Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Back in Moyock, company executives quickly mobilized their response. “This is a very sad day for the Blackwater family,” said president Gary Jackson. “We lost seven of our friends to attacks by terrorists in Iraq and our thoughts and prayers go out to their family members.” 72A company press release said, “Blackwater has a 15-member team of crisis counselors working with those family members to assist them in coping with the loss of their loved ones.” 73At the State Department, meanwhile, the seven men were eulogized as heroes. “These Blackwater contractors were supporting the State Department mission in Iraq, and were critical to our efforts to protect American diplomats there,” said Assistant Secretary of State Joe Morton. “These brave men gave their lives so that Iraqis may someday enjoy the freedom and democracy we enjoy here in America.” 74

Once again, the killing of Blackwater forces in Iraq had cast the spotlight back on the secretive world of mercenary companies. “The fact of the matter is that private security firms have been involved in Iraq from the very beginning, so this is nothing new,” said State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli, responding to questions from the press. “There’s a need for security that goes beyond what employees of the U.S. Government can provide, and we go to private companies to offer that. That’s a common practice. It’s not unique to Iraq. We do it around the world.” 75In Iraq, Ereli said, “I think it’s a statement of the obvious to say that the conditions… are such that it’s not completely safe to go throughout the country at all parts, at all times, so there continues to be the need for security—for this kind of security protection.” 76

Those words must have been music to Blackwater’s ears: There continues to be the need for this kind of security. Once again, the death of Blackwater contractors translated into more support for the mercenary cause. The day after the seven Blackwater mercenaries died in Iraq, the U.S. Senate approved a controversial $81 billion spending bill for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, pushing the total cost of the wars to more than $300 billion. 77More money was being allocated for “security” in Iraq. Some 1,564 U.S. soldiers had died since the invasion, 78along with an uncounted number of mercenaries. It was a year after the Blackwater ambush in Fallujah, and business had never been better for Erik Prince and his colleagues, despite the confirmed deaths of eighteen Blackwater contractors in Iraq. 79Back in the U.S., the Blackwater Empire was about to add another powerful former Bush administration official to its roster.

JOSEPH E. SCHMITZhad long been an ideological soldier for right-wing causes before he was appointed by President Bush to be the Pentagon’s Inspector General, the top U.S. official in charge of directly overseeing military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. And he proved himself a loyal servant of the administration during his scandal-plagued tenure in that post from 2002 to 2005. By the time he resigned, Schmitz stood accused by Republicans and Democrats alike of protecting the very war contractors he was tasked with overseeing and of allowing rampant corruption and cronyism to go virtually unchecked. On Schmitz’s watch, well-connected companies like Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Fluor, Titan, CACI, Triple Canopy, DynCorp, and Blackwater made a killing serving the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. By June 2005, the Defense Department had 149 “prime contracts” with seventy-seven contractors in Iraq worth approximately $42.1 billion. 1According to Pentagon auditors, Halliburton “alone represent[ed] 52% of the total contract value.” 2

Allegations of contract fraud and war profiteering during this period could fill volumes, and lawmakers denounced the lack of transparency and open bidding. “It’s been like Dodge City before the marshals showed up,” declared Senator Ron Wyden. 3In the midst of the brewing scandal over Halliburton’s profiteering and corruption in Iraq, Schmitz said in July 2004, “I haven’t seen any real deliberate gouging of the American taxpayer, but we are looking.” 4While there were many layers in the government system that facilitated such corporate misconduct, it was Schmitz whose singular task was overseeing the 1,250-person office with a $200 million budget charged with policing these lucrative U.S.-taxpayer-funded defense contracts. 5

After three years of playing a key role in the system that indemnified well-oiled corporate profiteers, during which Schmitz went out of his way to demonstrate his loyalty to the Bush administration, the Pentagon’s top cop found himself under investigation. The powerful Republican Senator Charles Grassley launched a Congressional probe into whether Schmitz “quashed or redirected two ongoing criminal investigations” into senior Bush administration officials. 6Grassley also “accused Schmitz of fabricating an official Pentagon news release, planning an expensive junket to Germany, and hiding information from Congress.” 7

Finally, under fire from both Democrats and Republicans, Schmitz resigned as Inspector General, though his office denied it was a result of the investigations. Just before he resigned, Schmitz revealed his intention to pursue a career working for Erik Prince at Blackwater. In a letter stamped June 15, 2005, he officially informed the Defense Department and the White House that “I am disqualified from participating in any official matter that will have a direct and predictable effect on the financial interests” of Blackwater USA. 8Schmitz wrote that he had “financial interests” in Blackwater “because I intend to discuss possible employment with them.” 9During Schmitz’s time at the Pentagon overseeing contractors, Blackwater had grown from a small private military and law-enforcement training facility to a global mercenary provider with hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government contracts.

But Schmitz’s interest in Blackwater (or Blackwater’s in Schmitz) was not simply about his dedication to the wars of the Bush administration, the fact that he worked for the Reagan administration, that he represented then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, or his involvement in the murky, corrupt world of military contractors. All of these were certainly factors, but the connection ran deeper. Joseph Schmitz, like Erik Prince and other executives at Blackwater, was a Catholic and a Christian fundamentalist. Some would go so far as to say he was a religious fanatic obsessed with implementing “the rule of law under God.” In numerous speeches given during his time as Pentagon Inspector General, Schmitz articulated his vision and understanding of the global war on terror, employing the rhetoric of Christian supremacy. “No American today should ever doubt that we hold ourselves accountable to the rule of law under God. Here lies the fundamental difference between us and the terrorists,” Schmitz said in a June 2004 speech, just after returning from trips to Iraq and Afghanistan. “It all comes down to this—we pride ourselves on our strict adherence to the rule of law under God.” 10On his official biography, Schmitz proudly listed his membership in the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, 11a Christian militia formed in the eleventh century, before the first Crusades, with the mission of defending “territories that the Crusaders had conquered from the Moslems.” 12The Order today boasts of being “a sovereign subject of international law, with its own constitution, passports, stamps, and public institutions” and “diplomatic relations with 94 countries.” 13In addition to his Christian zealotry, Schmitz was a fierce devotee and an awestruck admirer of one of the famed foreign mercenaries who fought on the side of Gen. George Washington during the American Revolutionary War: the Prussian militarist Baron Friedrich Wilhelm Von Steuben, whom Schmitz referred to as “our first Effective Inspector General.” 14Von Steuben is one of four men often cited by Blackwater officials as founding mercenaries of the United States, the others being Generals Lafayette, Rochambeau, and Kosciuszko, whose monuments stand across from the White House in what some Blackwater officials have taken to calling “Contractor Park.” 15All of this made Schmitz an ideal candidate to join the ranks of Prince and his cohorts at Blackwater, where Schmitz would sit directly at Prince’s right hand as the Prince Group’s chief operating officer and general counsel. 16In a press release announcing the hire, Erik Prince referred to him as “General Schmitz.” 17