Who Will Stop the U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq?
Raymond
Don't Look to the Congressional Democrats
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.
The Shadow War in Iraq
Funding the Mercenary War
by Jeremy Scahill
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
911review.org
it took 7 Blackwater mercenaries to hold the Small Business
Administration office here.
There were 5 people looking for loans and 7 military contractors armed
to the teeth
each making over $1000 a day
9/11 was the reason for war
and THESE people and other contractors like them
seem not to care about life at all
So why is it soo hard to think that they may have had something to do
with it ?
watch this
Shooting at Iraqi's for fun ?
http://humor.worldispnetwork.com/video/Aegis_Video.html
=0=
Looks like a typical gangstah drive-by commute in LA to me.
"911review.org" <brad....@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1185492480.2...@k79g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> Š Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill