• Blackwater does not have “a valid contract” with the United States: “The Anti-Pinkerton Act . . . prohibits the United States from doing business with ‘[a]n individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization.’ The legislative history of the Act makes it clear that a ‘similar organization’ means any mercenary or quasi-mercenary organization. Blackwater constitutes such a ‘similar organization’ and therefore lacks any valid contractual relationships with the United States.” (Ironically, a few months after the suit was filed, Blackwater vice president Martin Strong actually compared Blackwater’s work directly to Pinkerton’s. “Well, I can remember a time when Abraham Lincoln tried to get to his inaugural and he couldn’t find anybody to protect him except for the Pinkertons, who were a private-sector solution to protecting the new president of the United States,” he said. “This has been going on for a long, long time.”171)
Blackwater publicly declined to respond to the allegations in the suit, citing ongoing government investigations, but its spokesperson, Anne Tyrrell, said Blackwater “will defend itself vigorously.”172 Erik Prince, however, went on the attack—against the Iraqi victims’ lawyers. “The lawyers, the trial lawyers that filed this lawsuit are the same guys that defended the World Trade Center bombings in 1993, the blind sheikh, and defended a bunch of killers of FBI agents and other cops,” Prince said on CNN two days after the suit was filed. “So this is very much a politically motivated lawsuit, for media attention.”173 In fact, Prince was dead wrong. CCR did not represent “the blind sheikh,” nor did it “defend” the 1993 WTC bombing. But Prince’s spin was promptly adopted by his right-wing defenders and disseminated in the media.
A few days later, J. Michael Waller, vice president of the Center for Security Policy—a hard-line conservative think tank with deep connections to the Bush administration—wrote an op-ed in the New York Post called “Lawyers for Terror.”174 In it, he accused CCR and Michael Ratner of having “a four-decade record of aiding and abetting terrorists, spies and cop-killers” and said they “specialize in defending the enemies of American society.” Waller wrote, “As we await the facts to establish responsibility for the Sept. 16 tragedy in Nisour Square, we must demand answers to another question: Of the million-plus lawyers in the United States they could have chosen to sue Blackwater, how did ordinary Iraqis manage to pick the few who aid cop-killers and terrorists?”
Ratner said these claims were “transparent attempts to try and divert attention from Blackwater’s actions in Iraq and particularly its role in the Nisour killings. I don’t think character attacks fool anyone. Such attempts at character assassination are a smokescreen to cover up the killings. At trial the facts will speak for themselves and the truth will be revealed.”175
On December 19, 2007, CCR and Burke filed yet another lawsuit against Blackwater. This one stemmed from Blackwater’s alleged killing of five Iraqis on September 9 in Baghdad’s Watahba Square, one week before the Nisour Square killings. “Blackwater shooters shot, without justification, and killed five innocent civilians,” the suit alleged. “Numerous other innocent civilians were . . . injured in the incident.”176 Burke filed the case on behalf of the family of Ali Hussamaldeen Albazzaz. “This gentleman was a rug merchant, and he was gunned down for absolutely no reason, leaving behind a twenty-day-old baby daughter and family. It is again another instance in which Blackwater shooters shot first, asked questions later,” Burke alleged.177
“If the Government Doesn’t Want Us to Do This, We Will Go Do Something Else”
Despite the massive controversy surrounding Blackwater, its forces—and lucrative contracts—remained firmly in place on the ground in Iraq. One Blackwater employee described to the New York Times a conversation company representatives had with the State Department’s Gregory Starr in November 2007. “He said Blackwater has not lost the contract here in Iraq, and that it entirely depends on our actions from here on out.”178 On December 3, Blackwater posted job listings for “security specialists” and snipers as a result of its State Department diplomatic security “contract expansion.”179
Rather than hiding out and hoping for the scandals to fade, Blackwater launched a major rebranding campaign, changing its name to Blackwater Worldwide and softening its logo: once a bear paw in the site of a sniper scope, it would become a bear claw wrapped in two half ovals—sort of like the outline of a globe, with a United Nations feel. Its overhauled website boasted of a corporate vision “guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world.”180 Blackwater operatives were referred to as “global stabilization professionals.” Prince did a series of interviews, many of them conducted by mainstream journalists who were fawning and uncritical, in which he spun Blackwater as a patriotic extension of the military, often repeating almost verbatim his carefully crafted lines. He was named number eleven in Details magazine’s “Power 50,” the men “who control your viewing patterns, your buying habits, your anxieties, your lust . . . the people who have taken over the space in your head.”181
In one of the company’s most bizarre actions in this period, on December 1, Blackwater paratroopers staged a dramatic aerial landing, complete with Blackwater flags and parachutes—not in Baghdad or Kabul but in San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium during the halftime show at the San Diego State/BYU football game. The company also sponsored a NASCAR racer and teamed up with gun manufacturer Sig Sauer to create a Blackwater Special Edition full-sized 9-millimeter pistol with the company logo on the grip. It came with a limited lifetime warranty. For $18, parents could purchase infant onesies from the Blackwater ProShop emblazoned with the firm’s logo.182
During his media blitz, Prince indicated that Blackwater might quit Iraq. “We see the security market diminishing,” he told the Wall Street Journal in October.183 One way of looking at it was that Blackwater had gotten what it needed out of its Iraq work. As Prince told Congress, “If the government doesn’t want us to do this, we will go do something else.”184 While its name had become mud in the human rights world, Blackwater had not only already made big money in Iraq; it had secured a reputation as a company that kept U.S. officials in an extremely hostile war zone alive by any means necessary. It’s an image that could serve Blackwater well as it expands globally.
Prince vowed that in the future Blackwater “is going to be more of a full spectrum” operation.185 Amid the cornucopia of scandals, Blackwater was bidding for a share of a five-year $15 billion contract with the Pentagon to “fight terrorists with drug-trade ties.”186 This “war on drugs” contract would put Blackwater in the same league as the godfathers of the war business, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.
In addition to its ongoing robust business in law enforcement, military, and homeland security training, Blackwater is branching out. Among its current projects and initiatives:187
• Blackwater affiliate Greystone Ltd., registered offshore in Barbados, is an old-fashioned mercenary operation offering “personnel from the best militaries throughout the world” for hire by governments and private organizations. It also boasts of a “multinational peacekeeping program,” with forces “specializing in crowd control and less than lethal techniques and military personnel for the less stable areas of operation.”
• Prince’s Total Intelligence Solutions, headed by three CIA veterans (among them Blackwater’s number-two, Cofer Black), puts CIA-TYPE services on the open market for hire by corporations or governments. (See Epilogue.)
• Blackwater is launching an armored vehicle called the Grizzly, which the company characterizes as the most versatile in history. Blackwater intends to modify it to be legal for use on U.S. highways.
• Blackwater’s aviation division has some forty aircraft, including turboprop planes that can be used for unorthodox landings. It has ordered a Super Tucano paramilitary plane from Brazil, which can be used in counterinsurgency operations. In August 2007, the aviation division won a $92 million contract with the Pentagon to operat
e flights in Central Asia.
• In late 2007, it flight-tested the unmanned Polar 400 airship, which may be marketed to the Department of Homeland Security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border and to “military, law enforcement, and non-government customers.”
• A fast-growing maritime division has a new 184-foot vessel that has been fitted for potential paramilitary use.
What Blackwater has done since it first opened for business in the late 1990s is to build up a privatized parallel structure to the U.S. national security apparatus. As of this writing, it continues to receive major contracts for its various divisions, and the U.S. government remains the greatest consumer of its services. In December 2007, it registered a new high-powered lobbying firm, Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice.188 The disclosure form, filed with the U.S. Senate in January 2008, indicated the firm would be lobbying for Blackwater on a wide range of contracts in: defense, homeland security, aerospace, disaster planning, foreign relations, and law enforcement.
War Is Business. Business Is Good.
In many ways, Blackwater is the embodiment of the Bush administration’s “revolution in military affairs,” which has entailed aggressive outsourcing of core military functions. The company’s centrality to the U.S. occupation of Iraq was emblematic of the new face of the U.S. war machine. But it is also a symbol of the times in which we live, where every aspect of life is being radically privatized—schools, healthcare, prisons, homeland security operations, intelligence, municipal services. While Blackwater certainly owes its stunning success to the belligerent, offensive foreign policies of the Bush administration, it is important to remember that Blackwater opened for business during President Bill Clinton’s time in office. It was Clinton’s administration that authorized Blackwater as a vendor to the federal government and awarded the firm its first government contracts.
The fact is that privatization is not just a Republican or a Bush administration agenda—it was rapidly escalated by Bush, but it has been embraced and nurtured by the power structures of both political parties for decades. “Even under the Clinton administration, this was a standard operating procedure,” said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, one of the sharpest Congressional critics of war contracting. “But we’ve seen this enormous escalation of this industry so that now it’s billions and billions of dollars. This is definitely an expansion.”189 The U.S. 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],” according to a 2007 investigative report in Vanity Fair.190 As journalist Naomi Klein put it, “According to this radical vision, contractors treat the state as an ATM, withdrawing massive contracts to perform core functions like securing borders and interrogating prisoners, and making deposits in the form of campaign contributions.”191
“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,” said veteran U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last Ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The billions of dollars being doled out to war 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?”192
While the bipartisan privatization virus spreads further, companies like Blackwater become ever more deeply embedded in the most sensitive sectors of government. Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual scandals clearly aren’t enough to slow it down. Even if Blackwater were to go out of business tomorrow, there are scores of companies that would gladly step in to take over its work.
While radical privatization is having a devastating impact throughout society, the privatization of the war machine has been lethal. Blackwater is a company whose business depends on war and conflict to thrive. It operates in a demand-based industry where corporate profits are intimately linked to an escalation of violence. That demand has been tremendous during the presidency of George W. Bush. In particular, the unprecedented militarization of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which has occurred in tandem with the process of rapid privatization, has enriched Blackwater. The department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Services was originally envisioned as a small-scale bodyguard operation to protect small groups of U.S. diplomats and other U.S. and foreign officials. In Iraq, the administration turned it into a paramilitary force several thousand strong. Spending on the program jumped from $50 million in 2003 to $613 million in 2006.193 According to the Congressional Oversight Committee’s investigation, “In fiscal year 2001, Blackwater had $736,906 in federal contracts. By 2006, Blackwater had over $593 million in government contracts, an increase of more than 80,000%.”194 In 2007, Blackwater had two-thirds as many operatives deployed in Iraq as the U.S. Bureau of Diplomatic Security had in all other countries in the world combined. As Ambassador Ryan Crocker said in late 2007, “There is simply no way at all that the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts.”195
As of summer, 2007, there were more “private contractors” deployed on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq (180,000) than there were actual soldiers (160,000).196 These contractors worked for some 630 companies and drew personnel from more than 100 countries around the globe.197 Tens of thousands were armed operatives like those who work for Blackwater—exactly how many was unknown, because neither the administration nor the military could or would provide those numbers. This meant the U.S. military had actually become the junior partner in the coalition that occupies Iraq. The existence of a powerful shadow army enabled the waging of an unpopular war with forces whose deaths and injuries went uncounted and unreported. It helped keep a draft, which could make the continuation of the war politically untenable, off the table. It also subverted international diplomacy because the administration didn’t need to build a “coalition of the willing”: it rented an occupation force. Private soldiers were hired from countries that had no direct stake in the war or whose home governments opposed it, and were used as cheap cannon fodder.
War is business, and business has been very good. It is not just the actions of Blackwater and its ilk that need to be investigated, exposed, and prosecuted. It is the whole system. If the insatiable demand for these mercenary “services,” which derives from offensive, unpopular wars of conquest, is not forcefully challenged, Blackwater and other mercenary firms have little to fear. In street parlance, they are the dealers, but the government is the addict. These companies are not simply bad apples. They are the fruit of a very poisonous tree. This system depends on a wedding of immunity and impunity. If the government started slapping mercenary firms with indictments for war crimes or murder or human rights violations—and not just in a token manner—the risk for the companies would be tremendous. This, in turn, would make wars like the one in Iraq far more difficult and arguably impossible. But even after the outrage of Nisour Square, there was no sign of this happening. In early 2008, President Bush once again sought to force the Iraqi government to extend immunity to private contractors, as he negotiated a new “Status of Forces” agreement with Baghdad.198 He also said he would “waive” a provision of a 2008 law—which he signed—that would have established a bipartisan Wartime Contracting Commission to investigate war contractors, as well as one that provided protections for whistleblowers working for government contractors. In a statement, Bush said these provisions would “inhibit the President’s ability” to “protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief.”199
While Bush undoubtedly has been the war industry’s greatest supporter, the prospect for the ag
gressive action required to confront the mercenary menace, whether a Democrat or Republican replaces him in the White House, is slim. The war industry is an equal-opportunity campaign contributor and has solid support from influential politicians on both sides of the aisle. Representative Schakowsky introduced legislation in late 2007 called the Stop Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, which sought to end the use of Blackwater and other mercenary firms in U.S. war zones by 2009. “Private contracting companies have forfeited their right to represent the United States,” Schakowsky said, asserting that they “put our troops in harm’s way, and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians. They have become a liability instead of an asset.”200 Only a small fraction of the 435 legislators in the House signed on to support her bill and, as of spring 2008, only two senators—Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and New York’s Hillary Clinton.
Because of the Bush administration’s refusal to hold mercenary forces accountable for their crimes in Iraq and the Democrats’ unwillingness to effectively challenge the radically privatized war machine, the only hope the victims of Nisour Square have for justice lies in the lawsuit they filed against Blackwater in Washington, D.C. In some ways, that is the most logical place for such a trial to take place, because the violence unleashed by Blackwater in Iraq is ultimately rooted in the for-profit war machine based in the U.S. capital. Shortly after Nisour Square, Erik Prince was asked by an interviewer, “How many Iraqi civilians have been killed by Blackwater employees?” “That’s an unknowable number,” Prince replied, in a rare moment of candor on the subject.201 The significance of that acknowledgment was not lost on the lawyers suing Blackwater for Nisour Square. “What these Iraqi families are doing is a civil service to all Iraqis because they don’t want anyone else to be killed by Blackwater,” attorney Susan Burke said. “We are going to expose the corporate culture that is leading to all this death and destruction in Iraq.”202
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army Page 6