Who
Commands The Private Soldiers?
By David Leigh
17 May, 2004
The Guardian
Here
on the outskirts of the Great Dismal Swamp, now a nature reserve, is
the new face of the privatised American army. Some fear it is getting
out of control.
Grim-faced men in
battle fatigues are oiling their M4s and Glocks, blasting their way
through mocked-up terrorist streets, and riddling old cars with bullets.
The TV set in the
rest room is tuned to gung-ho Fox News and the mess tables are shared
today by a mixed bunch of 200, mostly male. Some are freelances readying
themselves for Iraq, some are from the overstretched real US military
buying firing-range time, some are coastguards about to be deployed
to an unspecified spot "overseas". Young men at one table
have Grupe Tactico Chile on their shoulders.
This is Blackwater,
a commercial army base - the largest private firearms training centre
in the world, according to its owner, Eric Prince, a former Navy Seal.
Blackwater guards
provincial outposts for the Iraqi coalition provisional authority, and
the firm has the contract to keep its head, Paul Bremer, alive. It fought
in a heroic rescue of a wounded soldier in Najaf, but four of its men
were ambushed and killed in Falluja, causing an international crisis.
This week the company
is bulldozing a long twisting track out of its 6,000 acres of swampland
so convoy troops can experience being shot at, as they will be in Iraq.
The trainers will use live ammunition.
Blackwater is at
the forefront of lobbying efforts to stop a clampdown on private military
companies in Iraq. The US defence department has issued draft regulations
seeking to bring them under US military law, instead of their present
local legal immunity.
"You simply
can't do that," said Chris Bertelli, their Washington lobbyist.
"How do you enforce it? At the end of your 60-day contract, you
can just go home."
Weapons ban
Other proposals being resisted are a ban on private weapons, or a rule
that they be returned to the US military when off duty. Blackwater,
whose weaponry ranges from M4 rifles to 20mm cannon on its helicopters,
says this is impractical in a war zone. It suggests voluntary standards.
"We're very
particular. We only hire former special forces people. There is still
a deep patriotism in many of them," Mr Bertelli said.
The US military
has gone headlong for privatisation, urged on by the defence secretary,
Donald Rumsfeld. One 2002 memo from the secretary of the army, Thomas
White, suggests that as much as a third of its budget is going on private
contractors, while army numbers are falling. The rationale is to save
money on permanent soldiers by using temporary ones.
But the policy has
other, political ad vantages. When a mortar shell lobbed at Baghdad
airport earlier this year killed Corporal Tomasi Ramatau, 41, no one
in the US media took much notice.
Names like his do
not appear on the roll-calls of US soldiers killed in Iraq, solemnly
enunciated on the daily TV shows. Ramatau was one of the unemployed
men from the Pacific island of Fiji hired in their hundreds by another
prominent private military firm, Global Risk of London, to take the
bullets for the Pentagon.
The loose control
of the 20,000-plus private-enterprise soldiers in Iraq has been thrown
into painful relief by the accusations that hired civilian interrogators
and translators encouraged obscene tortures at Abu Ghraib prison and
that one even allegedly raped an Iraqi boy in his cell.
No senator or congressman
appears to have had the least idea until the scandal broke that the
drive to privatise the military had gone so far as to use civilian contractors
for such sensitive jobs.
Aides to Democrat
congressman Ike Skelton were particularly incensed with a reply by Mr
Rumsfeld to a demand last month for information about private mil itary
firms in Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld produced a list of 60 companies, half a dozen
of them British, but withheld all mention of two of the biggest and
best-connected recruiting firms alleged to be at the centre of the torture
scandal - CACI in Washington and Titan in San Diego, California.
One of the few people
to have conducted a full-scale study of military privatisation, Peter
Singer of the Brookings Institution, said: "No lawmakers seemed
to know that they were hiring civilians as interrogators. They had this
concept that the civilians were there to mow lawns and answer phones."
In his recent book, Corporate Warriors, he lists dangers in excessively
privatised soldiering, such as cutting corners to save money, secrecy,
and hollowing out the genuine military by poaching their troops. All
have duly come to pass in Iraq.
CACI, for example,
placed Steve Stefanowicz, a former reservist from the Philadelphia area
who had once worked in naval intelligence, in Iraq. According to his
fellow interrogator Torin Nelson, CACI hired interrogators over the
phone, without even meeting them.
"I was interviewed
in September 2003 in a very short telephone conversation, which was
more like a sales pitch of how great the company was, than a typical
interview for a professional job," Mr Nelson said. "I never
met anyone from CACI until I landed in Fort Bliss [an army induction
centre in Texas], and then it was some other new hires."
Frantic
CACI website entries show increasingly frantic efforts to attract interrogators,
with the qualifications required being reduced from seven years' interrogation
experience, to five years, to two.
It does not seem
that CACI saved any military manpower for the US by hiring Mr Stefanowicz.
According to naval records, he was on active duty as a petty officer
3rd class in the reserves already, but apparently resigned in September
2003 to join CACI. Private companies are offering pay of up to $115,000
(about £65,000) a year.
In Iraq, the status
of the CACI interrogators was ambiguous. Mr Nelson said some of his
colleagues went around in desert camouflage uniform. "We contractors
were often able to establish our own method of actually implementing
the chain of command's intent, which was to glean information for intelligence
purposes."
Mr Stefanowicz ended
up being accused in the now-notorious leaked classified Taguba report,
of telling untrained and unsupervised reservist military policemen to
abuse the Abu Ghraib prisoners.
He remains in Iraq,
according to the US army on "administrative duties" while
investigations continue. The accused soldiers below him, however, all
face courts martial, beginning this month.
Unlike the gun-toting
security companies, firms like CACI seem to function merely as recruiting
postboxes. CACI, based in a Washington suburb, put former defence officials
on its board, including the former London representative of the code-breaking
National Security Agency, Barbara McNamara. It moved seamlessly from
origins as an IT firm to acquiring such small companies last year as
Premier Technology, also in Washington, which had contracts to supply
96 analysts to US military intelligence in Germany.
From there it was
a short step, when the call went out, to recruiting freelance army interrogators.
Similarly, firms like Blackwater and Global have shifted, almost unnoticed,
from providing bodyguard services to engaging in fighting.
Mr Singer points
out that mercenaries are nothing new, and huge standing national armies
are a recent development.
But one former British
special forces officer, recently returned to Europe from Iraq, said:
"The trouble is the private companies often have an attitude that
'Yeah, we can do it'. Then they become overstretched. As officers in
the military, there is an integrity level we would operate under normally.
And it just isn't there."