were sent out on
a mission ill-equipped and unprepared.

Yet rather than calling into question the role and mission of private
contractors, the incident played into the war propaganda machine by
providing the pretext by which to exact revenge and launch one of a
series of devastating military attacks against the people of Fallujah.

A week after the ambush, Prince met with key members of the Senate
Committee on Armed Services. "The mercenary gold rush was on," as
Scahill put it. With the reality of a resistance movement on the rise
in Iraq, "Blackwater was thrust into the fortunate position of a drug
rep offering a new painkiller to an ailing patient at the moment the
worst pain was just kicking in."

At the same time, Blackwater won a contract to begin operations in the
oil- and gas-rich Caspian Sea region. Acting as a "backdoor U.S.
military deployment" instead of sending in divisions of the U.S. Armed
Forces--which might be politically unpalatable to Russia--Blackwater
served a dual function. They both protected the oil and gas operations
in the region and laid the foundation for a possible forward operating
base to attack Iran.

On June 2004, Paul Bremer passed the infamous Order 17, which granted
sweeping immunity for the actions of contractors in Iraq. That is,
mercenaries were now no longer accountable under any military or
national laws or codes of conduct. Contractors had free reign to
potentially commit atrocities or war crimes with impunity. Scahill
points out that at the time, the United States began to move towards
"the Salvador option," the use of death squads to foment sectarian
divisions in Iraq, with the appointment of John Negroponte as
ambassador to Iraq. Facing no criminal prosecution, mercenaries were
free to potentially utilize assassinations, repression, and torture as
methods aimed to stoke divisions in Iraq and pacify the resistance.

Scahill includes a brilliant chapter on Blackwater's rapid deployment
to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, pointing out the irony that
guns for hire arrived faster than government relief and rescue
services. Preying on the racist fears of the white elite, Blackwater
marketed itself as a force capable of protecting business interests
from Black "looters" and "criminals." As Chris Kromm, editor of Gulf
Coast Reconstruction Watch described, "That's what happens when the
victims are black folks vilified before and after the storm-instead of
aid, they get contained." Blackwater was able to utilize Katrina to
further expand its ever-widening list of services, which now included
"humanitarian aid" and domestic security details for natural disasters.
While Louisiana's National Guard was in Iraq, Blackwater was on hand to
provide so-called "relief" via black t-shirts, wraparound sunglasses,
and guns.

Scahill does not shy away from asking the larger questions. What are
the consequences for democracy when military services are outsourced to
corporate entities with no accountability? What are the implications of
a government that relies upon paramilitary organizations that flought
U.S. law and potentially the Constitutional rights of its citizens?

While some may argue that the use of mercenaries represents the
telltale sign of the decline of U.S. Empire, Scahill's work puts
Blackwater and private contractors in a different light. The rise of
the security-industrial-complex represents the potential staying power
and resilience of U.S. imperialism around the globe. Scahill's
Blackwater is a clarion call to the Antiwar Movement to redouble its
efforts by demanding not only that coalition soldiers be pulled out of
the Middle East-but that, in addition, that all occupying foreign
forces, including those of Blackwater, withdrawal immediately as well.

[Martin Smith, former Sgt. USMC, is Midwest regional coordinator of
Iraq Veterans Against the War. He can be reached at: martin at ivaw.org

This review originally appeared in the ISR. 
(No date, no URL provided -NYTr)]


                        ***

Talk to Action - Sep 19, 2007
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2007/9/18/122342/856


Blackwater Blues for Dead Iraqi Civilians

By Bill Berkowitz

Erik Prince, the founder and head of Blackwater USA, has contributed
mega-bucks to Republican Party candidates and Christian right
organizations and causes. Why is this advocate of "traditional family
values" stonewalling the families of four Blackwater contractors killed
in Fallujah in March 2004?

After an incident over the weekend that resulted in the murder of eight
civilians and the wounding of thirteen others by private security
forces in Iraq, the ministry of interior yesterday took the decision to
expel Blackwater from the country.

According to The Guardian, US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice,
"apologized to the Iraqi government ... in an attempt to prevent the
expulsion of all" Blackwater employees from Iraq.

Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, the son of conservative
multi-millionaire, the late Edgar Prince, and the brother of Betsy
DeVos, the wife of Dick DeVos, the son of Amway founder Richard DeVos.

Over the paast two decades, both the Prince and DeVos families have
given millions of dollars to Republican Party candidates, and
conservative Christian organizations and causes. 'The world's most
powerful mercenary army'

In 1997, Erik Prince founded Blackwater USA, a company that grown into
what journalist Jeremy Scahill terms "the world's most powerful
mercenary army," in his recently released book titled
"Blackwater."      

Both Prince and his company prefer to avoid the spotlight.

In March 2004, however, four of Prince's Anerican contractors -- Jerry
Zovko, Scott Helvenston, Michael Teague and Wesley Batalona -- were
killed in Fallujah while escorting a convoy of empty trucks. They were
ambushed, shot and overcome by an angry mob. The men were burnt in
their vehicles and then their charred bodies were strung up from a
bridge.

The horrific images of the dead Americans received worldwide media
attention. That incident was soon followed by a massive U.S. assault on
Fallujah, an attack that reportedly resulted in thousands of dead Iraqi
civilians.

Erik Prince's Blackwater USA was no longer under the radar.  

For the past three years, the families of the dead contractors have
been trying to find out what really happened that March day in
Fallujah. For three years they've been stonewalled by Prince.

The suit and countersuit

In February of this year, relatives of the four slain Blackwater USA
contractors testified, at a House hearing in Washington -- held by Rep.
Henry Waxman, D-Calif. -- on the company's operations. The families of
the slain men, still unclear about what happened when their loved ones
were killed, sued Blackwater USA "for wrongful death in the hope that
their questions will be answered," the Associated Press reported in
mid-June.

The lawsuit alleges that Blackwater sent the men on a job with
inadequate equipment and protection.

According to the suit, AP pointed out, "the men should have been
traveling in fully armored vehicles and should have had a guard in each
vehicle acting as a rear gunner to protect them from attack."

The legal battle could have much broader implications. It "could prompt
more government oversight of security contracting companies and
determine the extent of their legal liability in the war zone," AP
noted. It "is the most prominent [suit] in an emerging body of
litigation surrounding the secretive world of private security
contractors in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As details about
security operations are revealed in the court cases, pressure has
intensified in Congress to regulate how armed contractors operate."

Blackwater has assembled a high-profile well-connected legal team to
combat the suit. They also filed a $10 million counterclaim.
Blackwater's legal dream team -- which once included Fred Fielding, now
White House counsel -- includes Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor
who investigated the Monica Lewinsky and Whitewater scandals during the
Clinton administration.

Blackwater maintains that since it was working for the government, it
was "subject to the same protections against lawsuits as the military,
which cannot be sued for the deaths or injuries of its troops," AP
reported. The company "argues that the four families' lawsuit
`unconstitutionally intrudes on the exclusive authority of the military
of the federal government to conduct military operations abroad.'"

In the two years since the families filed its suit, it has bounced
between state and federal courts amid a jumble of claims and
counterclaims. Last month U.S. District Judge James Fox in North
Carolina ordered the families and Blackwater into arbitration, a
non-public procedure that is designed to resolve disputes without a
trial. While the families are protesting that decision, that is a
desirable outcome for the company as it would continue to secrecy for
its operations.

Blackwater USA

That we know as much as we do about Blackwater USA is in part due to
the first-rate reporting of several journalists, including The Nation
magazine's investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill. In his bestselling
book "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary
Army" (Nation Books, 2007), Scahill describes the company as "a sort of
Praetorian Guard for the Bush Administration's `global war on terror.'"

He maintains that Prince

    "has been in the thick of this right-wing effort to unite
conservative Catholics, evangelicals, and neoconservatives in a common
theoconservative holy war." 

At the time the book was written Scahill pointed out that the Moyock,
North Carolina-headquartered company had

    "more than 2,300 private soldiers deployed in nine countries,
including inside the United States. It maintainsa database of 21,000
former Special Forces troops, soldiers, and retired law enforcement
agents on whom it could call at a moment's notice. ... [It] has a
private fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter
gunships and a surveillance blimp division."   

In addition, Blackwater had

    "train[ed] tens of thousands of federal and local law enforcement
agents ... [as well as] troops from `friendly' foreign nations."
Blackwater "operates its own intelligence division and counts among its
executives senior ex-military and intelligence officials." 

The company, which has a facility in Illinois, is building one in
California, and has a jungle training facility in the Philippines, has
garnered more than $500 million in government contracts. This "does not
include its secret `black' budget operations for U.S intelligence
agencies or private corporations/individuals and foreign governments,"
Scahill notes.

In addition to Prince, "A number of Blackwater executives are deeply
conservative Christians, including corruption-smeared former Pentagon
Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, who is also a member of the Sovereign
Order of Malta, which Scahill describes as `a Christian militia formed
in the eleventh century [to defend] `territories that the Crusaders had
conquered from the Moslems,'" Chris Barsanti wote in a review of the
book for In These Times.

Blackwater had a visible, and financially lucrative, presence in the
immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as the use of company
contractors cost the American taxpayer $240,000 a day.

 `Radical right wing Christian mega-millionaire'

Blackwater USA is the brainchild of Erik Prince -- a former Navy SEAL
and son of Edgar Prince, a wealthy Michigan auto-parts supplier --
described by Scahill as a "radical right wing Christian
mega-millionaire" who is a strong financial backer of President George
W. Bush, as well as a donor to a host of conservative Christian
political causes.  

In the 1980s "the Prince family merged with one of the most venerable
conservative families in the United States," when Erik's sister Betsy -
nine years his senior -- married Dick DeVos, whose father Richard,
founded the multilevel marketing firm Amway.

The two families exercized enormous political influence both inside and
outside Michigan. "They were one of the greatest bankrollers of
far-right causes in U.S. history, and with their money they propelled
extremist Christian politicians and activists to positions of
prominence," Scahill writes.    

Prince, who keeps a relatively low profile, recently appeared at the
North Carolina Technology Association's "Five Pillars" conference.
There, he put in a plug for his company, saying that had the police had
the kind of training that Blackwater provides, they could have dealt
with situations such as the killings at Columbine and Virginia Tech
much better.

"When I saw the Columbine tapes, I saw a lot of law enforcement
officers with really nice gear, equipment and weapons, but they had
never really trained together. They had never tested those
assumptions," Prince said. "The same with Virginia Tech -- they had
never really trained or planned for an active shooter."