blackwater: from the nisour square massacre to the future of the mercenary industry:
And what I should say at the onset here is that what’s become very, very clear over the past year is that without Blackwater, the occupation of Iraq would be untenable. I mean, this is a company now that has become so central to the US occupation that it can be responsible for one of the single greatest killing sprees of Iraqi civilians and face basically no consequences for that action and in fact continue to win hundreds of millions of dollars in US State Department contracts. Blackwater in Iraq was awarded over $100 million in contracts just in the two weeks following the Nisour Square shooting. It’s had over a billion dollars in contracts from the United States State Department. And the men who were alleged to have been responsible for those killings at Nisour Square, to this day, are walking around as free individuals.
(...) So, according to the witnesses, including this individual, the shooting of this young Iraqi medical student and his mother really began a shooting—a series of shootings in the square that would ultimately leave seventeen Iraqi civilians dead. And what he’s talking about there is that when the initial shots were fired, what happened was that this mother is sitting in the car and sees her son’s head essentially explode after being shot, and she grabs onto him. And it was an automatic car, and so what may have happened is that the car continued to sort of veer toward the Blackwater men, although aerial photos that were later obtained by the Washington Post revealed that that car hadn’t even really come anywhere close to the Blackwater operatives. That’s the allegation that the Washington Post made based on these aerial photos that they obtained.
(...) But let’s be clear here, we’re talking about what is alleged to be the single greatest massacre of Iraqi civilians by a private force in Iraq. The individuals alleged to have been responsible for that have faced no consequences right now. When the Iraqi government said, “We want to prosecute them as criminals for what they’ve done in our country,” the Bush administration had to remind Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that he in fact is not the prime minister of Iraq, that George Bush is the prime minister of Iraq and that the United States has imposed on Iraq a law, going back to the Bremer era, Order 17, that says that no private contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted by any Iraqi legal system. And Bremer issued this order at the time he was allegedly handing over sovereignty to the Iraqi government. No armed private security contractors have ever been prosecuted for any crimes in Iraq, not to mention killing of Iraqi civilians. So while this grand jury is meeting, I think that the odds of actual justice being achieved here for the victims of the Nisour Square massacre is highly unlikely. Maybe one or two people will go down as a symbolic gesture. Blackwater, as a company, is not facing any consequences for this.
(...) Right. I mean, what happened after the Nisour Square killings was extraordinary. You have the puppet Iraqi government saying, “These guys need to leave the country immediately, and we’re going to prosecute them.” And in fact, Blackwater’s work shut down for three days. As one Iraqi friend of mine said, they turned the Green Zone into the green zoo, because we saw how embedded Blackwater is in the occupation. No US officials could leave the Green Zone when Blackwater’s work was shut down. And so, you understand that, in the words of one US official, Blackwater has a client that will go to the ends of the earth to protect it, to shield it, because the US needs, the Bush administration needs, Blackwater. And so, the response of the Bush administration at every turn was to try to cover up for the individuals who did this shooting, try to protect Blackwater and shield the company from public scrutiny or any consequences for its actions.
(...) The other thing I have to add, Amy, is that when the first—they call it the “first blush” report on this incident came out, it purported to be the State Department’s view of what happened at Nisour Square. It said that they were ambushed, that there was enemy fire, that the Blackwater men were defending American lives in a war zone. And it was written on State Department letterhead, official stationery of the United States State Department. Well, it turns out it was actually written by a Blackwater contractor named Darren Hanner and put forward as the State Department’s official report on it. I mean, this is all what happened right away.
(...) But what has gotten almost no attention is that a US military unit did respond right after the shooting, arrived on the scene. And Lieutenant Colonel Mike Tarsa and his men did an investigation, and what they found is that there was no evidence of enemy fire. They examined the shell casings on the scene and found no evidence that there were any shots fired at the Blackwater convoy. And they labeled it a criminal event and said that all of the Iraqis killed that day were killed as a result of unjustified and unprovoked gunfire. Now, this has gotten almost no attention whatsoever.
(...) But the reality here, Amy, is that if you step back for a minute and you look at the situation, Blackwater’s role in Iraq is completely secure. I mean, what we learned through this in a very clear way is that this occupation cannot continue without Blackwater. It’s now ceased to be just a political dedication on the part of the Bush administration to these kinds of companies. It literally is now the case that they couldn’t do the work of the occupation without Blackwater.
(...) And so, if you say, well, Blackwater’s contract should be cancelled, as some have called for, then the question becomes, who’s going to do their job in Iraq? The military said it doesn’t want to do that, because it conflicts with the mission of the United States military. The State Department says it would take two to three years to recruit, train and vet a force of that size. And Blackwater’s competitors don’t seem to have the personnel to step in and fill Blackwater’s role. So Blackwater’s vice president, Martin Strong, Erik Prince and others, they actually don’t even need to have this debate anymore, because the money is in the bank and the boots are on the ground.
(...) But Erik Prince said shortly after this that he sleeps the sleep of the just. No, he sleeps the sleep of a man who knows that his business is going to be very secure, whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House. One of the most pathetic things that happened during that hearing where Erik Prince was there was watching the members of the House Oversight Committee who were Democrats reading the report, the investigative report, done by the committee for that hearing during Erik Prince’s testimony. The Democrats were completely unprepared. And in reality, Erik Prince sort of won the day. He was able to avoid having to talk about Nisour Square, which was what brought him there in the first place, and he was never faced, with few exceptions, with a very substantive follow-up to the things he was saying, some of which were totally untrue.
(...) Well, this is one of Erik Prince’s new initiatives. It’s a private CIA, essentially, called Total Intelligence Solutions. It opened for business in February of 2007 and could prove to be one of Blackwater’s most successful ventures. As I said, it’s like a private CIA. In fact, it’s run by three former very senior US intelligence officials. At the top of the Total Intelligence pyramid is J. Cofer Black, who is the former head of counterterrorism at the Central Intelligence Agency, a twenty-eight-year veteran of the CIA, the man who on 9/11 was responsible at the CIA for the hunt for bin Laden. And we’ve talked about him on this show before. He also ran the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, the government-sanctioned kidnap and torture program, where people like Maher Arar are abducted at JFK airport or in other places around the world and then sent to a third country to be tortured, often while being read questions provided by US interrogators. So this man Cofer Black, who said there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off, he’s the head of Total Intelligence Solutions, along with Robert Richer, who is the former deputy director of operations at the Central Intelligence Agency and Enrique “Ric” Prado, who was a veteran of the CIA in Latin America and worked for the CIA’s paramilitary division for a solid decade.
(...) The US has sixteen intelligence agencies now under one umbrella. 70 percent of their combined budget is now in the hands of the private sector. You have private contractors working basically at every level of the US intelligence apparatus. And so, what we see now, through Total Intelligence Solutions, is that Erik Prince is taking the decades and decades of CIA experience, the careers of people like Cofer Black, Robert Richer, Enrique “Ric” Prado, and putting all of their contacts, their knowledge, their networks, their intimate relationships with governments and heads of state around the world, on the open market for bidding.
(...) Blackwater has recruited soldiers from Chile, from Colombia. They paid their Colombian soldiers $34 a day, which is about $1,000 a month. The Chileans were paid somewhere in the ballpark of $4,000. But a US operative working for Blackwater right now is making about $600 to $650 a day. So there’s a real disparity in pay. When you go down to the bottom, you’ve got the Colombians at $34, the US soldiers at $650 a day working for Blackwater.
(...) But on Barack Obama, he’s in a very complicated situation, because his Iraq plan actually is not a plan to end the occupation of Iraq. It’s to continue it with a different label attached to it. And so, you hear him there talking about how “I don’t want to replace contractors with US troops.” The reality is, and Barack Obama knows this very well, his Iraq plan could not be implemented if he was against the use of Blackwater or other private security forces. And the reality is, he’s probably going to have to use these companies for two to three years at a minimum, unless he makes it an aggressive point of trying to shut them down. He might even have to use Blackwater for the first year of his administration.