The Democrats and U.S. Mercenaries in Iraq
by Jeremy
Scahill
"It's estimated 126,000 private military ‘contractors'
will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war."
This article originally appeared in TomDispatch.com.
The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing
up for a great sell-out on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124
billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a
"show down" or "war" with the White House, it is hardly
that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the anti-war
electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the Congressional
leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation,
even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that "this war is lost."
For months, the Democrats' "withdrawal" plan has
come under fire from opponents of the occupation who say it doesn't stop the
war, doesn't defund it, and insures that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will
remain in Iraq beyond President Bush's second term. Such concerns were
reinforced by Sen. Barack Obama's recent declaration that the Democrats will not
cut off funding for the war, regardless of the President's policies. "Nobody,"
he said, "wants to play chicken with our troops."
As the New
York Times reported, "Lawmakers said they expect that Congress and
Mr. Bush would eventually agree on a spending measure without the specific
timetable" for (partial) withdrawal, which the White House has said would
"guarantee defeat." In other words, the appearance of a fierce debate
this week, Presidential veto and all, has largely been a show with a
predictable outcome.
The Shadow War in Iraq
While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing
fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature
of this unpopular war - and most Americans will know next to nothing about it.
Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does
almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq - and it's not the
British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors"
who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.
The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by
occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and
the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political
ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive
corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers,
partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use
of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit
from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.
"Partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage
for the increased use of private military companies."
From the beginning, these contractors have been a major
hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and
absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq. While many of
them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the
sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once
was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in
military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability
Office, there are now some 48,000
employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I.
Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month
what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors
over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said
House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in
the hell do you justify that?"
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman
Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been
spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -
with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for
"logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence
Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the
occupation has gone to war contractors.
With such massive government payouts, there is little
incentive for these companies to minimize their footprint in the region and
every incentive to look for more opportunities to profit - especially if, sooner
or later, the "official" U.S. presence shrinks, giving the public a
sense of withdrawal, of a winding down of the war. Even if George W. Bush were
to sign the legislation the Democrats have passed, their plan "allows the
President the leeway to escalate the use of military security contractors
directly on the battlefield," Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy
Studies points out. It would "allow the President to continue the war
using a mercenary army."
The crucial role of contractors in continuing the occupation
was driven home in January when David Petraeus, the general running the
President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as
essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he
claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels
available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge,
the "tens
of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the
Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the
mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted
that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but
"secured by contract security."
Such widespread use of contractors, especially in
mission-critical operations, should have raised red flags among lawmakers.
After a trip to Iraq last month, Retired Gen. Barry McCaffery observed bluntly,
"We are overly dependant on civilian contractors. In extreme danger - they
will not fight." It is, however, the political rather than military uses
of these forces that should be cause for the greatest concern.
Contractors have provided the White House with political
cover, allowing for a back-door near doubling of U.S. forces in Iraq through
the private sector, while masking the full extent of the human costs of the occupation.
Although contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770
contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700
injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the
war. More significantly, there is absolutely 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.
Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an
edict, known as Order
17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is
like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of
unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the
world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq,
immunity and impunity are welded together.
"Order 17 immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq."
Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through
Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses,
only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged
with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the
possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.
While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed - 64 on
murder-related charges - 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.
As one armed contractor recently informed the Washington
Post, "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some
reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they
would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the
middle of the night." According to another, U.S. contractors in Iraq had
their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."
Funding the Mercenary War
"These private contractors are really an arm of the
administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis 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."
Until now, this situation has largely been the doing of a
Republican-controlled Congress and White House. No longer.
"The Democrats' approach plays into the agendas of both
the White House and the war contractors."
While some Congressional Democrats have publicly expressed
grave concerns about the widespread use of these private forces and a handful
have called for their withdrawal, the party leadership has done almost nothing
to stop, or even curb, the use of mercenary corporations in Iraq. As it stands,
the Bush administration and the industry have little to fear from Congress on this
score, despite the unseating of the Republican majority.
On two central fronts, accountability and funding, the
Democrats' approach has been severely flawed, playing into the agendas of both
the White House and the war contractors. Some Democrats, for instance, are
pushing accountability legislation that would actually require more U.S.
personnel to deploy to Iraq as part of an FBI Baghdad "Theater
Investigative Unit" that would supposedly monitor and investigate
contractor conduct. The idea is: FBI investigators would run around Iraq,
gather evidence, and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and
prosecutions in U.S. civilian courts.
This is a plan almost certain to backfire, if ever
instituted. It raises a slew of questions: Who would protect the investigators?
How would Iraqi victims be interviewed? How would evidence be gathered amid the
chaos and dangers of Iraq? Given that the federal government and the military seem
unable - or unwilling - even to count how many contractors are actually in the
country, how could their activities possibly be monitored? In light of the
recent Bush administration scandal over the eight fired US attorneys, serious
questions remain about the integrity of the Justice Department. How could we
have any faith that real crimes in Iraq, committed by the employees of
immensely well-connected crony corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton,
would be investigated adequately?
Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to
effectively monitor 126,000 or more private contractors under the best of
conditions in the world's most dangerous war zone, this legislation would give
the industry a tremendous PR victory. Once it was passed as the law of the
land, the companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure
governed their operations. Yet they would be well aware that such legislation
would be nearly impossible to enforce.
"It would be impossible to effectively monitor 126,000 or
more private contractors in the world's most dangerous war zone."
Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the
Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has
pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military
court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
The IPOA called
the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act - essentially
the Democrats' oversight plan - "the most cogent approach to ensuring
greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement
alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.
Then there is the issue of continued funding for the
privatized shadow forces in Iraq. As originally passed in the House, the
Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15%
or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military
operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management
improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments."
As it stood, this was a stunningly insufficient plan, given
ongoing events in Iraq. But even that mild provision was dropped by the
Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the
contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold - not cut - 15% of total
day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their
deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In
essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will
simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.
However obfuscated by discussions of accountability, fiscal
responsibility, and oversight, the gorilla of a question in the Congressional
war room is: Should the administration be allowed to use mercenary forces,
whose livelihoods depend on war and conflict, to help fight its battles in
Iraq?
Rep. Murtha says, "We're trying to bring accountability
to an unaccountable war." But it's not accountability that the war needs;
it needs an end.
By sanctioning the administration's continuing use of
mercenary corporations - instead of cutting off all funding to them - the
Democrats leave the door open for a future escalation of the shadow war in Iraq.
This, in turn, could pave the way for an array of secretive, politically
well-connected firms that have profited tremendously under the current
administration to elevate their status and increase their government paychecks.
Blackwater's War
Consider the case of Blackwater
USA.
A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its
"diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State
Department alone, total more than $750 million.
Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's
well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. 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" center just miles from the Iranian
border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in
New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the
American taxpayer, billing
$950 a day per Blackwater contractor.
Since September 11, 2001, the company has invested its
lucrative government pay-outs in building an impressive private army. At
present, it 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 near the
Great Dismal Swamp of 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 armored vehicle (nicknamed the
"Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.
"Blackwater's founder has talked of creating a ‘contractor
brigade' to support US military operations."
The man behind this empire is Erik Prince, a secretive,
conservative Christian, ex-Navy SEAL multimillionaire who bankrolls the
President and his allies with major campaign contributions. Among Blackwater's
senior executives are 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.
For years, Blackwater's operations have been shrouded in
secrecy. Emboldened by the culture of impunity enjoyed by the private sector in
the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater's founder
has talked of creating a "contractor brigade" to support US military
operations and fancies his forces the "FedEx" of the "national
security apparatus."
As the country debates an Iraq withdrawal, Congress owes it
to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow
forces that undergird the U.S. public deployment in Iraq. The President likes
to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of
the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for
politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the
occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it
possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.
Jeremy Scahill is the author
of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater:
The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a
Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.
Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill