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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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March 15th,
2007 - Bush’s Shadow Army Feature
article from the Nation Video: Jeremy
Scahill - Blackwater:The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army |
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By Jeremy Scahill The Nation March 15, 2007 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. 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). 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." About Jeremy Scahill: Jeremy
Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the
author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary
Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative
journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy
Now!. Copyright © 2008 The Nation External link: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070402/scahill_vid |