Allegations of abuse have raised wider questions about the role - and accountability - of civilian contractors

The Guardian
May 17, 2004
By David Leigh in Moyock, North Carolina

Here on the outskirts of the Great Dismal Swamp, now a nature reserve, is the new face of the privatised American army. Some fear it is getting out of control.

Grim-faced men in battle fatigues are oiling their M4s and Glocks, blasting their way through mocked-up terrorist streets, and riddling old cars with bullets.

The TV set in the rest room is tuned to gung-ho Fox News and the mess tables are shared today by a mixed bunch of 200, mostly male. Some are freelances readying themselves for Iraq, some are from the overstretched real US military buying firing-range time, some are coastguards about to be deployed to an unspecified spot "overseas". Young men at one table have Grupe Tactico Chile on their shoulders.

This is Blackwater, a commercial army base - the largest private firearms training centre in the world, according to its owner, Eric Prince, a former Navy Seal.

Blackwater guards provincial outposts for the Iraqi coalition provisional authority, and the firm has the contract to keep its head, Paul Bremer, alive. It fought in a heroic rescue of a wounded soldier in Najaf, but four of its men were ambushed and killed in Falluja, causing an international crisis.

This week the company is bulldozing a long twisting track out of its 6,000 acres of swampland so convoy troops can experience being shot at, as they will be in Iraq. The trainers will use live ammunition.

Blackwater is at the forefront of lobbying efforts to stop a clampdown on private military companies in Iraq. The US defence department has issued draft regulations seeking to bring them under US military law, instead of their present local legal immunity.

"You simply can't do that," said Chris Bertelli, their Washington lobbyist. "How do you enforce it? At the end of your 60-day contract, you can just go home."

Weapons ban
Other proposals being resisted are a ban on private weapons, or a rule that they be returned to the US military when off duty. Blackwater, whose weaponry ranges from M4 rifles to 20mm cannon on its helicopters, says this is impractical in a war zone. It suggests voluntary standards.

"We're very particular. We only hire former special forces people. There is still a deep patriotism in many of them," Mr Bertelli said.

The US military has gone headlong for privatisation, urged on by the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. One 2002 memo from the secretary of the army, Thomas White, suggests that as much as a third of its budget is going on private contractors, while army numbers are falling. The rationale is to save money on permanent soldiers by using temporary ones.

But the policy has other, political advantages. When a mortar shell lobbed at Baghdad airport earlier this year killed Corporal Tomasi Ramatau, 41, no one in the US media took much notice.

Names like his do not appear on the roll-calls of US soldiers killed in Iraq, solemnly enunciated on the daily TV shows. Ramatau was one of the unemployed men from the Pacific island of Fiji hired in their hundreds by another prominent private military firm, Global Risk of London, to take the bullets for the Pentagon.

The loose control of the 20,000-plus private-enterprise soldiers in Iraq has been thrown into painful relief by the accusations that hired civilian interrogators and translators encouraged obscene tortures at Abu Ghraib prison and that one even allegedly raped an Iraqi boy in his cell.

No senator or congressman appears to have had the least idea until the scandal broke that the drive to privatise the military had gone so far as to use civilian contractors for such sensitive jobs.

Aides to Democrat congressman Ike Skelton were particularly incensed with a reply by Mr Rumsfeld to a demand last month for information about private mil itary firms in Iraq. Mr Rumsfeld produced a list of 60 companies, half a dozen of them British, but withheld all mention of two of the biggest and best-connected recruiting firms alleged to be at the centre of the torture scandal - CACI in Washington and Titan in San Diego, California.

One of the few people to have conducted a full-scale study of military privatisation, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, said: "No lawmakers seemed to know that they were hiring civilians as interrogators. They had this concept that the civilians were there to mow lawns and answer phones." In his recent book, Corporate Warriors, he lists dangers in excessively privatised soldiering, such as cutting corners to save money, secrecy, and hollowing out the genuine military by poaching their troops. All have duly come to pass in Iraq.

CACI, for example, placed Steve Stefanowicz, a former reservist from the Philadelphia area who had once worked in naval intelligence, in Iraq. According to his fellow interrogator Torin Nelson, CACI hired interrogators over the phone, without even meeting them.

"I was interviewed in September 2003 in a very short telephone conversation, which was more like a sales pitch of how great the company was, than a typical interview for a professional job," Mr Nelson said. "I never met anyone from CACI until I landed in Fort Bliss [an army induction centre in Texas], and then it was some other new hires."

Frantic
CACI website entries show increasingly frantic efforts to attract interrogators, with the qualifications required being reduced from seven years' interrogation experience, to five years, to two.

It does not seem that CACI saved any military manpower for the US by hiring Mr Stefanowicz. According to naval records, he was on active duty as a petty officer 3rd class in the reserves already, but apparently resigned in September 2003 to join CACI. Private companies are offering pay of up to $115,000 (about £65,000) a year.

In Iraq, the status of the CACI interrogators was ambiguous. Mr Nelson said some of his colleagues went around in desert camouflage uniform. "We contractors were often able to establish our own method of actually implementing the chain of command's intent, which was to glean information for intelligence purposes."

Mr Stefanowicz ended up being accused in the now-notorious leaked classified Taguba report, of telling untrained and unsupervised reservist military policemen to abuse the Abu Ghraib prisoners.

He remains in Iraq, according to the US army on "administrative duties" while investigations continue. The accused soldiers below him, however, all face courts martial, beginning this month.

Unlike the gun-toting security companies, firms like CACI seem to function merely as recruiting postboxes. CACI, based in a Washington suburb, put former defence officials on its board, including the former London representative of the code-breaking National Security Agency, Barbara McNamara. It moved seamlessly from origins as an IT firm to acquiring such small companies last year as Premier Technology, also in Washington, which had contracts to supply 96 analysts to US military intelligence in Germany.

From there it was a short step, when the call went out, to recruiting freelance army interrogators. Similarly, firms like Blackwater and Global have shifted, almost unnoticed, from providing bodyguard services to engaging in fighting.

Mr Singer points out that mercenaries are nothing new, and huge standing national armies are a recent development.

But one former British special forces officer, recently returned to Europe from Iraq, said: "The trouble is the private companies often have an attitude that 'Yeah, we can do it'. Then they become overstretched. As officers in the military, there is an integrity level we would operate under normally. And it just isn't there."

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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