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Frieda Gardner, W A M M
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All modern wars bring us number fatigue. We are so good at counting the dead and injured, the vast pile of armaments, and what it all costs the various combatants.
Still, this spring’s news from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute feels surprisingly terrible, fleshing out numerically what we may casually assume from the bitter diet of daily news. Last year, the world’s governments spent $956 billion on war, its preparation, and practice. The U.S. government accounted for 47 percent of this total —nearly half. Next comes Japan, with five percent. Imagine what could be done with this vast sum of money for poverty, education, and the healing of the sick, imprisoned, war-damaged, and the globe. The huge waste it represents is sickening.
So, given the galactic size of overall expenditure, why write about the relatively small world of private military contractors (PMCs)? (At $100 billion annually, they represent merely one-ninth of the global war funds.) First, because PMCs offer a convenient and timely symbol of the world’s military madness—call it “mercenary madness.” Second, because PMCs have commanded bipartisan support among U.S. policy makers. And third, because PMCs have, until recently, been so conveniently under-publicized—hidden in the fog of war, the murk of empire.
In the U.S., there has always been robust contractual traffic between the Pentagon and the arms industry. What’s new since the 1990s (roughly speaking) is the tremendous growth of private contracts focused on services, not just hardware, in all parts of government. Such contracts represent conservative America’s romance with Private Enterprise, that fantasy business world which promises to be cheaper, faster, and more efficient than our wicked, tax-inspired Big Government.
Greased by the speed and intelligence of computers and their systems, privatizing has spread from prisons and schools to any kind of “security” that can be taught and/or hired. Good-guy services like landmine removal, bad-guy jobs like lightning assassinations, job-training programs, pesticide spraying on Colombian cocoa fields, public housing “management,” soldiers for Kosovo, processed disability claims, quickie military bases, fingerprinting skills, crowd-control lessons, food service for soldiers and civilians—it can all be bought. Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, according to Michael Scherer in Mother Jones, “From 1999 to 2002, the government eliminated 46,000 civil-servant jobs while adding an estimated 730,000 contract positions.”
President Bush has proposed letting businesses do the work of another 850,000 federal positions, about half the remaining civil service. Research on the results of all this privatizing activity points to a great victory for the foxes in charge of building and servicing the henhouse. About half the contracts are not subject to open bidding; sweetheart deals with companies like Halliburton abound; profits are fabulous; the revolving door streams with swiftly rotating government employees, politicians, lobbyists, and contractors; and practices like cost-padding are not unknown.
Oh, and while there is plenty of money for contracting, government funds for civil service auditors have been cut back severely. Angela Styles, Bush’s first chief of procurement policy at the Office and Management and Budget, criticized the growing elimination of competition and finally resigned in September.
Privatizing activity doesn’t get any less messy and complicated when we focus on the U. S. military in general and our war on Iraq in particular. Indeed, the work of PMCs seems designed for the brutal smoke-and-mirrors game of our war on Iraq. As of mid-June, and because of the scandalous prisoner torture revelations, there has sprung into existence a multitude of proposals for investigatory commissions within the State and Defense Departments, both houses of Congress, and the White House—all designed to clarify the relationship between PMCs and our government.
With private contracting up to about 30 percent of Pentagon spending in Iraq, there is a lot of investigating to do. And of course it doesn’t help that some defense contracting dollars go to other agencies, like the Interior Department’s National Business Center, which reportedly does a bang-up job handling payroll and “contract handling”—which is why Interior ended up paying the now-infamous CACI International to provide “interrogation” and “human intelligence” support to the military personnel running the Abu Ghraib prison. Talk about fog and murk.
The bland term governing discussion of PMCs is “accountability.” Military force is designed to frighten, injure, and kill. The line between “justifiable” violence and “cruel and unusual” force will always be subject to argument—hence the Geneva conventions, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, etc. In order not to be complicit in illegal and immoral acts of violence, citizens of a democracy must be able to hold their representative government responsible for the entirety of its military behavior.
But the use of PMCs in Iraq helps to establish what is called “plausible deniability.” With PMCs, one can pay Privatized Peter and declare com-plete ignorance about what has happened to Imprisoned Paul. It is notable that one year ago, Paul Bremer, recently our chief administrator in Iraq, gave broad immunity to PMCs. They were not to be touched either by Iraqi or American military law.
Approximately 20,000 contract employees work in Iraq, not counting those doing reconstruction. Since there is no Defense Department central registry of PMCs, it is unclear how many are operating in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld recently offered a list of 60, but characteristically failed to mention both CACI and Titan, both implicated in the recent torture scandal. Only nine PMCs currently belong to the sweet-sounding International Peace Operations Association. The public relations propaganda of many PMCs hums with economic hope (“transforming risk into opportunity”) and delicately phrased advice: Is your “supply chain” weak? “[S]mall gaps create substantial vulnerabilities.”
The word “mercenary” seems crude in this context. Mercenaries are tough, solitary, unscrupulous warriors who know how to get unsavory jobs done (for very good pay) and don’t like to talk much. You can read their stories in the pages of Soldiers of Fortune magazine and find their images in the “boy” aisle at ToysRUs. But employees training at Blackwater, “the largest private firearms training centre in the world” according to its owner, look and sound like ordinary soldiers (The Guardian, May 17, 2004). Part of their invisibility to us is that when they die, they are often referred to as “civilians,” a convenient technicality.
PMCs are too large a part of our war machinery to be invisible. We need more stories, more investigations, more truth about them. The ease with which an American citizen can be one day a hotel security guard and the next a civilian translator in an Iraqi jail is unsettling. To be hired over the phone by CACI to do “interrogation” work at Abu Ghraib seems both bizarre and dangerous. But the most frightening stories come from the top of George Bush’s administration.
Just a year ago, Attorney General John Ashcroft selected two men to reopen and manage Iraqi prisons. At the time, Lane McCotter was head of Management and Training Corporation, a private prison company with a dismal Justice Department reputation for the quality of its services. In 1997, McCotter had been removed as director of corrections in Utah “after a mentally ill inmate died after guards left him shackled naked to a restraining chair for 16 hours” (New York Times, May 21, 2004). John Armstrong, once commissioner of corrections in Connecticut, had a similar record—one marked by multiple lawsuits.
Since it seems that no one at the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons was consulted about Ashcroft’s appointments, one can only conclude that Ashcroft chose these two advocates of rough justice with clear-eyed deliberation.
Clearly, the presence of PMCs is merely symptomatic of America’s imperial designs, both abroad and at home. But exposure and explanation of all such symptoms should continue until we choose or are forced, as in Vietnam, to call a halt. |
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PMC Resources
For more information regarding Private Military Contractors (PMCs):
National Public Radio, “This American Life,” June 6, 2004, www.npr.com.
National Radio Project, “Making Contact,” available from the WAMM office.
Singer, Peter W., Corporate Warriors: The Rise & Ramifications of the Privatized Military Industry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Making a Killing: The Business of War. Washington, DC: Center for Public Integrity, 2004.
See also Mother Jones and The Nation for ongoing coverage.
Web sites of organizations watching PMCs:
www.prwatch.org
www.publicintegrity.org
www.disinfopedia.org
www.worldpolicy.org
www.counterpunch.org
Web Sites of Some of the PMCs in Iraq:
www.blackwaterusa.com
www.caci.com
www.custerbattles.com
www.titan.com
www.vinnell.com
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© 2004 Women Against Military Madness. All rights reserved.
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Complete July/August 2004 Index - click here
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