Razzle Dazzle: Bush: Mission Unaccountable

Razzle Dazzle
Bush: Mission Unaccountable

By RICHARD STEIER

Abraham Lincoln, the spiritual father of the Republican Party, would probably disown his progeny if he were able to recognize it in its current form.

The first great War President, who on the battlefield of Gettysburg spoke of "government of the people, by the people, for the people," could not have conjured the modern GOP vision, brought to life under George W. Bush, of government by and for the contractors.

But the administration's fixation on giving private firms major segments of the responsibilities traditionally performed by public workers has come home to roost in particularly ugly fashion with the shooting rampage by employees of Blackwater USA, the contractor in charge of security for U.S. diplomatic personnel in Iraq, in Baghdad last month.

A Bomb Triggers Senseless Shooting

Shortly after a bomb went off in that city, Blackwater personnel opened fire on a car carrying a young man and his mother. The young man was fatally wounded, but when the car continued rolling, even though its employees faced no danger, Blackwater increased its offensive and spread it to a separate area, and by the time the smoke had cleared, 17 Iraqis had been killed and 24 wounded.

A SHADOW GOVERNMENT: President Bush's decision to use campaign contributors to provide contract security to State Department personnel in Iraq has resulted in armed mercenaries sometimes wreaking havoc and feeding anti-U.S. sentiment while escaping prosecution for criminal acts including murder. A congressional hearing Oct. 2 steered away from that massacre in order not to compromise ongoing investigations by the State Department, the FBI and the Iraqi government. But Blackwater's chief executive, Erik Prince, was forced to defend his firm against charges that its employees were trigger-happy mercenaries and that it had sought to shield itself as well as some of those workers from criminal liability in the past by swiftly smuggling them out of Iraq after unjustifiable shootings.

Mr. Prince, whose sister-in-law is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and a major fund-raiser for President Bush, denied that she had used her influence to help him get government contracts. If true, it was all the more remarkable that Blackwater had gone from having less than $1 million in Federal contracts in 2001, the year Mr. Bush took office, to its position last year, when it was the recipient of nearly $600 million from Uncle George.

Blackwater officials have claimed that its personnel, including men deployed in helicopters, were justified in unleashing the Sept. 16 barrage because they were fired upon first, although there is no evidence of that in the interlude between the bomb going off and the car being driven by Ahmed Haithem Ahmed, taking his mother to the hospital where his father worked, venturing into their path.

A day before the hearing, the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform released a report stating that Blackwater guards engaged in 195 shooting incidents since the beginning of 2005, and more than 80 percent of the time, they fired first.

One former Blackwater guard testified that he believed there were far more shooting incidents, saying that his old unit averaged four or five shootings a week, even as the firm was reporting 1.4 shootings per week by its entire contingent.

Mr. Prince testified that his company's personnel had "acted appropriately at all times," and that nearly 30 employees had been killed carrying out their duties even while ensuring that none of the diplomats for whom they provided security had been killed.

Penalty for Murder: Lose Your Job

When he was asked about a Blackwater employee who - while drunk - allegedly shot and killed a man assigned to guard one of Iraq's Vice Presidents, Mr. Prince responded that the employee had been fired and fined.

"We can't incarcerate him," he testified. "That's up to the Justice Department."

A State Department official testified, however, that it wasn't clear whether contractors' personnel could be criminally prosecuted under Federal laws.

This ambiguity also surfaced during the investigation into the role that contract personnel allegedly had in the torture of Iraqi prisoners held at the notorious Abu Ghraib jail camp. While a handful of American soldiers were criminally prosecuted, little was done to the contractors who in some cases were alleged to have ordered or encouraged the sadistic and demeaning acts committed on prisoners. The lack of accountability fits neatly within Mr. Bush's concept of government, as well as the manner in which he has conducted the war. Billions have been squandered on contractors - with the leading culprit being Kellogg Brown and Root (since renamed KBR), a subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's old firm, Halliburton - even as American military personnel were shortchanged on body armor and medical treatment.

One of the sad ironies of the government's use of Blackwater is that what until now had been the most infamous incident connected to the firm also concerned a lack of armor.

In early 2004, the firm was transporting kitchen equipment through Iraq, paying its employees $600 a day while a series of subcontracting arrangements - one of which included KBR - boosted the charges to the Federal Government to more than twice that amount. In mid-March of that year, Blackwater deleted from its contract the requirement that the vehicles used in the transport be armored, allowing the company to cut its costs by $1.5 million.

Skimped on Safety

On March 31, 2004, Blackwater sent four employees on a convoy into the violence-torn Iraqi city of Falluja, even though their employment contracts stated that they were supposed to be deployed in teams of six. They were also not given the heavy automatic weapons that allowed them to launch rapid-fire counterattacks, instead using a smaller, less-powerful weapon. When one employee refused to go under those conditions, he was allegedly threatened with firing by his supervisor, who just a week earlier had replaced a man who was removed as program manager because he insisted that the vehicles be armored.

The four men took a wrong turn and wound up stuck in traffic in Falluja, where they were set upon by terrorists with guns. An armored vehicle would have repelled the gunfire; having a rear-gunner would have offered them protection against an attack from behind. Instead, the four men were helpless as they were fatally shot, and then a mob dragged them from the vehicle and mutilated their bodies, two of which were strung up on a bridge.

Outrage over the way they were treated prompted a swift, bloody response from U.S. forces that laid siege to the city. But lawyers for the families of the four men brought a wrongful-death suit against Blackwater, accusing it of violating its agreements to provide appropriate safeguards to the employees in order to save money. One of the attorneys, Daniel Callahan, told Jeremy Scahill of The Nation, "Blackwater is able to operate over there in Iraq free from any oversight that would typically exist in a civilized society."

A Stain on Our Image

This is important for reasons that go beyond how the firm treats its contract workers. The alleged shoot-first, ask-questions-later practices that have guided Blackwater personnel since the Falluja massacre reflect on the image of the U.S. in the eyes of the world, particularly in cases like last month's massacre in Baghdad. Unlike U.S. military personnel, who are trained to adhere to a strict code of conduct and face both military discipline and potential criminal prosecution if they deviate severely from that code, contract employees operate under just one imperative besides surviving: getting the job done. In a war zone, that is bound to breed errors on the side of violence if there is no fear of repercussions for dishonorable or unjustified conduct.

In the simplistic world of Mr. Bush, this seems to fall under the heading of "stuff happens," the phrase used by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to explain the massive looting in Iraq following the U.S. invasion. That same sense of liberation Rummy spoke of seems to have infected the war profiteers like Blackwater and KBR as they finagled from the government far more than any looter could lug away from the scene of a riot.

But the actions of some of the mercenaries they employ have consequences for this country's reputation that won't fade any time soon.

Secret Sign-Off on Torture

This may not matter to Mr. Bush, judging by the New York Times's Oct. 4 report that his Justice Department, led by then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, issued a secret opinion in February 2005 contravening a legal memo just two months earlier in which Justice publicly declared torture of terror suspects "abhorrent."

Even though experts believe torture is an ineffective way of prying loose information because it will often induce lies to bring an end to the physical or psychological pain being inflicted, it clearly has some visceral appeal for Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and their adherents.

But this kind of behavior undermines our moral authority in the world, dragging us further from the position of a nation justly seeking to avenge the atrocities of Sept. 11. In the process, it serves the terrorists' cause, making enemies of those who conclude they have good reason to fear us.

As one former Blackwater guard told the Washington Post, "The guy whose car you shoot up today is also the guy who could be planting an IED tomorrow. And the only reason he changed sides now is the car that took him 10 years of life savings to buy, now you've destroyed it."

If the Bush Administration can't understand this, it's up to Congress to act against the kind of Ugly Americanism perpetrated by mercenaries on the payroll of the until-now unaccountable contractors. It should be taking a hard look at whether security work in a war zone should be handled by private firms rather than U.S. military personnel.

Draft-Resisters

The argument that will be made in favor, of course, is that we don't have enough troops to be able to spare some for this work. There is a reason for that: the resistance of both Mr. Bush and Congress to reinstating a military draft, even though that stance has opened the door for the Blackwater excesses and troops being recalled for duty repeated times after their scheduled tours in Iraq had finished.

Reinstituting a draft would force a larger segment of the American public to focus on the reasons we are in Iraq and what we are accomplishing. Not only would it increase the majority who oppose the war, it might rouse them to action that would no longer permit the cynical dragging on of the American presence there and the thousands of deaths that will inevitably follow just so Mr. Bush can avoid acknowledging what a horrendous mistake this war was.

This was supposed to be a war where the most demanded of us was, according to the President, was that we go shopping to help the economy. We would sit, comfortably numb, while those with connections to the White House got rich and holes were slowly, methodically and often secretly gouged out of what this country stands for.

Somebody in power has to stand up and say that the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives on 9/11 and the more-than 3,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq since didn't die to permit a shadow government of contractors to get fat while their employees acted as though they were beyond the law.

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