Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (69 page)
In the bigger ideological picture, Blackwater executives fancy themselves part of a “just” mercenary tradition. “This is nothing new,” asserted IPOA’s Doug Brooks. “Even George Washington had contractors.”
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It is a line that Blackwater executives love. Indeed, they often cite the statues in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House as monuments to their trade and tradition. In the middle of the park is a statue of President Andrew Jackson on horseback. Flanking the four corners of the park are statues of mercenaries who fought on the U.S. side in the Revolutionary War: France’s Gen. Marquis Gilbert de Lafayette and Maj. Gen. Comte Jean de Rochambeau; Poland’s Gen. Thaddeus Kosciuszko; Prussia’s Maj. Gen. Baron Frederich Wilhelm Von Steuben (the object of Prince Group general counsel Joseph Schmitz’s obsession). “The idea of contractors on the battlefield, contractors doing this sort of thing, that it’s a new idea, is just wrong,” Erik Prince told a military conference in 2006.
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Citing the statues at Lafayette Park, Prince said, “Those are four military officers, foreign officers, contractors if you will, that came here and built the capability of the continental army, the continental army was having a tough time until they showed up. On Von Steuben’s statue it says he gave military training and discipline to the citizen-soldiers who achieved the independence of the United States. That’s what we’re doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, wherever we get hired and authorized to do so by the U.S. government, we’re giving them the capability to defend themselves, and to clean out their own problems, so you don’t have to send big conventional military to do that. You know, German mercenaries fought on behalf of the union in the civil war, even won the medal of honor.” Cofer Black echoed the narrative: “There is nothing new in this. What we are really talking about is the management of this for the good of the country and to achieve the objective. Lafayette Park could be called Contractor Park for our heroes that came to this country that trained us, trained our forebears.”
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In February 2006, the mercenary industry won a major victory in its rebranding campaign when private contractors were officially recognized in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review as part of the U.S. military’s “Total Force.” In releasing the report Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said the review “sets out where the Department of Defense currently is and the direction we believe it needs to go,” adding, “Now in the fifth year of this global war, the ideas and proposals in this document are provided as a roadmap for change, leading to victory.”
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Cofer Black, was particularly pleased about the line in the report that explicitly recognized contractors like Blackwater:
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“The Department’s Total Force—its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors—constitutes its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions.”
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Pentagon policy, according to the review, “now directs that performance of commercial activities by contractors . . . shall be included in operational plans and orders. By factoring contractors into their planning, Combatant Commanders can better determine their mission needs.” It was a momentous occasion for the mercenary industry—one that Blackwater and other firms recognized as a watershed moment in the drive for the kind of integration and legitimacy they viewed as central to their survival and profitability. Hiring mercenaries was no longer an option; it was U.S. policy. That it was issued as an edict from Rumsfeld, without public debate, was irrelevant. By 2007, Blackwater had its forces deployed in at least nine countries. Some twenty-three hundred private Blackwater troops were spread across the globe along with another twenty-one thousand contractors in its database should the need for their services arise.
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The rise of Blackwater’s private army is nothing short of the embodiment of the ominous scenario prophesied decades ago by President Eisenhower when he warned of the “grave implications” of the rise of “the military-industrial complex” and “misplaced power.”
Riding high on the privatization caravan aggressively pushed forward by the Bush administration, the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute, which has long been at the forefront of the movement to privatize the government and military, sponsored a mercenary conference in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2006. They called it “Contractors on the Battlefield: A Briefing on the Future of the Defense Industry.” It featured two former Pentagon officials who were instrumental to privatization schemes, as well as Blackwater’s vice chairman, Cofer Black. The conference room was packed with representatives from various private military companies, as well as the State Department, Pentagon, and a variety of NGOs. The event felt very much like a reeducation camp for mercenaries, with the godfather, Black, presiding over lessons in rebranding and marketing the product: mercenary services. “We are in a state, as a planet, of disorder,” Black told the crowd. “I’m rather personally upset about this because coming out of the Cold War, I indeed thought that we would have a period of calm and relaxation and goodwill among men. This disorder is subversive.”
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Turning directly to the mercenary trade itself and with the room silent before him, Black spoke slowly, choppily, methodically, as though he were a hypnotist talking someone into a trance. “It may sound a little bit like the Knights of the Round Table, but this is what we believe,” the veteran spy declared. “Focus on morals and ethics and integrity. This is important. We are not fly-by-night. We are not tricksters. We believe in these things. We believe in being represented. We believe in providing the support. We are ethical. We give training to our employees. This is something that will grow and grow. We want to be able to contribute for a significant period of time.”
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EPILOGUE
BLACKWATER BEYOND BUSH
IN EARLY
2008, Blackwater’s name had largely receded from the headlines save for the occasional blip on the media radar sparked by Henry Waxman’s ongoing investigations into the company’s activities. Its forces remained deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and despite the international infamy attached to the Blackwater name, business continued to pour in. In the two weeks directly following the Nisour Square massacre in September 2007, Blackwater signed more than $144 million in contracts with the State Department for “protective services” in Iraq and Afghanistan alone and, over the following weeks and months, won millions more in contracts with other federal entities like the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.
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Erik Prince continued to portray his company as the victim of a partisan witch hunt. “I met the president twice,” he said after appearing before Waxman’s committee. “Iraq is a controversial war—no question. If they can go after contractors and take some of them down . . . it’s another way to embarrass the administration.”
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Amid rampant speculation as to whether Blackwater’s lucrative State Department security contracts would be extended in Iraq, Prince and other executives seemed unfazed. While quietly maintaining Blackwater’s Iraq work, they aggressively pursued other business opportunities for the Prince Group empire. As Blackwater absorbed a barrage of incoming fire over its conduct in Iraq, there was a silver lining for the company. It had secured a very public reputation for being a badass operation that protected—and kept alive—its “principals” in the most hostile of settings by any means necessary. Its very presence in Iraq after Nisour Square, over the objections of the Iraqi prime minister and amid multiple Congressional, military, and Justice Department investigations, sent a clear message: Washington needed Blackwater more than the pretense of Iraqi sovereignty. Blackwater’s boots on the ground were too important to lose, even in the face of growing outrage in the United States over the lack of accountability of Washington’s private forces in Iraq. “I know we’re there not only to be a protective screen,” Prince said in late 2007, “but maybe the fall guy when something goes wrong. That’s probably what’s happened to us in this case.”
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After Nisour Square, Prince hinted that Blackwater might quit Iraq, at least in its overt capacity there. “It’s been a source of huge controversy and hassle for us,” he said.
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But Prince and Blackwater were clearly emboldened by the vivid demonstration of their centrality to the U.S. war machine, and in the days and weeks after Nisour Square, the Blackwater founder began speaking of his empire growing into “more of a full-spectrum” operation.
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A “One-Stop Shop” for the Government
In September 2007, it was revealed that Blackwater had been “tapped” by the Pentagon’s Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office to compete for a share of a five-year $15 billion budget “to fight terrorists with drug-trade ties.”
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According to the
Army Times
, the contract “could include anti-drug technologies and equipment, special vehicles and aircraft, communications, security training, pilot training, geographic information systems, and in-field support.”
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A spokesperson for another company bidding for the work said that “80 percent of the work will be overseas.”
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As Richard Douglas, a deputy assistant secretary of defense, explained, “The fact is we use Blackwater to do a lot of our training of counternarcotics police in Afghanistan. I have to say that Blackwater has done a very good job.”
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Such an arrangement could find Blackwater operating in an arena with the godfathers of the war industry, such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. It could also see Blackwater potentially expanding into Latin America, joining other private security companies who are well established in the region. The massive U.S. security company DynCorp is already deployed in Colombia, Bolivia, and other countries as part of the “war on drugs.” In Colombia alone, U.S. defense contractors are receiving nearly half the $630 million in annual U.S. military aid for the country.
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Just south of the U.S. border, the United States has launched Plan Mexico, a $1.5 billion counternarcotics program. This and similar plans could prove lucrative business opportunities for Blackwater and other companies. “Blackwater USA’s enlistment in the drug war,” observed journalist John Ross, would be “a direct challenge to its stiffest competitor, DynCorp—up until now, the Dallas-based corporation has locked up 94% of all private drug war security contracts.”
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The
New York Times
reported that the contract could be Blackwater’s “biggest job ever.”
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As populist movements grow stronger in Latin America, threatening U.S. financial interests as well as the standing of right-wing U.S. political allies throughout the region, the “war on drugs” becomes an increasingly central part of U.S. counterinsurgency efforts. It allows for more training of foreign security forces through the private sector—away from effective U.S. Congressional oversight—and a deployment of personnel from U.S. war corporations. With U.S. forces stretched thin, sending private security companies to Latin America offers Washington a “small footprint” alternative to the politically and militarily problematic deployment of active-duty U.S. troops. In a January 2008 report by the United Nations working group on mercenaries, international investigators found, “An emerging trend in Latin America but also in other regions of the world indicates situations of private security companies protecting transnational extractive corporations whose employees are often involved in suppressing the legitimate social protest of communities and human rights and environmental organizations of the areas where these corporations operate.”
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In early 2008, Blackwater suffered a setback to its plans for work along the U.S. border. The company announced that it was abandoning its plans to build “Blackwater West” on 824 acres of land in Southern California, a stone’s throw from Tecate, Mexico. Blackwater had planned to use the camp to train border patrol agents and other law enforcement and military in a major front line in the immigration debate.
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Residents of the tiny town of Potrero—population 850—waged a heroic battle against the company’s presence there for more than a year. They expressed a wide range of concerns—from the company’s reputation in Iraq to environmental issues—and forced out local town officials who had attempted to push through Blackwater’s deployment in their community. Finally, in March 2008, Blackwater had had enough; it released a muted statement that said, “The proposed site does not meet our business objectives at this time.”
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A company spokesperson said the decision had nothing to do with the protests against Blackwater. In the bigger picture, this was a minor defeat for Blackwater’s growing business. Even without its desired California facility, Blackwater already annually trains more than 25,000 military and state, federal, and local law enforcement personnel at its Moyock headquarters. It also successfully established “Blackwater North” in Illinois.
If there is one quality that is evident from examining Blackwater’s business history, it is the company’s ability to take advantage of emerging war and conflict markets. Throughout the decade of Blackwater’s existence, Prince has aggressively built his empire into a structure paralleling the U.S. national security apparatus. “Prince wants to vault Blackwater into the major leagues of U.S. military contracting, taking advantage of the movement to privatize all kinds of government security,” reported the
Wall Street Journal
shortly after Nisour Square. “The company wants to be a one-stop shop for the U.S. government on missions to which it won’t commit American forces. This is a niche with few established competitors.”
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