Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

[Bremer] enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was Order 37, which lowered Iraq’s corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order 39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector. Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order 39, they could sign leases and contracts that would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that remained of Saddam Hussein’s economic policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.

If these policies sound familiar, it’s because they are the same ones multinationals around the world lobby for from national governments and in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever enacted in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at once. Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest-open market. 40

Shortly after Bremer took over in Baghdad, economist Jeff Madrick wrote in the New York Times : “[B]y almost any mainstream economist’s standard, the plan, already approved by L. Paul Bremer III, the American in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority, is extreme—in fact, stunning. It would immediately make Iraq’s economy one of the most open to trade and capital flows in the world, and put it among the lowest taxed in the world, rich or poor…. The Iraqi planners, apparently including the Bush administration, seem to assume they can simply wipe the slate clean.” Madrick stated boldly that Bremer’s plan “would allow a handful of foreign banks to take over the domestic banking system.” 41

It seems appropriate, then, that Bremer, the senior U.S. official in Iraq, the public face of the occupation, would not be protected by U.S. government forces or Iraqi security but rather by a private mercenary company—and one founded by a right-wing Christian who had poured tens of thousands of dollars into Republican campaign coffers.

By mid-August, three months after Bremer arrived in Baghdad, resistance attacks against U.S. forces and Iraqi “collaborators” were a daily occurrence. “We believe we have a significant terrorist threat in the country, which is new,” Bremer said on August 12. “We take this very seriously.” 42As with other violent incidents and situations in preceding years, the chaos in Iraq would convert to financial success for Blackwater. On August 28, 2003, Blackwater was awarded the official “sole source,” no-bid $27.7 million contract to provide the personal security detail and two helicopters for Bremer 43as he carried out the all-important work of building the neoconservative program in Iraq. “Nobody had really figured out exactly how they were going to get him from D.C. and stand him up in Iraq,” recalled Blackwater president Gary Jackson. “The Secret Service went over and did an assessment and said, ‘You know what? It’s much, much more dangerous than any of us believed.’ So they came back to us.” 44Blackwater’s presence, Bremer wrote, “heightened the sense that Iraq had become even more dangerous.” 45The man who would head Bremer’s Blackwater security team was Frank Gallagher, who served as head of Henry Kissinger’s personal security detail in the 1990s when Bremer worked for Kissinger. 46“I knew and liked Frank,” Bremer recalled. “I trusted him totally.” 47

Employing Blackwater mercenaries as his personal guards was made possible by the very neoliberal policies Bremer had advocated for throughout his career and was now implementing in Iraq. It was a groundbreaking moment in the process that then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney launched in the early 1990s when he hired Brown and Root “to explore outsourcing logistical activities.” 48It also represented a major shift away from the long-held doctrine that the “U.S. military does not turn over mission-critical functions to private contractors,” according to Peter Singer, author of Corporate Warriors. “And you don’t put contractors in positions where they need to carry weapons…. A private armed contractor now has the job of keeping Paul Bremer alive—it can’t get much more mission-critical than that.” 49The privatization of the Bremer detail marked an almost immediate watershed moment for mercenary firms.

“Standard wages for PSD (personal security detail) pros [in Iraq] were previously running about $300 a day,” Fortune magazine reported. “Once Blackwater started recruiting for its first big job, guarding Paul Bremer, the rate shot up to $600 a day.” 50Blackwater described its Bremer project as a “turnkey security package.” 51Company vice president Chris Taylor said the job “was no ordinary executive protection requirement; it really amounted to a hybrid personal security detail (PSD) solution that had yet to be used anywhere. In response, Blackwater developed an innovative combat PSD program to ensure Ambassador Bremer’s safety and that of any ambassador who followed.” 52The company provided him with thirty-six “personnel protection” specialists, two K-9 teams, and three MD-530 Boeing helicopters with pilots to taxi him around the country. 53In October 2003, a Blackwater spokesman said the company had just seventy-eight employees in Iraq, a number that would soon explode. 54A month after winning the Bremer contract, Blackwater registered its new security division with the North Carolina Secretary of State. 55Blackwater Security Consulting LLC would specialize in “providing qualified and trained Protective Security Specialist[s] (PSS) to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau for Diplomatic Security for the purpose of conducting protective security operations in Iraq.” 56The Bremer contract had officially elevated Blackwater to a status as a sort of Praetorian Guard in the war on terror—a designation that would open many doors in the world of private military contracting. It wouldn’t be long before Blackwater was awarded a massive contract with the State Department to provide security for many U.S. officials in Iraq, not just the Ambassador. Paul Bremer’s picture would soon grace the top banner on the new Blackwater Security division’s Web site, as would images of Blackwater’s mercenaries around Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. 57

Blackwater’s men brought a singularly Yankee flair to the Bremer job and, by most accounts, embodied the ugly American persona to a tee. Its guards were chiseled like bodybuilders and wore tacky, wraparound sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniforms with ammo vests or Blackwater T-shirts with the trademark bear claw in the cross-hairs, sleeves rolled up. Some of them looked like caricatures, real-life action figures, or professional wrestlers. Their haircuts were short, and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists and ran Iraqi cars off the road or fired rounds at cars if they got in the way of a Blackwater convoy. “You see these pictures in the media of Blackwater guys loaded to the hilt with pistols and M-4s and their hand out grabbing the camera. There’s a reason for that,” said former Blackwater contractor Kelly Capeheart, who protected John Negroponte, Bremer’s successor in Iraq. “I don’t want my face on Al-Jazeera. Sorry.” 58

Helicopters with snipers would hover above some Blackwater transport missions, as a menacing warning to everyone below. “They made enemies everywhere,” recalled Col. Thomas X. Hammes, the U.S. military official put in charge of building a “new” Iraqi military after Bremer disbanded the old one. 59“I would ride around with Iraqis in beat up Iraqi trucks, they were running me off the road. We were threatened and intimidated. [But] they were doing their job, exactly what they were paid to do in the way they were paid to do it, and they were making enemies on every single pass out of town.” 60Hammes said Blackwater’s high-profile conduct in guarding Bremer broke the “first rule” of fighting an insurgency: “You don’t make any more enemies.” 61Hammes said, “They were actually getting our contract exactly as we asked them to and at the same time hurting our counterinsurgency effort.” 62An intelligence officer in Iraq told Time magazine, “Those Blackwater guys… they drive around wearing Oakley sunglasses and pointing their guns out of car windows. They have pointed their guns at me, and it pissed me off. Imagine what a guy in Fallujah thinks.” 63Al Clark, one of the founders of Blackwater, helped develop the company’s training procedures. In the United States, Clark said, “we get upset about a fender-bender.” But, he said, “you’ve got to get over that in Baghdad. Your car can be a 3,000-pound weapon when you need it. Hit and run. Trust me. The police aren’t coming to your house because you left the scene of an accident.” 64