Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

For most of the time Blackwater guarded Bremer, the company remained under the radar. There was rarely a mention of Blackwater in media reports; instead, the men were simply referred to as Bremer’s security detail or as his bodyguards. Sometimes, they were identified as Secret Service agents. Within the industry, though, Blackwater’s men were viewed as the elite, the trendsetters among the rapidly expanding mercenary army in the country.

Around the time Blackwater won its Bremer contract, mercenaries quickly poured into Iraq. Firms like Control Risks Group, DynCorp, Erinys, Aegis, ArmorGroup, Hart, Kroll, and Steele Foundation, many of which already had some presence in the country, began deploying thousands of mercenaries in Iraq and recruiting aggressively internationally. In a throw-back to the Vietnam War era, the positions were initially referred to as “private security consultants” on the job boards. Some companies, like Blackwater, won lucrative contracts with the State Department, the U.S. occupation authority, or the British government; others guarded oil projects, foreign embassies, or government buildings; while still others worked for major war contractors like Halliburton, KBR, General Electric, and Bechtel, or as part of security details for journalists. Among the highest paid mercenaries were former Special Forces: Navy SEALs, Delta Force, Green Berets, Rangers and Marines, British SAS, Irish Rangers, and Australian SAS, followed by Nepalese Gurkhas, Serbian commandos, and Fijian troops. Meanwhile, the prospect of tremendous profits depleted official national forces, as soldiers sought more lucrative posts with private companies, which also aggressively headhunted Special Forces men for private work in Iraq. “We were bigger than life to a lot of the military guys,” said ex-Blackwater contractor Kelly Capeheart. “You could see it in their eyes when they looked at us—or whispered about us. A lot of them were very jealous. They felt like they were doing the same job but getting paid a lot less.” 82

In addition to these “professionals,” there were many seedier elements that got in on the action, charging less money than their corporate colleagues and acting with even greater recklessness, among them former South African apartheid forces, some from the notorious Koevoet, who apparently entered Iraq in contravention of South Africa’s antimercenary laws. By November 2003, the United States was explicitly telling companies wishing to do business in Iraq to bring their own armed security forces into the country. 83

When Bremer left Iraq in June 2004, there were more than twenty thousand private soldiers inside the country’s borders and Iraq had become known as a “Wild West” with no sheriff. Those mercenaries officially hired by the occupation would be contracted for more than $2 billion of security work by the end of the “Bremer year” and would account for upwards of 30 percent of the Iraq “reconstruction” budget. That, of course, does not take into account the private entities that widely hired mercenaries in Iraq. According to The Economist magazine, the Iraq occupation shot British military companies’ revenues up from $320 million before the war to more than $1.6 billion by early 2004, “making security by far Britain’s most lucrative postwar export to Iraq.” 84One source cited by the magazine estimated that there were more ex-Special Air Service soldiers working as mercenaries in Iraq than on active duty there. Within a year, the British firm Erinys had built up a fourteen-thousand-man private army in Iraq, 85staffed by locals—among them, members of Ahmad Chalabi’s “Free Iraq” forces—and commanded by expatriates from the company, some of whom were South African mercenaries. “[T]he massive demand for protection, and the fear of almost daily killing of foreign workers, has overstretched market supply, spawning an upsurge in cowboy contractors and drawing on a pool of international guns for hire that, according to reputable firms, are as much a liability to themselves and Iraqis as to their clients,” reported The Times of London. 86

What these forces did in Iraq, how many people they killed, how many of them died or were wounded, all remain unanswerable questions because no one was overseeing their activities in the country. As of this writing, not a single U.S. military contractor has been prosecuted for crimes committed in Iraq. Still, stories trickled out of Iraq, sometimes through the bravado of the contractors themselves. One such case involved a Blackwater contractor bragging about his use of “non-standard” ammunition to kill an Iraqi.

In mid-September 2003, a month after Blackwater won the Bremer contract, a four-man Blackwater security team was heading north from Baghdad on a dirt road in an SUV when they say they were ambushed by gunmen in a small village. That morning, one of the Blackwater contractors, Ben Thomas, had loaded his M4 machine gun with powerful experimental ammunition that had not been approved for use by U.S. forces. They were armor-piercing, limited-penetration rounds known as APLPs. 87The product of a San Antonio company called RBCD, they are created using what is called a “blended metal” process. According to The Army Times, the bullets “will bore through steel and other hard targets but will not pass through a human torso, an eight-inch-thick block of artist’s clay or even several layers of dry-wall. Instead of passing through a body, it shatters, creating ‘untreatable wounds.’” 88The distributor of these experimental rounds is an Arkansas company called Le Mas, which admits that it gave Thomas some of the bullets after he contacted the company. During the short gun battle that day, Thomas says he fired one of the APLP rounds at an Iraqi attacker, hitting him in the buttocks. The bullet, he said, killed the man almost instantly. “It entered his butt and completely destroyed everything in the lower left section of his stomach… everything was torn apart,” Thomas told The Army Times . “The way I explain what happened to people who weren’t there is… this stuff was like hitting somebody with a miniature explosive round…. Nobody believed that this guy died from a butt shot.” 89Thomas, an ex-Navy SEAL, said he has shot people with various kinds of ammunition and that there is “absolutely no comparison, whatever, none,” between the damage the APLP bullet did to his Iraqi victim that day and what would be expected from standard ammo. When Thomas returned to base after the shooting, he says his fellow mercenaries “were fighting over” the bullets. “At the end of the day, each of us took five rounds. That’s all we had left.” 90

These bullets have been a source of some controversy in Congress, and the manufacturer has lobbyists trying to get them approved for use by U.S. forces, calling it “an issue of national security.” 91In fact, Thomas says he was threatened with a court-martial for using unapproved ammunition after he was mistakenly understood by a Pentagon official to be an active-duty soldier. 92It was the first recorded kill using the bullets, which had been tested for several years at the Armed Forces Journal annual “Shoot-out at Blackwater” at the company compound in Moyock. 93After Thomas allegedly killed the Iraqi using the APLP round, he sounded like a paid spokesman on a commercial for the bullets. “I’m taking Le Mas ammo with me when I return to Iraq, and I’ve already promised lots of this ammo to my buddies who were there that day and to their friends,” Thomas told an interviewer during a leave from Iraq. “This is purely for putting into bad guys. For general inventory, absolutely not. For special operations, I wouldn’t carry anything else.” 94The Armed Forces Journal excitedly chronicled Thomas’s experience with the rounds, calling them “reason enough for Pentagon officials to insist that Special Operations Command immediately begin realistic testing of the blended-metal ammunition.” 95Thomas later posted on his MySpace Web page a link to a news article about his use of the armor-piercing bullets in Iraq with a note that said: