March 25, 2007
On January 20th the Iraqi resistance shot down a Blackhawk helicopter killing thirteen American soldiers. Three days later, just hours before Bush would give his State of the Union address, a Little Bird helicopter was shot down, killing five more Americans—but this incident didn’t make nearly the amount of news as the former. While the five men died in combat, they were not members of the US military. They were employees of Blackwater USA, the shining star in a new breed of corporation specializing in private soldiers—also known as mercenaries.
These private companies are part of
a huge surge in the outsourcing of war,
which is extremely evident in Iraq, as
well as Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti,
and numerous other countries. Private
contractors are the second-largest con-
tingent of the "Coalition of the Willing"
with a ratio of about one armed con-
tractor for every two American soldiers.
This is up from a ratio of one to sixty
during the first Gulf War. The Pentagon
estimates the number of contractors at
around 100,000—but this is only an estimate because after four years in Iraq the
military is only now beginning a survey
to find the size of its contractor force.
According to the Government Accountability Office, approximately
48,000 of these contractors are working in Iraq as private soldiers, about
six times the number of British troops
in the country. Their roles include everything from operators of US military
aircraft to security guards to bodyguards
for high-level officials to interrogators
(such as the CACI employees involved
in the Abu Ghraib torture scandal).
For political purposes it is in the interests of the US government to build
a large army of private soldiers. Even
though 770 contractors have been killed
in Iraq and 7,761 have been injured, they
are not included in the official US death
toll. Perhaps even more have been killed
but the Pentagon doesn’t track contractor deaths, citing military regulations
as the reason for this lack of oversight.
Figures have to be deduced from insurance claims filed through the Depart-
ment of Labor. Plus, if contractors are
used for missions that are not quite legal or want to be distanced from official
policy, their actions are completely deniable as they are not employees of the
US government. This is the case along
the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where
American forces are not allowed to venture into Pakistani territory.
With the job being so risky, what
would attract so many to private companies? Well, Blackwater has been known to
pay its employees $365,000 per year, compared to the $36,000 an average US soldier makes. No wonder so many former
military personnel are signing up with a
private employer instead of re-enlisting.
Blackwater is able to pay its soldiers
so much because they have received $505
million in contracts from the US government since 2000. Three hundred twenty
million of this has been since June 2004
alone, when they received a no-bid contract to guard diplomats and staff in Iraq.
With this amount of money the company
has been able to build the largest base for
a private military in the world, acquire a
fleet of 20 aircrafts (including helicopter
gunships, a Boeing 767, and even a zeppelin), develop its own armored vehicle
called the Grizzly, and build up a force of
20,000 soldiers.
The scariest thing about Blackwater and other such companies is that
they currently lie in a legal no-man’s
land, under no authoritative jurisdiction from any US or international law,
nor the Geneva Conventions. In fact,
when L. Paul Bremer—whose personal
bodyguards were a specialized Blackwater team—was placed in charge of the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),
one of his first mandates was to make
contractors immune from Iraqi law.
In October, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham inserted a clause into the
2007 Defense Bill attempting to place
contractors under the Uniform Code of
Military Justice, the code of laws for the
US military. Proponents of expanded
controls on contractors initially saw
this as a small victory. In response Peter Singer, an expert on private military
companies at the Brookings Institution,
said "contractors’ 'get-out-of-jail-free’
cards may have been torn to shreds."
However, Doug Brooks, president of
the International Peace Operations Association, a lobbying group represent-
ing military contractors, disagrees and
insists that the clause would not cover
all military firms. "It might be doable
for Defense Department contractors,
but it’s not a panacea," Brooks says.
"It’s a square peg in a round hole." And
he’s most likely right. As many of the
contracts are not through the Defense
Department—especially those of most
companies in a "security" role, the ones
most likely to engage in combat and
therefore needing a means of accountability the most—military law would
not apply. Blackwater’s operations, for
instance, are conducted under a variety
of agencies, including the Department
of State and the CIA, among others.
"The lack of a legal framework for
battlefield contracting has allowed certain rogue contractor employees to perpetrate heinous criminal acts without
the threat of prosecution," said Democratic Congressman David Price. One
such incident occurred this past Christmas Eve when an off-duty Blackwater
contractor shot and killed an Iraqi contractor. The Blackwater employee was
quickly sent back to the US and fired,
although there is no indication he will
be extradited to Iraq to face trial. The
history of armed contractors in Iraq is
filled with similar stories.
Price has recently introduced legislation that he hopes will apply more generally anyone "employed under a contract (or subcontract at any tier) awarded
by any department or agency of the
United States Government, where the
work under such contract is carried out
in a region outside the United States in
which the Armed Forces are conducting
a contingency operation." However, it is
not clear that such legislation will pass a
vote on the House floor.
Many Americans first heard of
Blackwater back in March of 2004.
Four Blackwater guards were ambushed
as they were driving through Fallujah.
After being shot and burned, two of
their mutilated bodies were hung from
a nearby bridge. This episode—captured on video and broadcast around
the world—became the excuse for a
three-week attack on Fallujah that
April, and subsequently another operation that completely destroyed the city
in November, killing around 5,000 Iraqi
fighters, hundreds of civilians, and 95
US Marines.
The families of the four men killed
in Fallujah have sued Blackwater for
wrongful death by cutting corners on
the mission, saying the company violated contract by sending out the private
soldiers without the weapons and manpower they were promised. In response,
Blackwater has countersued for $10 million, targeting the family’s lawyer, Richard Nordan. They argue that by suing
for wrongful death, the family is in turn
breaching the dead soldiers’ contracts.
The most interesting fact about the
families’ lawsuit, however, is that Blackwater has been unable to get the lawsuit
dismissed or stayed. They have been arguing that their work is an extension of
the military and therefore is not subject
to the jurisdiction of civilian courts. As
their strategy seems to be failing, Blackwater has asked a federal court to move
the case to arbitration. It is necessary "in
order to safeguard both [Blackwater’s]
own confidential information," their attorneys say, "as well as sensitive information implicating the interest of the
United States at war."
This is very dangerous for Blackwater and other companies providing
similar services, as this case could become a precedent, making every death
of an employee a potential lawsuit. As
of fall 2006, Blackwater had nine pending lawsuits from dead employees’ families. But it seems that the most damaging part of the case to Blackwater—and
what they are most afraid of—might
not be the bad PR or the price of losing the lawsuit, but instead the fact that
sensitive information that they have so
far been able to keep private might be
made public.
Private companies, unlike government agencies, are not subject to the
Freedom of Information Act, and for
the past two years this has prevented
members of Congress from getting the
government to explain the details of
Blackwater’s contracts in regards to billing and payment. But this case might be
a chance for a rare peak into the secretive company.
One part of the contract under scrutiny in the lawsuit, for instance, has
revealed that Blackwater was paying
its soldiers $600 per day but charged
its client, Regency Hotel and Hospital
Co., whom the deceased men were escorting, $945 per day. Regency was in
turn a subcontractor of ESS, a division
of Compass, who was subcontracted by
Halliburton’s subsidiary KBR. There
have been no documents showing how
much each of the other companies
added on to these charges by the time
it reached the top contractor, Halliburton, who then billed the US government. Under Halliburton’s $16 billion
contract they are only allowed to rely
on the US military for armed protection
and not private firms. If too many documents of this nature are released, there’s
a possibility it could ultimately threaten
Blackwater’s ability to win contracts.
This shouldn’t be too big of a problem, however, as Blackwater has so far
won only no-bid contracts. And with a
global market opening as quickly as it is
now, plenty of new opportunities have
arisen. For example, the head of the
mission in Washington for Southern
Sudan’s regional government, Ezekiel
Lol Gatkuoth, recently announced that
he expects Blackwater to start working with security forces in the next few
weeks, although this has not officially
been confirmed by Blackwater.
Sudan was placed under sanctions
in 1997 after the US accused the government of supporting terrorism. Bush
lifted the embargo this past October,
giving Blackwater the ability to operate
in the country legally. The company was
apparently hired because no state was
willing to send troops to aid the southern Christian militias, which have allied
themselves with the Muslim government following a peace accord in order
to fight off the other rebel groups. The
conflict in Southern Sudan was separate
from that of Darfur, in the west, but the
government whose support has aided
the Janjaweed in its extermination of as
many as 450,000 non-Arabs in that region is the same.
Blackwater has big plans for Sudan,
and wants to use the situation in Darfur
to prove its ability to operate in a "peacekeeping" capacity. It has been pushing
the idea for sometime to members of
Congress and high-ups in the military,
saying it can send in a large ground
force aided by gunships for air support
in a moment’s notice. Gary Jackson,
Blackwater’s CEO, seems pretty confident about their future in Darfur. "We
are going to field a brigade-sized peacekeeping force," he says. "You can quote
me on that."
While Blackwater soldiers begin to
operate in Sudan, their deployment will
likely increase in the Middle East as
well. Their 2004 "diplomatic security"
contract with the State Department
was part of much larger plan called the
Worldwide Personal Protective Service
(WPPS) program, characterized as designed to protect US officials as well as
"certain foreign government high level
officials whenever the need arises," according to official documents. Other
than Blackwater, several other high
profile private military firms are included in the WPPS, such as DynCorp and
Triple Canopy.
Blackwater’s contract under the
WPPS is for five years and the payment
is supposed to be a total of $229.5 million. However, after only two years in
the program it had received a total of
$321,715,794. The State Department
has not been able to provide an answer as
to why the firm has received almost $100
million more than required for only half
the work that is due. And the contract
still has two and a half years left.
During Bush’s State of the Union
address he asked Congress to approve
two immense military buildups. First,
he requested "an increase in the size of
our active Army and Marine Corps by
92,000 in the next five years. A second
task we can take on together is to design
and establish a volunteer civilian reserve
corps. Such a corps would function much
like our military reserve." Bush, however, was not the first to mention this
idea. Blackwater CEO and co-founder
Erik Prince, a huge campaign contributor to Bush and the GOP, presented his
plan for a "contractor brigade" of private
military firms at a military conference
two years ago.
KBR’s CEO Bill Utt said they plan
on increasing the size of their force in
Iraq in response to Bush’s announcement of sending more troops. The company now has over 500,000 resumes
on file for people seeking employment
in Iraq, Kuwait, or Afghanistan. With
every troop "surge" the private military
business gets an extra boost as well.
Former Secretary of Defense Phillip Coyle sees this privatization of war
as directly related to the occupation of
Iraq, where contractors now perform
jobs previously done by US soldiers.
"Obviously the military could do it,"
Coyle says, "but indeed the Administration is looking for places to get more
troops for Iraq."
The 21,500 combat troops Bush is
sending into Iraq will have to be supported by 28,000 additional US military
men and women, a government assessment recently concluded. This makes
the actual number of US soldiers being
deployed around 50,000 at a cost of $27
billion according to the Congressional
Budget Office. Exactly how many more
contractors will arrive in Iraq as a result
has yet to be determined, but with the
current ratio of nearly one contractor for
every soldier, we can expect it to be a
significant number.
From Fault Lines #20
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