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"Outsourcing" and "privatisation" are merely words to describe the same phenomenom. The steady drawing out of the teeth of "government" control and bleeding its possessions out into the "private" sector. At first it seemed part of the "democracy" idea - as indeed it is. It depends however if democracy is what it pretends to be - the chance for the "great unwashed" to have some say in what happens.
Unfortunately everything is not quite as pleasant as it seems.
Outsourcing has been the buzz word of the late twentieth century. It started with Margaret Thatcher and the privatisation of British industry; water, electricity, education, transport all slipped into the privatisation basket. And now finally the most dangerous trend of all - the privatisation of the military where a bunch of trigger-happy mercenaries, armed to the teeth, paid over the odds, freed from responsibility for their actions, are let loose over a country.
For millenia men have gone to war either for a romantic ideal or for loot or for a combination of the two. Mercenaries owe their fidelity to whoever pays them. They are not fighting for a belief or loyalty to their leader. They are fighting because they are paid and paid well to kill on the orders of a private corporation.
The unprecedented privatisation of the US military started under Dick Cheney (US Defence Secretary from 1989 to 1991) with the result that military spending was reduced by $10 billion, the number of troops reduced from 2.2 million to 1.6 million plus the cancellation of complicated and expensive weapon systems. Year after year from 1989 to 1991 the military budget shrank. Previously the army relied very little on civilian contractors. The new idea purported to free the troops to do the fighting while private contractors handled the logistics. It also supplied a good way of getting round the public relations' nightmare when US troops were sent abroad.
Cheney paid Halliburton's subsidiary Brown and Root (later renamed KBR ) $3.9 million to produce a report on how the military could privatise the majority of support services.
By 1992 Halliburton, (soon to be run by Cheney himself) was commissioned to do virtually all the support work for the military over the next five years, a contract that opened the doors to the rapid privatisation in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere ushered in by that other buzz-word the "war on terror".
The downsizing of the military left the special forces community with a dearth of training grounds and provided contractors with a blank canvass .
Private companies provide governments with a wide range of military and security services. These include servicing of advanced weapons, facility protection, personnel security, translation, interrogation and training military and police forces. There are now about thirty five major private contractors in the US amongst these Halliburton, DynCorp, Trident and Blackwater.
Blackwater is an excellent example of the pickings offered from the corporate pie. Funded by Erik Prince, the ultra right wing heir of an auto parts fortune, who In 1996, hardly a year after his father's death, sold the Prince Corporation which he inherited to Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion, Blackwater won diplomatic security contracts from the State Department worth three quarters of a billion dollars in three years. Amongst its employees there are a number of top former Pentagon and CIA officials such as Cofer Black, Joseph Schmitz, Robert Richer and Rick Prado.As with Halliburton, the Pentagon's largest contractor, Blackwater seized a profitable moment and set out to carve a permanent niche for themselves for decades to come. Their aspirations were not limited to international wars. They beat most federal agencies to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, winning contracts worth a quarter of a million dollars a day. What is particularly scary about the role of these corporations is what President Bush labelled a "crusade" and in the case of Blackwater the company's leading executives are dedicated to a Christian-supremacist agenda.
In 1996 the main organ of the theo-conservative movement Richard Niehaus's journal " First Things" published a series of essays for a "Christian" insurrection against the government. One of these essays was by Chuck Colson (an Evangelical minister turned Catholic priest), and a close friend of Erik Prince the co-founder of Blackwater. The Prince family were of Dutch origin and members of the conservative Dutch Reform Church which based its beliefs on the teachings of John Calvin. One of the main tenets of Calvinism is that of predestination - the belief that God has predestined some people for salvation and others for damnation. Brought up in this faith it is puzzling that Prince changed to Catholicism, given that the two faiths even under the new Judeo Catholicism stiill are unalike.
Colson, the first person to be sentenced in the Watergate scandal, In 1994 with Richard Neuhaus and others built a unified movement "Evangelicals and Catholics Together" . The ECT document expressed the vision that would animate Blackwater's corporate strategy and the politics practised by Erik Prince - bolstered by the USS evangelical movement and the cooperation of large secular and Jewish neo conservatives. Taking a cue from his father's funding of right wing evangelical Protestant causes, Prince became a major funder of extremist fringe Catholic organisations. The Prince family were deeply involved in the secretive Council for National Policy. a little known club of a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country. It was started in 1981 by Rev. Tim LaHaye, one of the founders of the Christian Right wing movement in the US, with the idea of building a Christian Conservative alternative to the Council on Foreign Relations which LaHaye considered too liberal. The CNI membership is kept secret and the media is not advised when and where they meet ( à la Bilderberg?)
How does any of this accord with Chnstianity or indeed any religion if its adherents obtain their money - and plenty of it - from the brutal treatment of Iraki and other civilians?
Once Catholicism was the target but now that it has been effectively brought into the Judaic fold, Islam has become the target. To further complicate the matter, amongst the guilty there are many blinkered do-gooders who perhaps sincerely believe their own propaganda.
Blackwater's original five-year contract was estimated at $125,000. When it was extended in 2005 for another five years the estimate was pushed to $6 million. In 2006 Blackwater had been paid $111 million and by 2008 the figure reached more than a billion dollars.
But while Blackwater raised its profits margin and profile with its training services its true fame and fortune came when it formed Blackwater Security Consulting in 2002 and burst into the "mercenaries for hire" world. This time it was the vision of Jamie Smith ex CIA operative. Smith joined Blackwater in December 2001. Within months the US occupied Afghanistan and began planning for the Iraq invasion. One of the key players in landing the first Blackwater Security contract was A. B.( Buzzy) Krongard who started as an investment banker before he became executive director of the CIA. 911 conspiracy theorists have been interested in Krongard because the bank he headed, Alex Brown, later bought up by Deutsche Bank, was allegedly responsible for the unusually high number of put options in United Airline stock placed just before 911 - options that were never collected.
For Blackwater the opportunity of a lifetime would come when US forces rolled into Baghdad in March 2003. The role of Paul Bremer (another of those "conservative Catholic " converts) as pro-consol was presiding over a system in Iraq that resulted in widespread corruption with the lucrative world of private contracting. Bremer In the mid 1970s was assistant to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. At the height of Reegan's bloody wars in Central America, Bremer was promoted to Ambassador at Large on Terrorism. In the 1980s Bremer left the government and became the managing director of Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates.
In mid-2003 Dick Cheney's then Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz contacted Bremer to take the job of running the occupation of iraq. It seemed appropriate that Bremer should not be protected by US government forces or Iraqi security but by a private mercenary company founded by a "right wing Christian". Employing Blackwater mercenaries as his personal guards represented a major shift from the longstanding doctrine that the US military does not turn mission critical functions to private contractors.
Standard wages for personal security detail pros in Iraq were previously $300 dollars a day. Once Blackwater started recruiting these shot up to $600 a day. Built like body builders dressed in khaki unifoms, Blackwater's men embodied the ugly American persona to a tee.
The "operated under contractor immunity" and keeping Paul Bremer alive provided Blackwater with an great marketing campaign. When Bremer left Iraq there were more than twenty thousand private soldiers inside the country's borders. The mercenaries officially hired by the occupation would be contracted for more than $2 billion of security work by the end of the Bremer year. No official explanation was given to iraqis as to who these heavily armed non-uniformed forces were. Iraqis thought they were CIA or Israeli Mossad agents.
The ambush on March 31 2004 when Iraqi resistance fighters killed four Blackwater contractors in the centre of Fallujah would spark multiple US sieges of Fallujah and embolden the anti-occupations resistance movement.The brutal reprisals against Fallujah and the devastating effect of US weapons on the populace mirrored the results found after the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. US troops have already admitted using phosphorous munitions during the operations.
Although Blackwater became known through the Fallujah ambush and its role in guarding Bremer it also won more contracts to defend another pet project of the some of the most powerful figures in the US national security establishment, including Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Dick Cheney
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 Washington and its allies swooped like vultures to shore up the repressive regimes of the ex Soviet republics of the Caspian region. Unocal spent time in the 1990s trying to run a pipeline from Tajikistan through Afghanistan, a project worked on by Blackwater lobbyist Paul Behrends. But there was also great interest in the nations of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan as well as Georgia. Getting at the Caspian regions' oil has proved extremely difficult for Washington. A potential probe for the project lay in the dangerous geography of the neighbourhood located not far from Chechnya and Iran. In 2003 the Bush adminstration helped overthrow the government of a longtime US ally President Eduard Shevardnadze of Georgia who was increasingly doing business with Moscow. In 2003 the US officially launched a project called the "Caspian Guard" to improve the military capabilities of Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
In 2004 heightening its propaganda against Iran as "the axis of evil" Blackwater was hired by the Pentagon to deploy to Azerbaijan and joined a US corporate landscape in Baku that included Bechtel, Halliburton, Chevron Texaco, Unocal and ExxonMobil. While the Iraq war and the "war oin terror" dominated the headlines, beginning in 2004 Blackwater's forces were contracted in the oil and gas-rich Caspian Seas region and established a base just north of the Iranian border.
Defence Secretary Rumsfeld with other senior US officials had been discussing the establishment of operating sites in the area as facilities which would place the United States and coalition countries where they could have access and support. As part of the Caspian Guard the United States also contracted defence giant and Iraq war contractor Washington Group International to construct radar surveillance facility just north of the Iranian border.
The $3.6 billion pipeline project was heavily funded by the World Bank, the US Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and a consortium of BP, Unocal, ConocoPHilips and Hess. The BT pipeline was inaugurated in May 2005. Azerbaijan has a dismal record of human rights' trangressions. President Aliyex, the ally of Kissinger, Naker, Cheney, etc., maintained power through an election due to numerous irregularities. The United States spent milions of dollars to deploy Blackwater in the country with the explicit purpose of bolstering Azerbaijan's military capabilities.
The private military firms, such as Halliburton, Bechtel and Fluor hired by Washington to support its Iraq operation recruited aggressively around the globe along with workers from across the developing world lured by the prospect of higher salaries than they could get at home.
The US training of foreign forces to support covert operations is hardly new particularly in Latin America. Over the six decades of existence, the US Army School for the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001 ) trained more than sixty thousand Latin American soldiers . Amongst the largest contingents of non-US soldiers imported to Iraq by Blackwater were former Chilean commandos. In August 2006 35 Colombian troops on contract in Iraq with Blackwater claimed in interviews with the Colombian magazine "Semana" that Blackwater had defrauded them and was paying them just $34 a day. instead of the $4000 a month they expected.
The November 27, 2004 crash of Blackwater 61, a privately owned plane on contract with the US military attracted little media attention until the families of three of the US soliders killed in the crash filed a wrongful death lawsuit in June 2005. They alleged that the company had sidestepped basic safety procedures.
The US use of clandestine aviation companies dates back to at least the Vietnam War. From 1962 to 1975 the CIA used it's secretly owned airline Air America, simultaneously operating as an commercial airline, to conduct covert operations. Decades later the Bush adminstration clearly saw the need for a clandestine fleet of planes and shortly after 9/11 started a programme using a network of private planes . This kicked into high gear as the US began operating a sophisticated network of secret prison and detention centres around the globe. using private aircraft to transport prisoners.
Blackwater Aviation was founded in April 2003 . The Prince Group acquired Aviation Worldwide Services and its subsidiaries (AWS). In additon to normal circuits the company was also charged with flying out of the country, including Uzbekistan. An article in London's Daily Mail (which the paper quickly retracted) accused the company of engaging in renditions.
Paul Bremer left Iraq in June 2004 and left behind a violent, chaotic mess. His successor Ambassador John Negroponte was certainly no stranger to death-squad style operations having worked under Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War and acted as the Reegan administration's point man in Central America.
In March 2003 Schmitz another "Catholic Christian fundamentalist" became the Pentagon Inspector General responsible for investigating a scandal that involved one of the key architects of the Iraq policy of the administration. Richard Perle a leading neoconservative activist, founder of the Project for a New American Century and chair of the Defence Policy Board. and close to Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had been accused of having been retained by the telecommunications company Global Crossing to help overcome Defence Department resistance to its proposed sale to a foreign firm. Perle quickly resigned his chairmanship . Rumsfeld asked him to remain which he did. After a six month investigation Schmitz exonerated Perle of any wrongdoing.
In June 2004 Schmitz travelled to Iraq and Afghanistan at the time of the scandal over prisoner torture and abuse at Abiu Ghraib and did his best to whitewash the scandal. After his resignation and announcement that he would be working for Blackwater Schmitz was accused by the Republicans and Democrats for protecting the very war contractors he was supposed to be overseeing and of allowing rampant corruption. Companies like Halliburtobn, KBR, Bechtel, Fluor, Titan, CACL, Triple Canopy, DynCorp and Blackwater made a killing serving Iraq and Afghanistan. By June 2005 the Defence Department had 145 contracts with seventy seven contractors in Iraq worth approximately $42.1 billion. Halliburton alone represented 52% of the total contract value.
In January 2006 as Blackwater continued to enjoy the great windfall from Hurricane Katrina, its powerful lobbying firm, the Alexander Strategy Group, was brought down by the Jack Abramoff Lobbying scandal. Abramhoff was a member of President Bush's 2001 Transition Team and a close associate of many of the most powerful political players in the United States. He pleaded guilty to five felony counts in one of the greatest occupation scandals in Washington's recent history. In addition to the clients like Enron, TIme Warner, Microsoft and Eli Lilly, ASG had several evangelical Christian causes such as Salem Communications, the National Religious Broadcasters and Grace News. It was also on the cutting edge of one of the fastest growing industries - private security thanks to the relationship between ASG partner Paul Behrends and Erik Prince.
Prince managed to escape scrutiny despite his connections with Abramhoff and Tony Rudy of Delayiand who gave money to the organisation Toward Tradition an organisation described as a "national coalition of Jews and Christians devoted to fighting the secular institutions that foster anti-religious bigotry", run by Rabbi Daniel Lapin.
SInce its foundation in 1997 Blackwater had grown to become one of the most powerful private military actors on the international scene. In 2006 it had some twenty three hundred private soldiers deployed in nine countries around the world and possessed one of the world's largest private held stockpiles of heavy duty weaponry. Blackwater strives to be an independent army, deploying to conflict zones as an alternative to a NATO or UN force albeit one accountable to Blackwater's owners rather than member nations.
About a month after the 2004 Fallujah ambush, Blackwater quietly registered "Greystone Limited" and it was registered offshore in Barbados. A tax exempt corporate entit, Total Intelligence, which opened for business in February 2007 is a fusion of three entities bought up by Prince. The Terrorism Research Center, Technical Defense and the Black Group.
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the centre of a secret programme in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives inside and outside Pakistan. The Blackwater operatives also gather intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence.
Captain John Kirby, the spokesperson for Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” Meanwhile a defence official specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. “We don’t have any contracts to do that work for us. We don’t contract that kind of work out, period,” the official said. “There has not been, and are not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services.” The Pentagon has stated bluntly, “There are no US military strike operations being conducted in Pakistan.”
Blackwater’s founder Erik Prince contradicted this statement in an interview, telling Vanity Fair that Blackwater works with US Special Forces in identifying targets and planning missions, citing an operation in Syria. The magazine also published a photo of a Blackwater base near the Afghanistan–Pakistan border.
Blackwater, which also goes by the names Xe Services and US Training Center, has denied that the company operates in Pakistan. “Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the US government,” Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to the Nation, adding that the company has “no other operations of any kind in Pakistan.”
A former senior executive at Blackwater confirmed the military intelligence source’s claim that the company is working in Pakistan for the CIA and JSOC. He said that Blackwater is also working for the Pakistani government on a subcontract with an Islamabad-based security firm that puts US Blackwater operatives on the ground with Pakistani forces in “counterterrorism” operations, including house raids and border interdictions, in the North-West Frontier Province and elsewhere in Pakistan. This arrangement allows the Pakistani government to utilize former US Special Operations forces that now work for Blackwater while denying an official US military presence in the country. He also confirmed that Blackwater has a facility in Karachi and has personnel deployed elsewhere in Pakistan.
The company formerly known as Blackwater violated U.S. export control laws nearly 300 times, ranging from attempts to do business in Sudan while that country was under U.S. sanctions to training an Afghan border patrol official who was a native of Iran, .
The alleged violations were spelled out in documents released by the State Department as part of a $42 million settlement with Blackwater that will allow the company, now known as Xe Services LLC, to continue receiving U.S. government contracts.
The agreement appears to spell the end of a three-and-a-half-year, multi-agency federal probe into Xe Services' unauthorized exports of defence technologies and services. While elements of the case were presented to a federal grand jury, the company and its currently serving officers have avoided criminal prosecution.
The State Department said that Xe Services' alleged violations, while widespread, "did not involve sensitive technologies or cause a known harm to national security." Additionally, it said, they took place while Xe "was providing services in support of U.S. government programmes and military operations abroad."
Under the agreement with the U.S. government, the Moyock, N.C., company was levied a $42 million fine, but Xe is allowed to use $12 million of that to strengthen the company's export control compliance programmes. Xe won't be barred from further U.S. government contracts, and a government policy of denying most of the firm's export control applications, in place since December 2008, will be lifted.
Britain of course is in the same situation and in the same hands. On 4 December 2007 in the Ondaatje Theatre in the heart of the Royal Geographic Society building at the annual conference of the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC) set up in 2006 as the industry's trade and lobbying body two months after the Blackwater employees gunned down 17 Iraquis in the street. Representatives from most of the major companies - Aegis, Olive, Blue Hackle, Erinys, Globa, Control RIsks Group; G4 and ArmorGroup were present.
"Sir" Malcolm Rifkind Conservative MP for Kensington and Chelsea, a former defence and foreign secretary, a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq and now the non-executive chairman of Armor Group; opened the conference and stated: "....Very often it is not armies fighting armies that we have to work alongside. it's a different kind of problem. It's non-state fighters - insurgents or terrorists or secession groups or criminal elements or drug elements that the government cannot properly deal with. ... Against that backgound it is simply not possible to imagine that the armed forces and police of these countries can meet the tasks that are required that is allowing its people to go about their lawful business. That is where private security companies can make a difference. " He finished with the words ..." we try and assist those who are carrying those responsibilities to do so in a more successful and effective fashion...."
With such encouraging words from a politician of that calibre what need is there to say more?