The Mercenary Revolution: Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities.
By Jeremy ScahillFrom the August 15, 2007 issue | Posted in International | Email this article
If you think the U.S. has only 160,000 troops in Iraq, think again.
With almost no congressional oversight and even less public awareness, the Bush administration has more than doubled the size of the U.S. occupation through the use of private war companies.
There are now almost 200,000 private “contractors” deployed in Iraq by Washington. This means that U.S. military forces in Iraq are now outsized by a coalition of billing corporations whose actions go largely unmonitored and whose crimes are virtually unpunished.
In essence, the Bush administration has created a shadow army that can be used to wage wars unpopular with the American public but extremely profitable for a few unaccountable private companies.
Since the launch of the “global war on terror,” the administration has systematically funneled billions of dollars in public money to corporations like Blackwater USA , DynCorp, Triple Canopy, Erinys and ArmorGroup. They have in turn used their lucrative government pay-outs to build up the infrastructure and reach of private armies so powerful that they rival or outgun some nation’s militaries.
“I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives,” says veteran U.S. Diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last U.S. ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War.
The billions of dollars being doled out to these companies, Wilson argues, “makes of them a very powerful interest group within the American body politic and an interest group that is in fact armed. And the question will arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?”
Precise data on the extent of U.S. spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to
obtain — by both journalists and elected officials—but some in Congress estimate that up to 40 cents of every tax dollar spent on the war goes to corporate war contractors. At present, the United States spends about $2 billion a week on its Iraq operations.
While much has been made of the Bush administration’s “failure” to build international consensus for the invasion of Iraq, perhaps that was never the intention. When U.S. tanks rolled into Iraq in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of “private contractors” ever deployed in a war. The White House substituted international diplomacy with lucrative war contracts and a coalition of willing nations who provided token forces with a coalition of billing corporations that supplied the brigades of contractors.
‘THERE’S NO DEMOCRATIC CONTROL’
During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors was about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S. forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war contracting companies working in Iraq for the United States. Composed of some 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official U.S. military presence of 160,000 troops.
In all, the United States may have as many as 400,000 personnel occupying Iraq, not including allied nations’ militaries. The statistics on contractors do not account for all armed contractors. Last year, a U.S. government report estimated there were 48,000 people working for more than 170 private military companies in Iraq. “It masks the true level of American involvement,” says Ambassador Wilson.
How much money is being spent just on mercenaries remains largely classified. Congressional sources estimate the United States has spent at least $6 billion in Iraq, while Britain has spent some $400 million. At the same time, companies chosen by the White House for rebuilding projects in Iraq have spent huge sums in reconstruction funds — possibly billions on more mercenaries to guard their personnel and projects.
The single largest U.S. contract for private security in Iraq was a $293 million payment to the British firm Aegis Defence Services, headed by retired British Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who has been dogged by accusations that he is a mercenary because of his private involvement in African conflicts. The Texas-based DynCorp International has been another big winner, with more than $1 billion in contracts to provide personnel to train Iraqi police forces, while Blackwater USA has won $750 million in State Department contracts alone for “diplomatic security.”
At present, an American or a British Special Forces veteran working for a private security company in Iraq can make $650 a day. At times the rate has reached $1,000 a day; the pay dwarfs many times over that of active duty troops operating in the war zone wearing a U.S. or U.K. flag on their shoulder instead of a corporate logo.
“We got [tens of thousands of] contractors over there, some of them making more than the Secretary of Defense,” House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha (D-Penn.) recently remarked. “How in the hell do you justify that?” In part, these contractors do mundane jobs that traditionally have been performed by soldiers. Some require no military training, but involve deadly occupations, such as driving trucks through insurgent-controlled territory.
Others are more innocuous, like cooking food or doing laundry on a base, but still court grave risk because of regular mortar and rocket attacks.
These services are provided through companies like KBR and Fluor and through their vast labyrinth of subcontractors. But many other private personnel are also engaged in armed combat and “security” operations. They interrogate prisoners, gather intelligence, operate rendition flights, protect senior occupation officials and, in at least one case, have commanded U.S. and international troops in battle.
In a revealing admission, Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing Bush’s troop “surge,” said earlier this year that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq by “contract security.” At least three U.S. commanding generals, not including Petraeus, are currently being guarded in Iraq by hired guns. “To have half of your army be contractors, I don’t know that there’s a precedent for that,” says Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating war contractors.
“Maybe the precedent was the British and the Hessians in the American Revolution. Maybe that’s the last time and needless to say, they lost. But I’m thinking that there’s no democratic control and there’s no intention to have democratic control here.”
The implications are devastating. Joseph Wilson says, “In the absence of international consensus, the current Bush administration relied on a coalition of what I call the co-opted, the corrupted and the coerced: those who benefited financially from their involvement, those who benefited politically from their involvement and those few who determined that their relationship with the United States was more important than their relationship with anybody else. And that’s a real problem because there is no underlying international legitimacy that sustains us throughout this action that we’ve taken.”
Moreover, this revolution means the United States no longer needs to rely on its own citizens to fight its wars, nor does it need to implement a draft, which would have made the Iraq war politically untenable.
‘AN ARM OF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’
During his confirmation hearings in the Senate this past January, Petraeus praised the role of private forces, claiming they compensate for an overstretched military. Petraeus told the senators that combined with Bush’s official troop surge, the “tens of thousands of contract security forces give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission.”
Taken together with Petraeus’s recent assertion that the surge would run into mid-2009, this means a widening role for mercenaries and other private forces in Iraq is clearly on the table for the foreseeable future.
“The increasing use of contractors, private forces or as some would say ‘mercenaries’ makes wars easier to begin and to fight — it just takes money and not the citizenry,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose organization has sued private contractors for alleged human rights violations in Iraq.
“To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars and in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire. Think about Rome and its increasing need for mercenaries.”
Privatized forces are also politically expedient for many governments. Their casualties go
uncounted, their actions largely unmonitored and their crimes unpunished. Indeed, four years into the occupation, there is no effective system of oversight or accountability governing contractors and their operations, nor is there any effective law — military or civilian being applied to their activities. They have not been subjected to military courts martial (despite a recent congressional attempt to place them under the Uniform Code of Military Justice), nor have they been prosecuted in U.S. civilian courts. And no matter what their acts in Iraq, they cannot be prosecuted in Iraqi courts because in 2004 the U.S. occupying authority granted them complete immunity.
“These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies,” argues Kucinich, who has called for a withdrawal of all U.S. contractors from Iraq. “They charge whatever they want with impunity. There’s no accountability as to how many people they have, as to what their activities are.”
That raises the crucial question: what exactly are they doing in Iraq in the name of the U.S. and U.K. governments? Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a leading member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which is responsible for reviewing sensitive national security issues, explained the difficulty of monitoring private military companies on the U.S. payroll: “If I want to see a contract, I have to go up to a secret room and look at it, can’t take any notes, can’t take any notes out with me, you know — essentially, I don’t have access to those contracts and even if I did, I couldn’t tell anybody about it.”
‘A MARKETPLACE FOR WARFARE’
On the Internet, numerous videos have spread virally, showing what appear to be foreign mercenaries using Iraqis as target practice, much to the embarrassment of the firms involved. Despite these incidents and the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to possessing child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison.
Dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed — 64 on murder-related charges alone — but not a single armed contractor has been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In some cases, where contractors were alleged to have been involved in crimes or deadly incidents, their companies whisked them out of Iraq to safety.
U.S. contractors in Iraq reportedly have their own motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.” International diplomats say Iraq has demonstrated a new U.S. model for waging war; one which poses a creeping threat to global order.
“To outsource security-related, military related issues to non-government, non-military forces is a source of great concern and it caught many governments unprepared,” says Hans von Sponeck, a 32-year veteran U.N. diplomat, who served as head of the U.N. Iraq mission before the U.S. invasion.
In Iraq, the United States has used its private sector allies to build up armies of mercenaries many lured from impoverished countries with the promise of greater salaries than their home militaries can pay. That the home governments of some of these private warriors are opposed to the war itself is of little consequence.
“Have gun, will fight for paycheck” has become a globalized law.
“The most worrying aspect is that these forces are outside parliamentary control. They come from all over and they are answerable to no one except a very narrow group of people and they come from countries whose governments may not even know in detail that they have actually been contracted as a private army into a war zone,” says von Sponeck.
“If you have now a marketplace for warfare, it is a commercial issue rather than a political issue involving a debate in the countries.
You are also marginalizing governmental control over whether or not this should take place, should happen and, if so, in what size and shape. It’s a very worrying new aspect of international relations. I think it becomes more and more uncontrollable by the countries of supply.”
In Iraq, for example, hundreds of Chilean mercenaries have been deployed by U.S. companies like Blackwater and Triple Canopy, despite the fact that Chile, as a rotating member of the U.N. Security Council, opposed the invasion and continues to oppose the occupation of Iraq. Some of the Chileans are alleged to have been seasoned veterans of the Pinochet era.
“There is nothing new, of course, about the relationship between politics and the economy, but there is something deeply perverse about the privatization of the Iraq War and the utilization of mercenaries,” says Chilean sociologist Tito Tricot, a former political prisoner who was tortured under Pinochet’s regime.
“This externalization of services or outsourcing attempts to lower costs — third world mercenaries are paid less than their counterparts from the developed world — and maximize benefits. In other words, let others fight the war for the Americans. In either case, the Iraqi people do not matter at all.”
NEW WORLD DISORDER
The Iraq war has ushered in a new system. Wealthy nations can recruit the world’s poor, from countries that have no direct stake in the conflict, and use them as cannon fodder to conquer weaker nations. This allows the conquering power to hold down domestic casualties — the single-greatest impediment to waging wars like the one in Iraq. Indeed, in Iraq, more than 1,000 contractors working for the U.S. occupation have been killed with another 13,000 wounded. Most are not American citizens, and these numbers are not counted in the official death toll at a time when Americans are increasingly disturbed by casualties.
In Iraq, many companies are run by Americans or Britons and have well-trained forces drawn from elite military units for use in sensitive actions or operations. But down the ranks, these forces are filled by Iraqis and third-country nationals. Indeed, some 118,000 of the estimated 180,000 contractors are Iraqis, and many mercenaries are reportedly ill-paid, poorly equipped and barely trained Iraqi nationals.
The mercenary industry points to this as a positive: we are giving Iraqis jobs, albeit occupying their own country in the service of a private corporation hired by a hostile invading power.
Doug Brooks, the head of the Orwellian named mercenary trade group, the International Peace Operations Association, argued from early on in the occupation, “Museums do not need to be guarded by Abrams tanks when an Iraqi security guard working for a contractor can do the same job for less than one-fiftieth of what it costs to maintain an American soldier. Hiring local guards gives Iraqis a stake in a successful future for their country. They use their pay to support their families and stimulate the economy. Perhaps most significantly, every guard means one less potential guerrilla.”
In many ways, it is the same corporate model of relying on cheap labor in destitute nations to staff their uber-profitable operations. The giant multinationals also argue they are helping the economy by hiring locals, even if it’s at starvation wages.
“Donald Rumsfeld’s masterstroke, and his most enduring legacy, was to bring the corporate branding revolution of the 1990s into the heart of the most powerful military in the world,” says Naomi Klein, whose upcoming book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, explores these themes.
“We have now seen the emergence of the hollow army. Much as with so-called hollow corporations like Nike, billions are spent on military technology and design in rich countries while the manual labor and sweat work of invasion and occupation is increasingly outsourced to contractors who compete with each other to fill the work order for the lowest price. Just as this model breeds rampant abuse in the manufacturing sector — with the big-name brands always able to plead ignorance about the actions of their suppliers—so it does in the military, though with stakes that are immeasurably higher.” In the case of Iraq, the U.S. and U.K. governments could give the public perception of a withdrawal of forces and just privatize the occupation. Indeed, shortly after former British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he wanted to withdraw 1,600 soldiers from Basra, reports emerged that the British government was considering sending in private security companies to “fill the gap left behind.”
THE SPY WHO BILLED ME
While Iraq currently dominates the headlines, private war and intelligence companies are expanding their already sizable footprint. The U.S. government in particular is now in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in its history. According to a recent report in Vanity Fair, the government pays contractors as much as the combined taxes paid by everyone in the United States with incomes under $100,000, meaning “more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to [contractors] rather than to the [government].”
Some of this outsourcing is happening in sensitive sectors, including the intelligence community. “This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community,” says former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman. “My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It’s outrageous.”
RJ Hillhouse, a blogger who investigates the clandestine world of private contractors and U.S. intelligence, recently obtained documents from the Office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.54 billion in 2000. Currently that spending represents 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget going to private companies.
Perhaps it is no surprise then that the current head of the DNI is Mike McConnell, the former chair of the board of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the private intelligence industry’s lobbying arm. Hillhouse also revealed that one of the most sensitive U.S. intelligence documents, the Presidential Daily Briefing, is prepared in part by private companies, despite having the official seal of the U.S. intelligence apparatus.
“Let’s say a company is frustrated with a government that’s hampering its business or business of one of its clients. Introducing and spinning intelligence on that government’s suspected collaboration with terrorists would quickly get the White House’s attention and could be used to shape national policy,” Hillhouse argues.
MUTLINATIONAL MERCENARIES
Empowered by their new found prominence, mercenary forces are increasing their presence on other battlefields: in Latin America, DynCorp International is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries under the guise of the “war on drugs” — U.S. defense contractors are receiving nearly half the $630 million in U.S. military aid for Colombia; in Africa, mercenaries are deploying in Somalia, Congo and Sudan and increasingly have their sights set on tapping into the hefty U.N. peacekeeping budget (this has been true since at least the early 1990s and probably much earlier). Heavily armed mercenaries were deployed to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while proposals are being considered to privatize the U.S. border patrol.
Brooks, the private military industry lobbyist, says people should not become “overly obsessed with Iraq,” saying his association’s “member companies have more personnel working in U.N. and African Union peace operations than all but a handful of countries.” Von Sponeck says he believes the use of such companies in warfare should be barred and has harsh words for the institution for which he spent his career working: “The United Nations, including the U.N. Secretary General, should react to this and instead of reacting, they are mute, they are silent.”
This unprecedented funding of such enterprises, primarily by the U.S. and U.K. governments, means that powers once the exclusive realm of nations are now in the hands of private companies with loyalty only to profits, CEOs and, in the case of public companies, shareholders. And, of course, their client, whoever that may be. CIA-type services, special operations, covert actions and small-scale military and paramilitary forces are now on the world market in a way not seen in modern history. This could allow corporations or nations with cash to spend but no real military power to hire squadrons of heavily armed and well-trained commandos.
“It raises very important issues about state and about the very power of state. The one thing the people think of as being in the purview of the government — wholly run and owned by — is the use of military power,” says Rep. Jan Schakowsky. “Suddenly you’ve got a for-profit corporation going around the world that is more powerful than states, can effect regime possibly where they may want to go, that seems to have all the support that it needs from this administration that is also pretty adventurous around the world and operating under the cover of darkness.
“It raises questions about democracies, about states, about who influences policy around the globe, about relationships among some countries. Maybe it’s their goal to render state coalitions like NATO irrelevant in the future, that they’ll be the ones and open to the highest bidder. Who really does determine war and peace around the world?”
25 Responses to “The Mercenary Revolution: Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities.”
August 11th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Unfortunately, up until several months ago, it was difficult if not impossible to obtain any information at all about the the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. As the Washington Post wrote in nearly the first article ever written about the group:
“The group, a nonprofit professional association for members of the intelligence community — including private contractors, academics and members of U.S. spy agencies — is largely unknown. … Since the group’s inception nearly 30 years ago as the Security Affairs Support Association, it has never been profiled in the media, its officers say.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/01/AR2007040100686.html
Jason Kello is the Alliance spokesman, and obviously has an agenda in portraying the INSA a certian way.
http://www.politicalfriendster.com/rateConnection.php?id1=5691&id2=281
Even now, in its new period of “openness”
“INSA keeps things close to the vest. For example, it will not reveal the names of most of its members. It claims about 1,500 members, including private contractors and members of every government intelligence agency. The people remaking INSA represent much of the vanguard of the intelligence-industrial complex: BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Computer Sciences, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, ManTech International, Microsoft, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and SAIC.”
Now, what does the INSA actually DO? According to the fawning WaPo article, which basically reads like an INSA press release:
“the group is working to introduce a growing network of private contractors, large and small, to government intelligence agencies. Like much of the rest of the government, U.S. intelligence agencies are increasingly outsourcing what they need in the name of expediency: cutting-edge technology, goods and services, such as gee-whiz satellites, particularly to protect against another terrorist attack.”
So obviously, the INSA, despite it’s “non-lobbyist status” has an agenda is pushing the very kind of privatization Scahill documents in this article. What’s more,
“INSA doesn’t just make introductions for such members; it conducts research and analysis, and sponsors workshops, symposiums and councils on such matters as domestic intelligence, security, counterintelligence and innovative technologies. Since September, it has funded a Georgetown University professorship in the practice of intelligence, held by retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency who has been nominated as undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
“Appropriately enough, INSA’s offices are near Rosslyn and Crystal City, two unofficial centers of private intelligence and national defense contractors. But it’s hard for INSA to give much of a definitive shape to this undefined nexus between intelligence contractors and the government agencies they work for, a cast of characters located mostly in greater Washington, with the occasional cluster in such places as Silicon Valley.”
Now, granted, this isn’t “lobbying” in the technical sense. But only a naive fool wouldn’t understand the manner in which this kind of work is lobbying in a much more important way. The INSA appears to be setting the intellectual agenda for pushing forward the privatization of US intelligence …. Which is worse than lobbying. Perhaps these semantic distinctions matter in the fetid, incestuous swamp that is Washington DC, but most normal people, and honest journalists, understand enough to not be blinded by Clintonesque phrase parsing.
Then again, assuming that Jason Kello is the same beltway operative who served as a communications director for Professional Page Harasser Mark Foley
http://thinkexist.com/quotation/to-assume-we-re-going-to-have-our-head-over-a/1101619.html
http://www.washblade.com/2004/7-16/news/breaking/two.cfm
and a speechwriter for the disgraced ex-Sen. George “Macaca” Allen
http://thehill.com/onward–upward/changes-at-the-top-in-foleys-office-2004-11-18.html
He’s got a lot of experience in linguistic gymnastics.
Chris
August 11th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
The warmongering neocons along with the Republican party may have finally created “the monster that could not be killed”. And we all know these monsters inevitably turn on their creators in the end. God help us all.
August 12th, 2007 at 4:18 am
And may I lend my ears to all those who would cut then off by remarking ,as an Australian citizen of slightly brain damaged mind…that our beloved country,soon undergoing Federal elections seems really mute about private contractors,like a masculinity problem,disallows any opinion that suggests in any manner whatsoever..that all this is bloody terrible,and well I guess being really angry about this is both a mental disorder and death warmed up for breakfast.Add this to the pile of other insults offences and downright shameful behaviour by the U.S.A. and it looks like we all have to wait until ,maybe dear old Australia becomes the new target,troops are already here,and well we were brought up on mimicking American ways.So those interfering with my brain as is,please rest assured the brain in part recognises all your work,costing millions.. I would suspect,to do nothing other than be a common everyday parroting nuisance,before I open my mouth.And are you public or private..or just arse!?
August 12th, 2007 at 10:34 am
The horror of this all cannot even be imagined. It is partially documented on radio stations like KPFK/KPFA and a few others. It is not even mentioned on our so-called “public” radio; nor is it even mentioned on “public” TV. Lastly, the standard media of TV/newspapers/radio/magazines hardly glance at this immoral behavior of our elitist government. Fact: the costs for all of this comes out of our ass (taxes on everything there is); plus the Feds printing money/bonds/anything else that want to “issue” to pay for all this disaster. Well: who said this planet was destined for great things? Some innocent writer? God? Bye bye.
August 12th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Has anyone else felt tempted to re-read Catch-22 and The Dosadi Experiment? What seemed likewitty fantasy in 1962 now seems ominously and frighteningly true. Butm then, we not longer need any fiction, given the current state of both “governance” and the media.
August 13th, 2007 at 9:32 am
They’re only doing it for the money. That’s the mercenary capitalist world we live in. But if there were an alternative? And there is -
WORLD STRIKE 2012
If you agree that the abolition of money would be a fine solution to most of our problems, and that we could create a much better system where EVERYTHING - food and drink, clothing and housing, water, heating, education, health-care and entertainment - shall be FREE for EVERYONE - why not join the World-Wide Strike on the opening day of the Olympic Games in 2012?
The Strike will begin the moment the symbolic Olympic flame is lit - the signal for all who support the abolition of money to stop work and demand a new fair world of true freedom and justice.
WE WANT A MONEYLESS WORLD
August 14th, 2007 at 5:47 am
I think this article raises important questions. I am not an expert on all the details.
In order to follow up on the dangers portrayed by this article, one has to consider the following things:
(1) A program for converting defense firms to civilian production.
(2) A program for general and complete disarmament, negotiated with other military states.
(3) A program to systematically transfer funds from the military budget to civilian budget areas related to key areas like housing, alternative energy, mass transportation, and various physical infrastructure areas, notably bridges.
(4) Develop a program of education in the universities that addresses the political, economic, and technical questions associated with the above agenda.
(5) Move from deconstruction to reconstruction.
Jonathan M. Feldman
August 14th, 2007 at 6:05 am
Jason, if I remember correctly, the Wolf in Little Red Ridinghood lay in bed dressed in grandmother’s night clothes. Negroponte is a CIA minion and INSA is a right-wing front.
If Stalin were satill alive and endowed a chair on International Politics would that be OKAY with you? How about if Stroessner of Paraguay? Would it be OKAY then?
Wake up sir. As you justify and explain and pontificate, American Democracy is slipping through Americans’ finger like sand from an hourglass. Contracting out or Outsourcing War and violence to avoid its pain and evil is as destructive as Outsourcing’ Jobs…
August 14th, 2007 at 7:10 am
An analyst for Aegis wrote a study last year arguing that the next move for private military companies should be to muscle in on the role of aid agencies. Some extracts are available here:
http://www.tomgriffin.org/the_green_ribbon/2006/08/after_the_baghd.html
Some of Aegis’ intelligence reports from Iraq are available here:
http://www.tomgriffin.org/the_green_ribbon/2007/06/iraq_contractor.html
August 15th, 2007 at 4:50 am
You’re a bunch of commies. Mercenaries have been around since War has been around. Its how wars are successfully fought. Fact: People fight better if there’s something in it for them.
August 15th, 2007 at 6:48 am
Actually mercenaries are notoriously inferior in a confrontation with regular troops precisely because there’s nothing in it for them worth the risk involved.
The most famous example is the perormance of the Italian condottieri during the French invasions of the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condottieri
August 15th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Why doesn’t anybody call these mercenaries by their proper title? They are GOONS, hired thugs, the grandsons of the STRIKEBREAKERS, FINKS AND SCABS who locked horns with my grandpa in the early days of the labor movement. They cannot be trusted, their loyalty is only to self-interest.
We sure don’t want these GOONS deployed here in the homeland to enforce some martial-law scheme or to police the scene of the next natrural or unnatural disaster. We sure don’t want heavily-armed and heavily-funded corporate interests to influence government policy as a lobbying special-interest group. A heavy-handed and coercive one.
Remember, the “barbarians” who over-ran Rome and tore down its empire were Germanic mercenaries who had been in the service of the Romans, but turned on them.
August 15th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Is there no one in the House or Senate willing to raise serious quest ion about the use of mercenaries as privatized troops unaccountable to anyone no matter what they may do.
and extremely well paid. These mercenaties actually out numbe our troops and can earn from $650 to $1,000 a day if they are well trained soldiers. But the privatized corporate contractors whose armies of men run in the hundreds olf thousands provide a wide variey of services–guarding, training, etc earn the owners hundreds of millions off dollars.
We are giving away our national security by creating a privatized quasi military force that can not only compete with the army but can influence the goverenment to support highly profitable ventures into invasions,occupations and wars .
August 15th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
It’s my understanding under the rules of the Geneva Conventions that “mercenaries” are not to be used in occupations specifically because they are not answerable to the military authorities. The entire thing is illegal. Don’t forget that Bush hired Blackwater to go to New Orleans. Don’t forget that several bases are planned around this nation, the latest near San Diego and in Illinois. So who will have authority over them? A dictator? A CEO? Destroy our patriotic volunteer military while building mercenary forces with different loyalties.
August 16th, 2007 at 6:53 am
Scahill’s investigation is crucial to anyone still interested in this republic and democracy at large !
If the Republicans lose in 2008, they will leave office armed and dangerous. Bush’s Praetorian Guard, paid by YOU the people, could presage the final stage in the collapse of American democracy…BLACKWATER : THE SHADOW WAR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfu44knmLOE
August 17th, 2007 at 6:02 am
Actually, if the Republicans leave office in 2008, they will turn over management of this mercenary apparatus to the Democrats… who will continue to use it. Democrats are in lock-step with the Republicans over the basic features of this “long war”.
Don’t believe me? Then forgive me for noticing the results of the last election… Democrats became the governing party and quickly pushed through legislation legalizing the most intensive spying operations in the history of the world. This after they voted for the Military Commissions Act which “legalized” torture, indefinite detention without charge and the effective suspension of habeus corpus, the legal basis for a democratic society with a supposed rule of law.
I just love how smug liberals talk incesssantly about how “stupid” George Bush is, then turn around and PERSONALLY vote for Democrats who uphold and promote his program.
Who’s stupid now? Bush who admits his love of torture, war and empire or all those fans of the Daily Show who think they are so smart they can literally get played like suckers over and over and over again?
You just can’t make it up.
August 20th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Hi Folks…. If your tired of this BS! its time to vote for Ron Paul…. when you have mercenaries like this, it is only a matter of time before they are used at home.. actually during katrina in new orleans they were… Please help Ron Paul take our republic back from the the CLOWNS like Clinton, Bush, and Cheney! there is not a dimes difference between the Republican and democratic parties… Democrats should be terribly mad AT thier representaives not getting the US out of Iraq and stopping the war… this is why the dems won in 06.. dems are just like repubs, pelosi has done nothing that she promised..
Bush should have been impeached and pelosi and her liar compadres do nothing.. Ron Paul beleives in liberty and freedom.. He teaches in the ways of our founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson etc.! Please give this man your consideration its time to take out country back and make the world safer… RON PAUL IN 08!!!!!!!
September 21st, 2007 at 10:47 pm
MERCENARIES WITHOUT BORDERS,
the “dogs of war” of financial globalization
By Karel Vereycken
“While greed may be good, war is better”
Forbes.com, comment on DynCorp’s financial profits on the stock markets.
Prologue
For many today, the mere term mercenary evokes inevitably the image of individual “soldiers of fortune” and other “dogs of war”. But the public generally ignores a far more horrific new reality: the fast growing role of Private Military Contractors (PMC’s).
With the collapse of the soviet system in 1989, a new reality appeared. If in the past, some wild-eyed killers for rent or “soldiers of fortune” sold their skills to despots and dictators threatened to be kicked out of power, reactionary company owners out for having a militia capable to break strikes often and early or murky secret service special ops gurus, today, it are the “civilized” states, in full daylight, which sign the contracts: the Pentagon, the State Department, the UN, the OSCE, the African Union and even some NGO’s and the Red Cross!
The scandal of the century that rocks the United Kingdom and the USA, involving huge financial and political corruption around the weapons for oil contracts of BAE Systems with Saudi Arabia, lifted some part of the veil of the fascist policies the international financial oligarchy tries to impose on the world. It is an imperial model inspired by the British East India Company, which with its commercial and financial monopoly and its armies “ruled the waves” of “an empire on which the sun never sets.”
Today, as yesterday, the game is to unite a giant cartel of financiers, which by allying financial, military, technological and IT power, impose their rule on the resources, peoples and nations of the world. As the pirates of yesterday, the private military contractors perform the dirty jobs of the empire which glory they carry.
A short look at the careers of the current managers of BAE Systems, as well as on their address-books, confirms we are not any longer dealing with a normal corporation, but with a cartel uniting high tech weaponry (BAE Systems, United Defense Industries, Lockheed Martin), with speculative financiers (Lazard Frères, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank), together with raw material cartels (British Petroleum, Shell Oil) with on the ground, SMP’s.
The private military company DynCorp which trains thousands of policemen around the world, and about which we will talk later, is also nearly a grotesque caricature of the criminal wedding between huge financial speculators and large mercenary corporations. The main shareholder of DynCorp has been for a long time Capricorn Holdings a company directed by Herbert S. Winokur Jr., who’s a director at DynCorp and chairman of the financial board of Enron, the Texan energy giant known for a vast energy scam. Early 2007, DynCorp was bought by the investment fund Veritas Capital, directed by Robert B. McKeon, former CEO of Wasserstein Perella Management Partners. His former partner, Bruce Wasserstein, now leads the synarchist bank Lazard Freres…
If the fascist BAE cartel has nearly succeeded in deeply penetrating the core of the military industrial complex of the United States, it is the direct result of the limitless anglophilia of Dick and Lynne Cheney, as middlemen of the dangerous cult of neo-conservatives. The BAE scandal reveals to the world the real intentions and policies of this faction. Under the cover of a “revolution in military affaires” (RMA), a systematic policy of privatizations and outsourcing, together with a massive reduction in personnel coupled with the build up of space based “miracle” weapons developed secretly by a tiny elite of professionals, has created the explosion of the “marked” for PMC’s. As mad as it appears, this vast military apparatus, used as an instrument of blackmail, would give them the means to impose a “world government” keeping the planet hostage with space-based weaponry, while simultaneously controlling the chaos of world populations with mercenary entities, genetics without ethics, permanent disinformation and mind regulating drugs. This “scientific dictatorship”, a dangerous utopia of which dreamed George Orwell in his 1984 and Aldus Huxley in the Return of Brave New World, and largely popularized in comic strips, will become a reality unless we intervene.
Felix Rohatyn and Middlebury
On October 9, 2004, barely weeks before George W. Bush’s reelection, a conference took place in Middlebury, Vermont under the auspices of the “Rohatyn Center for International Affairs” on the theme of the “Privatization of National Security” (1)
Felix “the fixer” Rohatyn, big shot of the synarchist Lazard Freres-Lehman Brothers banking nexus, a man who was at ITT when that company was backing Pinochet’s coup in Chile on September 11, 1973, shared the panel with a group of scholars, editors such as William Dobson, editor of “Foreign Affairs”, geopolitical whiz kids, such as Harvard’s Michael Ignatieff who thinks America should drop the republic and become “liberal imperial”, and a selection of high placed military that travel very often from the Pentagon to the very profitable business of PMC’s, an ambiguous name to polish the less brighter label of feudal mercenary companies.
Lieutenant General Ed Soyster, for example, appeared on the program as a “Special assistant to the secretary of the Army”. In reality, Soyster, former head of D.I.A. (the Defense Intelligence Agency in charge of counter-intelligence operations) between 1988 and 1991, happens to be the current vice-president of Military Professionals Resources Inc. (MPRI), one of the largest PMC’s of the world. (2)
Seven years earlier, on January 1997, the D.I.A. organized a closed-door symposium, “The Privatization of National Security Functions in Sub-Saharan Africa.” According to Ken Silverstein, writing in The Nation of July 28, 1997, “On hand were M.P.R.I. and other U.S. private contractors, as well as Eeben Barlow, head of South Africa’s notorious Executive Outcomes (EO), which in the past few years has provided mercenaries to the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone, and Timothy Spicer of Sandline International.” (3)
One month after the conference, Rohatyn gave his thoughts on the matter in a co-authored article published in the Financial Times, “The Profit Motive Goes to War.” Since a decade, writes Rohatyn, a silent revolution is taking place. “In the first Gulf war, the ratio of American troops on the ground to private contractors was 50:1. In the 2003 Iraq war, that ratio was 10:1, as it was for the Clinton administration’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. As these figures reflect, key military functions have been outsourced to private companies; both Democratic and Republican presidents alike have steadily privatized crucial aspects of US national security. For a rough sense of the magnitude of this shift, Halliburton’s total contracts in Iraq to date are estimated at $11bn-13bn, more than twice what the first Gulf war cost the US.”
“In the history of warfare,” Rohatyn continued, “sub-contracting and the deployment of mercenaries are nothing new. The British built an empire with contracted soldiers, developing a citizens’ army only in the latter half of the 19th century. But there are two major structural differences between the 19th century British and 21st century US empires. First, publicly quoted companies now conduct private military operations. Second, the market for this force is now genuinely global, which raises new accountability and normative concerns.”
A $100 billion market
During the March 2003 military invasion of Iraq, US Navy troops were commanding American warships. But at their sides, stood private military personnel to operate some of the most sophisticated weaponry of the world. When the predatory Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV’s), the Hawks, and the Stealth heavy bombers engage in action, their systems are equally operated by PMC’s.
In Iraq, the role of these PMC’s increased even more dramatically in the so-called “post-war” period. In 2003, of $87 billion spent on the war costs, nearly one third, i.e. $30 billions went to PMC’s. The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) estimated the number of PMC’s to be 60 with 25.000 people deployed while it went up to 181 PMC’s with over 48.000 people deployed by PMC’s in Iraq in 2006, more than four times the number of the 11.000 soldiers of the British contingent!
The “Coalition of the willing” seemed outnumbered by the coalition of the “willing to get rich”. Flag officers of the British Army complain nearly daily about the great number of qualified military personnel of her majesty’s glorious army on the leave for jobs in the private sector paid generally five to twenty tiles as much as military personnel un the national army. A former commando of the highly trained SAS, Delta Force or other Special Forces can earn up to $1000 a day. Even the Pentagon was obliged in 2004, to stop the bleeding of its own forces by the PMC’s, to award an extra $150,000, paid immediately, for those non-commissioned officers willing to serve another six years.
“Revolution in Military Affairs”
This “revolution in military affaires” (RMA) described by Martin van Creveld’s “The Transformation of War” replacing nation-states by “war-making entities” is on the rise since years, but the magnitude of its dimension takes dramatic and worrisome dimensions now.
First, if one steps a little bit back in time, one sees that since the end of the cold war, nearly six million armed forces have been thrown on the labor market having as unique skill their military experience. The giant armies Red Army, the east-German Volksarmee or South-Africa’s military forces have been massively shrunken. The US army did not resist to the global trend and reduced its troops from 2.1 million men in arms in 1990 to a mere 1.4 million in 2003, i.e. one third less! It is this massive reduction of the armed forces under Clinton, a downsizing even further increased by the Bush-Cheney administration that lead to the explosion of the private market. Thanks to Donald Rumsfeld, who said that one can outsource “everything except shooting”, the PMC’s conquered a market of about $100 billions a year which absorbs nearly one fourth of the US defense budget of 2006 that amounted to $439.3 billions. In a typical Orwellian doublespeak, the PMC’s created their own lobby to market their business, called the International Peace Operations Association.
DynCorp, a “state within the state”
Let us examine first the case of a large private military contractor DynCorp. Based in Fall Church, Virginia, DynCorp (of which former CIA boss James Woolsey was a shareholder) employs 26.000 people in dozens of countries around the globe. Bought up by Veritas Capital, a major private equity investment firm of the NYSE, DynCorp has become a “state within the state”. In charge of providing worldwide protective services for State Department employees, DynCorp is often hired to train foreign police forces. On June 12, 2007, DynCorp appointed Dwight M. Williams, the Chief Security Officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as its vice-president for security. DynCorp touts itself as an “Internet Corporation”.
According to Catherine Austin Fitts, a Republican insider and financial specialist that left the first Bush administration after spending 18 months trying to clean up the $100 billion sized financial frauds (including BCCI, S&L, Iran-Contra and HUD), DynCorp is the information computer system provider to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and provides a substantial amount of computer and information systems for the DOJ and the FBI.
According to some sources, DynCorp, by contract, manages the financial data and other electronic records for more than 30 U.S. government agencies, including the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Justice, the Defense Department, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau of Prisons, and the Office of National Drug Policy. Catherine Fitts says that DynCorp uses “the most advanced version of the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) software system. Theoretically, they have access to everybody’s bank account, onshore and offshore.” Reportedly the PROMIS Software has been used to “swipe” the bank accounts of Emmanuel Noriega and Ferdinand Marcos. Who wants more?
Behind this aura of governmental imprimatur, far different motives appear. A confidential memorandum from the U.S. Embassy in Haiti dated January 1997 and addressed to the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department stated that: “Over 300 police officers of the Haitian National Police (HNP) have received specialized training in crowd control…. Embassy officials expect crowd control to be a major HNP task in 1997 as the stagnant economy engenders greater frustration among the populace.”
Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch wrote that DynCorp’s role in another State Department contract looks “designed to circumvent United States law.” Writing about DynCorp’s role in Latin America, he wrote that “In the Colombian conflict, Washington has supplied more than 70 Black Hawk and Huey helicopters and other military hardware that are maintained and flown by private contractors. Anxious to avoid the “secret wars” conducted by the Pentagon in Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s, Congress limited the number of US personnel that can operate in Colombia to 400 in uniform and 400 civilian contractors at any given time. US law also requires congressional notification before the government can approve the export of military services valued at $50 million or more. By limiting each individual contract to several million dollars; labeling them peace-keeping missions; employing retired CIA and Special Forces personnel working for private contractors as well as foreign nationals (to whom the 400 person ceiling does not apply), Congress does not have to be notified, making the contracts harder to oversee.”
US Representative Janice Shakowsky, an Illinois democrat, told the press: “Is the US military privatizing its mission to avoid public controversy or to avoid embarrassment – to hide body bags from the media and shield the military from public opinion?”
DynCorp is close to a caricature of the East India Company, the criminal wedding of large mercenary companies and great finance capital out for loot and power and war racketeering. DynCorp main shareholder has been over years Capricorn Holdings, a company directed by Herbert S. “Pug” Winokur Jr., who is a director of DynCorp while simultaneously the chairman of the finance committee of Enron’s board…Fitts believes one of the reasons why Winokur escaped going to jail for the Enron scam comes from DynCorp’s (i.e. Winokur’s) control over the government’s computer data files… Winukur is also director of the Harvard Endowment Fund, ($25.9 billion with a 19.2% return on investment for 2005), an entity close to the Bush dynasty.
Catherine Fitts notes the interesting fact that “Enron SEC filings indicate that there are about 700 Enron subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands”, the world’s leading center of the Anglo-Dutch hedge-fund operations and dirty money laundering. Another director of DynCorp is Dudley Mecum, also a director at Capricorn. Mecum is on the board of one of the largest US banks, Citygroup. Early 2007, DynCorp was bought by the investment fund Veritas Capital, directed by Robert B. McKeon, former CEO of Wasserstein Perella Management Partners. His former partner, Bruce Wasserstein, now leads the synarchist bank Lazard Freres. On Veritas’ defense and aerospace advisory council sits Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state and another shadowy Irangate figure.
Commenting the fabulous results of DynCorp on the NYSE, Forbes.com, cynically commented that “While greed may be good, war is better”, and added that “as conflict continues to dominate headlines analysts remain upbeat on military contractors.” In other words, if Cheney is impeached and the Iraq war brought to halt, war stock market values will collapse.
PMC’s and “humanitarian aid”
As we mentioned at the start, the ambiguous double-use of PMC’s has permitted them to obtain contracts from “highly respectable” entities such as the State Department, the Pentagon, the EU, the UN, the African Union, the OSCE, NGO’s and event the Red Cross.
In France, before, “socialist” Bernard Kouchner became the new foreign affairs minister of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, he gave a hint to the integration of private armies in Inflexions, a prominent French Military journal of reference, where he stated that “The major question in effect is undoubtedly not to know if the humanitarian domain has to remain the exclusive one for the NGO’s (as if this would have ever been so), but rather to know how a growing number of actors involved in the rescue operations of victims – NGO, UN organizations, civil security, national and transnational military forces, private actors, etc. – can have mandates, approaches and perimeters of actions that answer in the most efficient way, and with the best cost/efficiency ratio the needs of the populations subjected to the crisis’s.” (4)
As one sees here, for Kouchner, the question is not to create a dynamic that outlaws PMC’s or makes them unnecessary, but to benefit from the “best cost/efficiency ratio”, i.e. the market! To make this package something acceptable to French public opinion, often qualified to be backwardly “thirty years behind vis-à-vis the Anglo-Saxons”, certain former French military, eager to set up their own PMC, plead in favor of changing the name of PMC into “Strategic and Operational Support Company”. The message is clear: “Sir, la and behold, we’re no mercenaries, but serious professionals that work for a handful of dollars.” As usual, the revolution of word is in the making.
French Law and the Geneva Conventions
In France, a real opposition to the PMC phenomena exists. On April 3, 2003, few weeks after the beginning of the Iraq war, the French Members of Parliament, across party lines voted a new law prohibiting “active mercenary” activity. During the parliamentary debate, French Defense minister Michèle Alliot-Marie and many others expressed the good intuitions that dominate the French mindset. She declared: “Real war enterprises, often of Anglo-Saxon origin, have, in this context, appeared and fructify. ‘In hand’ war material is delivered by them to failing states and the means to achieve their ends is given to oppositions poorly respectful of any legal procedures. One has to note here, by the way, that we’re not talking about traditional mercenaries, as individuals, but about real commercial companies, the more so more fearsome as they dispose of powerful means.”
The law adopted by French national assembly reformulated the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977, where it is stated:
“Art 47. Mercenaries
1. A mercenary shall not have the right to be a combatant or a prisoner of war.
2. A mercenary is any person who:
(a) is specially recruited locally or abroad in order to fight in an armed conflict;
(b) does, in fact, take a direct part in the hostilities;
(c) is motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain and, in fact, is promised, by or on behalf of a Party to the conflict, material compensation substantially in excess of that promised or paid to combatants of similar ranks and functions in the armed forces of that Party;
(d) is neither a national of a Party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by a Party to the conflict;
(e) is not a member of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict; and
(f) has not been sent by a State which is not a Party to the conflict on official duty as a member of its armed forces.”
It should be noted that many countries, including the United States, are not signatories to the Protocol Additional GC 1977 (APGC77). So although it is the most widely accepted international definition of a mercenary, it is not definitive.
Seen the cumulative nature of the six criteria, the French law is not very binding. It merely integrates the juridical qualification of “mercenary” into the French Code Pénal. In reality the law turns out to be useless since it restrains itself to individual mercenaries only, not PMC’s. In Ivory Coast, for example, France was unable to indict the Slavic mercenaries that bombarded the French military on November 6, 2004 in Ivory Coasts second largest city Bouaké, since they were legally they were paid to do so by that country’s army. Legally, the attack had become an act of military aggression of Ivory Coast against France left without any legal base for indicting the mercenaries they had arrested… Even worse, the new law does not forbid any private company to “contract” with the American army for protective missions that can be performed by experienced “former” military.
In France, the former head of the French Foreign Intelligence Service DGSE, General Jean Heinrich created a fast growing company called Géos that employs about 120 former DGSE members. Géos got a contract to protect the pipeline that goes from Chad to Cameroon. Officially, its spokesman refuses to accept “missions belonging in principle to government agencies”, but in cases of emergency, and with the green light of the Quai d’Orsay, it operates “avoiding any direct involvement.”
The warning: from Machiavelli to Eisenhower
As in the times of imperial Rome when generals got themselves crowned emperor by buying the votes of the plebe by the loot of imperial conquest, the election of the Bush dynasty has largely benefited of the contributions and donations of the mercenary PMC’s and the investment funds that control them.
It remains almost impossible to evaluate the total figures of the millions of dollars donated by Carlyle, BDM International, Enron, Halliburton, DynCorp or Blackwater USA to many candidates running the show of media politics. What is known is that DynCorp, Bechtel and Halliburton gave together over $2.2 millions to mostly republican candidates and the Bush campaign.
Are we ready to sell our freedom and souls to the devils of war by accepting the “privatization” of one of the last state missions of our sovereign nation-states?
One time, according to an eyewitness, Bush was asked at a forum at John Hopkins University by a student about bringing PMC’s under a system of law. Bush replied, laughing, that he was going to ask Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, “I was going to – I pick up the phone and say, Mr. Secretary, I’ve got an interesting question [laughter]. This is what delegation – I don’t mean to be dodging on the question, although it’s kind of convenient in this case, but never – [laughter] I really will – I’m going to call the Secretary and say you brought up a very valid question, and what are we doing about it? That’s how I work.”
Two wiser voices of the past warn us against all excessive power of what was a military-industrial complex before and became military-financial now.
One of the major warnings came from Leonardo da Vinci’s friend, the Florentine statesman Machiavelli, writing “The Prince”, published in 1532. Then, closer to us, there was the warning of a great friend of French General Charles DeGaulle, the U.S. President-General Dwight Eisenhower at his last speech in January 1961.
Machiavelli, who realized that the condottieri and their mercenaries where the main cause for the ruin of Italy at his time, wrote in “The Prince”, chapter XIII, “Concerning Auxiliaries, Mixed Soldiery, And One’s Own”:
“Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you. They are ready enough to be your soldiers whilst you do not make war, but if war comes they take themselves off or run from the foe; which I should have little trouble to prove, for the ruin of Italy has been caused by nothing else than by resting all her hopes for many years on mercenaries, and although they formerly made some display and appeared valiant amongst themselves, yet when the foreigners came they showed what they were.”
(…) “The mercenary captains are either capable men or they are not; if they are, you cannot trust them, because they always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, who are their master, or others, contrary to your intentions; but if the captain is not skilful, you are ruined in the usual way. And if it be urged that whoever is armed will act in the same way, whether mercenary or not, I reply that when arms have to be resorted to, either by a prince or a republic, then the prince ought to go in person and perform the duty of captain; the republic has to send its citizens, and when one is sent who does not turn out satisfactorily, it ought to recall him, and when one is worthy, to hold him by the laws so that he does not leave the command. And experience has shown princes and republics, single-handed, making the greatest progress and mercenaries doing nothing except damage; and it is more difficult to bring a republic, armed with its own arms, under the sway of one of its citizens than it is to bring one armed with foreign arms.”
Finally, U.S. President General Dwight Eisenhower, on January 17, 1961, three days before the end of his mandate warned against the growing danger of a military industrial complex saying:
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, and even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, and every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.“
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Footnotes:
(1) The conference took place in the context of the « Princeton Project on National Security” co-chaired by George Schultz and financed by the Ford Foundation, an organization that has been involved in “covert” operations since decades and remarkably generous for those lefties that specialize in impotent war contesting.
(2) MPRI was bought in 2000 by L-3 Communications, a company that was set up by Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street bank that appointed Rohatyn to its board in august 2006. Unsurprisingly, BAE projected buying L-3 with the cash provided from its sale of the 20% shares of EADS. BAE has not taken over L3 so far.
(3) Some months later, as by magic, a new law is adopted in March 1998 to give a legal frame to the PMC activity, the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Any producer or exporter of military goods or services in the defense sector has to be registered at the Office of Defense Trade Control (ODTC). If his dossier is accepted he gets a license. The ITAR law permits to escape section 9 of the first article of the Constitution that outlines that any act of war needs approval of the Congress by defining that no green light of the Congress will be necessary for any contract below $50 million and that consequently, for any contract below $50 million, an simple authorization of the Pentagon is sufficient. As said an observer: “If the DoD was directly involve you’d have a whole network of Congressional offices providing oversight, even if it’s not always sufficient. But when you turn these tasks over to a contractor, the only oversight comes from an overworked civil servant in the federal bureaucracy.”
(4) Bernard Kouchner, “Humanitaire et Militaire” in “Mutations et invariants, Partie III, Humanitaire et Militaire, Nouveaux Mercenariats“, “Inflexions“ N°5, Jan-May, 2007, published by the Documentation Française.
End of main article
BOX: BAE’s Tony Blair and his Pet Bulldogs take over
With all these dark sunglasses carrying killer cowboys around, one easily understands why the area gets so dangerous. Many PMC’s themselves starts increasingly worry about deaths resulting from “friendly fire”. According to Iraq Casualties Org, 31.9% of SMP personnel get killed during ambushes with or without shooting. 23.7% is killed with IED’s and over 9% dies eventually from “friendly fire”, but these figures seem confused and underrated.
The cohabitation among PMC’s and between PMC’s and the U.S. Army is often horrific. To diminish the death rate of “friendly fire” the United States had the right idea of installing a Centre for Operations and Reconstruction (COR). The centre had to function on a voluntary base and not everybody accepted to share its intelligence. Understandable, since the task was awarded to Aegis Defense Services, the inheritor of Executive Outcomes and Sandline International, directed by “Tony Blair’s Pet Bulldog”, Tim Spicer.
Aegis is in a good position to become, to the great displeasure of the big American PMC’s, to become the most powerful PMC of the world and the Iraqi contract is said to have been obtained, according to a diplomatic source, after Tony Blair complained at a summit meeting with the Americans that the British companies had received scarcely any reward for the United Kingdom’s war effort…
“The American companies are furious. Spicer will not be their boss, but he will have access to sensitive information from American military intelligence and will coordinate some of their activities” said a British consultant. “To have to go through this Brit with an adventurer’s reputation in order to deal with the Pentagon seems to them a heresy…”
A correspondent of the French daily Le Monde commented the situation as follows: “After the attack on the Blackwater convoys in Falludja, the Pentagon proposed providing to the coordinating agency PMO – Program Management Office – and so today to Tim Spicer, air support for all the private military companies officially registered with the PMO. The program’s name is “Quarterback” It’s incredible. It’s the Wild West. Apache helicopters and ground attack fighters are going henceforth to be able to “clear” the roads for private companies”
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Drift toward madness: ten study cases
1) ANGOLA: payed with Diamonds
Before the end of the cold war, the United States had been helping Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA forces to combat the pro-soviet Dos Santos MPLA regime. UNITA occupied the region where vast reserves of mineral resources are located. In 1992, the world had changed and the British private military contractor Executive Outcomes (EO) signs a contract to cleanse the region as to restart mining activities. Founded in 1989 by former members of David Stirling’s British SAS and South-Africa’s Special Forces, Executive Outcomes has to protect the oil fields and mines in Angola. As documented by EIR’s Roger Moore, “EO’s contracts, nominally with the respective governments, and in part underwritten by the IMF and the World Bank, were paid off with diamond concessions to EO’s founder Tony Buckingham’s front company, Branch Energy” (a company in the orbit of de Beers diamond cartel CSO). Operations were so “successful” that EO got two new $80 millions contracts with the Angolan government suddenly converted to free trade. In 1995, Bill Clinton ordered the Angolan government to break all contract with EO, whose brutal methods forced its disbandment in 1998 and the adoption of an anti-mercenary law in South Africa. Most of EO’s 1,000 member employees joined Timothy Spicer’s Sandline International, equally disbanded in 2004. Personnel moves then again, this time eventually to MPRI who takes over the contract from EO in Angola but mostly to Spicer’s new PMC: Aegis Defense Services (see box “BAE’s Tony Blair and his Pet Bulldogs take over”).
(Sources : Revue Inflexions n°5, Jan-May 2007 ; Ken Silverstein, « Privatizing War », The Nation, July 28, 1997 ; Roger Moore, “Executive Outcomes : Arming For the Post-Nation State Era”, EIR, Aug. 22, 1997)
2) CROATIA: “Help the Croatians join NATO” and « Operation Storm »
Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster, who headed the DIA between December 1988 and September 1991 and who was a scheduled speaker at the Middlebury conference, is the current vice-president of Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) At MPRI, twenty-two corporate officers are former high-ranking military, notably General Carl E. Vuono, U.S. Army Chief of Staff during the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War and General Frederick Kroesen, former commander of U.S. army in Europe. Based in Alexandria, the company was created in 1987 by General Vernon Lewis. MPRI has a data bank of about 10,000 officers and non commanded officers, including 340 generals ready for missions at any point desired. They don’t have a permanent employment but can effectuate short missions in war theatres around the globe, as in Iraq. As goes the saying “There are more generals per square meter at MPRI than at the Pentagon.” MPRI has elaborated several official manuals for the US army.
“The Croatians hope to join NATO” says Ed Soyster, and “if you want to join the club, you have to look like the members.” Violating the 1991 UN embargo on weapon sales to entities belonging to the former country of Yugoslavia, and leaving the Croatians on the ground defenseless in front of the Serbian rampage, MPRI was hired in 1994 by the US State Department to train overnight the Croatian military, until then bumbling and inept, and help them to “avoid excesses or atrocities in military operations.” After some months of training and a secret meeting with MPRI’s head General Vuono at the island of Brioni to map out the Krajina campaign, the Croatian army launched “Operation Storm”. The four days offensive provoked the departure of some 100.000 Serbian civilians. Investigators of the International Human Rights Tribunal of the UN have indicted creation officers for “murder and other inhuman activities.” Soyster says “no MPRI employee played a role in planning, monitoring or assisting operation Storm”, but admits that a couple of Croatians assisted at MPRI’s training sessions. MPRI had similar contracts with Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo where it performs similar services and has a contract to protect the Company ITT.
Press reports also suspect the Zagreb regime from having bought weaponry from Ernst Werner Glatt, a German arms dealer who in the eighties bought cheap weapons in the East Bloc and shipped them to the Contra’s in Nicaragua or the Mujahedeen to fight communism. At one instance, Soyster reportedly arranged such a contract with Glatt.
In France, during the parliamentary debate, the French deputy Paul Quilès, speaking for the socialist group, denounced the fact that PMC’s “give the opportunity for certain states to intervene without appearing publicly. In this way the United States succeeded in escaping from the UN embargo imposed in Rwanda by paying a company, Ronco, to do de-mining and deliver military equipment, and to intervene in Croatia in 1995, by means of MPRI, to train and equip the creation army.”
(Sources : Ken Silverstein, « Privatizing War », The Nation, July 28, 1997 ; Leslie Wayne, “America’s For-Profit Secret Army” , New York Times, October 13, 2002; press coverage of former SAS John Geddes book “Highway to Hell”)
3) BOSNIA: Sex slavery
As a precondition for the signing of the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreements, the Bosnian government demanded, legitimately, an international effort to create a national army. The contract went to MPRI who got a $400 million program largely paid by donor countries Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Brunei and Malaysia who wired the money on a special account at the U.S. Treasury Department designated to pay MPRI. A journalist noted that “on the job, say guarding a peacekeepers’ compound in Tuzla, the civilian employees are subject to the same rules of engagement as foreign troops. But if an American GI draws and uses his weapon on an off-duty brawl, he will be subject to the US judicial military code. If an American guard employed by the US Company ITT in Tuzla dies the same, he answers to Bosnian law. By definition PMC’s are operating frequently in “failed states” where national law is notional.”
The risk of slipping into illegal behavior was demonstrated by another major PMC, DynCorp, in charge of training the Bosnian police and the employer of the UN’s international contingent (Civpol) in Kosovo. Based at Falls Church, Virginia, DynCorp employs 26,000 people in dozens of countries around the world. Former CIA chief James Woolsey has been mentioned as a major shareholder before it went private. In Bosnia, certain employees were accused of rape and sex trafficking including a girl as young as 12. A number of employees were fired, but never prosecuted. The only court cases to result involved the two whistleblowers who exposed the episode and got sacked. Kathryn Bolkovic, a former US police officer working for DynCorp won her suit for wrongful dismissal. Ben Johnston charged that he “witnessed co-workers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.”
Madeleine Rees, the chief UN human rights officer in Sarajevo commented that “DynCorp should never have been awarded the Iraqi police contract.” In Bosnia, an official of the Bosnian army, in charge of relations with MPRI stated that “It’s a conflict of interest. I represent our national interest, but they’re businessmen. I would have preferred direct cooperation with state organizations like NATO or the OSCE. But we had no choice, we had to use MPRI.”
(Sources: Ian Traynor, « The privatization of War », The Guardian, Dec.10, 2003; Catherine Fitts, “Enron, the anatomy of a cover-up”; Eric Leser, “L’armée américaine fait de plus en plus appel au secteur privé”, Le Monde, Feb., 10, 2003)
4) COLOMBIA: War on Drugs?
Repeatedly, the United States have committed themselves to assist Latin American countries in the “War on Drugs”, notably in Colombia, Peru or Bolivia. Paid $170 millions between 1996 and 2001 to destroy the coca fields? Answer: DynCorp, called by the pro mercenary magazine Soldiers of Fortune, “Colombia’s Coke-Bustin’ Broncos”.
Remark: DynCorp Aerospace Technology subcontracts the defoliation job to another company: Eagle Aviation Services and Technology (EAST). Other remark: EAST and its founder Richard Gadd worked closely with Colonel Oliver North to deliver weapons to the Nicaraguan Contra. In exchange, and to pay for the weapons, the plains flew cocaine into the United States…
Yet, one last remark: Dick Cheney has always been a strong supporter of Oliver North and a donator for North’s (failed) campaign for the Senate. On may 11, Oliver North attacked Nancy Pelosi for defending women and opposing the Iraq war by saying that “if Pelosi and her Democrat Party allies have their way — 650 million women around the globe may well be abandoned to the most misogynistic abuse imaginable at the hands of radical Islamists” since, through the war in Iraq, the “principal protectors of Muslim women today [are]: the Armed Forces of the United States.”
(Source: Ken Guggenheim, « Drug Fight in Colombia questioned », Associated Press, June 5, 2001.)
5) LIBERIA: Kidnappers for hire
In December 2003, a British PMC, Norhtbridge Services Group, said it had people ready to kidnap former Liberian president Charles Taylor, to claim a $2 million reward allegedly offered by the US Congress. Charles Taylor, who has been granted asylum in Nigeria, is wanted by the UN-backed court of Sierra Leone on war crimes charges and subject of an international arrest warrant by Interpol. In November 2003, George W. Bush signed a bill to provide funds totaling $87.5 billion for the war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a small portion for the provision of $2 millions reward money for the capture of an indictee of the Sierra Leone war crimes tribunal.
(Source: BBC, « Firm seeks Charles Taylor Bounty », Dec., 11, 2003)
6) EQUATORIAL GUINEA: Coup attempt
On March 2004, an airplane coming from South-Africa is blocked in Zimbabwe. On board, about a hundred men and their leaders: the British Simon Mann and the South-African Nick Du Toit, two former bosses of Executive Outcomes. Target: bring down the government of Equatorial Guinea, a country nicknamed “the Kuwait of Africa” for its oil and other mineral resources.
Who gave the orders for the operation: Mark Thatcher, son of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, equally arrested in South Africa on August 15, 2004. A Company related to Gary Hart, Mark Thatcher’s business associate and co-conspirer, reportedly benefited from over €20 million from BAE Systems.
(Source: Philippe Leymarie, Le Monde Diplomatique, « En Afrique, une nouvelle génération de ‘Chiens de guerre’ », novembre 2004)
7) KATRINA : do you drink Blackwater ?
Some 150 men of Blackwater USA, carrying automatic assault weapons and guns strapped to their legs, flak jackets covered with pouches for extra ammunition, arrive in New Orleans shortly after hurricane Katrina to “join the humanitarian effort”, billing the government $950 per man, per day, raking at one point the government more than $240.000 a day. “I worked the security detail of both Bremer and Negroponte” says one of them. Their mission consists in “securing neighborhoods” and “confronting criminals”.
Other PMC’s were ready to move in, such as the Israeli PMC Instinctive Shooting International (ISI) (sic). In Louisiana, in less than two weeks, the number of private security firms has increased from 185 to 235. Certain were acting for the Federal Government but many were just protecting private interests. If everybody paid his own security, taxes could be lowered?
(Source: Jeremy Scahill, « Blackwater Down », The Nation, Oct.10, 2005)
8) SOUDAN: Genocide for Oil
In 1983, John Garang launched his rebellion in the oil rich Southern Sudan. In 2001, his movement, the SPLA signs a contract with DynCorp for $3 million and becomes a co-governing factor of the semi-autonomous government of Southern Sudan. As a reward, the SPLA will reattribute the oil concession of “Bloc B”, legally attributed to the French oil giant Total, to the British oil Company White Nile UK. In 2006, DynCorp renews it contract to transform the SPLA into a regular army. Several sources affirm that, through SPLA channels, DynCorp funnels weaponry to the myriad of rebellions in Southern Darfur, where other oilfields are waiting.
In Darfur, when the 4,500 Nigerian and Rwandan soldiers of the African Union arrived, the US State Department signed a $20.6 million contract with two SMP’s: DynCorp and Pacific Architects & Engineers (PAE), another PMC known for overcharging its services in Democratic Republic of Congo. Note here that the African Union’s budget for 2004 was $43 million, the miserable equivalent of half the price of an Airbus A320 airplane…
In 2005, DynCorp got a contract to arrange housing and transportation to the rebels who meet in Nairobi, Kenya to end the 21-year civil war between the Government of Sudan and the SPLM. A special staff was set up in Washington DC for the job. “Why are we using private contractors to do peace negotiations in Sudan? The answer is simple,” says a senior United States government official, “We are not allowed to fund a political party or agenda under United States law, so by using private contractors, we can get around those provisions. Think of this as somewhere between a covert program run by the CIA and an overt program run by the United States Agency for International Development. It is a way to avoid oversight by Congress.”
(Source: Pratap Chatterjee, « Darfur diplomacy: Enter the Contractors », Oct., 21, 2004, CorpWatch)
9) USA: get ready to go to a Halliburton jail
Halliburton and DynCorp represent since years heavy weights on the largest market of the U.S.: private prisons. But on Jan. 24, 2006, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) component awarded Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR), a Halliburton Subsidiary an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinete Quantity $385 million contract to support ICE facilities “in the event of an emergency.” The building of immigrant detention facilities is part of a ten-year Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of “all removable aliens” and “potential terrorists.” In the 1980’s Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld discussed similar emergency detention powers as part of a super-secret program of planning for what was euphemistically called “Continuity of Government” (COG) in the event of a nuclear disaster. The plan included the suspension of the Constitution, not just after nuclear attack, but for any “national security emergency,” which they defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: “Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.” Clearly 9/11 met such a definition and COG was instituted on that day. As the Washington Post explained on March 1, 2002, the order “dispatched a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans” under the direction of Dick Cheney in charge of “ensure federal survival”. ENDGAME’s goal of a capacious detention capability is remarkably similar to Oliver North’s controversial Rex-84 “readiness exercise” for COG in 1984. It called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary “refugees,” in the context of “uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican border into the United States.
10) IRAQ: “Gold mine” for PMC’s
Long time before the invasion of Iraq, PMC vultures were circling the about to be corps of Iraq. The case of the Texan oil and construction company Halliburton, which employs over 20,000 persons in more than 20 countries often reached the media. In effect, Dick Cheney, for five year the CEO of the company before becoming vice-president remains the largest individual stockholder shareholder detaining $45.5 million. When the “war was in the making”, Halliburton employed 1,800 persons to set up tent villages in Kuwait, while DynCorp body guards patrolled the area to keep away angry villagers and MPRI instructors trained soldiers. Miles from the front, in California, two other PMC’s prepared more secretive operations: Titan Corporation recruited spies and Kurdish translators, the infamous “cultural advisors” that gave great fame to the Abou Graib prison. Intelligence agencies subcontracted their activities, notably interrogations. If private “soldiers” are not subject of military discipline, their contracts are renewed on a pro rata basis, according to how much information is obtained… In the meantime, Science Applications International Corp was paid to set up an emergency government with exiled Iraqis, and Richard Perle advised clients of Goldman Sachs on the future reconstruction contracts in Iraq…
After the “victory” of the coalition, General Jay Garner is promoted overlord in Baghdad. He proposes to use former combat units of the former Iraqi army for security missions in a new “free” country. The report of the General Accounting Office of June 2005 reports that the reconstruction companies “had planned minimal security in their contracts, limited at guards in charge of preventing people to steal on their wharfs.” The Pentagon rejected Garners proposal and nominates Paul Bremer as his successor on May 6, 2003. Bremer was a former assistant to Alexander Haig and a managing director of Kissinger Associates. His decision plunges Iraq into chaos and insecurity. Error or deliberate policy, this tragic decision will transform the country into what the PMC’s proudly called their “gold mine”. Unsurprisingly, Bremer was himself heading Marsh MCLellan, a company that owns Kroll Inc., a PMC that subcontracts with the U.S. government and defense industry. Unsurprisingly also, the fact that one of Bremer’s first decision was to make the PMC’s unaccountable to Iraqi law!
Even if, since April 5, 2007, Halliburton brook its links with Kellogs, Brown & Roots (KBR), KBR has an overriding share of all logistics for the U.S. Army in Iraq. A $200 million contract pays KBR to house, feed and maintain about 100,000 soldiers, a contract signed in December 2001, barely a few weeks after 9/11. KBR also has to repair the oil facilities ($28.2 millions) and build detention centers. It got a $40,8 millions contract for the accommodations of the Iraqi Survey Group, the unit deployed to find the weapons of mass destruction. Noteworthy is the fact that during the Gulf war, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney paid $8.9 million to Brown & Root services to study how PMC’s coud support American combat in war zones. It is unnecessary to read the report to know its conclusions. In 2003, KBR got from the US Army Corps of Engineers a $7 BILLION contract to extinguish burning oil wells and restore petroleum production, since Iraq oil revenues have to pay for the “reconstruction of Iraq”, i.e. the PMC business. A short look on one of Bremers “advisors” tells it all: Philip J. Carroll was named by Bremer to head the advisory committee on oil. Carroll is a Texas oil man, former head of Shell Oil and Fluor (another mainly republican campaign contributor), and currently a director of BAE Systems.
Paul Bremer also signed a $7.1 million contract for bodyguard missions with Blackwater USA. Together with DynCorp, Blackwater guarded many high personalities of the afghan Kharzai government. French Defense Minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie denounced the guards « aggressive attitude » when visiting Afghanistan.
Blackwater USA was founded in 1997 by former navy SEAL and conservative “Christian” multimillionaire Erik Prince, whose phone started “ringing off the hook” after 9/11. Blackwater got a contract for “securizing” the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Blackwater also trains Iraq police and army forces. A documentary film has pointed its responsibility in the Abou Graib torture scandal. According to a former Blackwater official, three providers, Blackwater, Regency and ESS, were engaged in a classic war-profiteering scheme. The News and Observer of North Carolina tells us that Blackwater was paying its men $600 a day but billing Regency $815. In addition, Blackwater billed Regency separately for all its overhead costs in Iraq. Regency would quote ESS a price, say $1,500 per man per day, and then tell Blackwater that it had quoted ESS $1,200. ESS then contracted with Halliburton subsidiary KBR which in turn billed the government an unknown amount for the same security services.
But there is worse. In March 2004, a new contingent of U.S. Marines went into the Falludja area with the idea of having some kind of an active presence in the city, concentrated on “soft-patrolling” and out to reach hearts and minds by building cooperative relations with the population. On March 31, four logistical contractors got lost and drove through Falludja where their convoy gets ambushed. Several armed men approach the two vehicles and open fire from behind, repeatedly shooting the men at point-blank range. Within moments, their bodies are dragged from the vehicles and a crowd descends upon them, tearing them to pieces. Their corpses are chopped and burned. The remains of two of the men are strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates River left to dangle. The gruesome image is soon beamed across the globe. The incident immediately builds huge pressure on the Marines whose strategy is was shelved before it even had a chance to begin. The incident kicked Blackwater into high gear in Washington, and the day after the ambush, Prince hires the Alexander Strategy Group, a K Street lobbying group, run by former staffers of then majority leader Tom Delay before he went down with the Jack Abramoff scandal. After a series of meetings with powerful republicans overseeing military contracts such as Tom Delay and Porter Gross, and hardly a week to the day after the ambush, Erik Prince sat down with at least four senior members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including its chair. Two months later, Blackwater got one of the government’s valuable security contracts, worth more than $300 million. Unsurprisingly, Blackwater USA gave $2.4 million of donations to republican candidates, in particular to Tom Delay and Rick Santorum, two republican big wigs in charge of selecting the army’s military subcontractors… No wonder Fast Company magazine puts Blackwater USA on its list of the 50 companies offering the best growth perspectives. From 2002 to 2005, it had a cumulated growth of 600%. Wow!
END
October 6th, 2007 at 1:04 am
Mercenary armies fighting wars for ‘global dominance’ is just speeding up our ‘circling the drain’ toward existintion! We’re soon going to find out what the ‘dinosaurs’ felt like!
January 5th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Where do I sign up? I’m looking for a list of Military Contractors hiring SF qualified operators.
patrick2813@earthlink.net
February 19th, 2008 at 2:34 am
I served in Korea 1979, and deployed to Panama in 1981.
I have JOTC Training from Ft. Sherman, Panama, Infantry Training, Reserve Police Officer Training, Extrodition Officer II.
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:22 pm
THANKS FOR PROVIDING ALL THIS INFO AND NO INFO ON WHAT TO DO NEXT
April 24th, 2008 at 4:06 am
While mercenary units are frowned apon by the more “liberal” minded western community, they can be a valuable tool in troubled times. Military contractors could easily bring the situation in Darfur under control while the UN sits on its collective hands. Executive Outcomes brought stability to Sierra Leone, allowing the people to hold free elections for the first time while the UN did nothing. Sierra Leone pretty much fell apart after EO left, but this was due to the contractors having a short term commitment, given more time, a stable security force could have been trained and kept the peace. Fault the employer not the contractor.
Keep in mind when speaking of criminal conduct that UN secutiry forces have been guilty of more violations than any military contractor. For the most part, western military contractors are profesionals in their trade and take their skills and jobs seriously. The days of gun happy thugs taking over third world nations have long passed.
December 15th, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Just added a link to your site from mine, great blog.
August 10th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
The reporter mischaracterizes the organization of which Director McConnell served as chairman–the Intelligence and National Security Alliance–which by its charter and by law does not lobby. Instead, it includes current government officials, professors, academics and private sector intelligence practitioners in a public policy forum. INSA funds a teaching position at Georgetown University to teach intelligence policy and partners with the University of Maryland. INSA also had a strong relationship with the former DNI Negraponte who asked INSA to host some conferences in partnership with the ODNI. This topic is important enough to deserve more accurate reporting.