[wvns] Behind Blackwater Inc.
"Our Mercenaries in Iraq: Blackwater Inc and Bush's Undeclared Surge"
Behind Blackwater Inc.
Democracy Now!
Jeremy Scahill
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/26/1559232
Student Researcher: Sverre Tysl
Faculty Evaluator: Noel Byrne, Ph.D.
The company that most embodies the privatization of the military
industrial complex—a primary part of the Project for a New American
Century and the neoconservative revolution is the private security
firm Blackwater. Blackwater is the most powerful mercenary firm in the
world, with 20,000 soldiers, the world's largest private military
base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships, and a
private intelligence division. The firm is also manufacturing its own
surveillance blimps and target systems.
Blackwater is headed by a very right-wing Christian-supremist
and ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family has had deep
neo-conservative connections. Bush's latest call for voluntary
civilian military corps to accommodate the "surge" will add to over
half a billion dollars in federal contracts with Blackwater, allowing
Prince to create a private army to defend Christendom around the world
against Muslims and others.
One of the last things Dick Cheney did before leaving office
as Defense Secretary under George H. W. Bush was to commission a
Halliburton study on how to privatize the military bureaucracy. That
study effectively created the groundwork for a continuing war
profiteer bonanza.
During the Clinton years, Erik Prince envisioned a project
that would take advantage of anticipated military outsourcing.
Blackwater began in 1996 as a private military training facility, with
an executive board of former Navy Seals and Elite Special Forces, in
the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. A decade later it is the
most powerful mercenary firm in the world, embodying what the Bush
administration views as "the necessary revolution in military
affairs"—the outsourcing of armed forces.
In his 2007 State of the Union address Bush asked Congress to
authorize an increase in the size of our active Army and Marine Corps
by 92,000 in the next five years. He continued, "A second task we can
take on together is to design and establish a volunteer civilian
reserve corps. Such a corps would function much like our military
reserve. It would ease the burden on the Armed Forces by allowing us
to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad
when America needs them."
This is, however, precisely what the administration has
already done—largely, Jeremy Scahill points out, behind the backs of
the American people. Private contractors currently constitute the
second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about
100,000 contractors in Iraq, 48,000 of which work as private soldiers,
according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers
have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints
and are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in
the official toll. With Prince calling for the creation of a
"contractor brigade" before military audiences, the Bush
administration has found a back door for engaging in an undeclared
expansion of occupation.
Blackwater currently has about 2,300 personnel actively
deployed in nine countries and is aggressively expanding its presence
inside US borders. They provide the security for US diplomats in Iraq,
guarding everyone from Paul Bremer and John Negroponte to the current
US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. They're training troops in
Afghanistan and have been active in the Caspian Sea, where they set up
a Special Forces base miles from the Iranian border. According to
reports they are currently negotiating directly with the Southern
Sudanese regional government to start training the Christian forces of
Sudan.
Blackwater's connections are impressive. Joseph Schmitz, the
former Pentagon Inspector General, whose job was to police the war
contractor bonanza, has moved on to become the vice chairman of the
Prince Group, Blackwater's parent company, and the general counsel for
Blackwater.
Bush recently hired Fred Fielding, Blackwater's former
lawyer, to replace Harriet Miers as his top lawyer; and Ken Starr, the
former Whitewater prosecutor who led the impeachment charge against
President Clinton, is now Blackwater's counsel of record and has filed
briefs with Supreme Court to fight wrongful death lawsuits brought
against Blackwater.
Cofer Black, thirty-year CIA veteran and former head of CIA's
counterterrorism center, credited with spearheading the extraordinary
rendition program after 9/11, is now senior executive at Blackwater
and perhaps its most powerful operative.
Prince and other Blackwater executives have been major
bankrollers of the President, of former House Majority Leader, Tom
DeLay, and of former Senator, Rick Santorum. Senator John Warner, the
former head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Blackwater,
"our silent partner in the global war on terror."
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