Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
The Mercenary Revolution: Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities
Originally published by The Indypendent newspaper
If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.
With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation through the use of private war companies.
There are now almost 200,000 private "contractors" deployed in Iraq by Washington. This means that U.S. military forces in Iraq are now outsized by a coalition of billing corporations whose actions go largely unmonitored and whose crimes are virtually unpunished.
In essence, the Bush administration has created a shadow army that can be used to wage wars unpopular with the American public but extremely profitable for a few unaccountable private companies.
Since the launch of the "global war on terror," the administration has systematically funneled billions of dollars in public money to corporations like Blackwater USA , DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Erinys and ArmorGroup. They have in turn used their lucrative government pay-outs to build up the infrastructure and reach of private armies so powerful that they rival or outgun some nation's militaries.
"I think it's extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives," says veteran U.S . Diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War.
The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, Wilson argues, "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?"
Precise data on the extent of U.S. spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to obtain - by both journalists and elected officials-but some in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every tax dollar spent on the war goes to corporate war contractors. At present, the United States spends about $2 billion a week on its Iraq operations.
While much has been made of the Bush administration's "failure" to build international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, perhaps that was never the intention. When U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of "private contractors" ever deployed in a war. The White House substituted international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts and a coalition of willing nations who provided token forces with a coalition of billing corporations that supplied the brigades of contractors.
'THERE'S NO DEMOCRATIC CONTROL'
During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors was about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S . forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war contracting companies working in Iraq for the United States. Composed of some 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official U.S. military presence of 160,000 troops.
In all, the United States may have as many as 400,000 personnel occupying Iraq, not including allied nations' militaries. The statistics on contractors do not account for all armed contractors. Last year, a U.S. government report estimated there were 48,000 people working for more than 170 private military companies in Iraq. "It masks the true level of American involvement," says Ambassador Wilson.
How much money is being spent just on mercenaries remains largely classified. Congressional sources estimate the United States has spent at least $6 billion in Iraq, while Britain has spent some $400 million. At the same time, companies chosen by the White House for rebuilding projects in Iraq have spent huge sums in reconstruction funds - possibly billions on more mercenaries to guard their personnel and projects.
The single largest U.S. contract for private security in Iraq was a $293 million payment to the British firm Aegis Defence Services, headed by retired British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who has been dogged by accusations that he is a mercenary because of his private involvement in African conflicts. The Texas-based DynCorp International has been another big winner, with more than $1 billion in contracts to provide personnel to train Iraqi police forces, while Blackwater USA has won $750 million in State Department contracts alone for "diplomatic security."
At present, an American or a British Special Forces veteran working for a private security company in Iraq can make $650 a day. At times the rate has reached $1,000 a day; the pay dwarfs many times over that of active duty troops operating in the war zone wearing a U.S. or U.K. flag on their shoulder instead of a corporate logo.
"We got [tens of thousands of] contractors over there, some of them making more than the Secretary of Defense," House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Penn.) recently remarked. "How in the hell do you justify that?" In part, these contractors do mundane jobs that traditionally have been performed by soldiers. Some require no military training, but involve deadly occupations, such as driving trucks through insurgent-controlled territory.
Others are more innocuous, like cooking food or doing laundry on a base, but still court grave risk because of regular mortar and rocket attacks.
These services are provided through companies like KBR and Fluor and through their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But many other private personnel are also engaged in armed combat and "security" operations. They interrogate prisoners, gather intelligence, operate rendition flights, protect senior occupation officials and, in at least one case, have commanded U.S. and international troops in battle.
In a revealing admission, Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing Bush's troop "surge," said earlier this year that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq by "contract security." At least three U.S. commanding generals, not including Petraeus, 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 Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating war contractors.
"Maybe the precedent was the British and the Hessians in the American Revolution. Maybe that's the last time and needless to say, they lost. But I'm thinking that there's no democratic control and there's no intention to have democratic control here."
The implications are devastating. Joseph Wilson says, "In the absence of international consensus, the current Bush administration relied on a coalition of what I call the co-opted, the corrupted and the coerced: those who benefited financially from their involvement, those who benefited politically from their involvement and those few who determined that their relationship with the United States was more important than their relationship with anybody else. And that's a real problem because there is no underlying international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this action that we've taken."
Moreover, this revolution means the United States no longer needs to rely on its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable.
'AN ARM OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'
During his confirmation hearings in the Senate this past January, Petraeus praised the role of private forces, claiming they compensate for an overstretched military. Petraeus told the senators that combined with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission."
Taken together with Petraeus's recent assertion that the surge would run into mid-2009, this means a widening role for mercenaries and other private forces in Iraq is clearly on the table for the foreseeable future.
"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.
"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."
Privatized forces are also politically expedient for many governments. Their casualties go uncounted, their actions largely unmonitored and their crimes unpunished. Indeed, four years into the occupation, there is no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law - military or civilian being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts. And no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts because in 2004 the U.S. occupying authority granted them complete immunity.
"These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. "They charge whatever they want with impunity. There's no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are."
That raises the crucial question: what exactly are they doing in Iraq in the name of the U.S. and U.K. governments? Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a leading member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which is responsible for reviewing sensitive national security issues, explained the difficulty of monitoring private military companies on the U.S. payroll: "If I want to see a contract, I have to go up to a secret room and look at it, can't take any notes, can't take any notes out with me, you know - essentially, I don't have access to those contracts and even if I did, I couldn't tell anybody about it."
'A MARKETPLACE FOR WARFARE'
On the Internet, numerous videos have spread virally, showing what appear to be foreign mercenaries using Iraqis as target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Despite these incidents and the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to possessing child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.
Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed - 64 on murder-related charges alone - but not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today." International diplomats say Iraq has demonstrated a new U.S. model for waging war; one which poses a creeping threat to global order.
"To outsource security-related, military related issues to non-government, non-military forces is a source of great concern and it caught many governments unprepared," says Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran U.N. diplomat, who served as head of the U.N. Iraq mission before the U.S. invasion.
In Iraq, the United States has used its private sector allies to build up armies of mercenaries many lured from impoverished countries with the promise of greater salaries than their home militaries can pay. That the home governments of some of these private warriors are opposed to the war itself is of little consequence.
"Have gun, will fight for paycheck" has become a globalized law.
"The most worrying aspect is that these forces are outside parliamentary control. They come from all over and they are answerable to no one except a very narrow group of people and they come from countries whose governments may not even know in detail that they have actually been contracted as a private army into a war zone," says von Sponeck.
"If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue rather than a political issue involving a debate in the countries.
You are also marginalizing governmental control over whether or not this should take place, should happen and, if so, in what size and shape. It's a very worrying new aspect of international relations. I think it becomes more and more uncontrollable by the countries of supply."
In Iraq, for example, hundreds of Chilean mercenaries have been deployed by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that Chile, as a rotating member of the U.N. Security Council, opposed the invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the Chileans are alleged to have been seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.
"There is nothing new, of course, about the relationship between politics and the economy, but there is something deeply perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries," says Chilean sociologist Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who was tortured under Pinochet's regime.
"This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs - third world mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world - and maximize benefits. In other words, let others fight the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all."
NEW WORLD DISORDER
The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit the world's poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the conflict, and use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This allows the conquering power to hold down domestic casualties - the single-greatest impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed, in Iraq, more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties.
In Iraq, many companies are run by Americans or Britons and have well-trained forces drawn from elite military units for use in sensitive actions or operations. But down the ranks, these forces are filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals. Indeed, some 118,000 of the estimated 180,000 contractors are Iraqis, and many mercenaries are reportedly ill-paid, poorly equipped and barely trained Iraqi nationals.
The mercenary industry points to this as a positive: we are giving Iraqis jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a private corporation hired by a hostile invading power.
Doug Brooks, the head of the Orwellian named mercenary trade group, the International Peace Operations Association, argued from early on 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-fiftieth 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, it is the same corporate model of relying on cheap labor in destitute nations to staff their uber-profitable operations. The giant multinationals also argue they are helping the economy by hiring locals, even if it's at starvation wages.
"Donald Rumsfeld's masterstroke, and his most enduring legacy, was to bring the corporate branding revolution of the 1990s into the heart of the most powerful military in the world," says Naomi Klein, whose upcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, explores these themes.
"We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army. Much as with so-called hollow corporations like Nike, billions are spent on military technology and design in rich countries while the manual labor 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, the U.S. and U.K. governments could give the public perception of a withdrawal of forces and just privatize the occupation. Indeed, shortly after former British Prime Minister 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."
THE SPY WHO BILLED ME
While Iraq currently dominates the headlines, private war and intelligence companies are expanding their already sizable footprint. The U.S. government in particular is now in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. According to a recent report in Vanity Fair, the government pays contractors as much as the combined taxes paid by everyone in the United States with incomes under $100,000, meaning "more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to [contractors] rather than to the [government]."
Some of this outsourcing is happening in sensitive sectors, including the intelligence community. "This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community," says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. "My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It's outrageous."
RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private contractors and U.S. intelligence, recently obtained documents from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000. Currently that spending represents 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to private companies.
Perhaps it is no surprise then that the current head of the DNI is Mike McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry's lobbying arm. Hillhouse also revealed that one of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence documents, the Presidential Daily Briefing, is prepared in part by private companies, despite having the official seal of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
"Let's say a company is frustrated with a government that's hampering its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning intelligence on that government's suspected collaboration with terrorists would quickly get the White House's attention and could be used to shape national policy," Hillhouse argues.
MUTLINATIONAL MERCENARIES
Empowered by their new found prominence, mercenary forces are increasing their presence on other battlefields: in Latin America, DynCorp International is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries under the guise of the "war on drugs" - U.S. defense contractors are receiving nearly half the $630 million in U.S. 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 U.N. peacekeeping budget (this has been true since at least the early 1990s and probably much earlier). Heavily armed mercenaries were deployed to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while proposals are being considered to privatize the U.S. 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 U.N. and African Union peace operations than all but a handful of countries." Von Sponeck says he believes the use of such companies in warfare should be barred and has harsh words for the institution for which he spent his career working: "The United Nations, including the U.N. Secretary General, should react to this and instead of reacting, they are mute, they are silent."
This unprecedented funding of such enterprises, primarily by the U.S. and U.K. governments, means that powers once the exclusive realm of nations are now in the hands of private companies with loyalty only to profits, CEOs and, in the case of public companies, shareholders. And, of course, their client, whoever that may be. 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. This could allow corporations or nations with cash to spend but no real military power to hire squadrons of heavily armed and well-trained commandos.
"It raises very important issues about state and about the very power of state. The one thing the people think of as being in the purview of the government - wholly run and owned by - is the use of military power," says Rep. Jan Schakowsky. "Suddenly you've got a for-profit corporation going around the world that is more powerful than states, can effect regime possibly where they may want to go, that seems to have all the support that it needs from this administration that is also pretty adventurous around the world and operating under the cover of darkness.
"It raises questions about democracies, about states, about who influences policy around the globe, about relationships among some countries. Maybe it's their goal to render state coalitions like NATO irrelevant in the future, that they'll be the ones and open to the highest bidder. Who really does determine war and peace around the world?"
Jeremy Scahill is author of The New York Times-bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. This article appears in the current issue of The Indypendent newspaper. He can be reached at jeremy(AT)democracynow.org
40 Comments so far
Show AllUniversity of Ilinois PTI, Blackwater -- "Conflict of Commitment"?
U of I investigates cop institute director's ties to contractor
CHAMPAIGN (AP) — The University of Illinois is investigating the ties between the director of its police institute and a military contractor best known for providing security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to university officials.
Tom Dempsey, director of the university's Police Training Institute, requested a leave of absence to work for Blackwater USA two months after signing an agreement that lets the institute and the contractor swap students and staff and share facilities, university spokeswoman Robin Kaler said.
The university is investigating "a potential conflict of commitment" involving Dempsey and the contractor, Kaler said.
The home number listed for Dempsey in the university telephone directory was answered Tuesday with a recorded message indicating the line doesn't work. An e-mail sent to his university address drew an automatic reply saying he is away on vacation.
The university is trying to find out whether Dempsey was working for Blackwater when he signed the partnership agreement on May 17 and why the agreement doesn't address that, university provost Linda Katehi told the Chicago Tribune, which first reported Dempsey's ties to Blackwater.
The document, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, indicates the Police Training Institute and Blackwater will work together for five years, exchanging faculty, working with each other's students and conducting unspecified research together. Under the terms of the deal, no money will change hands.
University officials who didn't know about the agreement approved Dempsey's July 19 request for a monthlong leave of absence to go to Afghanistan to work for the contractor, according to Katehi.
University employees are required to sign a conflict of commitment document saying they don't have any outside activities that conflict with their responsibilities for the university, Kaler said.
Dempsey, a former Marine, earns more than $118,000 annually in his university post.
Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said it is against company policy to discuss employees in sensitive situations overseas. She confirmed, however, that Moyock, N.C.-based Blackwater trains Afghan police to combat the drug trade.
She said the agreement with Illinois was related only to civilian police training. The security firm is well-known for providing paramilitary personnel for U.S. war efforts.
The university's police institute trains people for jobs in the law enforcement and corrections field and is one of the largest such institutes in the country.
It is also one of five training centers in the state certified by the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board to train potential police officers, board Executive Director Tom Jurkanin said.
Any Blackwater instructor teaching courses certified by the board would need to be OK'd by the board, Jurkanin said. Similarly, Blackwater would have to apply to the board to offer certified courses, he said. Neither has happened.
But law enforcement agencies can and do send officers to courses not certified by the board, Jurkanin added.
Blackwater already owns a training center in the state.
In April it opened the 80-acre Blackwater North in Mount Carroll, about 60 miles west of Rockford. It has trained 187 people since, Tyrrell said. The site has drawn anti-war protesters.
Tyrrell said the agreement with the University of Illinois was not connected to Blackwater North, saying students trained under the university deal would only take classes in Mount Carroll if there wasn't room at the police institute in Champaign or Blackwater's North Carolina headquarters.
The agreement, she said, is "not a tool for expansion; it's a tool for heightened expertise."
__________________________________
http://www.ucimc.org/node/1674
PTI's Tom Dempsey – Martyr? Or Just Another Unethical Cop?
by nightwatch
I cribbed the headline from the News-Gazette story about the Blackwater mercenaries on the front of their Aug. 12 Sunday Commentary section. It just doesn't seem logically possible that anyone who takes a job as a mercenary could be considered a "martyr." They're doing that job for the money, not for any higher principles. If they want to get involved in a war based on personal principles, they could have stayed in the military or police work in the first place. I don't mean to suggest that most of our service members or police are martyrs either, but at least on a personal level, a few of them might qualify as martyrs. Like most citizens, I would prefer that we have fewer dead martyrs and better public policy. The Police Training Institute director, Tom Dempsey, now in the employ of the same mercenary outfit, certainly doesn't qualify as a martyr, although he does his best to spin his involvement in a growing conflict of interest between Blackwater and the University of Illinois as a noble cause in a guest commentary a few pages later.
Dempsey claims in his News-Gazette guest commentary that "I declined until recently [to respond to news reports] out of deference to university officials and to Blackwater, whose policy it is not to disclose specific information regarding contracts." Dempsey words this in such a way as to imply to the reader that it is "university officials" also don't want to disclose contract information. In fact, it is the obligation of university officials to forthrightly disclose contract information to the public. Sure, Blackwater wants to keep its often questionable practices secret. Right here we can see that Dempsey is more interested in doing Blackwater's bidding than in serving the public interest, which is his obligation as the director of PTI. Clearly, Dempsey's grasp of ethical behavior is partial at best and possibly even downright deceptive.
Dempsey states, as he has several times since the Associated Press first revealed his apparent conflict of interest, that he was not actually in the employ of Blackwater when he signed the memorandum of understanding (MOU) agreement in May tying the University of Illinois' PTI and Blackwater together. That requires further investigation beyond taking Dempsey's word for it to confirm that was in fact the case, but let's just assume that he is telling the truth about that. He still has significant ethical problems whether or not he is telling the truth on that specific point.
Dempsey goes on to state that his "temporary employment" by Blackwater in Afghanistan occurred after the MOU was signed. However, he also confirms that "Discussion concerning the current project I am involved in began long before the MOU was approved by the board of trustees." Here is where his argument really starts to break down. The law governing ethical behavior by state employees applies, not just to direct violations of conflict of interest, but is designed to help state employees to avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. Clearly, once he states that his discussions about his "summer job" with Blackwater began before the signing of the MOU he negotiated, it leaves open the question that Blackwater and he had worked out a quid pro quo about the Blackwater contract he is now working under in Afghanistan. Maybe he wasn't actually in Blackwater's employ at the time the MOU was signed, as he states. But one can't help but wonder, since he does indicate he'd begun discussions about his Afghanistan contract before then, that those discussion almost certainly included something about how much he would be paid and how to pull it off without attracting attention to this obvious conflict of interest and commitment.
This problematic formulation of Dempsey's is further reinforced when he claims that he "submitted the required Report of Non-University Activity" and his vacation request to travel to Afghanistan to work for Blackwater for university approval. Both were approved, as he states, but other reporting indicates that those approving his requests knew nothing about the MOU he'd previously negotiated between PTI and Blackwater, which then became his vacation employer. Given that the university, for whatever reason, had decided to suppress information about the PTI/Blackwater MOU, the officials who approved his Report of Non-University Activity and vacation were certainly not aware of the possible chicanery already afoot. Dempsey also needs to take some responsibility for this oversight, since the ethical thing to do would have been full disclosure, which he apparently did not do in those requests. Moreover, it also seems that the investigation of Dempsey should include who else among the university administration or on the Board of Trustees facilitated the secrecy about the MOU that prevailed before the Associated Press blew the cover off this mess. If the MOU had been openly disclosed, Dempsey might have thought twice about his vacation job or the officials who approved his requests might have denied them as inappropriate.
Dempsey also avoids the biggest question of all, even if he is pure as the driven snow up to this point. How, after being employed by Blackwater, can he return to his position as director of PTI and then administer the MOU he signed between the university and Blackwater, once having been employed by them? There can be no doubt that such a situation will place him quite squarely into a conflict of interest.
Dempsey goes on to emphasize the noble nature of his work as part of a team, which included a U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency retiree and others with "international narcotics experience" in Afghanistan. Ironically, it is the DEA's training and facilitation that often sets local nationals up in positions of power. In nearly every case in which the DEA or its contractors provide such boosts to the careers of local "drug war" officials, it also facilitates their corruption, as these officials then are plied with bribes to influence them to look the other way in relation to major drug traffickers.
The prisons of Afghanistan, like those in Colombia, Lebanon, Pakistan, and even the United States itself, will soon be filled with lower level "mules" and other bit part players, as such U.S. "drug war" assistance is unlikely to have much effect on the level of drug trafficking or on the major players involved. In fact, such work in Afghanistan has been disrupted by the ongoing war (that Blackwater also profits from), which has actually led to a vast expansion of opium production, even though the country was already the source of 90% of the world's opium prior to the 2001 U.S. invasion. Once again, the "drug war" has proven to be a great jobs program for white males looking for a lucrative position, but a total failure as public policy. In fact, until Iraq came along, the "drug war" was the most costly lost U.S. war since Vietnam. Is it any wonder that the foremost advocates of the "drug war" are the mostly white police and prison guards who benefit from the job security it provides them, even as it fosters the violence of blackmarkets and acts as a price support mechanism for organized crime?
Returning to Illinois, why should we care? It's because PTI provides a significant source of the state-required training for many of those recruited by local police departments. No officer can remain employed in an Illinois police department unless they complete such training in a timely manner. PTI also writes much of the curriculum for the other police training schools that supplement its own direct police training role in Illinois. Yet the director of PTI seems fairly clueless about state ethics requirements, which require not only that he have no direct conflict of interest – which may or may not be the case, pending a full investigation of Dempsey's story – but also require that even the appearance of a conflict of interest be avoided. It's seems clear that Tom Dempsey has not met that standard nor is he capable of assuring the public that he can convey the necessity of ethical conduct to the officers he is responsible for training. It is also obvious that Dempsey cannot return to resume his directorship of PTI now that he has both signed a MOU with and been employed by the Blackwater mercenary corporation. Dempsey has brought into question whether the Illinois police officers trained under his watch have a proper grasp of what is – and is not – ethical behavior. The fish always rots from the head. For him to continue as director of PTI would only exacerbate existing questions about the ethics of those doing police work in Illinois.
Corporate fascism has taken on new meaning with the rise of American mercenary armies. Keep your powder dry !
As i've said many times, in the eyes of the Military Industrial Complex, Oil conglomerates, and Bankers etc Iraq has been a tremendous victory.
When are people going to realize that these people don't care about the human losses and human suffering they cause? it's not even a cost of doing business. It's nothing, it's written off.
Let alone they don't care about the public opinion and will of both the America and Iraqi peoples.... doesn't matter to them. They do not care.
And people can kick, scream, protest etc all they want- the corperations, and their corperate government still don't care.
In the 70s, a rogue military fellow in Denmark drew up a detailed 40 page plan on how to stage a coup against the gov't with a "few hundred" personnel. The idjit got caught because he tried to offer it to the Russians and the Danish Communist Party.
Thing is, I wonder, if a "few hundred" can (possibly) coup a country with a population of five million, how many would it take for a country the size of the US? My guess, because of redundency it would take a lot less than simply multiplying by how many times larger our population is than the Dane's -- my guess is between 30 and 50 thousand.
When I was growing up war was something that happened every 200 hundred pages or so in a history book. Today war has been incorporated into our daily lives and into business. So, it's not surprising that The United States of Everything is the major instigator and promoter of war today. It's great for their economy, they think.
Hoa binh
The author notes above that mercenaries were dispatched to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, there is no reason to assume they were dispatched to maintain order, it's every bit as possible their mission was to foment anarchy and sabotage the levee system. The stories of the snipers in the aftermath of Katrina have always reeked of being a black-op designed to shift the blame for the anarchy in New Orleans on the locals instead of the complete breakdown of any functioning government.
There is still no explanation on why or under whose authority caravans of bass fishermen with their bass boats in tow were turned away from volunteering to rescue the stranded in New Orleans. A modern bass boat would have been 10 times more efficient at rescuing those stranded than the multi-million dollar helicopters of the Coast Guard were winching people off the roofs one at a time. The stopping of the volunteers looks like evidence the aftermath of Katrina was designed to inflect the most pain possible on the residents of New Orleans
Iraq was to have been the neocon test lab for a society where corporations hold the ultimate power over both citizens and the government with the American army having the monopoly on violence. The Iraqi people broke the American monopoly on violence with the insurgency and the American people aren't thrilled that the cakewalk they'd been promised has turned into another Vietnam.
The use of contractors in Iraq is the logical extension of transferring power from the people to the elite, bypassing quaint restrictions like the Geneva Conventions.
The history channel just played "Gestapo". It's chilling to see that Hitler recruited and trained a private "police force" which he initially sent into Poland to harass, arrest, torture and kill all the "peace activists" "agitators" and "intellectuals", before he sent in the army.
Look out, stay strong, and CYA!
namvet67 August 13th, 2007 2:48 pm
We are rapidly being brainwashed and programmed into being a nationalistic, imperial, and military culture.
Much like how the Roman public, manipulated and uninformed about the world outside of Rome (living in the bubble that was Rome) was also largely brainwashed, timid, apathetic, paranoid, fearful, and insecure.
Get used to this type of an imperial foreign policy, passiveness and embracement of empire by the American public. My question is, if the corperate powers that be want an Imperial America, why are they so intent on it failing miserably so soon? My best guess is their true intent is the creation of a New World Order style of imperialism, and a World Government- rule/control of the MANY by rule of the few. Such a centralized vacuum of power is the true goal of the corperations.
The new government will certainly have the Carlyle Group as an integral part.They may let HIllary win the presidency in 2008, but she is really a republican. I have always said that Bill Clinton wasn't too bad a Republican president. NAFTA anybody?
I am frightened for my grandchildren and may ask my son and his wife to move to another country. I'm too damn old and broke to move.
In the the beginning of the Iraq invasion/occupation (I won't call it war) the administration sent in the mercs to avoid having a draft which would have quickly set the US people against the policy. One should keep in mind that only a fraction of the listed number of contractors are for real mercenaries. Even so, the idea of a well armed and financed military group based in the US and loyal only to those who pay them gives me an uneasy feeling.
Most of this info is covered in a great documentary:
IRAQ FOR SALE
the war profiteers
http://iraqforsale.org/
What happens when a new group of oligarchs try to succeed at trying what was tried in 1933 against FDR. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
For a good BBC radio piece on the plot:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml
Is it any wonder our troops are demoralozed?
Our troops get the dirty jobs and know the mercenaries earn more in a month than they are paid in a year.
Is it any wonder that most junior grade officers are leaving the military. They can get a job doing the same thing and earn from $600 to a $1,000 a day.
This is the legacy of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other architects of the global war on terror:
Break down, and then blur wherever possible, the traditional distinctions between soldier and civilian, citizen and spy, military and paramilitary, war and law enforcement, public service and the private sector. Let's just rebrand the endeavor good guys versus enemy combatants, and see what shakes out.
The more those lines get blurred, the greater is the ability for the Rambos at the bottom of the command heirarchy and the entrepreneurial true believers at the top to regularly run amok - and make a buck - without fear of personal accountability.
As Jeremy Scahill, Joe Wilson, and others now increasingly point out, half of the neo-colonial occupation forces on the ground in Iraq are civilian contractors, not active duty US soldiers that are subject to military orders, military training, and military discipline. This privatization of the American occupation "security presence" on the ground mirrors the rise of the various self-contained, interrelated indigenous Iraqi militias, death squads, criminal gangs, and rival black ops groups that are similarly running amok. No shit, the center cannot hold.
If Congress can't bring itself to cut funds for the troops, why not instead end the occupation by just cutting the funds for the contractors (and order up an audit to be completed in 6 months)?
Regardless, the greatest fear of course is that this restructuring is consciously designed to keep active duty US casualties at a level "acceptable enough" to the American public that a majority evolves to see such continuous, low intensity urban military conflict as a regretable but necessary fact of life for maintenance of Pax Americana.
Yet even if the public is not yet so numbed to violence that we watch the evening news from Baghdad and Kabul the way the Brits used to keep tabs with bemused detachment on the latest uprising somewhere in the outer reaches of their empire where the sun never sets, what sort of an attitude, mindset, and political orientation do you think these Blackwater types will bring back stateside with them, if the antiwar movement can eventually force an end to the Iraq debacle?
I'll bet a lot wind up on the payroll of Homeland Security. And even more will consider themselves loyal and beholden for life to the militarist wing of Karl Rove's GOP base.
Bill from Saginaw
oh!! goody-goody-goody
the gladiators have arrived..
maybe time to buy a tv..
watch the mercenary super bowl
and of course all
the very kool advertisements..
You won't really have a feel for what our billions have paid for until the American People get fed up and take to the streets.
Then you will see Blackwater et al., at their worst. You saw just a tiny taste of it in New Orleans. That was a practice run. Remember, these guys have all the hardware that the regulars have, plus more that, so far, we aren't allowed to use. How about that "pain ray" for crowd control, for instance? And, of course, they have gun ships and all the rest of it, ready to go. I imagine the various gases and chemicals that our "non-existent" bio-war labs have been developing will find their way into the mercenary arms locker, too.
I imagine a couple of towns turned into Falluja replicas will quiet the American populace down quickly. Hopefully We the People will just go underground like the Iraqi resistance, but who knows?
With all the surveillance equipment and cameras going in, it will be difficult indeed for people to survive and protest, once it is all in place.
And then there is the Halliburton/KBR concentration camps, staffed by nice Blackwater prison guards.
Yes, we'll get our money's worth, but without the Vasaline.
Although, as a progressive, I have reservations about the activities of these private "contractors", I must say that there's a lot to say for 'Public Private Initiatives' of this kind. We've seen time and time again that private sector management is more effective and responsive than the lumpen jobsworth mentality seen in nationalized industries. The huge difference in pay (bewteen the 'liberalized' military and the 'conventional' military) is surely an indication that the private sector is getting something right. I disagreed with the war strongly at the outset but now we are there I think we should knuckle down and pull together. If privatization is what it takes to unlock creativity and ensure that those involved are results-oriented, then so be it. War is an ugly business and, broadly speaking, I take exception to it like everyone else here at Common Dreams.
Sooner or later, natives will declare war on mercs and, because said mercs kill only for cash, not God or country, those who don't run for the hills will be slaughtered and/or caught, tried, and jailed for crimes that are crimes whether Cheneybush force the host country to pretend they aren't.
And God help any mercs who dare to turn their hired guns on Americans - we got 200 million weapons, and we won't be defending ourselves for dollars.
SOEHARTO has recently crawled out and is spewing his neo-con propaganda. Here he is again. Progressive? Wow, cudda fooled me. Time to change your posting name SOEHARTO, we know what you are.
JConrad said: "Corporate fascism has taken on new meaning with the rise of American mercenary armies. Keep your powder dry !"
THAT is why we need respect for the 2nd Amendment.
Here is just one outlandish example of many, of what private contractors are doing for us with our tax dollar$ soeharto. A sub copntractor of Halliburton, takes care of the laundry for our military. For each little sack of clothing they wash and dry, WE pay them $90.00.
Why should we pay $600 a day for a truck driver and another like ammount or more for his or her patner riding shotgun? They are being paid that daily, if they only deliver one truck load a month.
Bull shit, Halliburton pays them that ammount, but you can bet the company gets ten times that ammount to pocket and use some of the cash to pay off politicians.
All this is made possible by a limp dick Congress by means of the coercion of taxpayers. Congress itself can't specify where the money goes, and what the people know about all this is certain retribution from armed thugs if they fail to file their 1040's and otherwise support the grand rotten con game called the US Government.
If the Congress will not exercise the power of the purse, the people should, and they can do this legally by creating a groundswell for the election of Ron Paul.
The Democrat & Republican labels are meaningless. The US Government apparatus is so far beyond the control of the people it purports to serve that the people must starve it of funds and begin the process of dismantling it and exposing it to the light of day.
This military/industrial/congressional complex called the US Government bears little ressemblance to the government described in the US Constitution. It can't be reformed. It murdered its own people on 911 as the pretext for a campaign of wholesale murder in the Moslem countries. The people are denied all significant information about its operations. It can't be worked with, it has to be taken apart and the cancerous growths surgically removed.
The election of a principled Constitutionalist like Ron Paul can be the start of this deconstruction process. Forget about parties and political labels, conservative or liberal. Forget about ideologies. Elect a candidate who will confront this monster on Constitutional principle. It must first of all be de-fanged and de-clawed. It is a clear and present danger to the American people and the people of the world.
Which probably implies that the contractors are doing a better job than the regular armed forces that are now scraping the bottom of the barrel.
This is both a capitalist dream and perpetual motion: the military destroys it then business rebuilds it.
Massive amounts of money is made selling arms then heaps more is made in construction projects and infrastructure renewal.
And the best thing is there are lots more countries to invade!
"...recently obtained documents from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000.
My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It's outrageous."
We can say the same about our government, of, by and for the corporate agenda.
In addition to a Congress which for years has abdicated its "oversight" responsibilites and powers while trying to persuade the American people that its members have a "prerogative" and not a "consitutional duty" to oversee the spending of our tax dollars, this branch of government has undermined the people it is suposed to represent and has handed the Executive Branch increasing dictatorial power.
As Ulysses s. Grant said at the start of the Civil War: "There are but two parties now, traitors and patriots."
We must restore Constitutional Government!
Soeharto,
The slogan, "Private industry can do it better and cheeper than the Government" is just a slogan. It is not a fact.
The neocons are very clever at creating meaningless slogans: "War on terror", Support the troops", "Health forests", "Clear skies", "They hate us for our freedoms", etc. These slogans work to push the right buttons in people who don't think too hard about stuff.
If anything, these slogans are backed by action which is the opposite of what the slogan suggests.
KEM PATRICK August 13th, 2007 8:44 pm
"SOEHARTO has recently crawled out and is spewing his neo-con propaganda. Here he is again. Progressive? Wow, cudda fooled me. Time to change your posting name SOEHARTO, we know what you are."
Notice how Soheharto frequently starts his/her comments by saying, "as a progressive"........
Too funny!
The greatest shame of the Bush fiasco may very well be the privitizing of warfare. Giving a profit motive to war is the lowest form of.......frankly I can't think of a term that express's my contempt and lothing for this concept.
War is the most terrible place a human being can go and for someone to profit from these kids deaths and injuries.........I'll make an exception of the death penalty here, find a good wall.
I apologize for a 2nd. posting........but I missed this
We've seen time and time again that private sector management is more effective and responsive than the lumpen jobsworth mentality seen in nationalized industries.
When exactly has private industry been better at government funtions? Attempts at privitization of welfare delivery, deregulation of eletrical service,Child protective services, IRS collection, etc have all been utter disasters. Where exactly are the sucess's you tout?
The sub-contractors in Iraq and Afganistan are doing a better job than the militay they replaced? You are talking to different officers than I am. The body armor fiasco wasn't an uncommon occurence.
No wonder the Iraq War is costing so many billions of dollars. Those mercenaries are paid big bucks while the regular soldiers and their families limp along on Army pay.
I think it's important to remember that many of these "mercs" cook food, wash clothes, set up housing, drive trucks... I would like to see an actual count of private combat troops.
"I think it's important to remember that many of these "mercs" cook food, wash clothes, set up housing, drive trucks… I would like to see an actual count of private combat troops"
Probably only a few thousand actual "security forces". As you said, the vast majority of these contractors are doing construction, driving trucks, etc...
The result of this privatized was is to have overpriced contractors doing things that the military used to do at a MUCH higher price. This is one of the reasons that this war costs $10 billion per MONTH.
Not enough troops, no problem, we will just hire truck drivers, security and Haliburton at 10 times the cost to do the job. Our Republican business owner friends will be so grateful they will contribute much more to the GOP.
When those mercenaries come home they will be hired to continue their work and turn America into its Iraqi equivalent.
All this waste of blood and treasure to destroy a nation and NOT EVEN show signs of any capacity to rebuild it... its like throwing things into a black hole. "Christians" like the dear "Prince" owner/CEO of Blackwater may get rich but what he is sacrificing on the soul level for this debacles would stun the imagination of anyone sane or moral. My sincerest hope is that this banquet of senseless waste bolstered up by one false slogan after another will TRULY wean the world of war. Tragic for those in the front lines, but even the rest of us spectators see the depravity in a way history's countless examples may never have brought home with this level of vivid recoil.
"Giving a profit motive to war is the lowest form of..."
War is always fought for profit. Whether for profit in material resources or profit in power. War is the health of the state and its friends. This has always been the case and always will be.
"I must say that there's a lot to say for 'Public Private Initiatives' of this kind..."
The idea of a "public/private initiative" is a defining characteristic of economic fascism. There is nothing private about blackwater or any other 'business' that exists solely due to state funding. A truly private enterprise exists solely at the discretion of the consumers, since it survives and operates solely on funds obtained VOLUNTARILY from them.
Blackwater and the myriad other members of the military/industrial complex exist solely to serve the government and its ends. They are not in any way the natural outcome of a voluntary market process.
This idea of public/private partnerships permeates the entire economy of the US. The apologists for the present order wrap the current system of corporatism/corporate cronyism/fascism/state capitalism in the rhetoric of freedom and free markets and do their utmost to hide the fact that what exists today has absolutely nothing to do with free markets. It is of course no surprise then that the opponents of modern state capitalism confuse the present reality for 'free markets' and display such hostility toward the ideas of real liberty and real freedom.
The world has never seen a truly free market and perhaps never will. A free society is the antithesis of the present order, and strikes fear in the hearts of the corporatist elites, for they know that without the ability to 'legitimately' use violence, or the threat of it, via the state, their artificial dominance of the world would swiftly crumble before their eyes. It is of course then in their interest to build an army of hired apologists and syncophants to praise the virtues of the present 'free market'.
I believe there are 40,000 combat "mercs" in Iraq. The rest are truck drivers, cooks, janitors, etc....
Voting for an individual in the next election (no matter who that individual may be) will not fix the problem either; whether it be Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich. They (our Oligarch rulers) will just assassinate them (like they did John and Robert Kennedy) or put them in the Antarctica of Politics (like they did Jimmy Carter).
What Americans need to do is amend the Constitution to make it more like Switzerlands. The people should have the right to vote on important issues in this country and they should have the right to recall their elected officials at anytime when they are not representing the people. The People should have the final say in any important law that is passed (you think NAFTA would have passed if the American people had voted on it?).
And if the government will not allow We the People to amend the Constitution (there is no provision for people to make laws) than the People need to overthrow this government and start all over from scratch.
Mr. Military-Industrial complex
We'd like to have you meet................MR. KUCINICH
Contractors, trained at public expense to eventually provide security{at a lower rate} for the financial elite in their "in country green zones". They're safe; your not.
Yeah, looks like Kucinich is the only guy with the guts to speak truth to power...
____________
Folks, it doesn't take thousands of troops to pull off a coup d'etat, it just took a handful of justices on the Supreme Court. We have all witnessed the destruction the new regime has wrought lo, these last 6 tears (I mean 'years'; that was quite a slip!)
entelechy:
"When those mercenaries come home they will be hired to continue their work and turn America into its Iraqi equivalent."
Precisely.
You'd better believe they'll try to bitch slap the gov't figurines into submission, and succeed.
What it always boils down to in the end is survival in the rawest forms. It will likely end up being over literal food and shelter. Either the corps. starve us into submission or we them. Observe some historical failed states of the past, especially the empires. When the populus defies the authority, it rarely comes to pass until they are starving.
It is still true in much of the world today. The idea of starving the criminal corporate government is to stop giving our blessing (to them the $$ is mana rom heaven).
Get some ideas and do it, like Thoreau suggests you should.