By William HARTUNG

The costs and consequences of America’s twenty-first-century wars have by now been well-documented — a staggering $8 trillion in expenditures and more than 380,000 civilian deaths, as calculated by Brown University’s Costs of War project. The question of who has benefited most from such an orgy of military spending has, unfortunately, received far less attention.

Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion-plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.

“The Purse is Now Open”: The Post-9/11 Flood of Military Contracts

The political climate created by the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, as Bush administration officials quickly dubbed it, set the stage for humongous increases in the Pentagon budget. In the first year after the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Afghanistan, defense spending rose by more than 10% and that was just the beginning. It would, in fact, increase annually for the next decade, which was unprecedented in American history. The Pentagon budget peaked in 2010 at the highest level since World War II — over $800 billion, substantially more than the country spent on its forces at the height of the Korean or Vietnam Wars or during President Ronald Reagan’s vaunted military buildup of the 1980s.

And in the new political climate sparked by the reaction to the 9/11 attacks, those increases reached well beyond expenditures specifically tied to fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Harry Stonecipher, then vice president of Boeing, told the Wall Street Journal in an October 2001 interview, “The purse is now open… [A]ny member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November.”

Stonecipher’s prophesy of rapidly rising Pentagon budgets proved correct. And it’s never ended. The Biden administration is anything but an exception. Its latest proposal for spending on the Pentagon and related defense work like nuclear warhead development at the Department of Energy topped $753 billion for FY2022. And not to be outdone, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees have already voted to add roughly $24 billion to that staggering sum.

Who Benefitted?

The benefits of the post-9/11 surge in Pentagon spending have been distributed in a highly concentrated fashion. More than one-third of all contracts now go to just five major weapons companies — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. Those five received more than $166 billion in such contracts in fiscal year 2020 alone. To put such a figure in perspective, the $75 billion in Pentagon contracts awarded to Lockheed Martin that year was significantly more than one and one-half times the entire 2020 budget for the State Department and the Agency for International Development, which together totaled $44 billion.

While it’s true that the biggest financial beneficiaries of the post-9/11 military spending surge were those five weapons contractors, they were anything but the only ones to cash in. Companies benefiting from the buildup of the past 20 years also included logistics and construction firms like Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) and Bechtel, as well as armed private security contractors like Blackwater and Dyncorp. The Congressional Research Service estimates that in FY2020 the spending for contractors of all kinds had grown to $420 billion, or well over half of the total Pentagon budget. Companies in all three categories noted above took advantage of “wartime” conditions — in which both speed of delivery and less rigorous oversight came to be considered the norms — to overcharge the government or even engage in outright fraud.

The best-known reconstruction and logistics contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan was Halliburton, through its KBR subsidiary. At the start of both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Halliburton was the recipient of the Pentagon’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program contracts. Those open-ended arrangements involved coordinating support functions for troops in the field, including setting up military bases, maintaining equipment, and providing food and laundry services. By 2008, the company had received more than $30 billion for such work.

Halliburton’s role would prove controversial indeed, reeking as it did of self-dealing and blatant corruption. The notion of privatizing military-support services was first initiated in the early 1990s by Dick Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration and Halliburton got the contract to figure out how to do it. I suspect you won’t be surprised to learn that Cheney then went on to serve as the CEO of Halliburton until he became vice president under George W. Bush in 2001. His journey was a (if not the) classic case of that revolving door between the Pentagon and the defense industry, now used by so many government officials and generals or admirals, with all the obvious conflicts-of-interest it entails.

Once it secured its billions for work in Iraq, Halliburton proceeded to vastly overcharge the Pentagon for basic services, even while doing shoddy work that put U.S. troops at risk — and it would prove to be anything but alone in such activities.

Starting in 2004, a year into the Iraq War, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, a congressionally mandated body designed to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, along with Congressional watchdogs like Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), exposed scores of examples of overcharging, faulty construction, and outright theft by contractors engaged in the “rebuilding” of that country. Again, you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to find out that relatively few companies suffered significant financial or criminal consequences for what can only be described as striking war profiteering. The congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated that, as of 2011, waste, fraud, and abuse in the two war zones had already totaled $31 billion to $60 billion.

A case in point was the International Oil Trading Company, which received contracts worth $2.7 billion from the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency to provide fuel for U.S. operations in Iraq. An investigation by Congressman Waxman, chair of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, found that the firm had routinely overcharged the Pentagon for the fuel it shipped into Iraq, making more than $200 million in profits on oil sales of $1.4 billion during the period from 2004 to 2008. More than a third of those funds went to its owner, Harry Sargeant III, who also served as the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party. Waxman summarized the situation this way: “The documents show that Mr. Sargeant’s company took advantage of U.S. taxpayers. His company had the only license to transport fuel through Jordan, so he could get away with charging exorbitant prices. I’ve never seen another situation like this.”

A particularly egregious case of shoddy work with tragic human consequences involved the electrocution of at least 18 military personnel at several bases in Iraq from 2004 on. This happened thanks to faulty electrical installations, some done by KBR and its subcontractors. An investigation by the Pentagon’s Inspector General found that commanders in the field had “failed to ensure that renovations… had been properly done, the Army did not set standards for jobs or contractors, and KBR did not ground electrical equipment it installed at the facility.”

The Afghan “reconstruction” process was similarly replete with examples of fraud, waste, and abuse. These included a U.S.-appointed economic task force that spent $43 million constructing a gas station essentially in the middle of nowhere that would never be used, another $150 million on lavish living quarters for U.S. economic advisors, and $3 million for Afghan police patrol boats that would prove similarly useless.

Perhaps most disturbingly, a congressional investigation found that a significant portion of $2 billion worth of transportation contracts issued to U.S. and Afghan firms ended up as kickbacks to warlords and police officials or as payments to the Taliban to allow large convoys of trucks to pass through areas they controlled, sometimes as much as $1,500 per truck, or up to half a million dollars for each 300-truck convoy. In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that “one of the major sources of funding for the Taliban is the protection money” paid from just such transportation contracts.

A Two-Decade Explosion of Corporate Profits

A second stream of revenue for corporations tied to those wars went to private security contractors, some of which guarded U.S. facilities or critical infrastructure like Iraqi oil pipelines.

The most notorious of them was, of course, Blackwater, a number of whose employees were involved in a 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. They opened fire on civilians at a crowded intersection while guarding a U.S. Embassy convoy. The attack prompted ongoing legal and civil cases that continued into the Trump era, when several perpetrators of the massacre were pardoned by the president.

In the wake of those killings, Blackwater was rebranded several times, first as XE Services and then as Academii, before eventually merging with Triple Canopy, another private contracting firm. Blackwater founder Erik Prince then separated from the company, but he has since recruited private mercenaries on behalf of the United Arab Emirates for deployment to the civil war in Libya in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Prince also unsuccessfully proposed to the Trump administration that he recruit a force of private contractors meant to be the backbone of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan.

Another task taken up by private firms Titan and CACI International was the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. Both companies had interrogators and translators on the ground at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a site where such prisoners were brutally tortured.

The number of personnel deployed and the revenues received by security and reconstruction contractors grew dramatically as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on. The Congressional Research Service estimated that by March 2011 there were more contractor employees in Iraq and Afghanistan (155,000) than American uniformed military personnel (145,000). In its August 2011 final report, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan put the figure even higher, stating that “contractors represent more than half of the U.S. presence in the contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, at times employing more than a quarter-million people.”

While an armed contractor who had served in the Marines could earn as much as $200,000 annually in Iraq, about three-quarters of the contractor work force there was made up of people from countries like Nepal or the Philippines, or Iraqi citizens. Poorly paid, at times they received as little as $3,000 per year. A 2017 analysis by the Costs of War project documented “abysmal labor conditions” and major human rights abuses inflicted on foreign nationals working on U.S.-funded projects in Afghanistan, including false imprisonment, theft of wages, and deaths and injuries in areas of conflict.

With the U.S. military in Iraq reduced to a relatively modest number of armed “advisors” and no American forces left in Afghanistan, such contractors are now seeking foreign clients. For example, a U.S. firm — Tier 1 Group, which was founded by a former employee of Blackwater — trained four of the Saudi operatives involved in the murder of Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, an effort funded by the Saudi government. As the New York Times noted when it broke that story, “Such issues are likely to continue as American private military contractors increasingly look to foreign clients to shore up their business as the United States scales back overseas deployments after two decades of war.”

Add in one more factor to the two-decade “war on terror” explosion of corporate profits. Overseas arms sales also rose sharply in this era. The biggest and most controversial market for U.S. weaponry in recent years has been the Middle East, particularly sales to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have been involved in a devastating war in Yemen, as well as fueling conflicts elsewhere in the region.

Donald Trump made the most noise about Middle East arms sales and their benefits to the U.S. economy. However, the giant weapons-producing corporations actually sold more weaponry to Saudi Arabia, on average, during the Obama administration, including three major offers in 2010 that totaled more than $60 billion for combat aircraft, attack helicopters, armored vehicles, bombs, missiles, and guns — virtually an entire arsenal. Many of those systems were used by the Saudis in their intervention in Yemen, which has involved the killing of thousands of civilians in indiscriminate air strikes and the imposition of a blockade that has contributed substantially to the deaths of nearly a quarter of a million people to date.

Forever War Profiteering?

Reining in the excess profits of weapons contractors and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse by private firms involved in supporting U.S. military operations will ultimately require reduced spending on war and on preparations for war. So far, unfortunately, Pentagon budgets only continue to rise and yet more money flows to the big five weapons firms.

To alter this remarkably unvarying pattern, a new strategy is needed, one that increases the role of American diplomacy, while focusing on emerging and persistent non-military security challenges. “National security” needs to be redefined not in terms of a new “cold war” with China, but to forefront crucial issues like pandemics and climate change.

It’s time to put a halt to the direct and indirect foreign military interventions the United States has carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and so many other places in this century. Otherwise, we’re in for decades of more war profiteering by weapons contractors reaping massive profits with impunity.

tomdispatch.com

The Trump administration has made Colombia, where President Ivan Duque rules with the assistance of cartel drug lords and Central Intelligence Agency-linked paramilitary units. Abrams, Trump’s “special envoy” for Venezuela, failed miserably during the 1980s in trying to bring down the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Instead of President Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Abrams and his cohorts almost brought down the administration of Ronald Reagan when it was discovered that the CIA was illegally using the proceeds of arms sales to Iran to fund the anti-Sandinista Nicaraguan Contras.

Trump and his team of incompetents are reinforcing Maduro’s support within Venezuela and around the Western Hemisphere. Trump announced that Philip Goldberg, formerly the US ambassador to Bolivia, will take up the same post in Bogota, Colombia. In 2008, Goldberg was expelled from Bolivia for trying to overthrow the progressive government of President Evo Morales. Goldberg also previously served in Bogota as the coordinator of Plan Colombia, a discredited State Department program that was, in reality, a US weapons-transfer and intelligence-sharing operation for Colombian paramilitary units to commit human rights abuses against Colombia’s indigenous population, farm workers, and Afro-Caribbean people along the northern coast.

Goldberg’s modus operandi in Latin America is well known. The Bolivian government said Goldberg conspired with the opposition to foment unrest in Bolivia’s natural gas-rich provinces. Goldberg has also allowed the US embassy in La Paz and the US Peace Corps and Fulbright scholars in the country to be used for espionage purposes. Goldberg was also adept at coordinating terrorist attacks on key infrastructure components. On September 11, 2008 – note the date – a gas pipeline from Bolivia to Sao Paulo, Brazil was blown up by US-supported forces. Goldberg also coordinated anti-Morales actions of the right-wing governors of Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni, and Tarija. Opposition groups funded by the United States took over government buildings in the four states. Expect Goldberg, in coordination with Duque’s government, and President Jair Bolsonaro’s neo-fascist government in Brazil to carry out similar actions targeting Venezuela.

As Trump’s coup against stumbled as badly as George W. Bush’s 2002 coup attempt against Chavez, the anti-Maduro forces began making accusations, some aimed at one another. Alejandro Ordonez, the Colombian ambassador to the Organization of American States and a far-right Catholic zealot, claimed that the Venezuelan refugees were streaming out of Venezuela to “spread socialism” as part of a “global agenda” on behalf of Maduro’s government. That resulted in the Americas director for Human Rights Watch calling Ordonez “delirious.” Colombian Foreign Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo was forced to issue a “rectification” of Ordonez’s statement, without offering a retraction. The finger pointing in Colombia was matched by that among the CIA-supported opposition forces in Venezuela.

From Brazil, Bolsonaro declared that his government would use the “limits of Itamaraty” to force Maduro from power. Itamaraty is the nickname for the Brazilian Foreign Ministry. Bolsonaro also accused Maduro of being controlled by Venezuelan generals, Cubans, and Russians. Bolsonaro also repeated groundless propaganda emanating from neo-conservative circles in the Trump administration that the Lebanese Shi’a movement, Hezbollah, had established a major presence in Venezuela.

The attempted coup against Maduro will go down in history as one of the most laughable fiascos of all time. Bolton, Abrams, Pompeo, and Vice President Mike Pence believed that by paying off a few lower-ranking Venezuelan National Guardsmen to defect to the opposition duo of Juan Guaidó and Leopoldo Lopez a massive wave would sweep Maduro from office. The National Guard defectors enticed a few thugs, freed from a prison, to toss tear gas grenades back at armored police vehicles on a Caracas highway within the same narrow news feed camera angle. CNN, Fox News, MS-NBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation all fell for the Trump administration’s information warfare operation by calling 300 men, including prison convicts, tossing spent tear gas canisters a “coup.”

The 300 irregulars, some on motorbikes, were trying to storm through the fencing of the Carlota military base, located in the eastern Altamira region of Caracas. It was from within the base where Guaidó and his supporters had set up their coup headquarters and called for people to come to the base to support them.

Trump tweeted his support for the coup that never was, as well as a threat against Cuba: “If Cuban Troops and Militia do not immediately CEASE military and other operations for the purpose of causing death and destruction to the Constitution of Venezuela, a full and complete embargo, together with highest-level sanctions, will be placed on the island of Cuba . . . Hopefully, all Cuban soldiers will promptly and peacefully return to their island!”

Trump’s threat turned out to be as toothless as all of his other braggadocio-laden ultimatums.

Bolton had egg all over his face after the high-level “defections” of Maduro government officials never occurred. Bolton single out Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, Venezuelan Supreme Court Chief Justice Maikel Moreno, and Commander of Presidential Guard Rafael Hernandez Dala as supporting the coup. Bolton looked more foolish than usual after the three officials all publicly announced their loyalty to Maduro.

Contrary to false information from Washington, the Venezuelan military did not support the coup attempt. TeleSur broadcast a rebuttal to the opposition’s claim that Major General Ornelas Ferreira, Chief of Staff of the FANB [Bolivarian Armed Forces of Venezuela] had joined the coup plotters. A TeleSur reporter stated, “I just spoke with Major General Ornelas who stated that it is a disinformation campaign. The general said, ‘I am in the military headquarters with Admiral-in-Chief [Remigio] Ceballos. It is totally false. We are knee-deep with Commander-in-Chief Nicolás Maduro and we remain loyal to our country.”

Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations, Samuel Moncada, said the coup was a “failed attempt to overthrow, by violence, our government.” Moncada also revealed that the US prepared for the coup by turning the US diplomatic mission in Caracas into a virtual “war embassy.” Just hours prior to the coup, Blackwater mercenary firm founder Erik Prince, who now runs the mercenary company, Reflex Responses (R2), offered to send his Spanish-speaking Latin American mercenaries – many with horrible human rights records – from Abu Dhabi to Venezuela to help the CIA-supported opposition to overthrow Maduro. Prince’s “reinforcements” never appeared.

While the coup collapsed in Altamira, thousands of Maduro supporters took to the streets around the Miraflores presidential palace in downtown Caracas. No televised shots of these crowds made it onto CNN, MS-NBC, Fox, or the BBC.

Lopez and his family were forced to seek asylum, first in the Chilean embassy and then in the Spanish embassy. A couple of dozen defecting National Guardsmen were given asylum in the Brazilian embassy. Later, some of the National Guardsmen said they were misled by their commanding officer into joining Guaidó at the Carlota base.

For Bolton, Abrams, and the CIA to have chosen May 1 – the international holiday of socialist and labor solidarity – to launch a coup against the Bolivarian socialist government of Venezuela was truly an insane decision. After the failure of the coup against Maduro, Trump tweeted that “all options” were on the table as far as forcing Maduro to resign was concerned. Ironically, there were more calls in Washington for Trump and his embattled Attorney General to resign than there were for Maduro to step down.

«Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations».

The history of Blackwater and Dyncorp is one of heinous war crimes in Iraq and the Balkans and massive fraud involving U.S. taxpayers’ money in military forays around the world. After coming under investigation for his activities as Blackwater’s chief, Prince, whose sister is Donald Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, sold the company and moved his mercenary operations offshore to Abu Dhabi.

Prince’s Abu Dhabi-based company, Reflex Responses (R2), has been recruiting and training forces from around the world, particularly from Colombia, Chile, Honduras, South Africa, and Romania as mercenaries for Abu Dhabi’s crown prince Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahayan. There is a strict prohibition on hiring Muslim military personnel since they cannot necessarily be relied upon to kill fellow Muslims. The mercenaries, who are based at the large Zayed Military City outside of Abu Dhabi, are commanded by ex-special forces officers from the United States, Britain, France, and Germany. R2 recruits mercenary personnel via an offshore pass-through company, Thor Global Enterprises, which is based in the British Virgin Islands. R2 mercenaries have been reportedly fighting as part of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen’s civil war against forces opposed to Saudi domination of Yemen. Prince uses the code name «Kingfish» in all communications and documentation related to R2.

Feinberg, a Trump supporter, controls Dyncorp through his firm Cerberus Capital, an investment firm that controls several Pentagon contractors. Dyncorp was the subject of several congressional and inspector general investigations in Washington, including its role in the sexual trafficking of children and women in Kosovo and Bosnia while supporting Pentagon and NATO operations in those countries.

After Prince changed the name of Blackwater to Xe Services in 2009, he sold it in 2011 to USTC Holdings, which eventually changed the name of the firm to Academi. The firm was, along with its competitor mercenary firm Triple Canopy, acquired by Constellis Holdings in 2014. The changing corporate names and ownership represented a typical Central Intelligence Agency corporate shell game. Academi continues to maintain Blackwater’s original 7,000-acre military training facility in Moyock, in northeastern North Carolina.

Prince has long desired to see the Pentagon and CIA privatize its foreign military adventures to companies like Academi and R2. If Bannon and Kushner have their way, that desire may come to fruition in Afghanistan, now America’s longest war.

During the George W. Bush administration, Blackwater was a major security contractor for the State Department, providing security personnel for U.S. diplomatic posts worldwide. The State Department contract was rife with fraud. In sworn congressional testimony in November 2007, State Department Inspector General Howard «Cookie» Krongard at first denied his brother, former CIA Executive Director Alvin B. «Buzzy» Krongard, had any relationship with Blackwater. After the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform produced documents proving that Buzzy Krongard had been invited the join Blackwater Worldwide's Advisory Board and had accepted the invitation and attended a Blackwater advisory board meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia a few hours before Howard Krongard's testimony, the State Department IG changed his testimony to avoid a perjury charge.

Blackwater was already under FBI and Justice Department investigations for the shooting deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians on September 16, 2007. The company was also under Justice Department investigation for the smuggling of weapons to Iraq. Some of the weapons reportedly ended up in the hands of various insurgent groups in Iraq. The major reason for the State Department, CIA, and Department of Defense to hire a firm like Blackwater was to hide from federal investigators and congressional committees covert U.S. military operations abroad and even those within the United States during events like post-hurricane Katrina security operations in and around New Orleans.

The presence of Betsy DeVos in the Trump administration, along with the return of Prince to the highest corridors of power in Washington after his self-imposed exile in Abu Dhabi, has, once again, brought focus on the DeVos and Prince families ties to right-wing Republican politicians. The DeVos family has used various corporate entities, such as the Windquest Group, DP Fox Ventures, and Alticor, Inc. (formerly Amway), to funnel thousands of dollars to conservative GOP politicians and their political action committees. Prince has close ties to right-wing Christian evangelical political groups like the Family Research Council, as well as to the Mercer Family Foundation, the group headed by Rebekah Mercer, which gave financial and technical deep data-diving assistance to the Trump presidential campaign. The Mercers are the political patrons of Trump’s chief strategist Stephen Bannon and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

Dyncorp provided security services, under State Department contract, to Afghanistan’s then-president Hamid Karzai and Haitian Presidents Rene Preval and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The firm was believed to have participated in the 2004 CIA-initiated coup d’etat that deposed Aristide and the company may have had more than passing knowledge of financial corruption involving Karzai. Blackwater’s Aviation division was involved in covert operations in not only Afghanistan, but also Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. On November 27, 2004, a Blackwater CASA 212, designated «Blackwater 61», crashed in a canyon in a remote part of Afghanistan. There were no survivors among the crew and passengers. The Blackwater pilot never filed a flight plan before it took off from Bagram airbase in route to Farah and the aircraft did not maintain a tracking system to locate the plane. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) later determined that the pilot and crew engaged in reckless conduct and multiple mistakes.

Among the passengers killed in the crash of Blackwater 61 was Army Lt. Col. Michael MacMahon, who left young children and a widow, Army. Col. Jeanette MacMahon. Col. MacMahon later wrote to the House Oversight Committee about the crash that killed her husband: «Some would say it was simply a tragic accident, and that accidents happen especially in a combat theater. But this accident was due to the gross lack of judgment in managing the company [Blackwater]… My impression of Blackwater after having served 10 months of my tour in Baghdad is that they are trigger happy, unrestrained by our army's rules of engagement, a danger to Iraqi civilians and coalition forces alike, behave as if they are above the law, are viewed as indiscriminate killers by the population, and have no business operating in a combat theater. The consensus among my peers is they are a liability, not an asset.»

For the Pentagon and CIA, Blackwater Aviation was a return to the «Wild West» days of the reckless Air America, which flew every kind of cargo, from guns and chickens to high-grade heroin and commercial electronic goods, during the Indochina war. If Bannon, Feinberg, and Prince have their way, America’s «drug store cowboy» mercenaries will be calling the shots again in Afghanistan and perhaps other current and future war zones around the world.

The sentences of Paul A. Slough, Dustin L. Heard, Nicholas A. Slatten, and Evans S. Liberty, damn a certain form of warfare, but they do not reverse it.  The convictions have, instead, been taken as justification about a certain type of warfare, one waged in the US courtroom in the name of pleasing others and soothing consciences.  “This verdict,” argued US attorney Ronald C. Machen Jr., “is a resounding affirmation of the commitment of the American people to the rule of law, even in times of war.”[1]  In other words, killing must be executed with principle, and such a massacre was not meant for the good books.

The fractured, frittered state is a hungry behemoth.  The Private Military Company (PMC) is its rather aggressive, and mostly vicious offspring.  As Sean McFate posed in The New Republic last year, the US is faced with a set of strategic choices: “1) avoid all wars in the future; 2) institute a national draft; 3) use contractors.  I doubt a presidential or congressional campaign would survive options 1 and 2.”[2]

Wars are now being waged by corporations, and through corporations.  Since the late 1980s, governments have been looking at moving various functions to the market, be they in the realm of actual combat, or those associated with logistics.

The code of engagement is less that of public international law than privateering in the oldest sense of the term, a plunderer’s charter in the name of pay and fortune.  “The picture that has emerged,” as Rain Liivoja suggests in the Leiden Journal of International Law (Dec 2012), “is one of complete chaos and lawlessness: DynCorp employees trafficking and molesting girls in Bosnia, CACI staff members abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and trigger-happy Blackwater and Aegis gunmen shooting at civilian vehicles in the streets of Baghdad.”

In 2010, the US used 175,000 troops and 207,000 contractors in conflict zones.[3]  This invariably means that contractors, while also doing more killing, are being killed.  Fortune has a habit of stealing as well and granting.

Blackwater became the star studded monster in this endeavour, having risen to fame after the 1999 Columbine school massacre when it taught police how to “handle” such situations.  Where there is death, there is Blackwater swooping in with advice and material.  The company proceeded to sell lethal services in the way one sells car products and travel accessories. It sold merchandise with logos and brand recognition.  It provided boots on the ground for the US State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA.  It became the most accommodating of killers.

The rationale of its founder, Erik Prince, says it all: the heavy-handed business sense that insists on over-delivering to your clients, being the standard bearer, not so much of a new form of war as an old system that rejects the primacy of citizen soldiers.  Then, Prince sold his demon child.  The field became crowded, with “too many firms competing for a shrinking pie.”[4]

The existence of such contractors assists in prolonging, rather than halting, conflict. Security vacuums transform into magnets for PMCs.  The nexus between terror and instability is maintained, while building and reconstruction side of matters is left to wither.  This has been seen in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq.  But the global PMC market is marked by two trends, as noted by McFate.  There is the globalisation model, the globe-trotting contractor personified by the antics of Blackwater.  Then come the indigenous types – local warlords keen to staff their contracted entity with locals, keeping matters appropriately tribal.

The extent with which the nature of such companies has been normalised can be gathered by critics of the Blackwater verdicts.  On the website of the Sean Hannity show, sibling of one of the convicts, Jessica Slatten, notes the former employees as “decorated veterans” who, instead of wearing “dress blues adorned with medals earned for honourable military service” will face “jumpsuits and shackles”.[5]

Then there was the evidence.  Iraqi witnesses were singled out for inconsistencies.  There was a conspicuous absence of precise ballistics linking the deaths directly to the gunmen.  Here, the artificiality of law and war is revealed: the attempt by the legal eagle to claw its way into the working mind of the blood-rushed shooter.  The obvious point is that Blackwater operatives should never have been there to begin with, the legacy of an illegal war that laid waste to a state and its institutions.

Did their status as combatants matter?  No, according to Slatten.  They “fought for freedom, only to sacrifice theirs because of defensive actions taken on foreign soil, in a war zone, under imminent threats to their safety.”  How that computes with killing Iraqi civilians is not made out, but such apologies tend to find victims in those who pull triggers, rather than those who receive the bullets.

The fact that an entity like Blackwater can change its name first to Xe and then Academi says much about the shape changing nature of the industry, one of advertising, fiddling adjustments, and ultimately, instability.  Punish its delinquent associates, by all means, but accept the existence of their employees and what they provide.  These are, as P. W. Singer has suggested, the “corporate warriors”.[6]  When there is crisis and scarcity of resources, external help will be sought, less from “a state or even an international organization but rather the global marketplace.”  Even the United Nations is considering moving more of its operations to such service providers.  What a crude form of legitimisation that would make.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Notes:

[1] nytimes.com
[2] newrepublic.com
[3] newrepublic.com
[4] economist.com
[5] hannity.com
[6] cornellpress.cornell.edu

 ”Those organizations (private security companies) will do what NATO cannot do openly. They can train people to be terrorists,” Chossudovsky said, adding that in Syria private contractors were training al-Qaeda.

“We are talking about the continuation of the US policy of military intervention in Ukraine and a preparatory stage for a massacre in southeastern Ukraine,” Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of the National Defense monthly Russian-language magazine said, adding that the deployment of mercenaries from a private company Greystone Ltd. may be financed by Ukrainian oligarchs and organized in coordination with the US State Department.

Michel Chossudovsky told RIA Novosti that mercenaries are normally hired by governments, but options are numerous as they operate covertly and do not identify themselves.

“Private contractors could be hired by NATO, or by Ukrainian government or by an intermediary. Anyone can hire Greystone, they operate covertly, they don’t identify themselves, and make money,” Chossudovsky said.

“Considering that Ukraine’s security services show their obvious incompetence, foreign mercenaries are supposed to suppress the protests in the southeastern part of the country,” Korotchenko said.

Michel Chossudovsky expects Greystone to also  recruit Ukrainians for the operation and reminded that the company recruits different nationalities, who are trained by professional military personnel.

“Within the Ukrainian National Guard there are western military advisors, they have senior military people. They are supposed to train protective services, but in fact they train terrorists,” Chossudovsky said.

“NATO and the US won’t acknowledge the presence of these special forces. What is happening is an influx of special forces in Ukraine which are there with a view to sustaining the current government, but they also contribute to a process of destabilization,” Chossudovsky said stressing that mercenaries would infiltrate grassroots movements to trigger violence across Ukraine.

The Canadian expert also said that NATO advisors are already present in Ukraine and have been brought by Kiev authorities.

“We have reports that there were mercenaries in Eastern Ukraine in early March. Some of these mercenaries could possibly have been used for sophisticated sniper operations which characterize Euro Maidan,” Chossudovsky said, adding that the similar operations have been seen in other countries.

Greystone Ltd. is a private company registered in Barbados that “provides the skilled professionals and program management services necessary to deliver rotary wing, protective security and training solutions.”

It used to be a subsidiary of Blackwater private security services provider, and now operates as a separate entity but still has links to it.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has earlier voiced concerns over the buildup of Ukrainian forces in the southeastern part of the country involving some 150 American mercenaries from a private company Greystone Ltd., dressed in the uniform of the Ukrainian special task police unit Sokol. Moscow called this move violation of Ukraine’s legislation.

 4thmedia.org

Uncle Sam and the «matrix of justice»

A very special topic in the report by the Russian Foreign Ministry on human rights in the U.S on the partial review of offences committed by the American side, is in the absolutely abhorrent practice of extrajudicial killings abroad.

As part of the «war on terror» Washington has developed highly specific approaches, the application of which has not only massively violated many international legal norms, but killed thousands of innocent people… There is, for example, the «innovative thinking» concept of just wars, known since ancient times, on the basis of which the so-called «Matrix of justice» has developed. The authorship of this idea is attributed to President Obama's adviser on counter-terrorism, the Deputy Assistant to the National Security and a CIA veteran, John Brennan.

The «Matrix of justice» is, in fact a hit list, using which the «enemies of America» are to be destroyed without trial on the approval of the President of the United States. The hit list is updated regularly – some have already been consumed, someone else is waiting for their turn. So far, it has mostly been people from al-Qaeda and related groups, but if you want to, the criteria for the «matrix» can be extended. After all, in addition to already having slaughtered about 3 thousand people or so, the actual number of victims is many times greater than this, or as it is known in the American vernacular, collateral damage. To avoid «spilling the blood of our boys» the recent plan to implement the» matrix of justice «is performed mainly by drones which can be deployed anywhere in the world.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in the period from 2004 to 2012, with the help of such devices the CIA has made at least 327 strikes in Pakistan. As a result of which, between 2.5 to 3.2 thousand people died, including 482-852 peaceful Pakistani civilians (175 of them – children). In an air strike on the village of Datta-Khel in March 2011, more than 40 civilians were killed. During similar operations in Yemen 58-149 civilians were killed (24-31 – children), and in Somalia – 11-57 civilians (1-3 children).

Human rights activists have expressed serious concern over the practice of the U.S., noting that; in fact, it is no different from extrajudicial executions which are banned by international law. In May 2010 the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions F. Alston released a report which questioned the US use of drones in conformity to international humanitarian law and the protection of human rights. (1)In this particular situation, it is also about the abuse of executive order № 12333 of December 4, 1981 by Ronald Regan, by which U.S. intelligence agencies are prohibited from participating in assassinations. (2)

In September 2011, the «target» of the blow deliberately eliminated an American citizen, the Islamic cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, and in the same air strike killed another U.S. citizen – the editor of the Islamist web magazine S. Khan.

Many lawyers believe that the targeted assassination of American citizens abroad violates the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, according to which no one can be deprived of his life without a fair trial.

And the «classic» air forces continue to be used non-selectively. According to reports, by August 2012 the conflict in Iraq had claimed the lives of up to 117 thousand civilians, of which approximately 14.7 thousand were killed by an international coalition led by the United States (often as a result of air strikes and the use of unmanned vehicles) . In Afghanistan since the beginning of «Operation Enduring Freedom» about 14,4-17,2 thousand civilians have been killed, and 9 thousand of these by the forces of the international coalition led by the United States.

According to the Afghan authorities, just one American operation in Kunar Province in February 2011, claimed the lives of 65 civilians, including 22 women and 30 children. In March of that year, a NATO helicopter «mistakenly» shot nine Afghan teenagers between the ages of 7 to 15 years.

Crimes against humanity committed by US soldiers abroad often do not receive proper legal assessment under the national judicial system. In January 2012 the U.S. judicial authorities decided in the case of US Navy Sergeant F. Vutericha – the last of the accused in the «massacre in Haditha» in November 2005. Then, U.S. Marines shot 24 Iraqi civilians in retaliation for the death of a colleague M. Terrazas, after he had stepped on an improvised explosive device. This case took place against eight soldiers, one of whom was acquitted, and charges against six were completely dropped. After pleading guilty to «dereliction of duty» F. Vutericha was reduced in rank to private, but the result of a deal with the justice system meant he avoided even a minimum prison term.

In August 2012 the U.S. Justice Department terminated the investigation into the notorious U.S. private security firm «Blackwater» (re-registered as «Zee Services», and from 2012 called «Academi»), on trying to bribe the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Iraq. This company tried a bribe of 1 million dollars to obtain a license to work in Iraq and to block the investigation of the murder by their staff in September 2007 in Baghdad, of 17 civilians, including children (also more than 20 people were injured.) Contractors from «Blackwater» accompanied the convoy of the U.S. embassy and under the pretext of security staged a massacre in Nisoor Square. In this case, the U.S. State Department declined the services of this company but only two years after the tragedy.

Illegal abduction and detention of people remain in the arsenal of U.S. intelligence. In September 2006, President Bush acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons. As it later became known , in 2002-2003, about ten such detention facilities were built by the intelligence services, including in foreign countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Thailand, Morocco, Djibouti, Romania, Lithuania and Poland, creating a legal vacuum containing about 100 prisoners.

In January 2012, the special prison at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay (Cuba) marked its 10-year «anniversary». U.S. President Barack Obama, despite his campaign promise, failed to close it because of opposition from Congress. Open source information indicates that, during the decade, 779 foreigners passed through Guantanamo. 8 of them died (6 committed suicide). At the beginning of August 2012, 168 prisoners from 24 countries remained in jail, including the Russian citizen R.K. Mingazov, who was arrested in 2002 in Pakistan and is held in a legal vacuum, without charges. Among those who are still in prison are 87 prisoners that the U.S. administration has itself acknowledged should be released.

The American judicial system feels entitled to detain foreign nationals in third countries and on other than terrorism charges. Most significant in this regard, the Russian Foreign Ministry said were the arrests of Russian citizens V.A. Bout in Thailand and K.V. Yaroshenko in Liberia, carried out on the basis of the evidence «dummy agents» and dubious evidence. These methods of applying physical and psychological pressure bring into question the very foundations on which the entire investigation and judicial process was based.

Legalized in the United States but condemned by most countries of the world is the practice of torture. In April 16, 2009 the U.S. Department of Justice released four memorandums, prepared by lawyers between 2002-2005, implementing significant cuts in the legal services of the agency. They thoroughly substantiated the legality of harsh interrogation techniques of prisoners in CIA prisons in terms of U.S. law and international law. However, the treatment of detainees in secret CIA prisons have repeatedly been qualified as torture by international experts:

– The report of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2006,

– A confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross in February 2007,

– The report of Swiss Senator D. Marty to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2007,

– Other similar documents.

(To be continued)

(1) Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Study on Targeted Killings, Human Rights Council, 9-11, U.N. Doc. A/HRC/14/24/Add.6 (May 28, 2010)
(2) Executive Order No. 12333 «US Intelligence Activities».

For instance, Robert G. Joseph served as the Senior Director for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense within the US National Security and is known to have squeezed the infamous passage on Iraq's alleged attempts to buy uranium in Niger into G. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address. Like C. Powell's accusations based on the claims that the regime of S. Hussein possessed stockpiles of bacteriological warfare, the uranium forgery took no time to collapse, but nobody in the US Administration was held responsible and the plan for a military campaign against Iraq started to spin off, eventually leaving over a million people dead and the once robust country – devastated. 

John Bolton, another notorious hawk on Romney's foreign-policy panel, was the US envoy to the UN under G. Bush and is projected to jump to the post of the US Secretary of State if Romney's presidential bid goes through. Among other things, Bolton is a proponent of immediately attacking Iran and even suggested at one time that the country should come under a preemptive nuclear strike. The current impression is that Bolton more than anybody else shapes the positions Romney adopts on Iran. In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Romney, in the broadest sense, subscribed to the R. Reagan style in foreign policy and sent the following message regarding Iran: «I will speak out on behalf of the cause of democracy in Iran and support Iranian dissidents who are fighting for their freedom. I will make clear that America’s commitment to Israel’s security and survival is absolute. I will demonstrate our commitment to the world by making Jerusalem the destination of my first foreign trip. Most important, I will buttress my diplomacy with a military option that will persuade the ayatollahs to abandon their nuclear ambitions».

Romney's foreign-policy advisor Eliot Cohen played in the team led by D. Cheney in the early 2000ies and became known for his ardent advocacy of the war with Iraq, the country which he eloquently called «the big prize». Cohen is also a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, a group with the mission of laying out the ideological framework for the unipolar world and the US hegemony. Established by W. Kristol and R. Kagan in 1997, the Project for the New American Century is a high-profile thinktank with considerable influence on the US foreign policy. Dan Senor, former chief spokesperson for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and, like Cohen, a co-founder of the project, added a few expressive brush strokes to his reputation by praising the security and stability in Iraq and for justifying the killings of Iraqi citizens. Predictably, these days Senor is a key figure in the ranks of the tutors updating the Republican candidate on foreign-policy issues. 

Both Cohen and Senor favor military action against Iran. Moreover, Senor indicated in a conversation with the media people last July that Romney would understand Israel if it opts for an attack on the country accused of pursuing a nuclear arms program. «If Israel has to take action on its own, in order to stop Iran from developing that capability the governor would respect that decision», said Senor. Norman Coleman, an advisor to Romney and the board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, similarly pushes for a tighter US-Israeli alliance and pledges that approaches opposite to those of Obama's Administration would be adopted if the Republicans take over. In fact, one of the purposes behind the visit Romney paid to Tel Aviv last July was to highlight his differences with Obama on the Middle East. While Obama has never been to Israel as the US President and is obviously at odds with B. Netanyahu, Romney tends to stress his unlimited commitment to the security of Israel on every occasion that comes along. 

Cofer Black, a CIA official turned vice chairman of the Blackwater security contractor with a record scarred by numerous bloody incidents in Iraq, counsels Romney on intelligence-related subjects. Romney's yet another advisor Max Boot was a member of the team centered around D. Cheney in the early 2000ies. In October, 2001, Boot made a curious case for the American empire, expressing the view that «The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role», and called for the invasion of Afghanistan. At the moment, Boot's wish list includes keeping the US forces in Afghanistan indefinitely, sending troops to Syria, and, of course, bombing Iran. 

Principal Deputy Assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs under G. Bush Eric Edelman looks hawkish even against such background. Edelman's recently stated point appears to be that – due to the difficulty of containing nuclear capabilities allegedly cultivated by Iran – there is no viable alternative to bombing the country. 

Romney's team also counts an outspoken neocon and former World Bank president Robert Zoellick; a Cold War dinosaurs Richard Williamson who served in the US Administrations under R. Reagan and G. Bush, Jr.; co-founder of the Project for the New American Century and McCain's 2008 campaign advisor Robert Kagan, and Princeton University professor Aaron Friedberg who predicts military conflict with China and therefore offers the strategy of curbing its economic expansion. According to The Wall Street Journal, Romney is receptive to the recommendations coming in from George Shultz and James Baker, the US Secretaries of State under R. Reagan and Bush, Sr. 

Foreign Policy contributor Adam Smith voiced serious concern over the fact that Romney so openly admires D. Cheney. Smith warns that a whole Romney-Cheney doctrine has materialized within the conservative camp and that the election of Romney would promise a replay – in a form even more frightening than the original – of the discredited policies which harmed the US during the presidency of G. Bush, Jr. 

No doubt, Romney's victory in the upcoming poll spells trouble – likely, a new major war – for the whole world. Even C. Powell, not exactly a dove, judging by his role in unleashing the US war on Iraq, said in a May interview to MSNBC that the advisory board behind Romney narrowly reflected the leanings of the radical, extreme right fringe of the Republican Party. One might hope that, given the negative experiences the US earned in Afghanistan and Iraq, Romney will exercise a reasonable amount of restraint if elected, and that the current outpourings of hardline rhetoric are a game meant to sell his candidacy. It does have to be taken into account that Cheney and Co. rushed to invade both countries with no specific plans for the future in minds and with no intention to eventually bring the US forces back home. The conclusion made inescapable by what we hear is that the people who used to cosign Cheney's decisions and currently supply recipes to Romney learned nothing new from the past 11 years and continue to believe that everything was done right. They are simply too war-minded to reckon otherwise. 

Romney can count on captains of the US military-industrial complex as he invites a new major war to the Middle East. A boost to the US defense budget which – even apart from the unannounced spending – already measures $711b is written on Romney's ticket, and, in order to put the design into practice, Romney will discharge from the Pentagon many of the officials whose service scrutinize is to scrutinies the expenditures. All it takes to start creating a land of unlimited opportunity for the warmongers, with the taxpayers picking up the tab, is a serious provocation that would jolt the US into a war. 

It is objective reality that unexpected and deplorable developments – hostilities erupting here and there or smashing terrorist attacks – benefit Romney. This was the case, for example, with the obscurely sourced Innocence of Islam – coincidentally, neocon quarterback W. Kristol called in a paper published last May in The Washington Post for a war against politicized Islam, in which the front was supposed to stretch from Pakistan to Tunisia. Kristol, in particular, let out a stream of invective against Egypt and Turkey, asserting that Islamist regimes should be removed. A crusade against Islam must be brewing…