As this unprecedented private force expanded in Iraq, Bremer’s last act before
skulking out of Baghdad on June 28, 2004, was to issue a decree known as
Order 17, immunizing contractors in Iraq from prosecution.12 It was a
significant move in a sea of policies (and absence of policies) governing
the occupation of Iraq, and one that emboldened private forces. While U.S.
soldiers have been prosecuted for killings and torture in Iraq, the Pentagon
has not held its vast private forces to the same standards. That point was
driven home during one of the rare Congressional hearings on contractors in
Iraq, which took place in June 2006. Blackwater represented the industry at
the hearing, which also included several government officials.
Representative Dennis Kucinich questioned Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s
director of defense procurement and acquisition, the department in the DoD
responsible for contractors. Kucinich pointed out that U.S. troops are
subjected to enforceable rules of engagement and have been prosecuted for
violations in Iraq, while contractors were not. He said that as of the date
of the hearing, “no security contractor has been prosecuted” for crimes in
Iraq.13 He then directly asked Assad, “Would the Department of Defense be
prepared to see a prosecution proffered against any private contractor who
is demonstrated to have unlawfully killed a civilian?”
“Sir, I can’t answer that question,” Assad replied.
“Wow,” Kucinich shot back. “Think about what that means. These private
contractors can get away with murder.” Contractors, Kucinich said, “do not
appear to be subject to any laws at all and so therefore they have more of a
license to be able to take the law into their own hands.” Blackwater has
openly declared its forces above the law. While resisting attempts to
subject its private soldiers to the Pentagon’s Uniform Code of Military
Justice (UCMJ)—insisting they are civilians—Blackwater has simultaneously
claimed immunity from civilian litigation in the United States, saying its
forces are a part of the U.S. Total Force. Blackwater has argued in legal
briefs that if U.S. courts allow the company to be sued for wrongful death
of its workers, that could threaten the nation’s war-fighting capacity: “In
order for responsible federal contractors to accompany the U.S. Armed Forces
on the battlefield, it is essential that their immunity from liability for
casualties be federally protected and uniformly upheld by federal courts.
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. . . . How the President oversees and
commands these military operations, including his decisions through the
chain of command concerning the training, deployment, armament, missions,
composition, planning, analysis, management and supervision of private
military contractors and their missions, falls outside the role of [the
courts].”14 Instead, Blackwater claims that its forces operate under the
legally impotent and unenforceable code of conduct written by its own trade
association, ironically named the International Peace Operations
Association. Erik Prince says his forces are “accountable to our country,”15
as though declarations of loyalty to the flag are evidence of just motives
or activities or somehow a substitute for an independent legal framework.
This logic is encouraged not only by the virtual immunity already extended to
contractors but also by the Pentagon’s failure to oversee this massive
private force that is now officially recognized as part of the U.S. war
machine. Private contractors largely operate in a legal gray zone that
leaves the door for abuses wide open. In late 2006, a one-line amendment was
quietly slipped into Congress’s massive 2007 defense-spending bill, signed
by President Bush, that could subject contractors in war zones to the
Pentagon’s UCMJ, also known as the court martial system.16 But the military
has enough trouble policing its own massive force and could scarcely be
expected to effectively monitor an additional 100,000 private personnel.
While the five-word insert hardly establishes a system of independent
oversight, experts still predict it will be fiercely resisted by the private
war industry. Despite the unprecedented reliance on contractors deployed in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the government has failed to even count
them, let alone police them. A Government Accountability Office report
released in December 2006 found that the military had no effective system of
oversight and that “officials were unable to determine how many contractors
were deployed to bases in Iraq.”17 The Army and Air Force were unable to
provide the GAO investigators “the number of contractors they were using at
deployed locations or the services those contractors were providing to U.S.
forces.” The GAO concluded “problems with management and oversight of
contractors have negatively impacted military operations and unit morale and
hindered DOD’s ability to obtain reasonable assurance that contractors are
effectively meeting their contract requirements in the most cost-efficient
manner.”
A week after Donald Rumsfeld’s rule at the Pentagon ended, U.S. forces had
been stretched so thin by the war on terror that former Secretary of State
Gen. Colin Powell declared “the active Army is about broken.”18 Rather than
rethinking such aggressive policies and wars of conquest, the Bush
administration and the Pentagon talked of the need to expand the size of the
military. Prince had already offered up a proposal of his own: the creation
of what he called a “contractor brigade” to supplement the conventional U.S.
military. “There’s consternation in the DoD about increasing the permanent
size of the Army,” he said. “We want to add 30,000 people, and they talked
about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by
my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier. . . . We could do it
certainly cheaper.”19 It was an extraordinary declaration that could only
come from a man in control of his own army. Prince likes to position
Blackwater as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military, and in September
2005 he issued a company-wide memorandum requiring all company employees and
contractors to swear the same oath of loyalty to the U.S. Constitution as
Blackwater’s “National Security-related clients (i.e. Pentagon, State
Department and intelligence agencies)” to “support and defend the
Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
. . . So help me God.”
But despite the portrayal of Blackwater as an all-American operation seeking
to defend the defenseless, some of its most ambitious and secretive projects
reveal a very different and frightening reality. In May 2004, Blackwater
quietly registered a new division, Greystone Limited, in the U.S.
government’s Central Contracting office. But instead of incorporating the
company in North Carolina or Virginia or Delaware, like Blackwater’s other
divisions, Greystone was registered offshore in the Caribbean island-nation
of Barbados. It was duly classified by the U.S. government as a “tax-exempt”
“corporate entity.”21 Greystone’s promotional literature offered prospective
clients “Proactive Engagement Teams” that 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.”
The countries from which Greystone claimed to draw recruits were: the
Philippines, Chile, Nepal, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama,
and Peru, many of whose forces have human rights records that are questionable
at best. 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 (RPG, LAAW). Among the qualifications the
application sought: sniper, marksman, door gunner, explosive ordnance,
counter-assault team. In Iraq, Blackwater has deployed scores of Chilean
mercenaries, some of whom trained and served under the brutal regime of
Augusto Pinochet. “We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals,”
said Blackwater president Gary Jackson. “The Chilean commandos are very,
very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system.”
With domestic armed forces stretched to the limit—and a draft off the table
for political reasons— the U.S. government is left to struggle to find
nation-state allies willing to staff the occupations of its “global war on
terror.” If the national armies of other states will not join a “coalition
of the willing,” Blackwater and its allies offer a different sort of
solution: an alternative internationalization of the force achieved by
recruiting private soldiers from across the globe. If foreign governments
are not on board, foreign soldiers—many of whose home countries oppose the
U.S. wars— can still be enlisted, at a price. This process, critics allege,
is nothing short of a subversion of the very existence of the nation-state
and of principles of sovereignty and self-determination. “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.23 “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. Likewise, here at home in the United
States. Controlling an angry, abused population with a police force bound to
obey the Constitution can be difficult—private forces can solve this
‘problem.’”
As with Halliburton, the Pentagon’s largest contractor, Blackwater is set
apart from simple war profiteers by the defining characteristic of its
executives’ very long view. They have not just seized a profitable moment
along with many of their competitors but have set out to carve a permanent
niche for themselves for decades to come. Blackwater’s aspirations are not
limited to international wars, however. Its forces beat most federal
agencies to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, as hundreds of
heavily armed Blackwater mercenaries—some fresh from deployment in
Iraq—fanned out into the disaster zone. Within a week, they were officially
hired by the Department of Homeland Security to operate in the U.S. Gulf,
billing the federal government $950 a day per Blackwater soldier.24 In less
than a year, the company had raked in more than $70 million in federal
hurricanerelated contracts—about $243,000 a day.25 The company saw Katrina
as another moment of great opportunity and soon began applying for permits
to contract its forces out to local governments in all fifty states.
Blackwater executives have met with California Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger about deploying there in the aftermath of an earthquake or
another disaster. “Look, none of us loves the idea that devastation became a
business opportunity,” said the Blackwater official heading up its new
domestic operations division formed after Katrina.26 “It’s a distasteful
fact, but it is what it is. Doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, even
newspapers—they all make a living off of bad things happening. So do we,
because somebody’s got to handle it.” But critics see the deployment of
Blackwater’s forces domestically as a dangerous precedent that could
undermine U.S. democracy. “Their actions may not be subject to
constitutional limitations that apply to both federal and state officials
and employees—including First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights to be
free from illegal searches and seizures. Unlike police officers, they are
not trained in protecting constitutional rights,” says CCR’s Michael Ratner.
“These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts,
functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does
operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an
extremely dangerous threat to our rights.”
What is particularly scary about Blackwater’s role in a war that President
Bush labeled a “crusade” is that the company’s leading executives are
dedicated to a Christian-supremacist agenda. Erik Prince and his family have
provided generous funding to the religious right’s war against secularism
and for expanding the presence of Christianity in the public sphere
Prince is a close friend and benefactor to some of the country’s most hard
right Christian evangelists, such as former Watergate conspirator Chuck
Colson, who went on to become an adviser to President Bush and a pioneer of
“faith-based prisons,” and Christian conservative leader Gary Bauer, an
original signer of the Project for a New American Century’s “Statement of
Principles,” whom Prince has worked alongside since his youth and who was a
close friend of Prince’s father. Some Blackwater executives even boast of
their membership in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta,28 a Christian
militia formed in the eleventh century, before the first Crusades, with the
mission of defending “territories that the Crusaders had conquered from the
Moslems.”29 The Order today boasts of being “a sovereign subject of
international law, with its own constitution, passports, stamps, and public
institutions” and “diplomatic relations with 94 countries.”30 The
outsourcing of U.S. military operations in Muslim countries and in secular
societies to such neo-crusaders reinforces the greatest fears of many in the
Arab world and other opponents of the administration’s wars.
Most of the world first heard of “private military companies” after the
infamous March 31, 2004, ambush of four Blackwater soldiers in Fallujah,
Iraq—a gruesome mob murder that marked the moment the war turned and the
Iraqi resistance exploded. Many of the media reports at the time (and today)
refer to these shadowy forces as “civilian contractors” or “foreign
reconstruction workers” as though they were engineers, construction workers,
humanitarians, or water specialists. The term “mercenary” was almost never
used to describe them. That is no accident. Indeed, it is part of a very
sophisticated rebranding campaign organized by the mercenary industry itself
and increasingly embraced by policy-makers, bureaucrats, and other powerful
decision makers in Washington and other Western capitals. Those men who died
at Fallujah were members of Washington’s largest partner in the coalition of
the willing in Iraq—bigger than Britain’s total deployment—and yet most of
the world had not a clue they were there. The ambush resulted in Blackwater
being positioned in a key role to affect the regulations that would oversee
(or not) the rapidly expanding industry, of which Blackwater was the new
leader. Three months later, the company was handed one of the U.S.
government’s most valuable international security contracts: to protect
diplomats and U.S. facilities. The highly publicized deaths of four of its
private soldiers would prove to be the spark that set Blackwater on a path
to success for years to come.
The story of Blackwater’s rise is an epic one in the history of the
militaryindustrial complex. The company is the living embodiment of the
changes wrought by the revolution in military affairs and the privatization
agenda radically expanded by the Bush administration under the guise of the
war on terror. But more fundamentally, it is a story about the future of
war, democracy, and governance. This story goes from the company’s
beginnings in 1996, with visionary Blackwater executives opening a private
military training camp in order “to fulfill the anticipated demand for
government outsourcing of firearms and related security training,” to its
contract boom following 9/11, to the blood-soaked streets of Fallujah, where
the corpses of its mercenaries were left to dangle from a bridge. It
includes a rooftop firefight in Muqtada al-Sadr’s stronghold of Najaf; an
expedition to the oil-rich Caspian Sea, where the administration sent
Blackwater to set up a military base just miles from the Iranian border; a
foray into New Orleans’s hurricane- ravaged streets; and many hours in the
chambers of power in Washington, D.C., where Blackwater executives are
welcomed as new heroes in the war on terror. But the rise of the world’s
most powerful mercenary army began far away from the current battlefields,
in the sleepy town of Holland, Michigan, where Erik Prince was born into a
right-wing Christian dynasty. It was the Prince family that laid the
groundwork, spending millions of dollars over many decades to bring to power
the very forces that would enable Blackwater’s meteoric ascent
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Jeremy
Scahill
Serpent's Tail. £12.99. Buy the book here
at the offer price of £11.69 (inc p&p)
