Calling the tune and paying the piper

August 3rd, 2007

Ever wonder where that [estimated soon-to-be] trillion bucks in war funding goes? Some of it goes to graft and theft — I read an article the other day that indicated as many as 200,000 American weapons gone unaccounted for in Iraq. Much of it … most of it … goes into privatized pockets — 70% of the intelligence budget, for instance, and that’s a whopping amount o’ cash, dearhearts. Also gone down the rabbit hole is multi-billions to arm our “friends” … tell me, do you think the Saudis need our 20 billion? And won’t some of that come back into Iraq to blow holes in our own soldiers via the Sunni insurgents?

There are lessons to be learned from supporting one side against another — consider those poster boys who were once American allies, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Georgie Bush, Barbara’s errant son, history major and CEO of AmeriCo didn’t read that chapter, I guess.

Could we MAKE a bigger mess, I wonder? Ahhhh … but the profiteering goes on indefinitely!

Following the money, below.

Jude

Arms sales
Wha the fah?
ROB KEZELIS, Capital Hill Blue
July 31, 2007

The numbers are almost beyond understanding. Shocking, scary, and symptomatic of everything wrong with this administration.

30 billion - Israel (including cluster bombs)
20 billion - the House of Saud
15 billion - Egypt

and many more billions for other nations in the region. That is the cost of MILITARY AID we are throwing into a regional war zone. To opposing parties. With differing interests.

This follows a fatally late, fatally flawed and fatally organized plan to have Condi meet with everyone in the region and make peace. As Fem Fatales go, Condi is one of a kind. (luckily for the rest of globe) The ringing silence you hear from the region tells you just how believable this administration is there, and for the most part, the rest of the world.

Considering that this administration has never seen a lie it does not embrace, nor an issue that does not look like a nail in need of a blunt, hardened, heavy, wood-handled instrument of pounding, it is little surprise that as part of its “peace initiative” the first thing that they wield and yield is a hammer. A multi-billion dollar, deadly one, at that.

Before our current era, misnamed as the War on Terra, presidents, military leaders and most of our allies around the world, knew from experience that millitary action was the last resort, not the first. Partly, it was due to their horrific experiences in the field. A fine example is an underestimated president from the 1950s. Eisenhower knew just how it felt to have beloved junior officers die in his arms, how it was to deal with thousands of casualties, and how horrific the whole idea of war truly was. He also recognized the growing power of corporate America and what danger it posed if it joined together with millitaristic pols and leaders.

In some ways, what we face today is a confluence of some of the worst events in our history. Newt Gingrich, never someone to admit failure, and rarely able to recognize that someone else’s idea was far better than his, was the first to push the idea that military force was pointless if it remained unused. The neocons who followed in his path took those ideas to extremes never imagined by us, at the same time that they were greatly feared by our founding fathers. Add to that mix a maniac like Dick Cheney, a lightweight virtual illiterate like George, and a bombastic, insulting screw up like Rumsfeld, and you can imagine the result. Except, they managed to hire and promote some incredibly capable and effective staff, people who followed orders efficiently and effectively, thereby compounding the damage to the military, the country, and yes, even to the world.

Most of America now realizes just how badly served we have been by these cretins of corporatism, these dastards of Defense, these ineffable fools who ignored wise counsel at every turn. We see how terror has actually crystalized and become a far greater problem than the most dire predictions suggested (unless you review the 1999-2001 CIA reports which spelled out in painfully accurate detail what an invasion of Iraq would cause.)

Therein lies the problem. The foreign policy of our nation is bankrupt, corrupted, illogical and doomed to failure. Like a trapped, rabid animal, the Bush administration poses a greater threat to America than Al Qaida ever did. Even worse, they still control enough of the puppet strings in congress to get what they want - vastly increased foreign arms sales.

Who can profit from this misguided policy? Hmm. The arms dealers, perhaps?

We must ask the basic question: WHY? The Muddle West has been damaged by our officious, incompetent, and corrupted policies. Millions now suffer like never before, hundreds of thousands of innocents are dead, and thousands of US lives are lost. And the answer from Team Bush is to increase the amount of sophisticated arms in the region - to competing and unfriendly powers?

That is not just slightly insane, that is rapture-ready crazy.

If only we had a congress with a spine, willing to stop this madness before we make a horrific situation worse. But we don’t. We owe an apology to the world. ++

US has been covertly arming Gulf States since 2004, officials say
$20b arms sale to Saudi Arabia ‘done deal’
Larisa Alexandrovna, Raw Story
Thursday August 2, 2007

A recently disclosed US agreement with Saudi Arabia for a 10-year, $20 billion dollar arms sale is a “done deal,” according to intelligence officials and experts familiar with the negotiations.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a rare joint visit to Saudi Arabia to meet with members of the monarchy, as well as representatives of other Gulf States including the United Arab Emirates, to discuss a $20 billion dollar arms deal to deliver weapons, training, and weapons systems upgrades to Saudi Arabia over the next ten years. Although officially the meeting is to negotiate an agreement, sources have confirmed to RAW STORY that the deal has already been approved.

“It is a done deal. Everyone who needed to has already signed off,” said a former National Security Council official, who wished to remain anonymous given the security aspects of the topic. The deal also includes massive aid packages to Egypt and Israel, which have not yet been formally announced.

Arming the Gulf states

According to current and former intelligence officials, however, the Bush administration has been arming Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states covertly since “at least” 2004, a year after the US-led invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.

The GCC is a union of regional allies, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Created in 1981, it is similar in structure and purpose to the European Union.

Using backchannels and corporate partners, arms have been furnished to the Gulf states to beef up security against what the US sees as an increased risk posed by Iran. Along with sharing various resources, GCC members have agreed to jointly combine military forces.

According to the NSC official, the current Saudi deal serves two purposes, both of which are a direct result of the US-led war against Iraq and the regional instability it has caused. One is to support the Saudi rulers, while the other is to isolate Iran.

The most pressing concern for the Saudi royal family is their ability to maintain power. The Saudi royal family, who are Sunnis, see the election of Shi’a Muslim Nouri al-Maliki as Iraqi Prime Minister as a signal that the Shi’a state of Iran could become more powerful and threaten the sovereignty of the House of Saud. Beyond that, the royals also fear that their own people might overthrow the monarchy should instability in the region continue to worsen.

“The Saudis see Maliki as the cat’s paw of Iran and they think we are actively supporting Maliki,” the NSC official said. “What the monarchy is actively worried about is that guys who got bloodied in Iraq will return home and overthrow them, and that would be very bad for us.”

Not everyone agrees.

In an email to RAW STORY Wednesday, Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, said he believes the deal is unwise.

“I believe that the $20B arms package just announced – and the diplomacy accompanying it – is a complete refutation of the Bush/Rice policy of refusing to coddle the autocracies of the Middle East,” Wilkerson said. “Because we are afraid of Tehran, we are willing to fund massively regimes whose interests are not only counter to our own but who are actively engaged in covertly undermining U.S. interests, from supporting anti-U.S. elements in Iraq to building and funding thousands of madrassas in volatile places like the Federally Administered Territories in Pakistan.”

Since 1990, Saudi Arabia has spent over $39.6 billion in arming itself against both the threat of Iran and the growing likelihood of a domestic uprising. The US has also given $300 million more in arms during that period through the State Department, making that nation the single largest client of US defense contractors.

Bribing the House of Saud?

Several military and intelligence sources say that the other major impetus behind the arms deal is the Bush administration’s focus on destabilizing and isolating Iran. Part of that strategy involves cutting Iran off from dealing with companies that also have business dealing with Saudi Arabia and, at the same time, protecting Saudi Arabia from any fallout over US activities against Iran. According to the Washington Post, separate arms deals have also been approved for both Israel and Egypt to “strengthen pro-Western countries against Iran at a time when the hard-line regime seeks to extend its power in the region.”

Another motivation for the arms deal is the Bush administration’s need for support to curb the democratically elected Maliki’s influence while at the same time demonstrating “good faith” to the Saudis, who have increasingly become disillusioned with US policy in Iraq and mishandling of the Iraq war.

“There is a real fear that the [Saudi monarchy] will move towards France and Britain,” said the NSC official. A military official pointed out that with the increase in Asian demand for Saudi Arabia’s largest export, oil, the Arab nation now has more leeway to break away from its long-standing relationship with the United States.

Wilkerson points out, however, that the deal prioritizes aid to just three countries.

“By this recently-announced policy, we have effectively committed more than 80% of U.S. strategic aid to three countries – Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia – all of whom are acting in ways fundamentally counter to our interests,” he said. “In my view, we are doing this in a futile and desperate attempt to ‘buy’ their assistance with respect to Iraq, as well as an attempt to enlist their efforts in countering Iran – the latter of which they would do anyway, even without our aid.”

“This is quintessentially a diplomacy of fear and desperation and not of wisdom and confidence,” he added.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 men – 15 of them from Saudi Arabia – attacked the United States, do not seem to have had much effect on US interest in arming the Saudis.

When asked about this, one intelligence official said, “It was 14 or 15 guys, not the government of Saudi Arabia.”

Yet there is evidence that the Saudis have transferred or sold US arms to unauthorized partners.

During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, the Saudis allegedly gave Iraq 1,500 US 2,000-pound bombs (Los Angeles Times, 14 September 1992). “Inadvertent” transfers of bombs and vehicles to Syria and Bangladesh during the Gulf War have also been reported (Arms Control Today, May 1992), as well as another that almost took place when an asylum-seeking Saudi F-15 pilot flew his aircraft to Sudan in November 1990. The plane was returned (Washington Post, 15 November 1990).

Deal with Northrop Grumman alleged

A former high level State Department official pointed to at least one company that is providing weapons to the Saudi National Guard: Northrop Grumman subsidiary Vinnell Corporation.

“The Vinnell Corp has been in that business for decades,” said this official.

The defense giant Northrop Grumman was in talks with the Saudis in March of this year to sell them their E-2D Hawkeye 2000, a form of early air warning system.

Vinnell is also the quasi-official security training firm for the Saudis, through a joint Saudi-US enterprise called Vinnell Arabia.

Yet another offshoot of Northrop is Vinnell-Brown & Root, which is a joint venture between Northrop Grumman and Halliburton, the controversial company of which Vice President Cheney was the CEO until the 2000 election.

Vinnell-Brown & Root is also involved in training the Saudi National Guard.

One source familiar with the backchannel sales of weapons to the GCC states said there is a connection between the leadership of the 3rd Infantry Division of the US Army, from Fort Stewart Georgia, and Vinnell Corporation, but would not elaborate.

In April 2006, Robert Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, visited the GCC states in an attempt to broker a deal to install a missile defense system aimed against Iran.

While the arms list for the current deal is still shrouded in secrecy, if former deals are any indication, the Saudis will receive high caliber weapons that are top-of the line “system deployed with U.S. forces,” including M-1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, M-2A2 Bradley armored vehicles, F-15E Strike Eagle attack aircraft and Patriot surface-to-air missiles.

Saudis worry about Iraq fighters coming back

The greatest number of foreign fighters in Iraq are Saudi Arabs, making up roughly 45 percent of all foreign militants. Though not allied with any specific terrorist group, some Saudis are loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda; most, however, are simply fighting the Shi’a government of Iraq, which they perceive as a threat, as well as the US-led coalition, which they see as an even greater concern.

The result of this influx of foreign fighters and pervasive anti-Western sentiments has been a catastrophic radicalization of Muslims in general and Saudi Arabs in particular.

Such fighters, notes the former NSC official, have been radicalized and trained on the streets of Anbar province, and those who might return home to overthrow the Saudi monarchy will be that much more capable.

The Saudi monarchy only came into existence in 1932 and has owed its survival to the United States at every point since. By 1933, US oil interests had already offered $170,000 in gold for land concessions. In 1945 the US and King Abd al-Aziz agreed to a deal in which the US would provides military security to the regime in exchange for cheap oil and exclusive rights provided to US oil companies. Since 1945 the House of Saud has depended almost entirely on the military support of the US government, which has continued to provide arms and training to the Saudi National Guard, a praetorian-like special force that is responsible for the protection of the royal family from coup attempts, assassination attempts, and uprisings by its own people. ++

Larisa Alexandrovna is the Managing Editor-Investigative News for Raw Story. She is also the site’s intelligence and national security correspondent. Muriel Kane contributed to the research for this article.

Outsourcing Intelligence: How Bush Gets His National Intelligence From Private Companies
R.J. Hillhouse, The Nation
Tuesday 31 July 2007

The unprecedented involvement of private corporations in the Iraq War has been well documented. Private soldiers working for Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy and others provide security services against military-level threats, and they regularly engage in combat.

But what is not generally known is that the secret side of the Iraq War and the larger “war on terror” is also conducted by private corporations, fielding private spies. The reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Corporations are heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation’s most important and most sensitive national security document, the President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in US government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.

For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with private corporations, which run its support and management functions. As the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reported last year, more than 70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon’s newest intelligence unit, CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate contractors.

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA’s most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.

Employees of private corporations - “green badgers,” in CIA parlance - provide sensitive services ranging from covert CIA operations in Iraq to recruiting and running spies. They also gather human intelligence on behalf of the CIA and analyze it, creating intelligence products used by the intelligence community and also shared with other branches of government.

Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is the ODNI that produces the final document of the President’s Daily Brief.

The President’s Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at the ODNI sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the President every day as the US government’s most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

It’s true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the intelligence community tell me that corporations have so penetrated the intelligence community that it’s impossible to distinguish their work from the government’s.

Although the President’s Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it is misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.

Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the US national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.

To take an extreme example, a company frustrated with a government that’s hampering its business or the business of one of its clients could introduce or spin intelligence on that government’s suspected collaboration with terrorists in order to get the White House’s attention and potentially shape national policy.

Or, more subtly, a private firm could introduce concerns about a particular government to put heat on that government to shape its energy policy in a favorable direction.

To get us into the Iraq War, intelligence regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction had to be very artfully manipulated to short-circuit a formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial outsourcing in the intelligence community, even that fallible safeguard has been eroded.

Sources like “Curveball,” the Iraqi informant who wrongly asserted the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and upon whom the CIA relied, are no longer needed. This is particularly frightening when one considers that the “war on terror” is fought by a $100 billion-plus industry that has a vested interest in its continuation.

The tools needed to close this vulnerability are available, and they can be found in the private sector. Existing techniques could be applied to monitor the intelligence community for any suspicious activity to insure that no corporation could manipulate US government policy in this way.

Closing the gaps is simply a matter of the Director of National Intelligence acknowledging the problem, then finding the political will and leadership to implement a solution. Unfortunately, it will probably take a public outcry to make this happen. ++

A very private war
There are 48,000 ’security contractors’ in Iraq, working for private companies growing rich on the back of US policy. But can it be a good thing to have so many mercenaries operating without any democratic control?
Jeremy Scahill, The Guardian
Wednesday August 1, 2007

It was described as a “powder keg” moment. In late May, just across the Tigris river from Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, a heavily armed convoy of American forces was driving down a street near the Iraqi Interior Ministry. They were transporting US officials in what is known widely among the occupation forces as the “red zone” - essentially, any area of Iraq that does not fall inside the US-built “emerald city” in the capital. The American guards were on the look-out for any threat lurking on the roads. Not far from their convoy, an Iraqi driver was pulling out of a petrol station. When the Americans encountered the Iraqi driver, they determined him to be a potential suicide car bomber. In Iraq it has become common for such convoys to fire off rounds from a machine gun at approaching Iraqi vehicles, much to the outrage of Iraqi civilians and officials. The Americans say this particular Iraqi vehicle was getting too close to their convoy and that they tried to warn it to back off. They say they fired a warning shot at the car’s radiator before firing directly into the windshield of the car, killing the driver. Some Iraqi witnesses said the shooting was unprovoked.

In the ensuing chaos, the Americans reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between the Americans and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles. It could have become even more bloody before a US military convoy arrived on the scene.

A senior US adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry’s intelligence division told the Washington Post that the incident threatened to “undermine a lot of the cordial relationships that have been built up over the past four years. There’s a lot of angry people up here right now.”

While there is ongoing outrage between Iraqis and the military over such deadly incidents, this one came with a different, but increasingly common, twist: The Americans involved in the shooting were neither US military nor civilians. They were operatives working for a secretive mercenary firm based in the wilderness of North Carolina. Its name is Blackwater USA.

It was hardly the company’s first taste of action in Iraq, where it has operated almost since the first days of the occupation. Its convoys have been ambushed, its helicopters brought down, its men burned and dragged through the streets of Falluja, giving the Bush administration a justification for laying siege to the city. In all, the company has lost about 30 men in Iraq. It has also engaged in firefights with the Shia Mahdi Army, and succeeded by all means necessary in keeping alive every US ambassador to serve in post-invasion Iraq, along with more than 90 visiting US congressional delegations.

Just one day before the May shooting, in almost the exact same neighbourhood, Blackwater operatives found themselves in another gun battle, lasting an hour, that drew in both US military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. The shoot-out was reportedly spurred by a well-coordinated ambush of Blackwater’s convoy. US sources said the guards “did their job”, keeping the officials alive.

In another incident that has caused major tensions between Baghdad and Washington, an off-duty Blackwater operative is alleged to have shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard of the Shia vice-president Adil Abdul-Mahdi last Christmas Eve inside the Green Zone. Blackwater officials confirm that after the incident they whisked the contractor safely out of Iraq, which they say Washington ordered them to do. Iraqi officials labelled the killing a “murder”. The company says it fired the contractor but he has yet to be publicly charged with any crime.

Iraqi officials have consistently complained about the conduct of Blackwater and other contractors - and the legal barriers to their attempts to investigate or prosecute alleged wrongdoing. Four years into the occupation, there is absolutely no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations. They have not been subjected to military justice, and only two cases have ever reached US civilian courts, under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, which covers some contractors working abroad. (One man was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, in a case that has yet to go to trial, while the other was sentenced to three years for possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.) No matter what their acts in Iraq, contractors cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts, thanks to US-imposed edicts dating back to Paul Bremer’s post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority.

The internet is alive with videos of contractors seemingly using Iraqi vehicles for target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Yet, despite these incidents, and although 64 US soldiers have been court-martialled on murder-related charges, not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for any crime, let alone a crime against an Iraqi. US contractors in Iraq reportedly have a motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.”

At home in America, Blackwater is facing at least two wrongful-death lawsuits, one stemming from the mob killings of four of its men in Falluja in March 2004, the other for a Blackwater plane crash in Afghanistan in November 2004, in which a number of US soldiers were killed. In both cases, families of the deceased charge that Blackwater’s negligence led to the deaths. (Blackwater has argued that it cannot be sued and should enjoy the same immunity as the US military.) The company is also facing a mounting Congressional investigation into its activities. Despite all of this, US State Department officials heap nothing but words of praise on Blackwater for doing the job and doing it well.

There are now 630 companies working in Iraq on contract for the US government, with personnel from more than 100 countries offering services ranging from cooking and driving to the protection of high-ranking army officers. Their 180,000 employees now outnumber America’s 160,000 official troops. The precise number of mercenaries is unclear, but last year, a US government report identified 48,000 employees of private military/security firms.

Blackwater is far from being the biggest mercenary firm operating in Iraq, nor is it the most profitable. But it has the closest proximity to the throne in Washington and to radical rightwing causes, leading some critics to label it a “Republican guard”. Blackwater offers the services of some of the most elite forces in the world and is tasked with some of the occupation’s most “mission-critical” activities, namely keeping alive the most hated men in Baghdad - a fact it has deftly used as a marketing tool. Since the Iraq invasion began four years ago, Blackwater has emerged out of its compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina as the trendsetter of the mercenary industry, leading the way toward a legitimisation of one of the world’s dirtiest professions. And it owes its meteoric rise to the policies of the Bush administration.

Since the launch of the “war on terror”, the administration has funnelled billions of dollars in public funds to US war corporations such as Blackwater USA, DynCorp and Triple Canopy. These companies have used the money to build up private armies that rival or outgun many of the world’s national militaries.

A decade ago, Blackwater barely existed; and yet its “diplomatic security” contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750m (£370m). It protects the US ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces, and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a “command and control” centre just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect emergency operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 (£120,000) a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 (£470) a day per Blackwater contractor.

Yet this is still just a fraction of the company’s business. It also runs an impressive domestic law-enforcement and military training system inside the US. While some of its competitors may have more forces deployed in more countries around the globe, none have organised their troops and facilities more like an actual military.

At present, Blackwater has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world’s largest private military facility - a 7,000-acre compound in North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois (Blackwater North) and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego (Blackwater West) by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armoured vehicle (nicknamed the Grizzly) and surveillance blimps.

The man behind this empire is 38-year-old Erik Prince, a secretive, conservative Christian who once served with the US Navy’s special forces and has made major campaign contributions to President Bush and his allies. Among Blackwater’s senior executives are J Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former deputy director of operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon inspector general; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, Total Intelligence, to be headed by Black and Richer. Blackwater executives boast that some of their work for the government is so sensitive that the company cannot tell one federal agency what it is doing for another.

In many ways, Blackwater’s rapid ascent to prominence within the US war machine symbolises what could be called Bush’s mercenary revolution. Much has been made of the administration’s “failure” to build international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, but perhaps that was never the intention. Almost from the beginning, the White House substituted international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts. When US tanks rolled into Iraq in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of “private contractors” ever deployed in a war.

While precise data on the extent of American spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to obtain, Congressional sources say that the US has spent at least $6bn (£3bn) in Iraq, while Britain has spent some £200m. Like America, Britain has used private security from firms like ArmorGroup to guard Foreign Office and International Development officials in Iraq. Other British firms are used to protect private companies and media, but UK firms do their biggest business with Washington. The single largest US contract for private security in Iraq has for years been held by the British firm Aegis, headed by Tim Spicer, the retired British lieutenant-colonel who was implicated in the Arms to Africa scandal of the late 1990s, when weapons were shipped to a Sierra Leone militia leader during a weapons embargo. Aegis’s Iraq contract - essentially coordinating the private military firms in Iraq - was valued at approximately $300m (£1147m) and drew protests from US competitors and lawmakers.

At present, a US or British special forces veteran working for a private security company in Iraq can make $650 (£320) a day, after the company takes its cut. At times the rate has reached $1,000 (£490) a day - pay that dwarfs that of active-duty troops. “We got [tens of thousands of] contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of defense,” John Murtha, chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, recently said. “How in the hell do you justify that?”

In part, these contractors do mundane jobs that traditionally have been performed by soldiers, from driving trucks to doing laundry. These services are provided through companies such as Halliburton, KBR and Fluor and through their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But increasingly, private personnel are engaged in armed combat and “security” operations. They interrogate prisoners, gather intelligence, operate rendition flights, protect senior occupation officials - including some commanding US generals - and in some cases have taken command of US and international troops in battle. In an admission that speaks volumes about the extent of the privatisation, General David Petraeus, who is implementing Bush’s troop surge, said earlier this year that he has, at times, not been guarded in Iraq by the US military but “secured by contract security”. At least three US commanding generals 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 Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a member of the House oversight and government reform committee, which has been investigating war contractors. “There’s no democratic control and there’s no intention to have democratic control here.”

The implications, still unacknowledged by many US lawmakers and world leaders four years into this revolution, are devastating. “One of the key tenets of managing international crises in the aftermath of the cold war was established in the first Gulf war,” says a veteran US diplomat, Joe Wilson, who served as the last US ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf war. “It was that management of these crises would be a coalition of like-minded nation states under the auspices of a United Nations Security Council resolution which gave the exercise the benefit of international law.” This time, “there is no underlying international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this action that we’ve taken.”

Moreover, this revolution means the US no longer needs to rely on its own citizens and those of its nation-state allies to staff its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable. Just as importantly, perhaps, it reduces the figure of “official” casualties. In Iraq alone, more than 900 US contractors have been killed, with another 13,000 wounded. The majority of these are not American citizens and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by their losses.

In Iraq, many contractors are run by Americans or Britons and have elite forces staffed by well-trained veterans of powerful militaries for use in sensitive actions or operations. But lower down, the ranks are filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals. Hundreds of Chilean mercenaries, for example, have been deployed by US companies such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that Chile opposed the invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the Chileans are alleged to be seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.

Some 118,000 of the estimated 180,000 contractors in Iraq are Iraqis. The mercenary industry points to this as encouraging: we are giving Iraqis jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a private corporation hired by a hostile invading power. As Doug Brooks, the head of the Orwellian-named mercenary trade group, the International Peace Operations Association, argued early 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-50th 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, however, it is the exact model used by multinational corporations that depend on poorly paid workers in developing countries to staff their highly profitable operations. This keeps prices down in the industrialised world and consumers numb to the reality of how the product ends up in their shopping basket.

“We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army,” says Naomi Klein, whose forthcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, explores these themes. “Much as with so-called hollow corporations such as Nike, billions are spent on military technology and design in rich countries while the manual labour 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, what is particularly frightening is that the US and UK governments could give the public the false impression that the occupation was being scaled down, while in reality it was simply being privatised. Indeed, shortly after 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”.

Outsourcing is increasingly extending to extremely sensitive sectors, including intelligence. The investigative blogger RJ Hillhouse, whose site TheSpyWhoBilledMe.com regularly breaks news on the clandestine world of private contractors and US intelligence, recently established that Washington spends $42bn (£21bn) annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $18bn in 2000. Currently, that spending represents 70% of the US intelligence budget.

But the mercenary forces are also diversifying geographically: in Latin America, the massive US firm DynCorp is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries as part of the “war on drugs” - US defence contractors are receiving nearly half the $630m in US 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 UN peacekeeping budget; inside the US, private security staff now outnumber official law enforcement. Heavily armed mercenaries were deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while there are proposals to privatise the US 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 UN and African Union peace operations than all but a handful of countries”.

Most worryingly of all, perhaps, powers that were once the exclusive realm of national governments are now in the hands of private companies whose prime loyalty is to their shareholders. 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.
While the private military/security industry rejects the characterisation of their forces as mercenaries, Blackwater executives have turned the grey area in which they operate into a brand asset. The company 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, invitation-only Greystone “inauguration” at the swanky Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, DC. The guest list for the seven-hour event included weapons manufacturers, oil companies and diplomats from the likes of Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Romania, Indonesia, Tunisia, Algeria, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Kenya, Angola and Jordan. Several of those countries’ defence or military attaches attended. “It is more difficult than ever for your country to successfully protect its interests against diverse and complicated threats in today’s grey world,” Greystone’s promotional pamphlet told attendees. “Greystone is an international security services company that offers your country or organisation a complete solution to your most pressing security needs.”

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 could be employed for personal security operations, surveillance and countersurveillance. Applicants for jobs with Greystone were asked 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 skills sought were: 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, in many ways it is like a small, high-end boutique surrounded by megastores such as DynCorp, ArmourGroup and Erynis, operating in a $100bn industry. In fact, experts say, there are now more private military companies operating internationally than there are member nations at the UN.

“I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force … in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives,” says Wilson. The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, he says, “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?”

Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, a Democrat and a leading member of the House select committee on intelligence, echoes those fears. “The one thing the people think of as being in the purview of the government is the use of military power. Suddenly you’ve got a for-profit corporation going around the world that is more powerful than states”.

At war with the Pentagon
How Rumsfeld paved the way for Blackwater

The world was a very different place on September 10 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld stepped on to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as defense secretary under President George W Bush. For most Americans, there was no such thing as al-Qaida, and Saddam Hussein was still the president of Iraq. Rumsfeld had served in the post once before - under President Gerald Ford, from 1975 to 1977 - and he returned to the job in 2001 with ambitious visions. That September day, in the first year of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld addressed the Pentagon officials in charge of overseeing the high-stakes business of defence contracting - managing the Halliburtons, DynCorps and Bechtels. The secretary stood before a gaggle of former corporate executives from Enron, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation whom he had tapped as his top deputies at the department of defense, and he 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. “This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defence of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.”

Pausing briefly for dramatic effect, Rumsfeld - himself a veteran cold warrior - told his new staff, “Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary’s much closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.”

Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old department of defense bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. The problem, Rumsfeld said, was that unlike businesses, “governments can’t die, so we need to find other incentives for bureaucracy to adapt and improve.” The stakes, he declared, were dire - “a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American’s.”

That day, Rumsfeld announced a major initiative to streamline the use of the private sector in the waging of America’s wars and predicted his initiative would meet fierce resistance. “Some might ask, ‘How in the world could the secretary of defense attack the Pentagon in front of its people?’” Rumsfeld told his audience. “To them I reply, 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 literally be attacked as American Airlines Flight 77 - a Boeing 757 - smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn’t take long for him to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war on the fast track. ++

· An extract from Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Entry Filed under: Political Waves