On September 16, mercenaries from the secretive private military company Blackwater USA shot dead at least 11 innocent Iraqis in Baghdad, claiming they came under fire from "insurgents". The Iraqi government angrily asked the firm to leave Iraq, only to tone down their demand under pressure from the United States. The headline-grabbing incident again helped focus attention on one of the darkest aspects of America's illegal and cruel war in Iraq: the involvement of foreign mercenaries.
In his brilliant book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which was published earlier this year, investigative American journalist Jeremy Scahill traces the phenomenal growth of the company and the broader private war industry in aftermath of 9/11.
Scahill writes: "… Blackwater has risen out of a swamp in North Carolina to become a Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration in its 'global war on terror'."
The company's intriguing name was inspired by the black waters of the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. Today, Blackwater has 2,300 mercenaries deployed in nine countries. It maintains a database of more than 21,000 former Special Forces soldiers and law enforcement agents which it can call upon at a moment's notice. It has perhaps the largest privately held armoury in the US, along with 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships. Its 7,000-acre headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina, is the world's largest private military training facility.
Private army of one man
Scahill quotes one US Congressman as saying that in pure military terms, Blackwater is so strong that it could overthrow many of the world's governments.
At the basic level, Blackwater is the private army of one man — Eric Prince, a secretive former US Navy SEAL whom Scahill calls "a radical right-wing Christian mega-millionaire who has served as a major bankroller not only of President Bush's campaigns but of the broader Christian-right agenda".
Indeed, the religious-extremist theme runs deep throughout the book. He describes the Eric Prince breed of war-profiteers as belonging to a wider "theocon" movement in the US. "Eric Prince has been in the thick of the right-wing effort to unite conservative Catholics, evangelicals and neoconservatives in a common theoconservative holy war — with Blackwater serving as a sort of armed wing of the movement."
Scahill estimates that the company has won at least $500 million in US government contracts — and that does not include the "black budget" contracts for the CIA (such as providing aircraft for the agency's infamous "renditions" programme, wherein terror suspects are illegally transported to countries where they are tortured), and contracts with private corporations and foreign governments.
The crimes of September 11, 2001, came as a golden opportunity for the company, which embarked on an aggressive drive to market its services in fighting Bush's unending "war on terror". The first major contract the company got following the invasion of Iraq — worth $27 million — was to guard the most hated man in the country at that time: Paul Bremer.
That the Bush administration could outsource the protection of its proconsul to a private company speaks volumes about the levels to which the war has been privatised.
Scahill provides interesting insights into Bremer's relationship with the company, and especially with Prince. One of the last acts of Bremer, before he left the post in June 2004, was to sign Order 17, which granted totally immunity from prosecution to "private contractors" in Iraq.
Few had heard of Blackwater before March 31, 2004. On that day, four of its heavily armed mercenaries — who were misleadingly described in the media at that time as "civilian contractors" — were ambushed and killed in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, a hotbed of resistance to the US occupation. In disturbing images that were broadcast around the world, their burnt corpses were seen suspended from a bridge.
Scahill follows the story closely, and interviews the mothers of two of the mercenaries about the wrongful death lawsuits they have filed against the company.
While the incident increased the profile of the firm, the US also used it as a pretext to launch a brutal, all-out assault on Fallujah beginning April 4, 2004, which led to the deaths of more than 800 Iraqis. Another assault in November that year left hundreds more Iraqis dead. This, in a city of just over 300,000.
But these sieges did not succeed in "pacifying" Fallujah. In fact, they had a mobilising effect, contributing to the hardening of the ferocious insurgency that has since gripped Iraq.
The story of the rise of Blackwater can be written in the blood of Iraqis. The company's dogs of war soon found themselves in the thick of things again on April 4, 2004 along with a handful of US troops and a few soldiers from El Salvador — this time in the southern Shiite holy city of Najaf. They were "defending" the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority's offices in the city from an angry crowd that had gathered. In the four-hour battle, the group fired so many rounds that some of them "had to stop shooting every 15 minutes to let their gun barrels cool".
Scahill quotes one US soldier, Corporal Lonnie Young, who took part in the killings, as saying: "I gazed over the streets with straining eyes, only to see hundreds of dead Iraqis lying all over the ground."
What's more, the company also managed to call in reinforcements — military style — which were delivered from Baghdad by its own helicopters.
The book also provides fascinating profiles of some of the other ideologues who have played a major role in the rise of the company. Among them the former head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre Cofer Black and ex-inspector general Joseph Schmitz.
Plus, in the chapter Blackwater's Man in Chile, we are introduced to Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle, who has recruited more than 1,000 Chileans and many Hondurans and Nicaraguans to fight as mercenaries in Iraq for Blackwater. Many of these Chileans had, like Ovalle himself, served in the atrocious regime of Chile's former dictator General Augusto Pinochet.
Scahill's book is authoritative and very well researched. And it is a page-turner, full of shady deals and shadowy operators. It would have also been an excellent thriller — had it not been so deadly real.
