Rohan Pearce
The post-9/11 rehabilitation of thinly veiled imperialist militarism, in the guise of the "war on terror", has been a massive windfall for "private military companies" (PMCs) — the preferred euphemism of the modern mercenary company.
The Pentagon's military programs have long been a vital source of profits for an important section of US capitalist ruling class. In return, defence contractors sponsor the election campaigns of warmongering politicians — to the tune of US$16,098,091 in the 2004 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Increasingly, however, the line between the private enterprise of profit and the public endeavour of war has become even more blurry as waging war itself has become a profit-making business for corporations. They're often dubbed "modern privateers", after the European privateers (pirates) who, with their government's sanction, raided the cargo ships of enemy nations until the mid-19th century. These modern mercenary companies provide both "boots on the ground" security personnel and logistic support to Western armed forces.
Guns for hire
A 2002 report produced by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Privatizing Combat, the New World Order, describes how the Pentagon "has increasingly turned to outside vendors for logistical support, one of the most heavily out-sourced sectors for the armed forces in both peacekeeping and wartime. In Bosnia, for example, the ratio of contractors to American soldiers has ranged from one in 10 to nearly one-to-one, according to various defense analysts. The trend gained momentum after the 1991 Gulf War, in which troops were heavily supported by a panoply of private contractors."
Throughout the 1990s, PMCs were most associated with endeavours that involved them supplementing the armed forces of Third World regimes. Corporations such as Sandline, which was run by Tim Spicer, a former lieutenant-colonel in Britain's Scots Guard, achieved notoriety for their activities.
Sandline was infamous for its $36 million contract with the PNG government to clear the Rio Tinto copper mine on Bougainville of locals who had closed down the site in protest at devastation of the island's environment and were calling for independence. However, the scheme was a fiasco, with a revolt by the PNG army putting an end to the government's plan. In 2004 Spicer burst back onto the scene with a new company, Aegis Defense Services, and a $239 million contract with the US occupation regime in Iraq.
Parasites like Spicer have flocked to Iraq to avail themselves of the Pentagon's largesse, while the US government takes advantage of the benefits of mercenaries — the minimal public scrutiny of their actions, the lack of enforced regulations governing their conduct and a more flexible force structure for some aspects of counterinsurgency warfare.
Public attention was drawn to the pervasiveness of private "security contractors" in Iraq after the March 31, 2004, killing and mutilation of four employees of Blackwater USA in Fallujah, which was used as justification by the US military to attempt a bloody reoccupation of the city.
According to an investigation published by the British Guardian in December 2003, the ratio of "contracted security personnel" in Iraq to regular service men and women is 10 times greater than during the 1991 Gulf War. The paper estimated that there was a private contractor for every 10 service personnel, making the private sector the largest contributor of troops to the "coalition of the willing" after the US — the 10,000 or so mercenaries outstripping Britain's troop contribution (then at 9900).
An April 19, 2004, report in the New York Times put the number of mercenaries in Iraq at close to 20,000. The NYT reported that with "every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos. Company executives see a clear boundary between their defensive roles as protectors and the offensive operations of the military. But more and more, they give the appearance of private, for-profit militias."
Of the US$87 billion "earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including Central Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly $30bn, will be spend on contracts to private companies", the Guardian revealed.
A particular advantage that employing mercenaries holds for the US occupation regime in Iraq, under siege from an unrelenting insurgency, is that contractors' deaths only infrequently find their way into the casualty counts of the "coalition of the willing", helping slow the US public's growing unease about the war's human cost.
Hiding cost of war
The NYT article observed that some people "suggest the Bush administration is relying on [PMCs] to both mask the [human] cost of the war and augment an overstretched uniformed force". An analysis by the paper of workers' compensation claims filed with the US Department of Labor revealed that contractors filed claims for 10 deaths and 843 injuries during 2001 and 2002. But since the start of 2003, reported the NYT, the figures had jumped to 94 deaths and 1164 injuries. "No precise nation-by-nation breakdown is yet available, but Labor Department officials said an overwhelming majority of the cases since 2003 were from Iraq."
An April 13, 2004, article in the Johannesburg Star by Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn revealed that "at least 80 foreign mercenaries ... have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq". The reporters compared the total to the number of US troops who had been killed since April 1 — around 70 according to the Pentagon — revealing that the scope of the insurgency was far greater than Washington had admitted.
According to an April 2004 Associated Press report, Pentagon officials "won't talk about the rules covering contractors' use of force", because of "security concerns". Even pro-war Democrat senators have qualms about the lack of oversight of mercenaries' activities in Iraq. Thirteen of them, including then Senate minority leader Tom Daschle, wrote to US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld in April 2004 arguing that it "would be a dangerous precedent if the United States allowed the presence of private armies operating outside the control of governmental authority and beholden only to those who pay them". In fact, the lack of regulation and, at best, minimal levels of accountability are part of the attraction of PMCs.
Subcontracting torture
This holds true in Iraq, where mercenaries have helped carry out some of the most brutal policies of the occupation regime. During the flurry of revelations in 2004 about the systematic torture of Iraqis at the US-run Abu Ghraib prison it was revealed that private contractors had played key roles as translators and interrogators.
The US military's confidential "investigation" of the Abu Ghraib scandal, conducted by Major General Antonio Taguba, revealed that employees of Virginia-based CACI International had lied to investigators about the torture taking place at the prison.
According to Taguba's report, one of the interrogators employed by CACI, Steven Stephanowicz, "Allowed and/or instructed MPs [military police], who were not trained in interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by 'setting conditions' which were neither authorized and in accordance with applicable regulations/policy. He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse."
A May 7, 2004, report by CorpWatch revealed that a relative of one of the Abu Ghraib soldiers facing court martial told the watchdog group that, when he complained about the abuse of prisoners, "he was told by superior officers to follow instructions from civilians, contract workers interrogating the Iraqi prisoners. They said go back down there. Do what the civilian contractors tell you to do and don't interfere with them and loosen these soldiers up for interrogation."
In early May this year, CACI was still advertising job vacancies for interrogators — in Baghdad. Other CACI job openings in Iraq include "intelligence planner", "senior intelligence analyst", "open source intelligence analysis" and "red team analyst" (an analyst who "assesses future and on-going political-military developments, military capabilities and doctrine, weapons acquisitions, and employment of military forces").
Iraq is far from being the only place where these modern-day buccaneers are making a quick — and bloody — fortune. A 2001 report by CorpWatch's Jeremy Bigwood described the role that DynCorp, another PMC with a scandal-filled record and big money contracts in Iraq, played as part of Plan Colombia — Washington's counterinsurgency war against left-wing Colombian guerrillas. Since 1997 the corporation has "operated under a $600 million State Department contract " in Latin America. According to the contract, DynCorp mainly "participates in eradication missions, training, and drug interdiction, but also participates in air transport, reconnaissance, search and rescue, airborne medical evacuation, ferrying equipment and personnel from one country to another, as well as aircraft maintenance".
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, May 11, 2005.
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