In addition to the hundreds of thousands of
US troops in Iraq, The Bush administration has deployed
a shadow army of private contractors.
Earlier this summer it was reported that the number of
U.S.-paid private contractors in Iraq now exceeds that of
American combat troops, with more than 180,000 civilians
-- including Americans, foreigners and Iraqis -- working
in Iraq under U.S. contracts, according to State and Defense
Department figures obtained by the Los Angeles Times.
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Blackwater USA, which has a 6,000 acre training facility
as part of its headquarters in North Carolina, is one such
company that currently has tens of thousands of heavily
armed mercenaries stationed in Iraq who are accountable
to no one and have hit the headlines on multiple occasions.
In March 2004, four Blackwater personnel died in a grisly
attack in Iraq in Falluja, west of Baghdad. The Four, all
of whom were military veterans, were ambushed, killed, mutilated
and had their charred remains strung from a bridge overlooking
the Euphrates River in an incident that sparked shock and
outrage.
However, after Blackwater refused to share information
about why and how they were killed, and callously told the
families of the men that they would need to sue to get any
information, a lawsuit was filed, marking the first time
a company has been sued for deaths in the line of work.
Blackwater has since attempted to reverse the situation
and
sue the families for $10 million to silence
them and keep them out of court.
By the end of 2004 Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson,
was bragging to the press of "staggering" 600
percent growth. "This is a billion-dollar industry,"
Jackson said in October 2004. "And Blackwater has only
scratched the surface of it.". This prompted outrage
that security in Iraq is partly (and we now know mostly)
in the hands of private companies who profit from the continuation
of conflict and chaos.
In 2005 the LA
Times reported that Private security contractors,
including Blackwater, have been involved in scores of shootings
in Iraq, but none have been prosecuted despite findings
in at least one fatal case that the men had not followed
proper procedures. Instead of facing any kind of accountability,
contractors suspected of reckless behavior are simply sent
home with the full knowledge of U.S. officials.
Last
February one Blackwater employee got into an
argument with an Iraqi security contractor working for the
Vice President as a security guard. It is not cleared what
transpired but the Blackwater employee emptied the entire
magazine of his pistol into the Iraqi. Rather than being
arrested and sent to prison for murder the contractor was
simply returned to the US and dropped from the payroll.
Most recently, a Congressional Research Service report
stated that a news article discussing an incident in which
a Blackwater guard shot dead an Iraqi driver in May 2007
quoted an Iraqi official's statement that the Iraqi Interior
Ministry had received four previous complaints of shootings
involving Blackwater employees.
Everyday Iraqis have dubbed the mercenaries "Mossad"
and many have gone
on record to state that they have witnessed
Blackwater contractors killing innocent people in the street
without a care.
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Blackwater USA does not hide the fact that it has hired
fascist thugs—for instance, Chilean commandos, “many
of who had trained under the military government of Augusto
Pinochet,” according to Blackwater head honcho Gary
Jackson. Other investigative journalists have
alleged that Blackwater is engaged in recruiting U.S. trained
former
soldiers and police officers from Colombia
as well as Filipino
mercenaries.
According to Ken
Silverstein of Harper's Magazine,
Blackwater also has a "revolving door" with the
CIA and the Pentagon and is engaged in "aggressively
recruiting" top CIA officials. In 2006 Silverstein
wrote:
After years of running riot in Iraq with impunity, the license
of private contractor company Blackwater USA has been revoked
by the Iraqi government, and the company has been banned
from operating in the country all together according to
reports, a move that will see the withdrawal of tens of
thousands of armed mercenaries from Iraq.