Dynamight

Private Security Contractors (PSCs) are, as noted in this discussion from Georgetown university, a relatively new phenomenon, and we're at something of a crossroads in deciding how to make them accountable for their actions. If we leave it much longer their influence will become such they'll become too powerful for any regulatory system to control, such is the money available to them in the increasingly lucrative private war business. Mercenary armies themselves are nothing new, but the globalised corporate mercenary army is a comparatively recent development. As countries and companies become more and more like each other, dissolving into supernational entities, the question of how to reign them in becomes ever more significant as traditional mechanisms of oversight prove themselves not fit for purpose.

However, as more power and wealth is centralised in the hands of fewer and fewer people and institutions we've seen the global elite become ever more covert and secretive. Passing the buck is an age old political game, but what we're seeing is the attempt to destroy the buck in the first place. Last week, the UK government announced that they will hold an inquiry in the Iraq war, but it is going to take place via the laughably named Inquiries Act 2005. The Act was brought into effect just two months before July 7th, enabling any public investigation to be centrally controlled, including any potential inquiry into the deaths of 56 people. The staff, the terms and questions and focus will all be determined by the executive, as will the ability to keep some or all of the inquiry sessions secret, and there's even provision in the Act for the government to shut down any such investigation without having to give reasons. As such, the very mechanism which is meant to hold the government to account is entirely beholden to the government for its existence, let alone its content.

Unsurprisingly, the Iraq inquiry will be held in secret. Considerable pressure resulted in the government performing something of a u-turn, saying that the chairman of the inquiry will determine what and how much will be secret or public. However, it won't seek to apportion blame, and won't report until after the next general election, expected to be held in Spring 2010. It has since been alleged that it was former Prime Minister Tony Blair who demanded that the inquiry be held in secret as he believes a public investigation will damage his bid to become EU president. Blair first attended the meeting of the Bilderberg club back in 1993, before he even became leader of the Labour party, though when asked about this in the House of Commons in 1998 he knowingly lied. Blair is also a longtime friend of the Rothschilds, as shown shortly before his resigation when Lady Rothschild organised a 'headhunting' party at Number 10 Downing St. Clearly unhappy with the offers made at that meeting, Blair ended working for Rothschild bank JP Morgan Chase, who are paying him £5 million a year for his part-time role. Though he is due to give evidence at the Iraq inquiry, it will be behind closed doors, much like Bush/Cheney's evidence to the 9/11 Commission, though there are indications he will have to appear in public, and under oath.

No such luck regarding PSCs. Though they've gained considerably more attention in recent years the problems go back to their very inception. One of the oldest of all is DynCorp, the world's premier rent-a-cop business. Their HQ is in Falls Church Virginia, less than 10 miles from the Pentagon. Their chairman Robert McKeon sponsors lectures at the Council on Foreign Relations and is the co-founder of a Wall Street private equity firm who have at times invested in DynCorp. They have had many different government contracts. They were paid by the US military to produce anthrax, they recently got a near $1 billion deal to provide technical support to aircraft in Iraq, they landed a contract to upgrade and update the FBI's IT systems, an ongoing joke in the intelligence world, they handle secure data transfer for the Department of Justice, the Security and Exchange Commission, The Treasury, the IRS, The Centers for Disease Control, Federal Communication Commission and others. They also guard the US border with Mexico and are in charge of the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential jets.

Under Plan Columbia, a US-sponsored miltary operation that's part of the War on Drugs, DynCorp run the planes spraying the coca crops supposedly with the aim of eradicating them. However, as with so many other examples such privatisation is counterproductive. If DynCorp are successful in eradicating the coca crop and bringing the Columbian drug cartels to their knees then there's no more crop-spraying contracts in Columbia. As such, it's in DynCorp's interests to not spray the crops very well, which is perhaps one reason why a group of Ecuadorians brought a lawsuit in 2001 saying the herbicides had drifted over the border and were ruining their farms.

DynCorp also trained the new police force in Bosnia, completing the circle. MPRI were used to help train and equip the armies and guerillas who brought about the need for greater security, and DynCorp profited from providing that increased security. However, there is an even more horrific side to this. Two people were fired for blowing the whistle on the involvement of UN officials and DynCorp employees, supposedly there on 'peacekeeping' missions, in prostitution and sex slavery. Ben Johnston, an aircraft mechanic working for the company in Kosovo, filed a RICO/wrongful dismissal suit against the company that stated he's witnessed DynCorp employees and supervisors were 'purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports' and more.

Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased...

..."None of the girls," continues Johnston, "were from Bosnia. They were from Russia, Romania and other places, and they were imported in by DynCorp and the Serbian mafia. These guys would say 'I gotta go to Serbia this weekend to pick up three girls.' They talk about it and brag about how much they pay for them — usually between $600 and $800. In fact, there was this one guy who had to be 60 years old who had a girl who couldn't have been 14. DynCorp leadership was 100 percent in bed with the mafia over there. I didn't get any results from talking to DynCorp officials, so I went to Army CID and I drove around with them, pointing out everyone's houses who owned women and weapons.- insightmag.com

Likewise, Kathryn Bolkovac worked for DynCorp as an investigator as part of the contract to train the UN police force in Bosnia. She described how DynCorp employees, UN peacekeepers and international aid workers frequented bars where girls as young as 15 were made to dance and have sex with customers. Confirming what Johnston said she also said that a UN policeman who was meant to be investigating the sex trade paid £700 to a bar owner for a young girl who he used as a prostitute.

Both Johnston and Bolkovac tried to blow the whistle and provide some sort of accountability. DynCorp simply fired a few employees, and then fired Johnston and Bolkovac too for good measure. They both took the company to court, and won, essentially vindicating their claims not only of wrongful dismissal, but also of serious and horrific criminal activity on the part of contractors and those supposed to be providing oversight. The company initally sought to appeal against the ruling in the Bolkovac case but in 2003 changed its mind and agreed to pay her damages.

Bush did sign an order banning human trafficking by contractors in January 2006, in response to increasing pressure in part due to the DynCorp scandal, leading to the DoD publishing a rule the following October. However, this is extremely ambiguous, as covered in detail by the Project on Government Oversight, leaving ample ground for guilty people to be freed by talented lawyers. Unsurprisingly, this hasn't stopped the rot. In August 2008 Halliburton subsidiary KBR were sued for trafficking Nepalese men into Iraq as labourers. Of the 13 men, 12 were later executed.

This followed on from the case of Jamie Leigh Jones, a young Texan woman who said she was drugged and gang-raped by KBR employees while working in Baghdad in July 2005. She was then put in a metal shipping container, with armed guards, and told if she tried to leave Iraq to seek medical treatment she would be fired. More than a day after they imprisoned her she managed to convince a guard to lend her a mobile phone, which she used to phone her father back in the US and tell him what happened. Her father than contacted his congressman, who alerted the State Department who then sent agents from the Baghdad embassy and rescued her. She was examined by Army doctors, who concluded that she had been raped and beaten but the kit used in the examination was handed over to KBR security staff, and then disappeared. By the time it reappeared in May 2007 key photographs and notes had been removed, undermining any possibility of bringing a criminal case against her attackers.

Dyncorp, as noted above, are still getting new contracts from the US government, despite a change of ruling party and president, and ongoing evidence of the very worst crimes being perpetrated by their employees. That they treated Johnston, Bolkovac and Jones in such horrible ways shows their total disregard for the rights even of their own employees, let alone the poor sods they're paid to target. However, there's no war against PSC brutality, no grand attempt to prevent these kinds of incidents or at the least hold people culpable when they do happen. Instead of turning our focus onto the hundreds of thousands of private contractors who operate in essence in a legal vacuum of macho barbarity we deploy our multi-trillion dollar military, intelligence and legal infrastructure against Al Qaeda.

Whereas the criminal activities of DynCorp, MPRI, Blackwater, Erinys et al are relatively clear, the existence and nature of Al Qaeda is an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in disinformation. If you asked the 9/11 Commission, they'd tell you Al Qaeda is an international terrorist network that carried out numerous attacks culminating in flying hijacked aircraft into buildings in September 2001. If you asked the CIA they'd mostly tell you that Al Qaeda are a militant Salafist group seeking to overthrow the Wahhabist ruling family in Saudi Arabia and by extension the US interests propping them up. If you asked Jason Burke, the journalist who wrote Al Qaeda, or Adam Curtis, the director who made The Power of Nightmares, a series largely telling the same story as Burke, they'd tell you Al Qaeda as a network doesn't exist, but there is a real threat from loosely affiliated groups in various countries united by some vision of Islam cleansing the world through violence. If you asked Nafeez Ahmed, author of The War on Truth, he'd tell you Al Qaeda does exist, but it has become an international force largely at our bidding as we've formed alliances with militant Islamic groups all over the world, and that this compromises our ability to hold them to account for terrorist attacks. If you asked the head of MI5 he'd tell you Al Qaeda is a brand. Similarly, the Washington Post recently quoted an intelligence official describing them as 'a fast food franchise, "only for terrorism."'

The franchise isn't doing half bad, with the US terrorist watchlist now officially admitted to have over 1 million entries. Now, being on the watchlist didn't stop Omar Abdel Rahman getting into the US in 1990, though that's largely due to being protected by the CIA, or Islamic Jihad member Ali Mohamed from getting into the US in 1985, joining the US Army and getting posted to the training place of US Special Forces, though that's largely due to being protected by the CIA. Others have not been so lucky. An airline captain and a former assistant attourney general have both faced ongoing problems due to sharing their name with another James Robinson, who is on the watchlist. Yet another James Robinson has faced similar problems, only he's an 8 year old boy.

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, "I don't know." - CNN

This is not an isolated incident - 7 year old John Anderson, has in effect been on the list since he was only 2, an unnamed 5 year old from Seattle, Sam Adams, also 5, whose father publishes comics, and 4 year old Edward Allen all have the misfortune of sharing names with one of a million suspected terrorists and thus having perpetual difficulty at airports. Nonetheless, over 800 people have been able to buy guns despite sharing names with people on the watchlist.

Even stranger is a March 2001 incident where Hollywood film star Russell Crowe was approached by the FBI who told him they'd learned of a plan by Al Qaeda to kidnap. The plan was said to be part of a cultural destabilisation operation, by showing the vulnerability of iconographic Americans. Apparently Al Qaeda were unaware that Crowe is a New Zealand-born Australian.

However, Crowe remained unconvinced about the level of danger he was in. "I never fully understood what the fuck was going on." - Guardian