WHEN Congress reconvenes today, it should take a close look at how the Bush administration is paying billions of taxpayer dollars to private military contractors.

The biggest beneficiary is Halliburton, which was headed by Dick Cheney until 2000, when he resigned to run for vice president with George W. Bush.

Halliburton has received $1.7 billion in no-bid contracts for work in Iraq, and is set to get hundreds of millions more in the near future, The Washington Post reported last week.

Halliburton and its subsidiary, Brown and Root, also earned $183 million from U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan.

But this is not simply about private military contractors getting rich from taxpayer dollars. The use of PMFs (private military firms) — some of which provide mercenaries for actual combat missions — raises deeper questions.

To whom are their workers accountable — America, or to their private employers?

To whom must PMFs explain their activities? Are they accountable to Congress and the American people? Or do they simply have to answer to their private stockholders?

Is there any real Congressional oversight?

P.W. Singer’s pathbreaking new book, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, asks these questions and more. Singer is a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Some PMFs, like Brown and Root, provide military support services, such as delivering military equipment, preparing meals for soldiers, delivering mail and putting out oil-field fires. Others, like Military Professional Resources Inc., provide direct advice and technical support for combat operations.

Still others, like Executive Outcomes, engage in actual combat. Using former soldiers from apartheid South Africa, Executive Outcomes fought on both sides of some armed conflicts, such as the bitter battles in Angola. Some PMFs help provoke violent coups.

During the first Gulf War, one of every 100 Americans in that region worked for a PMF. Today in Iraq, one of every 10 Americans works for a private military contractor.

PMFs get hired everywhere, by all sides, as long as the employers have enough cash or unmined mineral resources. PMFs have found work in Colombia, the Congo, Bosnia, Sudan, Kuwait, Sri Lanka, New Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Equatorial Africa.

Some PMFs provide desperately needed security to humanitarian groups, to U.N. workers, to multinational corporations.

But minimal oversight can lead to problems. During the Balkan conflict, private employees of DynCorp., most of whom are U.S. military veterans, were implicated in sex crimes, prostitution rackets and illegal arms trading.

The rapid growth of PMFs raises other troubling questions.

“Predictable power balances and deterrence relationships are now made unstable,” Singer writes. “With such diversity, it becomes more difficult to figure who exactly are the ‘good guys.’”

Singer questions the “lax and haphazard way in which governments have privatized their own military services over the last decade. The simple fact that one can outsource does not always mean one should.”

Author Singer told the Gazette he has grown even more concerned since finishing his book, published in June.

The Bush administration hired three PMFs to train military, paramilitary and police units in postwar Iraq. Facing increasing dangers and insurance payments, some private workers are beginning to back out of those commitments.

That means U.S. troops must work even harder. If they leave their posts, soldiers face military court martial. Private contractors do not.

The Bush administration also sent 200 Marines and Navy Seals to help restore order in Liberia. But privately, behind the scenes, the White House did much more, awarding an initial $10 million contract to a PMF to work in that troubled nation.

Congress should hold hearings to ask questions about this exploding industry. Peter Singer should be one of the first witnesses called to testify.

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