Blackwater USA: trigger-happy mercenaries

Blackwater

The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army

By Jeremy Scahill

Nation Books. 382 pages. $26.95

Few Americans had ever heard of Blackwater USA until it was thrust into the news recently. Like the U.S. Supreme Court, it is powerful but had been virtually unknown.

Blackwater’s power lies in its ability to get away with murder and its status of being above the law. It is one of nearly 200,000 private military contractors serving in Iraq. It epitomizes what the Bush administration is doing: outsourcing and privatizing as many government functions as possible.

Outsourcing is not just an economic gambit to make huge profits for corporations. It is government outsourcing intelligence-gathering and the use of deadly force.

In fact, the military is so privatized that America has more civilian contractors in Iraq than it has a uniformed fighting force. It is not a “coalition of the willing” but a coalition of the billing.

Bernard Weiner writes Online in The Crisis Papers: “Cheney/Bush have created what amounts to their own private legions--soldiers, intelligence analysts, security guards, construction experts and supply specialists--a mercenary force bought and paid for by the American taxpayer.”

Outsourcing is the administration’s cagey way of avoiding a draft, which alienated so many Americans during the Vietnam War.

As columnist Robert Scheer writes: “All of this (outsourcing) was designed by neoconservative hawks in the Pentagon to pursue their dreams of empire while avoiding a conscripted army, which would have millions howling in the street in protest. We have checkbook imperialism.”

“Blackwater” author Scahill writes that the mercenaries are able “to affix a permanent sieve to the most lucrative feeding trough in the world,” the U.S. budget.

Blackwater, founded in 1996 in North Carolina, has quickly become the fifth branch of the the U.S. military. Robert Fisk, excellent British war correspondent, wrote from Baghdad three years ago: “Blackwater’s thugs with guns now push and punch Iraqis who get in their way.”

Today U.S. soldiers take umbrage at Blackwater. Its contractors make $600 to $800 a day, dwarfing the pay of GIs in the war zone. No wonder Blackwater soldiers have been called “the whores of war.”

Another thing annoying U.S. soldiers in Iraq: Blackwater can roam the country with impunity. At the same time it is not liable for family lawsuits for its personnel killed in Iraq.

Still another thing angering U.S. soldiers is paying with GI lives to clean up Blackwater messes. In an effort to find the killers of four Blackwaterites in Fallujah in 2004, U.S. forces carried out 700 airstrikes and damaged or destroyed 18,000 buildings in Fallujah. The vengeful sweep cost 150 U.S. soldiers’ lives.

The State Department noted that Blackwater has been involved in 56 shootings while guarding U.S. diplomats in Iraq. Overall, Blackwater has been involved in nearly 200 shootings in two years. Hired gunslingers and soldiers of fortune run amok.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, declares: “These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law.”

Matt Taibbi wrote bluntly in Rolling Stone recently: “In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity...wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear while modern day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP.”

The Blackwater Praetorian Guard, with its black uniforms and automatic weapons, operates in America too. It got on the gravy train in New Orleans after Katrina, branching out its lucrative business into domestic disasters.

As for the Iraqis, their hatred of the occupying U.S. troops and the Blackwater mercenaries fuels the insurgency. They would like to expel Blackwater but the Iraqi government is powerless to do so.

Scahill, a Polk-award winning investigative reporter, wrote an Online piece in the Indypendent last summer in which he quoted Joe Wilson, former U.S. ambassador to Iraq: “I think it is extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy.”

Blackwater has its own military base, a private air force of 20 planes and 25,000 troops. Yet it is accountable to no one, not the Iraqis, not the U.S. government and not the American people.