Blackwater

Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

By Jeremy Scahill

Serpent's Tail, 2007, 452 pages, $35 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/38999

When George Bush won the 2004 US election, Gary Jackson, President of Blackwater, sent out a celebratory mass email to his employees under the screaming headline "BUSH WINS FOUR MORE YEARS!! HOOYAH!!".

And why wouldn't he be happy? The head of the world's largest soldiers-for-hire outfit, writes Jeremy Scahill in Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, knew the US government gravy train would continue to roll on in its endless "war on terror", gathering massive profits for Blackwater.

Mercenaries are now prolific enough to constitute a fifth branch (after Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines) of the US military and there has been a surge of the privatised killers in Iraq. In 1991, one in 60 US military personnel deployed on active-service was a private contractor. By 2006, the 100,000 mercenaries operating in Iraq had brought the ratio to almost one to one.

Blackwater has been at the head of the pack with 21,000 former military and law enforcement agents on its at-call list, a fleet of armoured vehicles and twenty aircraft (including helicopter gunships). Blackwater has scored billions of dollars from US government contracts (including secret, "black" contracts with the CIA and other intelligence agencies) and from services for private corporations and foreign governments.

Blackwater has particularly benefited because of its close ties to US military and intelligence circles and its shared political passions with US neo-conservatives. Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince, is a former US Navy commando and an extreme right-wing Catholic multi-millionaire, so far to the right that he regards the Democrats as too left-wing to warrant any of the money he bankrolls the Republicans with. Blackwater, says Scahill, is "a sort of armed wing of the movement" of "theo-conservatives", the powerful alliance of right-wing Christian and political conservatives. Many Blackwater executives share a "Christian-supremacist" agenda, charged with the missionary fervour of returning Muslim territories to the Christendom lost during the Crusades.

Blackwater was formed in 1996, from the Prince family fortune, and named after the black waters of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, where its headquarters is located. Blackwater struck the mercenary jackpot after the Twin Towers attacks on September 11, 2001.

Blackwater's subsequent "security" contracts with the Bush administration were sweetheart, no-bid deals between ideological soul-mates and included providing security guards for the CIA station in occupied Kabul, supplying the bodyguard for the head of the US occupation in Iraq (Paul Bremer), and guarding the US embassy and other US officials in "sovereign" Iraq.

More low profile have been a Blackwater deployment to Azerbaijan in the oil and gas-rich Caspian Sea region to patrol pipelines, train an elite force in the human rights-abusing Azerbaijani government and set up a strategic base close to Iran.

Like some other private "security" companies, Blackwater's aviation division also flies in Afghanistan, from airfields such as the US-run detention and torture facility at Bagram to Uzbekistan and other key destinations in the CIA and military "rendition" program for outsourcing torture in its "war on terror".

The economics of military privatisation have made the mercenary industry's collective head swim. Mercenaries make in a day what a GI makes in a week (US$600-$800), an inducement that ensures no lack of recruits, while Blackwater bills the government US$1500 to $2000 a day per soldier, clearing a hefty profit (even heftier when Blackwater hires Third World killers on the cheap, paying its Colombian recruits only $34 a day).

After the invasion of Iraq, share prices in one of the few publicly listed private security firms, Kroll Inc., increased 38%, profits soared 231% and sales of their "security" services doubled to $486 million. The total value of the US mercenary industry is estimated at $100 billion a year.

Blackwater attracts its "professionals" from those who get high on an adrenaline rush from violence in the service of patriotism. Its highest paid mercenaries are elite former US Navy SEALs, delta force, green berets, rangers and marines, and British and Australian SAS personnel.

Countries whose militaries have grim human rights records such as the Philippines, Nepal, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama and South Africa under Apartheid are fertile recruiting grounds, their particular field of expertise being the kidnapping, torturing and killing of defenceless civilians.

Blackwater's Stallone and Scwharzenegger clones are petrol to the blaze in Iraq. Middle East reporter Robert Fisk writes how Blackwater mercenaries "push and punch Iraqis who get in their way ... abusing Iraqis in the street, drinking heavily ... shooting down innocent Iraqis with total impunity".

They use ammunition banned as "non-standard" by the US military, "experimental" bullets that shatter rather than pass through a human torso, their miniature explosion creating untreatable wounds and killing even when hitting a usually non-fatal part of the body.

Blackwater mercenaries fire into protesting crowds, intimidate journalists and shoot at civilian vehicles without warning. Their swaggering, macho bravado makes enemies everywhere.

Blackwater literally gets away with murder in Iraq. One of Bremer's binding decrees on the incoming "sovereign" Iraqi government was Order 17 immunising US mercenaries from prosecution under Iraqi legal processes.

The US legal system is equally impotent, with the Pentagon unfazed by switching between insisting that the mercenaries are civilians and therefore not subject to US military justice, and claiming immunity from civilian litigation in the US by saying the mercenaries are part of the military.

Although Bush was forced to concede in a defence-spending bill in 2007 that military contractors in war zones could be subject to the military court martial system, the US military lacks the zeal to police its mercenaries. This failure of legal oversight and accountability means that, at the time of the book's publication, not a single US mercenary has been prosecuted for murder or other war crimes committed in Iraq.

The US government's kid gloves also bear handsome financial gifts for Blackwater as it diversifies its "security" business, adding disaster-profiteering to war-profiteering. After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, Blackwater raked in $73 million in federal hurricane-related contracts.

What New Orleans desperately needed was food, water and housing but what poured in instead were guns, as Blackwater mercenaries, contracted by the Department of Homeland Security and heavily armed with assault rifles, patrolled the French quarter of the city.

One month later, Blackwater deployed 600 mercenaries under government contract in the aftermath of Hurricane Rita in Mississippi.

Blackwater has also branched out into "border security" through government-contracted training of border patrol agents, and Blackwater has also pitched for contracts for "humanitarian" UN interventions in the Darfur region of the Sudan and other conflict zones, eyeing off a chunk of the UN's $7 billion annual "peacekeeping" budget.

The US mercenary industry is not just big business. US paramilitaries operate above the law, disguised under protective euphemisms as "civilian contractors" or "foreign reconstruction workers" and, concludes Scahill, provide the US government with a way around declining military recruitment, the political cost of conscription and dead soldiers, and a way to short-circuit citizen anti-war opposition and other potential democratic brakes on the government's unpopular wars.

Scahill notes that the Roman empire during its decline relied on mercenaries. The killers-for-hire of Blackwater may herald a troubled decline for the US empire but, if so, they carry the unprecedented potential for great harm to life and liberty for the world's citizens on the receiving end of empire.