Sometimes they really mean it. When the
Democrats took back the US Congress last autumn,
among the things they promised to do was to resume
its traditional oversight function - something
that had become almost as dead as the dodo bird in
the Republican years.
Normally a
congressional hearing is a highly scripted,
formulaic affair. Like actors on a stage or
lawyers at a trial, all the committee members
already know what they are going to hear and know
what questions they are going to ask. There
normally
aren't any surprises.
But February 7 was different. That day the
House of Representatives Oversight and Government
Reform Committee held a hearing on oversight of
private security contractors operating in Iraq.
And Hollywood itself could not have improved on it
in terms of content, atmospherics or drama.
It had everything you could want:
gut-wrenching testimony from four women, relatives
of the four Blackwater USA security contractors
murdered in the infamous ambush at Fallujah in
2004; terse bickering between Republicans and
Democrats; real indignation; revelations about
contractor operations heretofore unknown. In
short, it offered a fascinating look into an area
of activity that gets a lot of heat but little
light.
Now, before going any further it
should be said that a lot of outright silly and
inaccurate things get written in the US about
private military and security contractors. Some of
that is due to the contractors' reluctance to talk
about their work, but a lot of it is due to some
media's inability or unwillingness to recognize
that contractors are generally just another tool
that the US government uses in the conduct of its
military policy these days. True, the presence of
private contractors is quite large and getting
larger all the time, but there is nothing
nefarious or clandestine about it. It's just
another example of privatization at work.
Sometimes, though, the trend is surreal.
An example is the recent news that last June, the
US General Services Administration, short of
employees to review cases of incompetence and
fraud by federal contractors, hired a private
contractor to do the investigation. The contractor
- CACI International - had itself barely avoided
suspension from federal contracting for its role
in the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal. CACI
supplied six people to work for the GSA - at
US$104 an hour, more than $200,000 per person
annually.
That being said, however, a tool
can either be used well or it can be used badly.
And it is certainly true that in the nearly four
years private contractors have operated in Iraq
there have been enough examples of things going
wrong to make examination of their operations long
overdue, if only so some sort of baseline can be
laid down for their future activities.
Robert Young Pelton, author of the book
Licensed to Kill, said on the US Public
Broadcasting Service's The NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer the night of the hearing: "There are
some terrible things going on in the name of
security contracting, and there are some very
important things going on. But the problem is, as
these hearings showed today, how do you know the
difference between a good contract and a bad
contract, a good contractor or a bad contractor?"
The very fact that nearly a thousand
American contractors have been killed or wounded
in Iraq, a number that rarely is added into the
total of US casualties there, makes further
scrutiny of their role necessary. The Pentagon has
already awarded 119 contractors the Defense of
Freedom medal, which is considered the civilian
equivalent of a Purple Heart, a citation for being
wounded.
While contractors can often
correctly claim that their contracts require them
not to talk about their work, sometimes this
silence gets carried to a ridiculous extreme. For
example, consider this excerpt from the opening
statement of Congressman Henry Waxman, the
committee chairman:
It is now almost three years later
and we still don't know for sure the identity of
the prime contractor under which the four
Blackwater employees were working ... It's
remarkable that the world of contractors and
subcontractors is so murky that we can't even
get to the bottom of this, let alone calculate
how many millions of dollars taxpayers lose in
each step of the subcontracting
process.
In fact, on the Fallujah
mission, Blackwater was at the bottom of a
multi-tiered chain of at least four companies.
Among the revelations at the hearing was
the admission by the lawyer for Blackwater USA
that one of the company's operatives shot and
killed an Iraqi security worker last Christmas
Eve. The Blackwater man was off duty when the
shooting occurred, and the company brought him
back to the United States and fired him, said
Andrew G Howell during testimony before a
congressional oversight committee. It was the
company's first public admission of the killing.
Another less-than-thrilling moment for
Blackwater came during the first panel when a
joint statement compiled by the Fallujah victims'
families accused Blackwater of sending their loved
ones into harm's way unprepared and of treating
the families with callous indifference.
"We continue to relive that horror every
day," Katy Helvenston-Wettengel told the
committee. Helvenston-Wettengel, who served as
primary spokeswoman for the families, is the
mother of Scott Helvenston, a former US Navy SEAL
(member of the Sea, Air and Land special force).
When the families sought information from
Blackwater about what happened, she said, they
were told it was confidential: "When we insisted
on seeing the report concerning the incident,
Blackwater told us that we would have to sue them
to get it."
The families did just that.
Their lawsuit accuses Blackwater of breaking its
contractual obligations to the four men by sending
them into hostile territory without armored
vehicles, automatic weapons or a rear gunner -
deficiencies they attribute to Blackwater's
single-minded pursuit of profit.
Blackwater took another hit when the
committee released an internal e-mail exchange
that indicated there was concern about how well
equipped the men were.
An e-mail sent by
the four men's supervisor, Tom Powell, to his
superiors on March 30, 2004, one day before the
ambush, conveyed an urgent need for armored
vehicles, weapons, ammunition and communications
equipment. He was unsure who had the contractual
responsibility for those items, Powell wrote, "but
guys are in the field with borrowed stuff and in
harm's way ... which I'm very uncomfortable with".
Powell's superior, Mike Rush, wrote back
that they were the responsibility of the next
subcontractor up the chain, not Blackwater.
Yet another revelation was that the US
Army took back $20 million from military
contractor Halliburton after finding that it had
improperly charged taxpayers for security work it
subcontracted to Blackwater.
Yet despite
everything, one thing is certain:
private-contractor activity will continue. It was
reported early this month that the Pentagon plans
to continue hiring private contractors to provide
security at reconstruction projects in Iraq and to
train US and Iraqi military officers in
counterinsurgency, despite problems with past
contracts for such jobs that traditionally have
been done by military personnel.
David Isenberg is a senior
analyst with the British American Security
Information Council. He is also a member of the
Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an
adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute,
contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project,
a research fellow at the Independent Institute,
and a US Navy veteran. The views expressed are his
own.
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