Unaccountable Private Armies - Coming to a Disaster Near You - A Review of "Blackwater"

The book that will be reviewed here is Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, by Jeremy Scahill. The book was published just a few months ago in 2007, and is Scahill's in-depth examination of the private military contractor firm Blackwater USA, based in North Carolina. While other private corporations have numerous contracts with the federal government in places and times of war (for example, Halliburton), the more worrying aspect of Blackwater's role in war is its military mission. Blackwater USA provides, essentially, armies for hire.However, the book Blackwater also spends just as much time explaining the circumstances and political environment that allowed Blackwater USA to come into existence and increase its participation with the federal government exponentially. Scahill sees the rise of outsourcing government responsibilities in conflicts beginning in earnest with the first Bush presidency with Dick Cheney as Defense Secretary, increasing during the years Clinton was in the White House and Cheney spent his time with Halliburton, and then growing exponentially during the current Bush administration with a Cheney vice-presidency. Obviously, the main link in this equation is Dick Cheney's interest in outsourcing more and more of government services, including the government's sole right to the use of force. This is the factor that disturbs Scahill the most, along with the sheer unaccountability of Blackwater USA.Through some legal maneuvering, Blackwater and its mercenaries, though most of the company's existence, has been exempt from the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), the court-martial system. This system theoretically imposes codes of conduct and accountability on soldiers who participate in combat and is the foundation of American military law. Scahill quotes Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich to underline his point about the murkiness of the legal environment in which Blackwater USA's contractors operate: the contractors "do not appear to be subject to any laws at all and so therefore they have more of a license to be able to take the law into their own hands." Thus, mercenaries may be able to kill, imprison, torture, or otherwise act outside of the boundaries of the law that govern the actions of official American soldiers.Blackwater also, according to Scahill, has another problem of accountability. Namely, the author provides some examples of the company not providing necessary security or resources to their contracted mercenaries, which resulted in unnecessary deaths of these contractors. The most visible was the ambush of four Blackwater USA contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, in late March 2004. Images of the aftermath of this ambush were played on news stations worldwide, as images were shown of Iraqis burning the contractors' vehicles and even burning the contractors' bodies themselves before hanging them from the infrastructure of a nearby bridge. Most news agencies failed to mention that these "private military contractors" were essentially hired soldiers who were providing security for another government contractor, but were understaffed and underarmed, with no clear idea of what they were getting into.The families of these Blackwater USA contractors see the company as responsible for the death's of their loved ones, but Blackwater has been fighting their lawsuits by claiming the mercenaries knew they were going to be serving in war and had signed waivers acknowledging the possibility of being maimed or killed. However, the families believe that the contractors would be alive if they had had the proper number of men and resources with them on the mission in Fallujah, and that Blackwater knew the dangers and failed to provide the necessary protection the men would have needed to defend or fight off any potential ambush or attack from Iraqis.The book also raises many other important issues in the story of Blackwater USA, including its relationship to the Christian Right, its hiring of mercenaries from other countries that did not support the war in Iraq (focusing mainly on Chile), the vast differences between the pay of a regular soldier and a mercenary, and its ties to the Central Intelligence Agency through Blackwater's vice chairman Coffer Black. Scahill also provides much more detail on the families of the Fallujah contractors and their relationship with the company, and general information on the role of mercenary armies in other countries and throughout history. The book cites numerous sources in each of its nineteen chapters and focuses on using mainstream news media sources, Congressional hearings, and the author's own direct interviews with families of the contractors killed in Iraq.The main points of the book seem to highlight another instance of governmental outsourcing of services to companies that have strong connections to the current administration, an issue raised by countless other books, magazines, articles, and websites. With the privatizing of actual combat and the use of force, however, a new chapter in private contracting has begun. Outsourcing any government service raises the issue of private companies taking advantage of government largesse, but a private company given the responsibility of performing actions formerly reserved only to soldiers who are governed by a strict code of justice gives rise to the possibility of private armies, wielding more power than the government, paying its own contractors more than the government pays its own armies, and being accountable to no laws other than the laws of a capitalist system that encourages profit over the safety of its own employees and the satisfaction of its target market. A corporatocracy in itself is a frightening scenario, without the possibility of a private corporate army able to impose its will without the accountability of military law or governmental oversight.The author has also given numerous interviews about the implications of his book and one of the main questions to be raised, interestingly enough, has been to the effect of "Couldn't we have expected this? The administration has outsourced nearly everything else; what's the big deal this time?" This is, of course, a disturbing question, having taken for granted that a system of corruption and awarding of ever larger government contracts to private companies. The fact that private armies being deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and even New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina has become commonplace and just a matter of course makes this book even more important and timely. dr seuss cat in hat quotes