The Nature of the Beast

"Johnny was soldier who lived right next to me. Young kid who came out to Iraq and had been there for almost a year. He had a few kills under his belt and was a wreck. He tried to act like he was fine with things, but would always end up breaking down mid-sentence and getting choked up. He wore nicotine patches, chewed the nicotine gum, smoked two packs a day, and always had a dip in his lip. He wanted complete annihilation of all the Iraqi people and to get back home to Disney World.

The list goes on and on. Afghanistan has a batch unmatched too... Characters you could not muster in your wildest dreams. The nuts and bolts of the machine are all loose and ready to drop at anytime. Some of the people out here are only one step away from the crazy fucks you see in a 7-11 talking to the hot dog machine. There are some sane people, but not many, and they are boring anyway..."
---
Interview with a Contractor Pt. I
Welcome Center

I first met "Nero" at McMurdo Station, Antarctica, in 1998. After a winter there, he flew to Indonesia for a vacation, where he narrowly escaped death in the 2002 Bali terrorist bombings. He has since done two contracts in Iraq, and is presently in Afghanistan.

Comparing the contracts, why do you prefer the combat zone to the Antarctic contract?

Even just applying for a job in the Middle East, the company gave me a list of the living conditions, such as:

*

You will be living in tent city in an 8-10 man GP Medium tent (like on the show M*A*S*H)
* If there is a Biological or Chemical attack and you are a casualty your body will be CREMATED and sent home.

I especially love the part where they describe the conditions as "like on the show M*A*S*H", because most of these clowns can only relate to TV for an idea of anything outside their worlds. They have to make parallels and visuals for these people who have never owned a passport, nor ever traveled, nor even read of other places or cultures.
"I am making six figures doing a job that is one of the easiest I have ever had."

Nevertheless, the main reason that the War Zones pull people in is the pay. Antarctica offered nickels and dimes compared to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Combat Pay is ridiculous. The other night I was out drinking and ran into this guy who makes $15,000 every two weeks setting up IT systems. Some are making $400,000 a year working security or supervision.

I am making six figures doing a job that is one of the easiest I have ever had. I had a supervisor in Camp Taji who couldn’t read or spell or speak or really do anything productive besides breathe and smoke cigarettes. She labeled our Supply Manual with "Suppy Manula" and she was making six figures.

Many think you insane for wanting to go to a combat zone. Besides the money, why are you there?

It does not take an insane person to want to go to the most fucked-up places on the planet because, to me, the most fucked-up places on the planet are in little neighborhoods, behind little fences, under little roofs. A little world that stretches as far as the little sedan will go. Working in the little office with the little lunch break and the little retirement fund as you lose a little more hair and a little more hope. The little dreams fade, the little bible makes little promises and then one day they might chisel some good words on the little tombstone. To me, that is hell on earth.

What are some experiences you have had over there?

I have:

* swam in Saddam’s swimming pools and relaxed in his palaces
* shook hands with Bush
* lifted body-filled caskets onto trucks with a forklift
* been in over 80 rocket and mortars attacks
* lived in a tent with over thirty insane truck drivers
* watched helicopters blow up insurgents
* shot big guns, rode in big tanks, flown in a big chopper as it attacked ground forces
* Pool Scene sang "Blue Suede Shoes" in the middle of Kabul in front of a bunch of locals
* said goodbye to somebody and ten minutes later they were dead
* lived with a porn-crazy Iraqi who is part of the new forming government
* seen Saddam go in and out of court
* watched bullets pound the wall directly above my head as I smoked a cigarette
* been introduced to local warlords

What characterizes the people who work combat zone contracts?

There are prior convicts that snuck through the filter. There are people who think that all Iraqi people are Terrorists, and that all of the Afghans are Taliban, and that anyone with a towel on their head is against the Freedoms of American, McDonalds, and American Idol. Uneducated, hypocritical Bee Bops that run to the dollar and then bitch as they stand around wearing safety gear. Also, most of the people out here believe in God. I’m a rare one because I don't close my eyes and give thanks for my dry meatloaf and wet lima beans.

Tell me about some of the characters you've met.

Al Asad:

Moose Knuckles was a crazy Asian woman famous for her massive vaginal lips through her sweatpants. She snuck up on men as they pissed in the Porta-John. She opened the door violently to catch a glimpse of some pecker and would then run off howling. One night I walked into a party to find her blowing a lesbian who was wearing a motorized strap-on dildo. Then when she declared that she wanted the "real thing", a co-worker stepped up. Later that night she was overheard in the phone room sending love to her husband with penis breath, and the next morning she was back in Church eating the body of Christ.
"Several times I came into work in the morning and would find him passed out naked in the loft. The room would smell like hot lotion and booze."

Big Boy was a redneck from Texas who took pride in the fact that he had managed to bang the fattest and the ugliest women on base. He was known as "The Godfather" because he traded thousands of dollars worth of military lumber for whiskey, porn, and other unknown favors. He called blacks "niggers", Iraqis "sand niggers", and me a "wigger" when he one day heard me listen to rap. Big Boy was a sadist. The last day I saw Big Boy, he put his hand down his pants, grobbled his nuts, pulled out a slimy hand and smeared it across the face of some unsuspecting Marine. The Marine gagged twice and then barfed, causing Moose Knuckles to vomit as well. As the two victims held their stomach over their mess, Big Boy stood there laughing with tears in his eyes. That was the happiest I ever saw him.

Gonzo was my boss in Al Asad, and was the most fucked up of them all. Several times I came into work in the morning and would find him passed out naked in the loft. The room would smell like hot lotion and booze. He would wake-up and chase me around with no clothing until the Marines showed up. When the Marines came into the office he would climb up into the loft and spread his ass and say in a high pitched voice, "You love these New York Balls!" The Marines would shrug him off and call him a fag. He stole a Master Sergeant's bottle of booze one night and drank half of it, then pissed into the bottle to fill it back up and put it back in the Sergeant's room. The Sergeant drank it with a lady friend the next night and they both got ill. They never knew that they had drank Gonzo’s piss, and just thought they got a bad bottle of whiskey. Gonzo ended up falling apart and ran back to Texas where he married a lady who was twice his age. He still sends me e-mails with pictures of him with giant catfish or furniture he makes by hand.

Camp Taji:
Jesus Pendant

Soft Hands' only previous employment before Iraq was as a drug dealer. He scared up a resume using experience he copied from a website. He got the nickname Soft Hands because he never worked and his hands felt like soft Chinese silk. A self-proclaimed "Asian Baller", he walked around the dirty warehouses in his baggie pants and extra-long white shirts sporting a $5,000 Jesus Piece Necklace and a doo-rag. He took pride in his ability to avoid working, and was constantly dodging the supervisors as he went from warehouse to warehouse trying to get poker games going. Soft Hands married a "stripper gone Army" back home, and had two kids, and was in Iraq trying to get enough money together to buy a few kilos of blow which he could then sell and triple his money.

Suicide 7 was an older black soldier I met in Taji. His wife committed suicide right before his deployment. She had asked him to go to the store to get some milk, and when he came back she was hanging from a rope in the garage. He had no more love for anything and fully admitted that he came back to Iraq with the sole purpose to kill and be killed. He already had a bullet hole in his neck and he bitched about how "that was the one": it missed his spine by half an inch. He wanted death.

Matt came out to Iraq on some unknown mission. Recently converted to Christianity, on the bus full of cussing and cursing he would hold his ears and rock back and forth as if Satan were trying to climb into his ears. His co-workers came to work one day to find that he hung a Napkin with Luke 12 over a drawing of a Chupracabra they had in the office. He said that it was a Satanic image. He grabbed me one day and prayed with me after I smashed my finger in a door, saying that God works in strange ways and that my finger would be proof. He also claimed to have come over to help the Iraqi people with their rise from the ashes. He fell down one day in front of a warehouse holding a bible and said that God had came and talked to him. When the Ambulance arrived, the paramedics asked what God had told him. Matt said, "Be Good. A bright light, and then God told me to be good, and I fell down." Matt was taken away and sent home when the Doctor deemed him insane.

Green Zone:

Pedro worked for Triple Canopy (a security company that hired guys from Peru to protect gates and checkpoints within the Green Zone.) Pedro was a nice guy who always greeted everyone with a loud "hola!" or "Como Estas?" Often he was in gym wearing tight yellow spandex pants, and loved the song "Sex Bomb" by Tom Jones. One day he got into an argument with another employee. He pulled out his semi-automatic and blasted him apart. That day I went to the hospital to get some pain meds for my back pain. The hospital staff was running around asking for blood types; they did not get enough blood and the man died. Pedro was sent back to Peru to face death or life in prison.
"Some of the people out here are only one step away from the crazy fucks you see in a 7-11 talking to the hot dog machine."

Johnny was soldier who lived right next to me. Young kid who came out to Iraq and had been there for almost a year. He had a few kills under his belt and was a wreck. He tried to act like he was fine with things, but would always end up breaking down mid-sentence and getting choked up. He wore nicotine patches, chewed the nicotine gum, smoked two packs a day, and always had a dip in his lip. He wanted complete annihilation of all the Iraqi people and to get back home to Disney World.

The list goes on and on. Afghanistan has a batch unmatched too… Characters you could not muster in your wildest dreams. The nuts and bolts of the machine are all loose and ready to drop at anytime. Some of the people out here are only one step away from the crazy fucks you see in a 7-11 talking to the hot dog machine. There are some sane people, but not many, and they are boring anyway.

What have you learned by working in a combat zone?
Billboard

I have gained more of an understanding of the people and the areas.

Al Asad (my first place of work in Iraq) has an Oasis on it that is considered the third Holiest spot in all of Islam: an oasis where Abraham supposedly drank and bathed. A few Marines swam in the Oasis and ended up having to go to the hospital with some horrible skin rash. This Oasis is now surrounded by a dump, and within the dump there is a fenced area that holds a grave site for an entire Iraqi soccer team that was executed by Saddam’s military after losing an important soccer match. Not far from Al Asad is an area that is supposedly the Garden of Eden. It too is now an area filled with mass graves.

The sight of an elderly goat herder looking up into the sky as an unmanned Predator Assault aircraft flies over and takes photos: brilliant! Watching Americans cover their ears as they walk past a Mosque blasting the words of Mohammed from a pair of blown out speakers: genius!

It is hypnotic to be part of this lunacy.
Bush Speech

So many people know how to correct the world, and they feel like they contributed when the office pooled $2,000 for the Tsunami. They feel like they are humanitarians, and that their hearts are so big. Yet even the relief campaigns and the Red Cross are constantly embroiled in scams and rip-off plans. While twenty-one-year-old soldiers from Hanksack, Nebraska are dying. And children are losing their legs. So the real question is: when are we going to get some motherfucking Starbucks up in here?

About a week ago I had to go down to the gate to meet a truck, which was delayed. I walked outside the gate and was standing on the street corner waiting for the truck. A horde of hungry children, most not more than six, came running over. It was maybe 5 degrees, and some of these kids were barely dressed in rags, with frozen snot and tears of pain on their little faces. The living conditions of most of these Afghans is almost unfathomable. It made me sick, but there was not much I could do except toss them a few bucks and do my Elvis impersonation.

I finished my transaction at the gate and hurried back to the warmth of the office. As I sat at the desk, I looked up to the TV. The morning news show came on to bring America into the new day. The broadcasters promised in the next hour that they would give "Tips on making it through the Holiday Season Blues", "How to dress for success for cheap", a special on dog hotels, and then for the "Top News" of the day: the battle between Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell.

How does status work in the combat zone contract? Do the soldiers look down at the contractors?
DFAC Soldier

Between the contractors, the great divide is the money that is being made. People are funny about it: you ask someone how much they are making and they dance around it if they think you might be making more. The sad part is that the soldiers are on the low end of the pay scale. And this does cause friction between soldiers and contractors. In the same breath, however, many soldiers ask me over and over about contracting so that when they finish their tour of service they can come back over as a contractor. Most of the contractors have previous military experience, and most of the CEOs and Presidents of the contracting companies are actually retired officers who finished their time in the Army and decided to make some money off their connections and love for war.

Contracting allows the government to disperse funds in a cloaked fashion and to stand upon the shoulders of the corporate giants: Raytheon, Kellogg Brown and Root, Halliburton, Boeing, Blackwater, URS. And at the feet of these giants scurry the smaller contract rats that feast on all the meat and bones dropped from the giants’ table. History will one day catch up to the scams, the money shuffles, the seedy business. There is an insane amount of money over here.

It is sad, though, when you realize that a soldier going beyond the wire and making $25,000 a year and risking his life daily is being mocked by some 250-pound chick who is sitting behind a desk in a posh office eating Twinkies and making $130,000 a year. Is it right or is it wrong? I do not know. However, I have gotten to the point where I will turn to a soldier who is troubled by this and say, "Hey, no one twisted your arm and pushed you into the recruiting office and had you sign on with the Army. And if you want to act like a victim and point fingers, you had best realize that we all choose our own fates." They know this is true and back down. It is like driving down Rodeo Drive in a beat-up Datsun and bitching about rich people. Pointless. You would never get Joe BeeBow From Texas to come out to Iraq for $35,000 a year, it just would not happen.
Flag of Heroes

But at the bottom you have the TCNs, or Third Country Nationalists. The TCNs are the bottom of the totem pole and, in many areas, they are treated like slaves or "disposable humans". The TCNs come from all over the world: Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, Philippines, India, Afghanistan, Kazahkstan, Sri Lanka, and are paid very low wages. Some get jobs that are not bad, like working as a Taco Bell employee, or being a swimming pool cleaner. But some are not so easy. For example, in the Green Zone they had teams of seven to ten Iraqi workers armed with brooms and a wheelbarrow sweeping a seven-mile stretch of highway in 130 degree heat. Sweeping a highway by hand? Down the highway about 40 yards sat a white pickup that housed a fat white man who was reading a newspaper and listening to Clint Black in the cooling comforts of an air conditioned cab. As I drove by he gave me the "Good ol' Boy" hat tip and two fingered wave. I ran into the Good Ol' Boy later and he would sling out some words, "Goddamn man. When those little Hajis finished sweeping that road, their little stinky asses got back in the truck with me and I damn near vomited cause those little faggots smelled so bad. Goddamn you would think the smelly little Sand Nigs would buy some Right Guard or wash der asses out."

The thing about the pay difference really comes to light when you consider the fact that the fatass who sits inside the truck and doesn't lift anything heavier than a pencil is making anywhere between $90,000 to $120,000 a year, whereas the TCN might be making $10 a day if he is lucky. So you can have 30 hard working TCNs that do not eat and are not insured and will work until their hands bleed for the price of one fully-insured lazy fatass.

The TCNs also allow for various shadowy services to be performed. For example, the military will use TCN trucks and truck drivers to bring supplies from Kuwait and Syria and various locations around Iraq. These drivers are paid pretty good money. However, these drivers are subjected to dangers and situations that would shock most. I would watch as the trucks would pull into the camp where these drivers and trucks were placed in a large holding yard where they were unable to leave. They had porta-johns set up and little more. They were not even given water or food, and they could not leave the barbwire fences until their truck was called and escorted to the area where their truck was unloaded. Pool GirlsThese trucks came in with rocks stuck in the window, bullet holes down the side, and other war scars. When we brought the trucks up to our yard to unload, the drivers would beg us for water which we would bring them. When these trucks were hit and blown up, the driver was shit out of luck. He lost his truck, his load, his money, and in many cases, his life. American convoys, on the other hand, are escorted by the US military and have a back-up plan when attacked. The TCNs were occasionally given some support, but usually they have no protection, and thus risk everything to bring the supplies to the various locations.

As with my previous statement, no one is holding a gun to their head to make them sweep highways with a broom or drive through bomb-riddled areas. They're there for the job and pay.

What about those inside the gate vs. those who go outside the gate?
"...they were told not to slow down for anyone or anything, and so ran over children."

The Outside/Inside the wire question is one that is also a touchy one. People who go outside the wire in Iraq have some pretty big nuts and I loved hearing the stories about the hell and chaos that lived outside the protective bases. A truck driver, for example, is a perfect story: you have a guy who came from the US and, in most cases, never even walked on foreign soil ever. KBR tossed out these chunk checks in front of these guys and now you have the classic scenario of the American Truck Driver on the Roads of Iraq. When I lived in a tent with 30 truck drivers I would sit down and listen to their "Outside the Wire" stories all night. They always had a steady supply of booze and hash. Movies could be made of their stories. They talked about some gruesome events in which they were told not to slow down for anyone or anything, and so ran over children. Or they would get stuck in the middle of RPG and gunfire and all they would do is "duck down and drive it like I stole it!" There were the nights when a convoy would roll in late and some burly man would come into the tent crying, "They Got Jimmy! He got blown up last night rolling down Hell's Pass. Motherfucking IED took out two trucks. God Damn!" The truck drivers would all get up with their peckers flopping out of their boxers and start sleepily pouring whiskey and talking about the good memories of Jimmy.
Tank and Razor Wire

Outside the wire is work that puts you on a level of bragging rights normally reserved for soldiers only. Inside the wire you might have to run from a rocket or mortar from time to time, but you are still a pussy when it comes to being in a war zone because, as described to me: "you aint shit until you are driving down the road and shit starts blowing the fuck up and 'ping ping ping' bullets are popping off the side of your truck. Then the soldiers start fucking shit up!" The same with the security contractors who would go outside the wire and experience these situations that made anything inside the wire seem like a Betty Crocker cooking show.

Now, up here in Afghanistan, going outside the wire is not as insane of an event. We go outside the wire and have actually been on fairly extensive road trips without a gun, without armor, and in a Nissan pick-up with nothing but a bottle of water and a windshield scraper. There have been many attacks on vehicles and convoys, but these attacks have been mostly on military vehicles and convoys. Some soldiers and security contractors up here look at us rolling outside the gate with no guns or armor and cringe, but I feel fine and I do not consider myself to be a manly man because of this. I went into the Red Zone once in Iraq, and I will say that I should have been wearing a diaper on that trip. That was fear. In Afghanistan I will drive to fetch a locksmith, or to eat a steak dinner, or to go drink a brew at the Russian bar.

How has your view of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan changed since you went over there? At one point you only knew what you read in the paper. What does the media omit?
Statue

There is plenty of news that is omitted by the media, and will be hidden from the public for years, or for lifetimes. I remember being in Al Asad and sitting around drinking with the military as they talked about their missions and killing Iraqis. They told stories about how they were ordered to shoot and kill anything that moved, and they had no qualms admitting that they had killed innocent people. They would shrug it off saying that it is War and that innocent people will die.

I remember one female soldier who said that every Iraqi and their child should be dragged outside and shot in the head; she had recently lost a friend to an IED attack. There were soldiers who admitted to stealing things from homes that they searched, and knew that many of the Iraqis they captured were probably innocent people who "were in the wrong place at the wrong time". I remember hearing all of these stories right when I got to Iraq and thinking that plenty of this was hidden from the media. Months later, however, I saw that the Marines who killed innocent people in Anbar Province were plastered all over the media and that these stories were actually coming out. But there are plenty of these stories that will never come out.

I guess that's the nature of the beast.

A Democratic Sell-out on Bush's Mercenaries

Tomgram: Scahill, A Democratic Sell-out on Bush's Mercenaries

Let's be clear about what it is -- when it comes to "withdrawal" from Iraq -- that the President will veto this Wednesday. Section 1904(b) of the supplemental appropriations bill for the Pentagon, H.R. 1591, passed by the House and Senate, mandates that the Secretary of Defense "commence the redeployment of the Armed Forces from Iraq not later than October 1, 2007, with a goal of completing such redeployment within 180 days." If you've been listening to network TV news shows or reading your local newspaper with less than an eagle eye, you might well be under the impression that -- just as the phrasing above seems to indicate -- a Democratic-controlled Congress has just passed a bill that mandates a full-scale American withdrawal from Iraq. (Reporters and commentators regularly speak of the Democrats' insistence that "American troops be withdrawn from Iraq.") But that's only until you start reading the exceptions embedded in the bill.

Here are the main ones. According to H.R. 1591, the Secretary of Defense is allowed to keep U.S. forces in Iraq for the following purposes:

1. "Protecting American diplomatic facilities and American citizens, including members of the United States Armed Forces": This doesn't sound like much, but don't be fooled. As a start, of course, there would have to be forces guarding the new American embassy in Baghdad (known to Iraqis as "George W's Palace"). When completed, it will be the largest embassy in the known universe with untold thousands of employees; then there would need to be forces to protect the heavily fortified citadel of the Green Zone (aka "the International Zone") which protects the embassy and other key U.S. facilities. Add to these troops to guard the network of gigantic, multibillion dollar U.S. bases in Iraq like Balad Air Base (with air traffic volume that rivals Chicago's O'Hare) and whatever smaller outposts might be maintained. We're talking about a sizable force here.

2. "Training and equipping members of the Iraqi Security Forces": By later this year, U.S. advisors and trainers for the Iraqi military, part of a program the Pentagon is now ramping up, should reach the 10,000-20,000 range (many of whom -- see above -- would undoubtedly need "guarding").

3. "Engaging in targeted special actions limited in duration and scope to killing or capturing members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with global reach": This is a loophole of loopholes that could add up to almost anything as, in a pinch, all sorts of Sunni oppositional forces could be labeled "al-Qaeda."

An Institute for Policy Studies analysis suggests that the "protection forces" and advisors alone could add up to 40,000-60,000 troops. None of this, of course, includes U.S. Navy or Air Force units stationed outside Iraq but engaged in actions in, or support for actions in, that country.

Another way of thinking about the Democratic withdrawal proposals (to be vetoed this week by the President) is that they represent a program to remove only U.S. "combat brigades," adding up to perhaps half of all U.S. forces, with a giant al-Qaeda loophole for their return. None of this would deal with the heavily armed and fortified U.S. permanent bases in Iraq or the air war that would almost certainly escalate if only part of the American expeditionary forces were withdrawn (and the rest potentially left more vulnerable).

No less strikingly, in an era in which the "privatizing" of state functions is the rage, the enormous mercenary forces of private "security" companies like Blackwater USA, now fighting a shadow war alongside U.S. troops in Iraq, would be untouched. On this striking point Jeremy Scahill has much to say -- and he should know. He's the author of the surprise national bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which will shake you to your combat boots when it comes to the nature of the mercenary age -- sorry, the age of "private security contractors" -- that we've now entered. No personal library that claims to make sense of our messy, bloody planet should be without his book. Tom

Who Will Stop the U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq?

Don't Look to the Congressional Democrats

By Jeremy Scahill

The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing up for a great sell-out on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a "show down" or "war" with the White House, it is hardly that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the anti-war electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the Congressional leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation, even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that "this war is lost."

For months, the Democrats' "withdrawal" plan has come under fire from opponents of the occupation who say it doesn't stop the war, doesn't defund it, and insures that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq beyond President Bush's second term. Such concerns were reinforced by Sen. Barack Obama's recent declaration that the Democrats will not cut off funding for the war, regardless of the President's policies. "Nobody," he said, "wants to play chicken with our troops."

As the New York Times reported, "Lawmakers said they expect that Congress and Mr. Bush would eventually agree on a spending measure without the specific timetable" for (partial) withdrawal, which the White House has said would "guarantee defeat." In other words, the appearance of a fierce debate this week, Presidential veto and all, has largely been a show with a predictable outcome.

The Shadow War in Iraq

While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war -- and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq -- and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.

The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.

From the beginning, these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq. While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -- with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.

With such massive government payouts, there is little incentive for these companies to minimize their footprint in the region and every incentive to look for more opportunities to profit -- especially if, sooner or later, the "official" U.S. presence shrinks, giving the public a sense of withdrawal, of a winding down of the war. Even if George W. Bush were to sign the legislation the Democrats have passed, their plan "allows the President the leeway to escalate the use of military security contractors directly on the battlefield," Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies points out. It would "allow the President to continue the war using a mercenary army."

The crucial role of contractors in continuing the occupation was driven home in January when David Petraeus, the general running the President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."

Such widespread use of contractors, especially in mission-critical operations, should have raised red flags among lawmakers. After a trip to Iraq last month, Retired Gen. Barry McCaffery observed bluntly, "We are overly dependant on civilian contractors. In extreme danger--they will not fight." It is, however, the political rather than military uses of these forces that should be cause for the greatest concern.

Contractors have provided the White House with political cover, allowing for a back-door near doubling of U.S. forces in Iraq through the private sector, while masking the full extent of the human costs of the occupation. Although contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely 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. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.

Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges -- 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.

As one armed contractor recently informed the Washington Post, "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night." According to another, U.S. contractors in Iraq had their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."

Funding the Mercenary War

"These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis 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."

Until now, this situation has largely been the doing of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House. No longer.

While some Congressional Democrats have publicly expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of these private forces and a handful have called for their withdrawal, the party leadership has done almost nothing to stop, or even curb, the use of mercenary corporations in Iraq. As it stands, the Bush administration and the industry have little to fear from Congress on this score, despite the unseating of the Republican majority.

On two central fronts, accountability and funding, the Democrats' approach has been severely flawed, playing into the agendas of both the White House and the war contractors. Some Democrats, for instance, are pushing accountability legislation that would actually require more U.S. personnel to deploy to Iraq as part of an FBI Baghdad "Theater Investigative Unit" that would supposedly monitor and investigate contractor conduct. The idea is: FBI investigators would run around Iraq, gather evidence, and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions in U.S. civilian courts.

This is a plan almost certain to backfire, if ever instituted. It raises a slew of questions: Who would protect the investigators? How would Iraqi victims be interviewed? How would evidence be gathered amid the chaos and dangers of Iraq? Given that the federal government and the military seem unable -- or unwilling -- even to count how many contractors are actually in the country, how could their activities possibly be monitored? In light of the recent Bush administration scandal over the eight fired US attorneys, serious questions remain about the integrity of the Justice Department. How could we have any faith that real crimes in Iraq, committed by the employees of immensely well-connected crony corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton, would be investigated adequately?

Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively monitor 126,000 or more private contractors under the best of conditions in the world's most dangerous war zone, this legislation would give the industry a tremendous PR victory. Once it was passed as the law of the land, the companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations. Yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- essentially the Democrats' oversight plan -- "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.

Then there is the issue of continued funding for the privatized shadow forces in Iraq. As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments."

As it stood, this was a stunningly insufficient plan, given ongoing events in Iraq. But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold -- not cut -- 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.

However obfuscated by discussions of accountability, fiscal responsibility, and oversight, the gorilla of a question in the Congressional war room is: Should the administration be allowed to use mercenary forces, whose livelihoods depend on war and conflict, to help fight its battles in Iraq?

Rep. Murtha says, "We're trying to bring accountability to an unaccountable war." But it's not accountability that the war needs; it needs an end.

By sanctioning the administration's continuing use of mercenary corporations -- instead of cutting off all funding to them -- the Democrats leave the door open for a future escalation of the shadow war in Iraq. This, in turn, could pave the way for an array of secretive, politically well-connected firms that have profited tremendously under the current administration to elevate their status and increase their government paychecks.

Blackwater's War

Consider the case of Blackwater USA.

A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.

Since September 11, 2001, the company has invested its lucrative government pay-outs in building an impressive private army. At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility -- a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.

The man behind this empire is Erik Prince, a secretive, conservative Christian, ex-Navy SEAL multimillionaire who bankrolls the President and his allies with major campaign contributions. Among Blackwater's senior executives are Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, "Total Intelligence," to be headed by Black and Richer.

For years, Blackwater's operations have been shrouded in secrecy. Emboldened by the culture of impunity enjoyed by the private sector in the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater's founder has talked of creating a "contractor brigade" to support US military operations and fancies his forces the "FedEx" of the "national security apparatus."

As the country debates an Iraq withdrawal, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that undergird the U.S. public deployment in Iraq. The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill

A Democratic Sell-out on Bush's Mercenaries

Tomgram: Scahill, A Democratic Sell-out on Bush's Mercenaries

Let's be clear about what it is -- when it comes to "withdrawal" from Iraq -- that the President will veto this Wednesday. Section 1904(b) of the supplemental appropriations bill for the Pentagon, H.R. 1591, passed by the House and Senate, mandates that the Secretary of Defense "commence the redeployment of the Armed Forces from Iraq not later than October 1, 2007, with a goal of completing such redeployment within 180 days." If you've been listening to network TV news shows or reading your local newspaper with less than an eagle eye, you might well be under the impression that -- just as the phrasing above seems to indicate -- a Democratic-controlled Congress has just passed a bill that mandates a full-scale American withdrawal from Iraq. (Reporters and commentators regularly speak of the Democrats' insistence that "American troops be withdrawn from Iraq.") But that's only until you start reading the exceptions embedded in the bill.

Here are the main ones. According to H.R. 1591, the Secretary of Defense is allowed to keep U.S. forces in Iraq for the following purposes:

1. "Protecting American diplomatic facilities and American citizens, including members of the United States Armed Forces": This doesn't sound like much, but don't be fooled. As a start, of course, there would have to be forces guarding the new American embassy in Baghdad (known to Iraqis as "George W's Palace"). When completed, it will be the largest embassy in the known universe with untold thousands of employees; then there would need to be forces to protect the heavily fortified citadel of the Green Zone (aka "the International Zone") which protects the embassy and other key U.S. facilities. Add to these troops to guard the network of gigantic, multibillion dollar U.S. bases in Iraq like Balad Air Base (with air traffic volume that rivals Chicago's O'Hare) and whatever smaller outposts might be maintained. We're talking about a sizable force here.

2. "Training and equipping members of the Iraqi Security Forces": By later this year, U.S. advisors and trainers for the Iraqi military, part of a program the Pentagon is now ramping up, should reach the 10,000-20,000 range (many of whom -- see above -- would undoubtedly need "guarding").

3. "Engaging in targeted special actions limited in duration and scope to killing or capturing members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with global reach": This is a loophole of loopholes that could add up to almost anything as, in a pinch, all sorts of Sunni oppositional forces could be labeled "al-Qaeda."

An Institute for Policy Studies analysis suggests that the "protection forces" and advisors alone could add up to 40,000-60,000 troops. None of this, of course, includes U.S. Navy or Air Force units stationed outside Iraq but engaged in actions in, or support for actions in, that country.

Another way of thinking about the Democratic withdrawal proposals (to be vetoed this week by the President) is that they represent a program to remove only U.S. "combat brigades," adding up to perhaps half of all U.S. forces, with a giant al-Qaeda loophole for their return. None of this would deal with the heavily armed and fortified U.S. permanent bases in Iraq or the air war that would almost certainly escalate if only part of the American expeditionary forces were withdrawn (and the rest potentially left more vulnerable).

No less strikingly, in an era in which the "privatizing" of state functions is the rage, the enormous mercenary forces of private "security" companies like Blackwater USA, now fighting a shadow war alongside U.S. troops in Iraq, would be untouched. On this striking point Jeremy Scahill has much to say -- and he should know. He's the author of the surprise national bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which will shake you to your combat boots when it comes to the nature of the mercenary age -- sorry, the age of "private security contractors" -- that we've now entered. No personal library that claims to make sense of our messy, bloody planet should be without his book. Tom

Who Will Stop the U.S. Shadow Army in Iraq?

Don't Look to the Congressional Democrats

By Jeremy Scahill

The Democratic leadership in Congress is once again gearing up for a great sell-out on the Iraq war. While the wrangling over the $124 billion Iraq supplemental spending bill is being headlined in the media as a "show down" or "war" with the White House, it is hardly that. In plain terms, despite the impassioned sentiments of the anti-war electorate that brought the Democrats to power last November, the Congressional leadership has made clear its intention to keep funding the Iraq occupation, even though Sen. Harry Reid has declared that "this war is lost."

For months, the Democrats' "withdrawal" plan has come under fire from opponents of the occupation who say it doesn't stop the war, doesn't defund it, and insures that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will remain in Iraq beyond President Bush's second term. Such concerns were reinforced by Sen. Barack Obama's recent declaration that the Democrats will not cut off funding for the war, regardless of the President's policies. "Nobody," he said, "wants to play chicken with our troops."

As the New York Times reported, "Lawmakers said they expect that Congress and Mr. Bush would eventually agree on a spending measure without the specific timetable" for (partial) withdrawal, which the White House has said would "guarantee defeat." In other words, the appearance of a fierce debate this week, Presidential veto and all, has largely been a show with a predictable outcome.

The Shadow War in Iraq

While all of this is troubling, there is another disturbing fact which speaks volumes about the Democrats' lack of insight into the nature of this unpopular war -- and most Americans will know next to nothing about it. Even if the President didn't veto their legislation, the Democrats' plan does almost nothing to address the second largest force in Iraq -- and it's not the British military. It's the estimated 126,000 private military "contractors" who will stay put there as long as Congress continues funding the war.

The 145,000 active duty U.S. forces are nearly matched by occupation personnel that currently come from companies like Blackwater USA and the former Halliburton subsidiary KBR, which enjoy close personal and political ties with the Bush administration. Until Congress reins in these massive corporate forces and the whopping federal funding that goes into their coffers, partially withdrawing U.S. troops may only set the stage for the increased use of private military companies (and their rent-a-guns) which stand to profit from any kind of privatized future "surge" in Iraq.

From the beginning, these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war, almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq. While many of them perform logistical support activities for American troops, including the sort of laundry, fuel and mail delivery, and food-preparation work that once was performed by soldiers, tens of thousands of them are directly engaged in military and combat activities. According to the Government Accountability Office, there are now some 48,000 employees of private military companies in Iraq. These not-quite G.I. Joes, working for Blackwater and other major U.S. firms, can clear in a month what some active-duty soldiers make in a year. "We got 126,000 contractors over there, some of them making more than the secretary of Defense," said House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. "How in the hell do you justify that?"

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman estimates that $4 billion in taxpayer money has so far been spent in Iraq on these armed "security" companies like Blackwater -- with tens of billions more going to other war companies like KBR and Fluor for "logistical" support. Rep. Jan Schakowsky of the House Intelligence Committee believes that up to forty cents of every dollar spent on the occupation has gone to war contractors.

With such massive government payouts, there is little incentive for these companies to minimize their footprint in the region and every incentive to look for more opportunities to profit -- especially if, sooner or later, the "official" U.S. presence shrinks, giving the public a sense of withdrawal, of a winding down of the war. Even if George W. Bush were to sign the legislation the Democrats have passed, their plan "allows the President the leeway to escalate the use of military security contractors directly on the battlefield," Erik Leaver of the Institute for Policy Studies points out. It would "allow the President to continue the war using a mercenary army."

The crucial role of contractors in continuing the occupation was driven home in January when David Petraeus, the general running the President's "surge" plan in Baghdad, cited private forces as essential to winning the war. In his confirmation hearings in the Senate, he claimed that they fill a gap attributable to insufficient troop levels available to an overstretched military. Along with Bush's official troop surge, the "tens of thousands of contract security forces," Petraeus told the Senators, "give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission." Indeed, Gen. Petraeus admitted that he has, at times, been guarded in Iraq not by the U.S. military, but "secured by contract security."

Such widespread use of contractors, especially in mission-critical operations, should have raised red flags among lawmakers. After a trip to Iraq last month, Retired Gen. Barry McCaffery observed bluntly, "We are overly dependant on civilian contractors. In extreme danger--they will not fight." It is, however, the political rather than military uses of these forces that should be cause for the greatest concern.

Contractors have provided the White House with political cover, allowing for a back-door near doubling of U.S. forces in Iraq through the private sector, while masking the full extent of the human costs of the occupation. Although contractor deaths are not effectively tallied, at least 770 contractors have been killed in Iraq and at least another 7,700 injured. These numbers are not included in any official (or media) toll of the war. More significantly, there is absolutely 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. Before Paul Bremer, Bush's viceroy in Baghdad, left Iraq in 2004 he issued an edict, known as Order 17. It immunized contractors from prosecution in Iraq which, today, is like the wild West, full of roaming Iraqi death squads and scores of unaccountable, heavily-armed mercenaries, ex-military men from around the world, working for the occupation. For the community of contractors in Iraq, immunity and impunity are welded together.

Despite the tens of thousands of contractors passing through Iraq and several well-documented incidents involving alleged contractor abuses, only two individuals have been ever indicted for crimes there. One was charged with stabbing a fellow contractor, while the other pled guilty to the possession of child-pornography images on his computer at Abu Ghraib prison. While dozens of American soldiers have been court-martialed -- 64 on murder-related charges -- 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.

As one armed contractor recently informed the Washington Post, "We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night." According to another, U.S. contractors in Iraq had their own motto: "What happens here today, stays here today."

Funding the Mercenary War

"These private contractors are really an arm of the administration and its policies," argues Rep. Dennis 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."

Until now, this situation has largely been the doing of a Republican-controlled Congress and White House. No longer.

While some Congressional Democrats have publicly expressed grave concerns about the widespread use of these private forces and a handful have called for their withdrawal, the party leadership has done almost nothing to stop, or even curb, the use of mercenary corporations in Iraq. As it stands, the Bush administration and the industry have little to fear from Congress on this score, despite the unseating of the Republican majority.

On two central fronts, accountability and funding, the Democrats' approach has been severely flawed, playing into the agendas of both the White House and the war contractors. Some Democrats, for instance, are pushing accountability legislation that would actually require more U.S. personnel to deploy to Iraq as part of an FBI Baghdad "Theater Investigative Unit" that would supposedly monitor and investigate contractor conduct. The idea is: FBI investigators would run around Iraq, gather evidence, and interview witnesses, leading to indictments and prosecutions in U.S. civilian courts.

This is a plan almost certain to backfire, if ever instituted. It raises a slew of questions: Who would protect the investigators? How would Iraqi victims be interviewed? How would evidence be gathered amid the chaos and dangers of Iraq? Given that the federal government and the military seem unable -- or unwilling -- even to count how many contractors are actually in the country, how could their activities possibly be monitored? In light of the recent Bush administration scandal over the eight fired US attorneys, serious questions remain about the integrity of the Justice Department. How could we have any faith that real crimes in Iraq, committed by the employees of immensely well-connected crony corporations like Blackwater and Halliburton, would be investigated adequately?

Apart from the fact that it would be impossible to effectively monitor 126,000 or more private contractors under the best of conditions in the world's most dangerous war zone, this legislation would give the industry a tremendous PR victory. Once it was passed as the law of the land, the companies could finally claim that a legally accountable structure governed their operations. Yet they would be well aware that such legislation would be nearly impossible to enforce.

Not surprisingly, then, the mercenary trade group with the Orwellian name of the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) has pushed for just this Democratic-sponsored approach rather than the military court martial system favored by conservative Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. The IPOA called the expansion of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- essentially the Democrats' oversight plan -- "the most cogent approach to ensuring greater contractor accountability in the battle space." That endorsement alone should be reason enough to pause and reconsider.

Then there is the issue of continued funding for the privatized shadow forces in Iraq. As originally passed in the House, the Democrats' Iraq plan would have cut only about 15% or $815 million of the supplemental spending earmarked for day-to-day military operations "to reflect savings attributable to efficiencies and management improvements in the funding of contracts in the military departments."

As it stood, this was a stunningly insufficient plan, given ongoing events in Iraq. But even that mild provision was dropped by the Democrats in late April. Their excuse was the need to hold more hearings on the contractor issue. Instead, they moved to withhold -- not cut -- 15% of total day-to-day operational funding, but only until Secretary of Defense Robert Gates submits a report on the use of contractors and the scope of their deployment. Once the report is submitted, the 15% would be unlocked. In essence, this means that, under the Democrats plan, the mercenary forces will simply be able to continue business-as-usual/profits-as-usual in Iraq.

However obfuscated by discussions of accountability, fiscal responsibility, and oversight, the gorilla of a question in the Congressional war room is: Should the administration be allowed to use mercenary forces, whose livelihoods depend on war and conflict, to help fight its battles in Iraq?

Rep. Murtha says, "We're trying to bring accountability to an unaccountable war." But it's not accountability that the war needs; it needs an end.

By sanctioning the administration's continuing use of mercenary corporations -- instead of cutting off all funding to them -- the Democrats leave the door open for a future escalation of the shadow war in Iraq. This, in turn, could pave the way for an array of secretive, politically well-connected firms that have profited tremendously under the current administration to elevate their status and increase their government paychecks.

Blackwater's War

Consider the case of Blackwater USA.

A decade ago, the company barely existed; and yet, its "diplomatic security" contracts since mid-2004, with the State Department alone, total more than $750 million. Today, Blackwater has become nothing short of the Bush administration's well-paid Praetorian Guard. It protects the U.S. ambassador and other senior officials in Iraq as well as visiting Congressional delegations; it trains Afghan security forces and was deployed in the oil-rich Caspian Sea region, setting up a "command and control" center just miles from the Iranian border. The company was also hired to protect FEMA operations and facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, where it raked in $240,000 a day from the American taxpayer, billing $950 a day per Blackwater contractor.

Since September 11, 2001, the company has invested its lucrative government pay-outs in building an impressive private army. At present, it has forces deployed in nine countries and boasts a database of 21,000 additional troops at the ready, a fleet of more than 20 aircraft, including helicopter gun-ships, and the world's largest private military facility -- a 7,000 acre compound near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. It recently opened a new facility in Illinois ("Blackwater North") and is fighting local opposition to a third planned domestic facility near San Diego ("Blackwater West") by the Mexican border. It is also manufacturing an armored vehicle (nicknamed the "Grizzly") and surveillance blimps.

The man behind this empire is Erik Prince, a secretive, conservative Christian, ex-Navy SEAL multimillionaire who bankrolls the President and his allies with major campaign contributions. Among Blackwater's senior executives are Cofer Black, former head of counterterrorism at the CIA; Robert Richer, former Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA; Joseph Schmitz, former Pentagon Inspector General; and an impressive array of other retired military and intelligence officials. Company executives recently announced the creation of a new private intelligence company, "Total Intelligence," to be headed by Black and Richer.

For years, Blackwater's operations have been shrouded in secrecy. Emboldened by the culture of impunity enjoyed by the private sector in the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater's founder has talked of creating a "contractor brigade" to support US military operations and fancies his forces the "FedEx" of the "national security apparatus."

As the country debates an Iraq withdrawal, Congress owes it to the public to take down the curtain of secrecy surrounding these shadow forces that undergird the U.S. public deployment in Iraq. The President likes to say that defunding the war would undercut the troops. Here's the truth of the matter: Continued funding of the Iraq war ensures tremendous profits for politically-connected war contractors. If Congress is serious about ending the occupation, it needs to rein in the unaccountable companies that make it possible and only stand to profit from its escalation.

Jeremy Scahill is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute.

Copyright 2007 Jeremy Scahill

Faulty contract costs the VA millions

EXCLUSIVE

By Chris Adams

McClatchy Newspapers

• VA criticized several times for faulty contracts

WASHINGTON - The Department of Veterans Affairs backdated a key document and violated other rules as it pushed through a $100 million computer security contract that resulted in inflated prices and duplicate payments, according to a previously undisclosed report.

In the end, the contract turned into "an open checkbook" for various VA expenses, and the agency today can't detail the whereabouts of some $35 million in equipment purchased under the contract, the report by the VA's inspector general said.

Indeed, the agency blew through the contract's funds so quickly that the VA was temporarily left without proper defenses against computer hackers and was forced into a higher "CYBERCON" alert level.

As it responds to concerns about the treatment of veterans served by its health care and disability programs, the VA's internal auditor has said in recent months that the agency has another significant problem: the way it contracts for millions of dollars in supplies and personnel.

With a budget of more than $70 billion and more than 235,000 employees, the VA is one of the largest departments in the federal government. But the VA inspector general has repeatedly found that the agency doesn't follow proper contracting procedures, resulting in "significant dollar losses and failed projects," in the words of the most recent report.

Although it disputed some of the inspector general's legal interpretations, for the most part the VA accepted the investigator's findings and promised to make fixes. In response to questions about this report and others, a VA spokesman said that the agency was having trouble keeping good workers and that annual turnover in its central acquisition office has been more than 60 percent.

"VA is committed to being a good fiscal steward of taxpayer dollars," said spokesman Matt Burns, who added that the department is "working aggressively to strengthen its acquisition function and correct issues identified by the IG." The agency has taken several steps to help prevent future problems, he said.

An official for SecureInfo Corp., the company that received the contract, disagreed with the inspector general's conclusions. Stewart Curley, the chief financial officer, said the VA "at no time during the review raised any concerns to us regarding" his company's activities.

He said the company would detail its objections to the inspector general in writing.

The Feb. 26 inspector general's report detailed a series of decisions between 2002 and 2005 to purchase computer services for what was called the "central incident response capability" contract. It's designed to help the VA fend off computer hackers.

In 2002 testimony before a congressional subcommittee, a top VA official said the agency had conducted a rigorous several-month effort to award the contract to a collective bid from several companies joined together under the name VAST, for Veterans Affairs Security Team. The lead company was SecureInfo, which has offices in Virginia and Texas and supplies several government agencies with computer security expertise.

The contract was valued at $103 million. But the inspector general found several problems in the VA's decisions, resulting in "uncontrolled spending, overpayments and illegal contracting actions."

Among them:

-Although the contract was awarded in July 2002 as a small business set-aside, the inspector general said VAST didn't meet the requirements of a small business. VAST brought together several small and large businesses and had been incorporated in Texas seven days before the contract was awarded. At one time in the contracting process, VAST boasted that it had "180,000 technical professionals" at its disposal, calling into question its status as a small business.

-Even though the VA's in-house lawyer recommended they do so, two VA contracting officials chose not to tell the VA's inspector general that they heard an allegation that somebody was trying to manipulate the contracting process. The allegation didn't involve VAST, said Maureen Regan, who handled the report for the inspector general's office. But not referring the allegation to the inspector general for proper investigation was "inappropriate," the report said.

-In October 2002, the VA made a key modification to the contract, changing a portion of it from fixed terms to more open-ended terms. It made that change retroactive to August 2002.

That decision helped turn the contract into "an open checkbook for" computer-related expenditures, many of which weren't related to the original contract. Those new expenditures "were essentially awarded non-competitively and with little or no assurance of price reasonableness."

Other expenses may have been double-billed - meaning the VA paid VAST twice for at least some of the same services, the report said. But because VAST had been formed just to get the VA contract and "was nothing more than an empty shell," it could be difficult for the VA to recoup $8.5 million in potential overpayments.

In addition to labor costs, the VA spent more than $35 million for equipment and supplies under the contract. But the VA doesn't know what equipment it has or where it might be located, the report says.

The contract was expected to last up to 10 years. But the VA spent $92 million within three years and had to let the contract expire when its funds ran out.

The VA's in-house lawyer disputed some of the report's legal findings and also rejected the contention that the office hadn't adequately examined the contract.

But the inspector general said the lawyer's office didn't document why the VA modified the contract in 2002. The lawyer responded that "thorough review and analysis are not always reduced to writing," according to the report.

The inspector general concluded that the VA's unwillingness to accept some of the report's findings "will most likely result in a continuation of contract failures such as this."

America's hidden war dead

More than 770 civilians working for U.S. firms have lost their lives supporting the military in Iraq, and some families are now speaking out

By Howard Witt
Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 26, 2007

HOUSTON -- Like thousands of other Americans who have served in Iraq since the U.S. intervention began four years ago, Walter Zbryski came home in a coffin. Only his coffin was not draped in an American flag or accompanied by a military honor guard.

Instead, the mangled body of the 56-year-old retired firefighter from New York City was shipped back to his family in June 2004 in the bloodied clothes in which he died, with half of his head blown away, according to Zbryski's brother Richard.

"I viewed the body," Richard Zbryski said. "What really upset me was that he was laying there floating in at least 6 inches of his own body fluids. They didn't even clean him up for us."

Zbryski's death was not counted among the official tally of more than 3,200 American military personnel who have been killed in Iraq, nor was it noted by the Defense Department in a news release. That's because Zbryski was not a soldier--he was a truck driver working in the private army of hundreds of thousands of contractors hired by the Pentagon to support the logistical side of the massive American war effort in Iraq.

More than 770 civilian contractors working for American companies have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion began on March 20, 2003, according to an obscure office inside the U.S. Department of Labor, which loosely tracks the figures. If those deaths--of truck drivers and cooks, laundry workers and security guards--are added to the military toll, the human cost of the U.S. war effort in Iraq is nearly 25 percent higher.

Now the family members of some of those American workers killed and injured in Iraq are raising their voices, complaining that the contributions of their loved ones have been forgotten by the U.S. public. Some allege that the workers were put in harm's way without adequate protection. Others charge that their own financial and psychological hardships have been ignored by the contracting companies that promised to help them.

"I think these deaths are glossed over and swept under the carpet," said Hollie Hulett, whose husband, Stephen, 48, was killed in an ambush in Iraq on April 9, 2004, while driving a truck for KBR, formerly Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of oil services giant Halliburton. "I don't think anybody, including the Pentagon and the companies that hire these contractors, want it to be known that it is that dangerous over there and they are sending them out into a mess."

Critics of the war, and some members of Congress, have begun pressing the Bush administration to disclose more details about the Pentagon's reliance on private contractors to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense Department officials conceded in congressional testimony last year that they do not keep track of how many contractors are at work in Iraq and Afghanistan or how many casualties they have suffered.

"We want to know how many contractors and subcontractors there are, the total cost of the contracts, the number of dead and wounded contractors," said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has introduced a bill to require the Bush administration to collect and publicize such information. "This is basic information. . . . When you don't even count [the contractor deaths], you mask the cost in life of this war."

The most common estimate of the number of contractors currently working for U.S. firms in Iraq is 100,000, according to military analysts, but that figure includes unknown proportions of Americans, Iraqis and citizens of other countries.

Casualties understated?

The most recent statistic for deaths among those contractors is 770 as of the end of 2006, according to the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Division of the U.S. Labor Department, which computes the figures from workers' compensation claims filed under the federal Defense Base Act.

But those figures, which also count 7,761 contract workers injured in Iraq, appear to understate the actual number of casualties because they do not include killings of off-duty workers. Nor do they specify the nationalities of the dead and wounded.

What is more clear is that KBR, the Houston-based company that holds the largest Pentagon services contract, has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors at work in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait who are driving fuel and supply trucks, cooking meals, delivering mail and generally supporting the U.S. military in the region. So far, according to the company, 99 KBR employees have been killed on the job, most of them in Iraq.

The war-zone jobs come with health and other benefits and are high-paying -- contract workers in Iraq can earn $80,000 or more, most of it tax-free--and KBR has more than 500,000 applications from interested workers. But company officials insist that they provide repeated and explicit warnings about the dangers in Iraq to every job applicant during an extensive orientation program in Houston.

When employees are injured or killed in Iraq, officials at Halliburton headquarters say they are committed to helping the workers and their families.

"The work KBR employees perform in Iraq is often done under harsh and difficult conditions," Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann said in a written reply to questions from the Tribune. "Therefore, KBR recognizes the importance of helping its employees and their families during difficult times and is committed to do so in any way possible."

But former KBR workers and their families, some of whom are suing KBR and Halliburton over the deaths of their loved ones, say they got little help.

"It was like pulling teeth trying to find out from KBR what happened to Steve," said Hulett, whose husband was among six KBR employees killed when their convoy was ambushed along a route where fighting between Iraqi insurgents and U.S. forces had been raging for several days. "Later on, I asked KBR to continue paying my health insurance -- I couldn't afford the COBRA for it, almost $800 per month. They refused. They wouldn't help."

Richard Zbryski, whose brother was a KBR truck driver, said company officials "were going to dump my brother at the airport, and that was the extent of them taking care of it"--until he said he contacted several New York newspapers about the story. Soon afterward, Zbryski said, KBR agreed to cover his brother's funeral costs.

Nightmares, flashbacks

Ray Stannard, a former KBR truck driver who was among 11 contractors wounded in the same ambush in which Hulett was killed, said he still suffers nightmares and flashbacks from that harrowing day and wonders if he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"The first day I got back, I thought I was going to get help from KBR," said Stannard, 48, who now drives long-haul trucks out of El Paso, Texas. "A lot of us who survived that thing, we are all having nightmares. But they never even called us to follow up. When I got ahold of one of the KBR secretaries higher up, she said they had a lot of people who have gone through that, you're not anything different than anyone else."

The former KBR workers and their families said they had encountered criticism from skeptics who said the dead and injured workers ought to have known the dangers they were facing and deserved no special sympathy.

That attitude offends Steven Schooner, a law professor at George Washington University and a former military officer who is an expert on Pentagon procurement and the use of private contractors to support U.S. military operations.

"People think of the contractors, alive or dead, as profiteers, adventurers, mercenaries or the like, whereas anyone in uniform who dies is a patriot and a hero," Schooner said. "That's appalling. These are workers who are there to enable the U.S. military to do its job. And when the going got tough, they didn't go home."


hwitt@tribune.com

Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

Several large US military projects under fire

by David Dieudonne Sat Mar 17, 1:36 PM ET

The Pentagon is facing mounting criticism over the awarding of several large contracts because of deficiencies and irregularities in the procurement of new age military machines.

Thursday, the US Government Accountability Office, a congressional agency responsible for keeping tabs on federal spending, revealed delays in developing an advanced combat Joint Strike Fighter and costs had swollen 12 percent.

"Total JSF program acquisition costs (through 2027) have increased by 31.6 billion dollars," the GAO said.

Wednesday, the US Coast Guard withdrew a contract from Lockheed Martin and Northrop Gumman to steer the procurement of 12 patrol boats, saying it could better "ensure full and open competition, and control costs" by doing the work in-house.

The 24-billion dollar "Deepwater" project launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States was to provide for progressive modernization and recapitalization of the aging Coast Guard fleet over 25 years.

In December, the New York Times exposed several deficiencies in the program, launched in June 2002 to better protect America's coasts against possible terrorist attacks. They included hull cracks, engine breakdowns, design flaws and electronic equipment that was not sufficiently waterproofed.

The construction of the high-speed vessel was already scrapped once because they were deemed too heavy, guzzled too much fuel and problems with their propulsion systems arose, the newspaper said.

"You will see changes shortly in the Coast Guard in our acquisition organization," fleet commander Admiral Thad Allen had predicted then. "It will be significantly different than we have done in the past."

Late February, doubt was coast over another major military purchase worth 10 billion dollars -- Boeing's construction of 141 combat search and rescue helicopters (CSAR) for the US Air Force.

The GAO recognized that Boeing competitors Sikorsky (United Technologies) and Lockheed Martin had valid concerns about the current bidding process.

"We recommend that the Air Force amend the solicitation to clarify its intent with respect to evaluation of Operations and Support costs, reopen discussions with offerors consistent with our conclusions above, and then request revised proposals," the GAO said.

But Boeing chief executive Jim McNerney told the Financial Times in March: "I do not think there will be a full-blown re-compete on the helicopter competition."

These complications come at the worst time for the Air Force.

Already facing a poor rating over contracts granted to Boeing for the renewal of its supply aircrafts, then canceled, the Air Force is under intense scrutiny by Congress.

The House Armed Services Committee held hearings on March 7 on the Air Force's procurement plans, some accusing the Pentagon of rigging the bidding process for supply planes to favor Boeing over consortium EADS/Northrop.

Halliburton May Forfeit $400 Million for Using Mercenaries in Iraq

Contractor could lose $400 million
N.C. company's role defended

Military contracting giant KBR Inc. could be docked up to $400 million for improperly using private security companies in Iraq, the company disclosed this week.
The Army has already said it withheld about $20 million in payments to KBR's parent company, Halliburton, because the company's subcontractors used private security contractors, including North Carolina-based Blackwater USA. Army officials have said that private security companies were not allowed under Halliburton's main contract in Iraq and that the military was to provide security.

The Army began looking into the use of private security firms by KBR's subcontractors after a congressional investigation sparked by a series of stories in The News & Observer. KBR has won billions in contracts to provide troops in Iraq with basic needs.

In its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday, KBR said the Army was continuing to review its contract and that it would begin withholding more payments unless the company "can provide timely information sufficient to show that such action is not necessary to protect the government's interests." If KBR fails, it could lose $400 million in Army payments, although the actual losses could be lower, according to the report.

KBR contends that its Army contract does not prohibit subcontractors from hiring private security services. It's unclear how many security companies might have worked under the KBR contract, but it's certain that Blackwater was not the only one.

In 2004, The N&O investigated Blackwater's work in Iraq and the deaths and public mutilation of four of its workers in Fallujah. Prompted in part by the articles, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California who now heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, started an investigation into how layers of subcontracts in Iraq add to the Pentagon's costs and limit its ability to oversee the work.

It was during a hearing of Waxman's committee last month that a top Army contracting official revealed that the Army had decided to withhold $19.6 million in payments to KBR. Waxman released a statement Thursday saying that the Army's decision showed why Congress must keep an eye on Pentagon contracts.

"Our investigation might mean a savings of hundreds of millions of dollars for taxpayers," Waxman said. "It would have been better if the money had never been wasted in the first place, but there's at least a chance now to fix this expensive mistake."


Staff writer Jay Price can be reached at 829-4526 or jprice@newsobserver.com.
© Copyright 2007, The News & Observer Publishing Company
A subsidiary of The McClatchy Company

Theatre of the absurd

February 11, 2007
By ERIC MARGOLIS

TORONTO -- "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money," famously quipped U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen back in the 1960s.

Our minds boggled last week at U.S. government estimates that U.S. President George W. Bush's so-called "war on terror" (including Afghanistan and Iraq) will cost at least $690 billion US by next year. That's more than the total cost of the First World War, Korea or Vietnam, and second only to the Second World War's $2 trillion.

This means that by 2008, Bush's wars in the Muslim world will have cost each American man, woman and child $2,300.

Defeat looms in Iraq, and Afghanistan is headed that way. And now U.S. intelligence reports that al-Qaida is stronger than ever. Osama bin Laden, who said the only way to expel U.S. influence from the Muslim world was to bleed the U.S. financially, must be beaming.

As kings have found since the dawn of time, in war, money counts as much as armies. Wars always cost far more than originally projected.

A primary architect of the 2003 Iraq War, former deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, assured Americans the Iraq war would only cost $40 billion. The cost of occupying Iraq would be paid, he claimed, by plundering its oil. Wolfowitz now heads the World Bank.

Speaking of epic idiocy, enter the man selected by Wolfowitz to become proconsul of U.S.-occupied Iraq, a bumbling conservative Republican hack named Paul Bremer.

During the 14 months he ran Iraq, Bremer committed two enormous follies. Bremer dissolved Iraq's army and police, then fired all government employees who were members of Saddam's Baathist party. Iraq was left without security forces or functioning government. Chaos ensued.

For a few hundred million dollars, the U.S. could have hired much of Saddam's army, security forces and bureaucrats. Instead, the Bush administration declared them outlaws and began using Shiite militias and death squads to fight the Sunni resistance, triggering today's ghastly Sunni-Shiite civil war.

Chaos in U.S.-occupied Iraq, and the collapse of its banking system and Baath party-run social programs, forced Washington to rush 363 tons of $100 US bills to Baghdad. This money, which belonged to Iraq, came from the UN-run "Oil for Food" program.

Bremer's people dished out $12 billion US by the truckload. Another $800 million US was stolen by U.S.-appointed officials of Iraq's defence ministry.

But $12.8 missing billions is just the tip of the corruption iceberg. U.S. corporations in bed with the Republican party's right wing, like Halliburton, and mercenary-supplier, Blackwater, made billions out of Iraq. Halliburton, whose former CEO was V.P. Cheney, was awarded $16 billion US in sweetheart Iraq contracts.

Last week, House Democrats opened hearings that finally began to expose the tsunami of corruption that accompanied the occupation and plundering of Iraq. Billions more of fraud and thievery concealed by the Bush administration will likely be uncovered.

The whole sordid story of the 100,000 "private contractors" employed by the U.S. in Iraq has only begun to emerge. According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, at least 48,000 of these - let's use the correct term, mercenaries - are private gunmen working for hundreds of shadowy U.S. military corporations like Blackwater and Vinnell. These heavily armed desperados are a law unto themselves and are under no supervision. Some mercenaries make $1,000 US daily in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The White House wants to help pay for its foreign wars by slashing spending on health and seniors.

While the Washington, D.C., police no longer dare patrol crime-infested southern parts of America's capital, Bush and Cheney are sending the 82nd Airborne Division to try to pacify Baghdad. If this isn't the extreme theatre of the absurd, I don't know what is.

ERIC MARGOLIS