M
My Fellow Americans
Guest
Bush's Shadow Army
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/05/05/18410518.php
On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda
or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld
stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first
major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush.
Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as
his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting --
many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation --
Rumsfeld 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. "It disrupts the defense of the United States
and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his
new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators
of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said.
"It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift
in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy
with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this
major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience,
"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 be attacked, literally,
as a Boeing 757 -- American Airlines Flight 77 -- smashed into its
western wall.
Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies
from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize
the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his
personal war -- laid out just a day before -- on the fast track.
The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions,
sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private
contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine.
"We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that
encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave
less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists,"
Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for
Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration
in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military
revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in
November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the
"most sweeping transformation of America's global force
posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's
trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of
the most significant developments in modern warfare --
the widespread use of private contractors in every
aspect of war, including in combat.
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11
period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization.
From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of
the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an
integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave
the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was
prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into
Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army
of private contractors ever deployed in modern war.
By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an
estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq --
an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned
he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an
official part of the US war machine.
In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he
called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to
be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as
"its active and reserve military components, its civil servants,
and its contractors -- constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and
capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations
around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish
critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph
for war contractors -- conferring on them a legitimacy they had never
before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover,
allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of
public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces
shrouded in secrecy.
The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have
shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and
legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000
private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been
indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops
in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is
that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich,
one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have
marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to
be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term,
leading Democrats were announcing investigations of
runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha,
chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense,
after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said,
"We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly
what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission
and they're falling all over each other." Two days later,
during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as
Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared,
"This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey,
"Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks,
particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being
performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost
and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system
but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch
very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the
Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will
hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing
investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in
Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the
shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to
many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar,
Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and
protection within the US war apparatus. This company's
success represents the realization of the life's work of
the conservative officials who formed the core of the
Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization
has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has
repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are
part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a
legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity."
Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect
declared its forces above the law -- entitled to the immunity
from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also
not bound by the military's court martial system.
While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused
on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under
which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into
the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically
connected private army that has become the
Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian
multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince -- the scion of a
wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations
helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the
Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding,
the company largely consisted of Prince's private
fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near
the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina.
Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for
government outsourcing of firearms and related
security training." In the following years, Prince,
his family and his political allies poured money into
Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover
of Congress and the ascension of George W.Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the
Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was
not until the "war on terror" that the company's glory moment arrived.
Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would
become a central player in a global war. "I've been operating
in the training business now for four years and was starting to get
a little cynical on how seriously people took security,"
Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly shortly after 9/11.
"The phone is ringing off the hook now."
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted
Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of
US operations there. In the ensuing years the company
has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror,"
winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts,
many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince
has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres,
making it the world's largest private military base.
Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries,
with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more
than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a
private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing
surveillance blimps and target systems.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans,
where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day --
at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day.
At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from
Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued
domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division.
Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the
Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives
have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The company has applied for operating licenses in all US
coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical
presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.
Its largest obtainable government contract is with the
State Department, for providing security to US diplomats
and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with
the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq
proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two
subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad,
as well as other diplomats and occupation offices.
Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional
delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
According to the latest government contract records,
since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million
in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged
in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as
a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush
lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan,
paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there.
In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan's
regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training
the south's security forces soon.
Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials
close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among
them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at
the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11,
and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General,
who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater
during much of the "war on terror" -- something he stood accused
of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure,
powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a
Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had "quashed or
redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of
senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire,
Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.
Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated
in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its
private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja.
A mob then burned the bodies and dragged them through the streets,
stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates.
In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned.
US forces laid siege to Falluja days later, killing hundreds
of people and displacing thousands, inflaming the fierce
Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day.
For most Americans, it was the first they had heard of private soldiers.
"People began to figure out this is quite a phenomenon,"
says Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat,
who said he began monitoring the use of private contractors
after Falluja. "I'm probably like most Congress members in
kind of coming to this awareness and developing an interest
in it" after the incident.
What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja,
Blackwater executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the
company's newfound recognition. The day after the ambush,
it hired the Alexander Strategy Group, a K Street lobbying firm
run by former senior staffers of then-majority leader
Tom DeLay before the firm's meltdown in the wake of the
Jack Abramoff scandal. A week to the day after the ambush,
Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its chair,
John Warner. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting,
which included Warner and two other key Republican senators --
Appropriations Committee chair Ted Stevens of Alaska and
George Allen of Virginia. This meeting followed an earlier
series of face-to-faces Prince had had with powerful
House Republicans who oversaw military contracts.
Among them: DeLay; Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence
Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter,
chair of the House Armed Services Committee;
and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House
Appropriations Committee. What was discussed at these meetings
remains a secret. But Blackwater was clearly positioning
itself to make the most of its new fame.
Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of
the government's most valuable international security
contracts, worth more than $300 million.
The firm was also eager to stake out a role in crafting
the rules that would govern mercenaries under US contract.
"Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater's]
visibility and need to communicate a consistent message
has elevated here in Washington," said Blackwater's new
lobbyist Chris Bertelli. "There are now several federal
regulations that apply to their activities, but they are
generally broad in nature. One thing that's lacking is
an industry standard. That's something we definitely
want to be engaged in." By May Blackwater was leading a
lobbying effort by the private military industry to try to block
Congressional or Pentagon efforts to place their forces
under the military court martial system.
But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in
the "war on terror" within the Administration and the
GOP-controlled Congress, the families of the four men killed
at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater as
they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their
loved ones were killed. After what they allege was months of
effort to get straight answers from the company, the families
filed a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater
in January 2005, accusing the company of not providing the men
with what they say were contractually guaranteed safeguards.
Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja mission
that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should
have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles.
This case could have far-reaching reverberations and is being
monitored closely by the war-contractor industry -- former Halliburton
subsidiary KBR has even filed an amicus brief supporting Blackwater.
If the lawsuit is successful, it could pave the way for a
tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors find
themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured
in war zones.
As the case has made its way through the court system,
Blackwater has enlisted powerhouse Republican lawyers to defend it,
among them Fred Fielding, who was recently named by Bush
as White House counsel, replacing Harriet Miers; and
Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater prosecutor investigating
President Clinton, and the company's current counsel of record.
Blackwater has not formally debated the specific allegations
in the suit, but what has emerged in its court filings is
a series of legal arguments intended to bolster Blackwater's
contention that it is essentially above the law.
Blackwater claims that if US courts allow the company to
be sued for wrongful death, that could threaten the nation's
war-fighting capacity: "Nothing could be more destructive of
the all-volunteer, Total Force concept underlying U.S. military
manpower doctrine than to expose the private components to
the tort liability systems of fifty states, transported overseas
to foreign battlefields," the company argued in legal papers.
In February Blackwater suffered a major defeat when the
Supreme Court declined its appeal to hear the Falluja case,
paving the way for the state trial -- where there would be
no cap on damages a jury could award -- to proceed.
Congress is beginning to take an interest in this potentially
groundbreaking case. On February 7 Representative Henry Waxman
chaired hearings of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
While the hearings were billed as looking at US reliance on
military contractors, they largely focused on Blackwater and
the Falluja incident. For the first time, Blackwater was forced
to share a venue with the families of the men killed at Falluja.
"Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of
the military's chain of command and can literally do whatever
they please without any liability or accountability from
the US government," Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one
of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee.
"Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government
without having to answer a single question about its security operators."
Citing the pending litigation, Blackwater's general counsel,
Andrew Howell, declined to respond to many of the charges levied
against his company by the families and asked several times for
the committee to go into closed session. "The men who went
on the mission on March 31, each had their weapons and they
had sufficient ammunition," Howell told the committee, adding
that the men were in "appropriate" vehicles. That was sharply
disputed by the men's families, who allege that in order to save
$1.5 million Blackwater did not provide the four with armored vehicles.
"Once the men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East,
Blackwater treated them as fungible commodities," Helvenston
told lawmakers in her emotional testimony, delivered on behalf of
all four families.
The issue that put this case on Waxman's radar was the
labyrinth of subcontracts underpinning the Falluja mission.
Since November 2004 Waxman has been trying to pin down who
the Blackwater men were ultimately working for the day of the ambush.
"For over eighteen months, the Defense Department wouldn't even
respond to my inquiry," says Waxman. "When it finally replied
last July, it didn't even supply the breakdown I requested.
In fact, it denied that private security contractors did
any work at all under the [Pentagon's contracting program].
We now know that isn't true." Waxman's struggle to follow the money
on this one contract involving powerful war contractors
like KBR provides a graphic illustration of the secretive nature
of the whole war contracting industry.
What is not in dispute regarding the Falluja incident is
that Blackwater was working with a Kuwaiti business called
Regency under a contract with the world's largest food services
company, Eurest Support Services. ESS is a subcontractor for
KBR and another giant war contractor, Fluor, in Iraq under
the Pentagon's LOGCAP contracting program. One contract covering
Blackwater's Falluja mission indicated the mission was
ultimately a subcontract with KBR. Last summer KBR denied this.
Then ESS wrote Waxman to say the mission was conducted
under Fluor's contract with ESS. Fluor denied that, and the
Pentagon told Waxman it didn't know which company the
mission was ultimately linked to. Waxman alleged that
Blackwater and the other subcontractors were
"adding significant markups" to their subcontracts for
the same security services that Waxman believes were then
charged to US taxpayers. "It's remarkable that the world
of contractors and subcontractors is so murky that we
can't even get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate
how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step
of the subcontracting process," says Waxman.
While it appeared for much of the February 7 hearing
that the contract's provenance would remain obscure,
that changed when, at the end of the hearing, the Pentagon
revealed that the original contractor was, in fact, KBR.
In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors'
using private forces for security instead of US troops,
KBR had entered into a subcontract with ESS that was
protected by Blackwater; those costs were allegedly passed
on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater
said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning
a markup of more than $17 million was ultimately passed on
to the government. Three weeks after the hearing, KBR told
shareholders it may be forced to repay up to $400 million
to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.
It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to
a simple question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services?
But, as the Falluja lawsuit shows, it is not just money at issue.
It is human life.
A Killing on Christmas Eve
While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems
from Falluja, another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny.
On Christmas Eve inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone,
an American Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed an
Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior Iraqi official. For weeks
after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated around the
Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi
was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the
contractor was spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted.
Media inquiries got nowhere -- the US Embassy refused to confirm
that it was a Blackwater contractor, and the company refused to comment.
Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing.
As the session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich
raced back into the room with what he said was a final question.
He entered a news report on the incident into the record and
asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater had flown the
contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting.
"That gentleman, on the day the incident occurred,
he was off duty," Howell said, in what was the first
official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater.
"Blackwater did bring him back to the United States."
"Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder,
and if not, why not?" Kucinich asked.
"Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that
there's currently an investigation," Howell replied.
"We are fully cooperating and supporting that investigation."
Kucinich then said, "I just want to point out that there's
a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate
officers accessories here in helping to create a
flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder."
The War on the Hill
Several bills are now making their way through Congress
aimed at oversight and transparency of the private forces
that have emerged as major players in the wars of the
post-9/11 period. In mid-February Senators Byron Dorgan,
Patrick Leahy and John Kerry introduced legislation aimed
at cracking down on no-bid contracts and cronyism,
providing for penalties of up to twenty years in prison
and fines of up to $1 million for what they called
"war profiteering." It is part of what Democrats
describe as a multi-pronged approach. "I think there's
a critical mass of us now who are working on it,"
says Congressman Price, who represents Blackwater's home state.
In January Price introduced legislation that would
expand the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA)
to include all contractors in a war zone, not just those
working for or alongside the armed forces. Most of Blackwater's
work in Iraq, for instance, is contracted by the State Department.
Price indicated that the alleged Christmas Eve shooting
could be a test case of sorts under his legislation.
"I will be following this and I'll be calling for a
full investigation," he said.
But there's at least one reason to be wary of this approach:
Price's office consulted with the private military lobby as
it crafted the legislation, which has the industry's
strong endorsement. Perhaps that's because MEJA has been
for the most part unenforced. "Even in situations when
US civilian law could potentially have been applied to
contractor crimes, it wasn't," observed P.W. Singer,
a leading scholar on contractors. American prosecutors
are already strapped for resources in their home districts --
how could they be expected to conduct complex investigations
in Iraq? Who will protect the investigators and prosecutors?
How will they interview Iraqi victims? How could they
effectively oversee 100,000 individuals spread across a
dangerous war zone? "It's a good question," concedes Price.
"I'm not saying that it would be a simple matter."
He argues his legislation is an attempt to "put the whole
contracting enterprise on a new accountable footing."
This past fall, taking a different tack --
much to the dismay of the industry --
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve
lawyer and former reserve judge, quietly inserted
language into the 2007 Defense Authorization,
which Bush signed into law, that places contractors
under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ),
commonly known as the court martial system.
Graham implemented the change with no public debate
and with almost no awareness among the broader Congress,
but war contractors immediately questioned its constitutionality.
Indeed, this could be a rare moment when mercenaries and
civil libertarians are on the same side. Many contractors
are not armed combatants; they work in food, laundry and
other support services. While the argument could be made
that armed contractors like those working for Blackwater
should be placed under the UCMJ, Graham's change could
result in a dishwasher from Nepal working for KBR being
prosecuted like a US soldier. On top of all this,
the military has enough trouble policing its own
massive force and could scarcely be expected to monitor
an additional 100,000 private personnel. Besides,
many contractors in Iraq are there under the auspices
of the State Department and other civilian agencies,
not the military.
In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama
introduced comprehensive new legislation in February.
It requires clear rules of engagement for armed contractors,
expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to "arrest and detain"
contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over to
civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the
Justice Department to submit a comprehensive report on
current investigations of contractor abuses, the number of
complaints received about contractors and criminal cases opened.
In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors are
"operating with unclear lines of authority,
out-of-control costs and virtually no oversight by Congress.
This black hole of accountability increases the danger to
our troops and American civilians serving as contractors."
He said his legislation would "re-establish control over
these companies," while "bringing contractors under the rule of law."
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the
House intelligence committee, has been a leading critic of the
war contracting system. Her Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act,
introduced in February, which bolsters Obama's, boils down to what
Schakowsky sees as a long overdue fact-finding mission through
the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among other provisions,
it requires the government to determine and make public the
number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are
employed in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country's,
international or US laws that have been broken by contractors;
disciplinary actions taken against contractors; and the total
number of dead and wounded contractors. Schakowsky says she has
tried repeatedly over the past several years to get this
information and has been stonewalled or ignored.
"We're talking about billions and billions of dollars --
some have estimated forty cents of every dollar [spent on the occupation]
goes to these contractors, and we couldn't get any information
on casualties, on deaths," says Schakowsky. "It has been virtually
impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war
and so when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks,
they have not been part of this whatsoever.
This whole shadow force that's been operating in Iraq,
we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at
arm's length from the American people what this war
is all about."
While not by any means a comprehensive total of the
number of contractor casualties, 770 contractor deaths
and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December 31, 2006,
were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only
counts those contractors whose families applied for benefits
under the government's Defense Base Act insurance.
Independent analysts say the number is likely
much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least
twenty-seven men in Iraq. And then there's the
financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds
have been paid for private security forces in Iraq,
according to Waxman. Yet even with all these additional forces,
the military is struggling to meet the demands of a
White House bent on military adventurism.
A week after Donald Rumsfeld's rule at the Pentagon ended,
US forces had been stretched so thin by the "war on terror"
that former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared
"the active Army is about broken." Rather than rethinking
its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with
plans for a troop "surge" in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan
to supplement the military with a Civilian Reserve Corps
in his January State of the Union address. "Such a corps
would function much like our military Reserve.
It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us
to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on
missions abroad when America needs them," Bush said.
The President, it seemed, was just giving a
fancy new title to something the Administration
has already done with its "revolution" in military affairs
and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while
Bush's proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress
and among the public, the Administration's increasing reliance
on private military contractors has gone largely undebated
and underreported.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/05/05/18410518.php
On September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al Qaeda
or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror," Donald Rumsfeld
stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first
major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush.
Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as
his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting --
many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and Aerospace Corporation --
Rumsfeld 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. "It disrupts the defense of the United States
and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his
new staff, "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators
of the world.... [But] the adversary's closer to home," he said.
"It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift
in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy
with a new model, one based on the private sector. Announcing this
major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience,
"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 be attacked, literally,
as a Boeing 757 -- American Airlines Flight 77 -- smashed into its
western wall.
Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies
from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize
the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his
personal war -- laid out just a day before -- on the fast track.
The new Pentagon policy would emphasize covert actions,
sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private
contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine.
"We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that
encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave
less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists,"
Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for
Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military."
Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration
in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military
revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in
November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing the
"most sweeping transformation of America's global force
posture since the end of World War II." Indeed, Rumsfeld's
trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of
the most significant developments in modern warfare --
the widespread use of private contractors in every
aspect of war, including in combat.
The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11
period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatization.
From the moment the US troop buildup began in advance of
the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an
integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave
the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was
prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into
Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army
of private contractors ever deployed in modern war.
By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an
estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Iraq --
an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers.
To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned
he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an
official part of the US war machine.
In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Review, Rumsfeld outlined what he
called a "road map for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to
be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as
"its active and reserve military components, its civil servants,
and its contractors -- constitut[ing] its warfighting capability and
capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations
around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish
critical missions." This formal designation represented a major triumph
for war contractors -- conferring on them a legitimacy they had never
before enjoyed.
Contractors have provided the Bush Administration with political cover,
allowing the government to deploy private forces in a war zone free of
public scrutiny, with the deaths, injuries and crimes of those forces
shrouded in secrecy.
The Administration and the GOP-controlled Congress in turn have
shielded the contractors from accountability, oversight and
legal constraints. Despite the presence of more than 100,000
private contractors on the ground in Iraq, only one has been
indicted for crimes or violations. "We have over 200,000 troops
in Iraq and half of them aren't being counted, and the danger is
that there's zero accountability," says Democrat Dennis Kucinich,
one of the leading Congressional critics of war contracting.
While the past years of Republican monopoly on government have
marked a golden era for the industry, those days appear to
be ending. Just a month into the new Congressional term,
leading Democrats were announcing investigations of
runaway war contractors. Representative John Murtha,
chair of the Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Defense,
after returning from a trip to Iraq in late January, said,
"We're going to have extensive hearings to find out exactly
what's going on with contractors. They don't have a clear mission
and they're falling all over each other." Two days later,
during confirmation hearings for Gen. George Casey as
Army chief of staff, Senator Jim Webb declared,
"This is a rent-an-army out there." Webb asked Casey,
"Wouldn't it be better for this country if those tasks,
particularly the quasi-military gunfighting tasks, were being
performed by active-duty military soldiers in terms of cost
and accountability?" Casey defended the contracting system
but said armed contractors "are the ones that we have to watch
very carefully." Senator Joe Biden, chair of the
Foreign Relations Committee, has also indicated he will
hold hearings on contractors. Parallel to the ongoing
investigations, there are several bills gaining steam in
Congress aimed at contractor oversight.
Occupying the hot seat through these deliberations is the
shadowy mercenary company Blackwater USA. Unbeknownst to
many Americans and largely off the Congressional radar,
Blackwater has secured a position of remarkable power and
protection within the US war apparatus. This company's
success represents the realization of the life's work of
the conservative officials who formed the core of the
Bush Administration's war team, for whom radical privatization
has long been a cherished ideological mission. Blackwater has
repeatedly cited Rumsfeld's statement that contractors are
part of the "Total Force" as evidence that it is a
legitimate part of the nation's "warfighting capability and capacity."
Invoking Rumsfeld's designation, the company has in effect
declared its forces above the law -- entitled to the immunity
from civilian lawsuits enjoyed by the military, but also
not bound by the military's court martial system.
While the initial inquiries into Blackwater have focused
on the complex labyrinth of secretive subcontracts under
which it operates in Iraq, a thorough investigation into
the company reveals a frightening picture of a politically
connected private army that has become the
Bush Administration's Praetorian Guard.
Blackwater Rising
Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian
multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince -- the scion of a
wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations
helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the
Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding,
the company largely consisted of Prince's private
fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near
the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina.
Its vision was "to fulfill the anticipated demand for
government outsourcing of firearms and related
security training." In the following years, Prince,
his family and his political allies poured money into
Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party's takeover
of Congress and the ascension of George W.Bush to the presidency.
While Blackwater won government contracts during the
Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was
not until the "war on terror" that the company's glory moment arrived.
Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would
become a central player in a global war. "I've been operating
in the training business now for four years and was starting to get
a little cynical on how seriously people took security,"
Prince told Fox News host Bill O'Reilly shortly after 9/11.
"The phone is ringing off the hook now."
Among those calls was one from the CIA, which contracted
Blackwater to work in Afghanistan in the early stages of
US operations there. In the ensuing years the company
has become one of the greatest beneficiaries of the "war on terror,"
winning nearly $1 billion in noncovert government contracts,
many of them no-bid arrangements. In just a decade Prince
has expanded the Moyock headquarters to 7,000 acres,
making it the world's largest private military base.
Blackwater currently has 2,300 personnel deployed in nine countries,
with 20,000 other contractors at the ready. It has a fleet of more
than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a
private intelligence division, and it is manufacturing
surveillance blimps and target systems.
In 2005 after Hurricane Katrina its forces deployed in New Orleans,
where it billed the federal government $950 per man, per day --
at one point raking in more than $240,000 a day.
At its peak the company had about 600 contractors deployed from
Texas to Mississippi. Since Katrina, it has aggressively pursued
domestic contracting, opening a new domestic operations division.
Blackwater is marketing its products and services to the
Department of Homeland Security, and its representatives
have met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The company has applied for operating licenses in all US
coastal states. Blackwater is also expanding its physical
presence inside US borders, opening facilities in Illinois and California.
Its largest obtainable government contract is with the
State Department, for providing security to US diplomats
and facilities in Iraq. That contract began in 2003 with
the company's $21 million no-bid deal to protect Iraq
proconsul Paul Bremer. Blackwater has guarded the two
subsequent US ambassadors, John Negroponte and Zalmay Khalilzad,
as well as other diplomats and occupation offices.
Its forces have protected more than ninety Congressional
delegations in Iraq, including that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
According to the latest government contract records,
since June 2004 Blackwater has been awarded $750 million
in State Department contracts alone. It is currently engaged
in an intensive lobbying campaign to be sent into Darfur as
a privatized peacekeeping force. Last October President Bush
lifted some sanctions on Christian southern Sudan,
paving the way for a potential Blackwater training mission there.
In January the Washington, DC, representative for southern Sudan's
regional government said he expected Blackwater to begin training
the south's security forces soon.
Since 9/11 Blackwater has hired some well-connected officials
close to the Bush Administration as senior executives. Among
them are J. Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at
the CIA and the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden after 9/11,
and Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General,
who was responsible for policing contractors like Blackwater
during much of the "war on terror" -- something he stood accused
of not doing effectively. By the end of Schmitz's tenure,
powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a
Congressional probe into whether Schmitz had "quashed or
redirected two ongoing criminal investigations" of
senior Bush Administration officials. Under bipartisan fire,
Schmitz resigned and signed up with Blackwater.
Despite its central role, Blackwater had largely operated
in the shadows until March 31, 2004, when four of its
private soldiers in Iraq were ambushed and killed in Falluja.
A mob then burned the bodies and dragged them through the streets,
stringing up two from a bridge over the Euphrates.
In many ways it was the moment the Iraq War turned.
US forces laid siege to Falluja days later, killing hundreds
of people and displacing thousands, inflaming the fierce
Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day.
For most Americans, it was the first they had heard of private soldiers.
"People began to figure out this is quite a phenomenon,"
says Representative David Price, a North Carolina Democrat,
who said he began monitoring the use of private contractors
after Falluja. "I'm probably like most Congress members in
kind of coming to this awareness and developing an interest
in it" after the incident.
What is not so well-known is that in Washington after Falluja,
Blackwater executives kicked into high gear, capitalizing on the
company's newfound recognition. The day after the ambush,
it hired the Alexander Strategy Group, a K Street lobbying firm
run by former senior staffers of then-majority leader
Tom DeLay before the firm's meltdown in the wake of the
Jack Abramoff scandal. A week to the day after the ambush,
Erik Prince was sitting down with at least four senior members
of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its chair,
John Warner. Senator Rick Santorum arranged the meeting,
which included Warner and two other key Republican senators --
Appropriations Committee chair Ted Stevens of Alaska and
George Allen of Virginia. This meeting followed an earlier
series of face-to-faces Prince had had with powerful
House Republicans who oversaw military contracts.
Among them: DeLay; Porter Goss, chair of the House Intelligence
Committee (and future CIA director); Duncan Hunter,
chair of the House Armed Services Committee;
and Representative Bill Young, chair of the House
Appropriations Committee. What was discussed at these meetings
remains a secret. But Blackwater was clearly positioning
itself to make the most of its new fame.
Indeed, two months later, Blackwater was handed one of
the government's most valuable international security
contracts, worth more than $300 million.
The firm was also eager to stake out a role in crafting
the rules that would govern mercenaries under US contract.
"Because of the public events of March 31, [Blackwater's]
visibility and need to communicate a consistent message
has elevated here in Washington," said Blackwater's new
lobbyist Chris Bertelli. "There are now several federal
regulations that apply to their activities, but they are
generally broad in nature. One thing that's lacking is
an industry standard. That's something we definitely
want to be engaged in." By May Blackwater was leading a
lobbying effort by the private military industry to try to block
Congressional or Pentagon efforts to place their forces
under the military court martial system.
But while Blackwater enjoyed its new status as a hero in
the "war on terror" within the Administration and the
GOP-controlled Congress, the families of the four men killed
at Falluja say they were being stonewalled by Blackwater as
they attempted to understand the circumstances of how their
loved ones were killed. After what they allege was months of
effort to get straight answers from the company, the families
filed a ground-breaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater
in January 2005, accusing the company of not providing the men
with what they say were contractually guaranteed safeguards.
Among the allegations: The company sent them on the Falluja mission
that day short two men, with less powerful weapons than they should
have had and in Pajero jeeps instead of armored vehicles.
This case could have far-reaching reverberations and is being
monitored closely by the war-contractor industry -- former Halliburton
subsidiary KBR has even filed an amicus brief supporting Blackwater.
If the lawsuit is successful, it could pave the way for a
tobacco litigation-type scenario, where war contractors find
themselves besieged by legal claims of workers killed or injured
in war zones.
As the case has made its way through the court system,
Blackwater has enlisted powerhouse Republican lawyers to defend it,
among them Fred Fielding, who was recently named by Bush
as White House counsel, replacing Harriet Miers; and
Kenneth Starr, former Whitewater prosecutor investigating
President Clinton, and the company's current counsel of record.
Blackwater has not formally debated the specific allegations
in the suit, but what has emerged in its court filings is
a series of legal arguments intended to bolster Blackwater's
contention that it is essentially above the law.
Blackwater claims that if US courts allow the company to
be sued for wrongful death, that could threaten the nation's
war-fighting capacity: "Nothing could be more destructive of
the all-volunteer, Total Force concept underlying U.S. military
manpower doctrine than to expose the private components to
the tort liability systems of fifty states, transported overseas
to foreign battlefields," the company argued in legal papers.
In February Blackwater suffered a major defeat when the
Supreme Court declined its appeal to hear the Falluja case,
paving the way for the state trial -- where there would be
no cap on damages a jury could award -- to proceed.
Congress is beginning to take an interest in this potentially
groundbreaking case. On February 7 Representative Henry Waxman
chaired hearings of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
While the hearings were billed as looking at US reliance on
military contractors, they largely focused on Blackwater and
the Falluja incident. For the first time, Blackwater was forced
to share a venue with the families of the men killed at Falluja.
"Private contractors like Blackwater work outside the scope of
the military's chain of command and can literally do whatever
they please without any liability or accountability from
the US government," Katy Helvenston, whose son Scott was one
of the Blackwater contractors killed, told the committee.
"Therefore, Blackwater can continue accepting hundreds of
millions of dollars in taxpayer money from the government
without having to answer a single question about its security operators."
Citing the pending litigation, Blackwater's general counsel,
Andrew Howell, declined to respond to many of the charges levied
against his company by the families and asked several times for
the committee to go into closed session. "The men who went
on the mission on March 31, each had their weapons and they
had sufficient ammunition," Howell told the committee, adding
that the men were in "appropriate" vehicles. That was sharply
disputed by the men's families, who allege that in order to save
$1.5 million Blackwater did not provide the four with armored vehicles.
"Once the men signed on with Blackwater and were flown to the Middle East,
Blackwater treated them as fungible commodities," Helvenston
told lawmakers in her emotional testimony, delivered on behalf of
all four families.
The issue that put this case on Waxman's radar was the
labyrinth of subcontracts underpinning the Falluja mission.
Since November 2004 Waxman has been trying to pin down who
the Blackwater men were ultimately working for the day of the ambush.
"For over eighteen months, the Defense Department wouldn't even
respond to my inquiry," says Waxman. "When it finally replied
last July, it didn't even supply the breakdown I requested.
In fact, it denied that private security contractors did
any work at all under the [Pentagon's contracting program].
We now know that isn't true." Waxman's struggle to follow the money
on this one contract involving powerful war contractors
like KBR provides a graphic illustration of the secretive nature
of the whole war contracting industry.
What is not in dispute regarding the Falluja incident is
that Blackwater was working with a Kuwaiti business called
Regency under a contract with the world's largest food services
company, Eurest Support Services. ESS is a subcontractor for
KBR and another giant war contractor, Fluor, in Iraq under
the Pentagon's LOGCAP contracting program. One contract covering
Blackwater's Falluja mission indicated the mission was
ultimately a subcontract with KBR. Last summer KBR denied this.
Then ESS wrote Waxman to say the mission was conducted
under Fluor's contract with ESS. Fluor denied that, and the
Pentagon told Waxman it didn't know which company the
mission was ultimately linked to. Waxman alleged that
Blackwater and the other subcontractors were
"adding significant markups" to their subcontracts for
the same security services that Waxman believes were then
charged to US taxpayers. "It's remarkable that the world
of contractors and subcontractors is so murky that we
can't even get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate
how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in each step
of the subcontracting process," says Waxman.
While it appeared for much of the February 7 hearing
that the contract's provenance would remain obscure,
that changed when, at the end of the hearing, the Pentagon
revealed that the original contractor was, in fact, KBR.
In violation of military policy against LOGCAP contractors'
using private forces for security instead of US troops,
KBR had entered into a subcontract with ESS that was
protected by Blackwater; those costs were allegedly passed
on to US taxpayers to the tune of $19.6 million. Blackwater
said it billed ESS $2.3 million for its services, meaning
a markup of more than $17 million was ultimately passed on
to the government. Three weeks after the hearing, KBR told
shareholders it may be forced to repay up to $400 million
to the government as a result of an ongoing Army investigation.
It took more than two years for Waxman to get an answer to
a simple question: Whom were US taxpayers paying for services?
But, as the Falluja lawsuit shows, it is not just money at issue.
It is human life.
A Killing on Christmas Eve
While much of the publicity Blackwater has received stems
from Falluja, another, more recent incident is attracting new scrutiny.
On Christmas Eve inside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone,
an American Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed an
Iraqi bodyguard protecting a senior Iraqi official. For weeks
after the shooting, unconfirmed reports circulated around the
Internet that alcohol may have been involved and that the Iraqi
was shot ten times in the chest. The story then went that the
contractor was spirited out of Iraq before he could be prosecuted.
Media inquiries got nowhere -- the US Embassy refused to confirm
that it was a Blackwater contractor, and the company refused to comment.
Then the incident came up at the February 7 Congressional hearing.
As the session was drawing to a close, Representative Kucinich
raced back into the room with what he said was a final question.
He entered a news report on the incident into the record and
asked Blackwater counsel Howell if Blackwater had flown the
contractor out of Iraq after the alleged shooting.
"That gentleman, on the day the incident occurred,
he was off duty," Howell said, in what was the first
official confirmation of the incident from Blackwater.
"Blackwater did bring him back to the United States."
"Is he going to be extradited back to Iraq for murder,
and if not, why not?" Kucinich asked.
"Sir, I am not law enforcement. All I can say is that
there's currently an investigation," Howell replied.
"We are fully cooperating and supporting that investigation."
Kucinich then said, "I just want to point out that there's
a question that could actually make [Blackwater's] corporate
officers accessories here in helping to create a
flight from justice for someone who's committed a murder."
The War on the Hill
Several bills are now making their way through Congress
aimed at oversight and transparency of the private forces
that have emerged as major players in the wars of the
post-9/11 period. In mid-February Senators Byron Dorgan,
Patrick Leahy and John Kerry introduced legislation aimed
at cracking down on no-bid contracts and cronyism,
providing for penalties of up to twenty years in prison
and fines of up to $1 million for what they called
"war profiteering." It is part of what Democrats
describe as a multi-pronged approach. "I think there's
a critical mass of us now who are working on it,"
says Congressman Price, who represents Blackwater's home state.
In January Price introduced legislation that would
expand the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000 (MEJA)
to include all contractors in a war zone, not just those
working for or alongside the armed forces. Most of Blackwater's
work in Iraq, for instance, is contracted by the State Department.
Price indicated that the alleged Christmas Eve shooting
could be a test case of sorts under his legislation.
"I will be following this and I'll be calling for a
full investigation," he said.
But there's at least one reason to be wary of this approach:
Price's office consulted with the private military lobby as
it crafted the legislation, which has the industry's
strong endorsement. Perhaps that's because MEJA has been
for the most part unenforced. "Even in situations when
US civilian law could potentially have been applied to
contractor crimes, it wasn't," observed P.W. Singer,
a leading scholar on contractors. American prosecutors
are already strapped for resources in their home districts --
how could they be expected to conduct complex investigations
in Iraq? Who will protect the investigators and prosecutors?
How will they interview Iraqi victims? How could they
effectively oversee 100,000 individuals spread across a
dangerous war zone? "It's a good question," concedes Price.
"I'm not saying that it would be a simple matter."
He argues his legislation is an attempt to "put the whole
contracting enterprise on a new accountable footing."
This past fall, taking a different tack --
much to the dismay of the industry --
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force reserve
lawyer and former reserve judge, quietly inserted
language into the 2007 Defense Authorization,
which Bush signed into law, that places contractors
under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ),
commonly known as the court martial system.
Graham implemented the change with no public debate
and with almost no awareness among the broader Congress,
but war contractors immediately questioned its constitutionality.
Indeed, this could be a rare moment when mercenaries and
civil libertarians are on the same side. Many contractors
are not armed combatants; they work in food, laundry and
other support services. While the argument could be made
that armed contractors like those working for Blackwater
should be placed under the UCMJ, Graham's change could
result in a dishwasher from Nepal working for KBR being
prosecuted like a US soldier. On top of all this,
the military has enough trouble policing its own
massive force and could scarcely be expected to monitor
an additional 100,000 private personnel. Besides,
many contractors in Iraq are there under the auspices
of the State Department and other civilian agencies,
not the military.
In an attempt to clarify these matters, Senator Barack Obama
introduced comprehensive new legislation in February.
It requires clear rules of engagement for armed contractors,
expands MEJA and provides for the DoD to "arrest and detain"
contractors suspected of crimes and then turn them over to
civilian authorities for prosecution. It also requires the
Justice Department to submit a comprehensive report on
current investigations of contractor abuses, the number of
complaints received about contractors and criminal cases opened.
In a statement to The Nation, Obama said contractors are
"operating with unclear lines of authority,
out-of-control costs and virtually no oversight by Congress.
This black hole of accountability increases the danger to
our troops and American civilians serving as contractors."
He said his legislation would "re-establish control over
these companies," while "bringing contractors under the rule of law."
Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the
House intelligence committee, has been a leading critic of the
war contracting system. Her Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act,
introduced in February, which bolsters Obama's, boils down to what
Schakowsky sees as a long overdue fact-finding mission through
the secretive contracting bureaucracy. Among other provisions,
it requires the government to determine and make public the
number of contractors and subcontractors (at any tier) that are
employed in Iraq and Afghanistan; any host country's,
international or US laws that have been broken by contractors;
disciplinary actions taken against contractors; and the total
number of dead and wounded contractors. Schakowsky says she has
tried repeatedly over the past several years to get this
information and has been stonewalled or ignored.
"We're talking about billions and billions of dollars --
some have estimated forty cents of every dollar [spent on the occupation]
goes to these contractors, and we couldn't get any information
on casualties, on deaths," says Schakowsky. "It has been virtually
impossible to shine the light on this aspect of the war
and so when we discuss the war, its scope, its costs, its risks,
they have not been part of this whatsoever.
This whole shadow force that's been operating in Iraq,
we know almost nothing about. I think it keeps at
arm's length from the American people what this war
is all about."
While not by any means a comprehensive total of the
number of contractor casualties, 770 contractor deaths
and 7,761 injured in Iraq as of December 31, 2006,
were confirmed by the Labor Department. But that only
counts those contractors whose families applied for benefits
under the government's Defense Base Act insurance.
Independent analysts say the number is likely
much higher. Blackwater alone has lost at least
twenty-seven men in Iraq. And then there's the
financial cost: Almost $4 billion in taxpayer funds
have been paid for private security forces in Iraq,
according to Waxman. Yet even with all these additional forces,
the military is struggling to meet the demands of a
White House bent on military adventurism.
A week after Donald Rumsfeld's rule at the Pentagon ended,
US forces had been stretched so thin by the "war on terror"
that former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared
"the active Army is about broken." Rather than rethinking
its foreign policies, the Administration forged ahead with
plans for a troop "surge" in Iraq, and Bush floated a plan
to supplement the military with a Civilian Reserve Corps
in his January State of the Union address. "Such a corps
would function much like our military Reserve.
It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us
to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on
missions abroad when America needs them," Bush said.
The President, it seemed, was just giving a
fancy new title to something the Administration
has already done with its "revolution" in military affairs
and unprecedented reliance on contractors. Yet while
Bush's proposed surge has sparked a fierce debate in Congress
and among the public, the Administration's increasing reliance
on private military contractors has gone largely undebated
and underreported.