Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Mercenaries at work
By Chalmers Johnson
As David Bromwich, a political critic and Yale professor of literature,
observed in the New York Review of Books:
The separate
bookkeeping and accountability devised for Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy,
and similar outfits was part of a careful displacement of oversight from
Congress to the vice-president and the stewards of his policies in various
departments and agencies. To have much of the work parceled out to private
companies who are unaccountable to army rules or military justice, meant, among
its other advantages, that the cost of the war could be concealed beyond all
detection.
Euphemisms are words intended to deceive. The United
States is
already close to drowning in them, particularly new words and terms devised, or
brought to bear, to justify the American invasion of Iraq - coinages Bromwich
highlights like "regime change", "enhanced interrogation techniques", "the
global war on terrorism", "the birth pangs of a new Middle East", a "slight
uptick in violence", "bringing torture within the law", "simulated drowning",
and, of course, "collateral damage", meaning the slaughter of unarmed civilians
by American troops and aircraft followed - rarely - by perfunctory apologies.
It is important that the intrusion of unelected corporate officials with hidden
profit motives into what are ostensibly public political activities not be
confused with private businesses buying Scotch tape, paper clips, or hubcaps.
The wholesale transfer of military and intelligence functions to private, often
anonymous, operatives took off under Ronald Reagan's presidency, and
accelerated greatly after 9/11 under George W Bush and Dick Cheney. Often not
well understood, however, is this: The biggest private expansion into
intelligence and other areas of government occurred under the presidency of
Bill Clinton. He seems not to have had the same anti-governmental and
neo-conservative motives as the privatizers of both the Reagan and Bush II
eras. His policies typically involved an indifference to - perhaps even an
ignorance of - what was actually being done to democratic, accountable
government in the name of cost-cutting and allegedly greater efficiency. It is
one of the strengths of Shorrock's study that he goes into detail on Clinton's
contributions to the wholesale privatization of our government, and of the
intelligence agencies in particular.
Reagan launched his campaign to shrink the size of government and offer a large
share of public expenditures to the private sector with the creation in 1982 of
the "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control." In charge of the survey, which
became known as the "Grace Commission," he named the conservative businessman,
J Peter Grace, Jr, chairman of the WR Grace Corporation, one of the world's
largest chemical companies - notorious for its production of asbestos and its
involvement in numerous anti-pollution suits. The Grace Company also had a long
history of investment in Latin America, and Peter Grace was deeply committed to
undercutting what he saw as leftist unions, particularly because they often
favored state-led economic development.
The Grace Commission's actual achievements were modest. Its biggest was
undoubtedly the 1987 privatization of Conrail, the freight railroad for the
northeastern states. Nothing much else happened on this front during the first
Bush's administration, but Bill Clinton returned to privatization with a
vengeance.
According to Shorrock:
Bill Clinton ... picked up the cudgel where the
conservative Ronald Reagan left off and ... took it deep into services once
considered inherently governmental, including high-risk military operations and
intelligence functions once reserved only for government agencies. By the end
of [Clinton's first] term, more than 100,000 Pentagon jobs had been transferred
to companies in the private sector - among them thousands of jobs in
intelligence ... By the end of [his second] term in 2001, the administration
had cut 360,000 jobs from the federal payroll and the government was spending
44% more on contractors than it had in 1993. (pp 73, 86)
These
activities were greatly abetted by the fact that the Republicans had gained
control of the House of Representatives in 1994 for the first time in 43 years.
One liberal journalist described "outsourcing as a virtual joint venture
between [House Majority Leader Newt] Gingrich and Clinton". The right-wing
Heritage Foundation aptly labeled Clinton's 1996 budget as the "boldest
privatization agenda put forth by any president to date". (p 87)
After 2001, Bush and Cheney added an ideological rationale to the process
Clinton had already launched so efficiently. They were enthusiastic supporters
of "a neo-conservative drive to siphon US spending on defense, national
security, and social programs to large corporations friendly to the Bush
administration". (pp 72-3)
The privatization and loss - of institutional memory
The end result is what we see today: a government hollowed out in terms of
military and intelligence functions. The KBR Corporation, for example, supplies
food, laundry, and other personal services to our troops in Iraq based on
extremely lucrative no-bid contracts, while Blackwater Worldwide supplies
security and analytical services to the CIA and the State Department in
Baghdad. (Among other things, its armed mercenaries opened fire on, and killed,
17 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007, without
any provocation, according to US military reports.) The costs - both financial
and personal - of privatization in the armed services and the intelligence
community far exceed any alleged savings, and some of the consequences for
democratic governance may prove irreparable.
These consequences include: the sacrifice of professionalism within our
intelligence services; the readiness of private contractors to engage in
illegal activities without compunction and with impunity; the inability of
Congress or citizens to carry out effective oversight of privately-managed
intelligence activities because of the wall of secrecy that surrounds them;
and, perhaps most serious of all, the loss of the most valuable asset any
intelligence organization possesses - its institutional memory.
Most of these consequences are obvious, even if almost never commented on by
our politicians or paid much attention in the mainstream media. After all, the
standards of a career CIA officer are very different from those of a corporate
executive who must keep his eye on the contract he is fulfilling and future
contracts that will determine the viability of his firm. The essence of
professionalism for a career intelligence analyst is his integrity in laying
out what the US government should know about a foreign policy issue, regardless
of the political interests of, or the costs to, the major players.
The loss of such professionalism within the CIA was starkly revealed in the
2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's possession of weapons of mass
destruction. It still seems astonishing that no senior official, beginning with
secretary of state Colin Powell, saw fit to resign when the true dimensions of
our intelligence failure became clear, least of all director of Central
Intelligence George Tenet.
A willingness to engage in activities ranging from the dubious to the outright
felonious seems even more prevalent among our intelligence contractors than
among the agencies themselves, and much harder for an outsider to detect. For
example, following 9/11, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, then working for the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense,
got the bright idea that DARPA should start compiling dossiers on as many
American citizens as possible in order to see whether "data-mining" procedures
might reveal patterns of behavior associated with terrorist activities.
On November 14, 2002, the New York Times published a column by William Safire
entitled "You Are a Suspect" in which he revealed that DARPA had been given a
$200 million budget to compile dossiers on 300 million Americans. He wrote,
"Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you
buy and medical prescription you fill, every website you visit and every e-mail
you send or receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book, and
every event you attend - all these transactions and communications will go into
what the Defense Department describes as a 'virtual centralized grand
database.'" This struck many members of Congress as too close to the practices
of the Gestapo and the Stasi under German totalitarianism, and so, the
following year, they voted to defund the project.
However, Congress's action did not end the "total information awareness"
program. The National Security Agency secretly decided to continue it through
its private contractors. The NSA easily persuaded SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton
to carry on with what Congress had declared to be a violation of the privacy
rights of the American public - for a price. As far as we know, Admiral
Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness Program" is still going strong today.
The most serious immediate consequence of the privatization of official
governmental activities is the loss of institutional memory by our government's
most sensitive organizations and agencies. Shorrock concludes, "So many former
intelligence officers joined the private sector [during the 1990s] that, by the
turn of the century, the institutional memory of the United States intelligence
community now resides in the private sector. That's pretty much where things
stood on September 11, 2001." (p 112)
This means that the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, and the other 13 agencies in the US
intelligence community cannot easily be reformed because their staffs have
largely forgotten what they are supposed to do, or how to go about it. They
have not been drilled and disciplined in the techniques, unexpected outcomes,
and know-how of previous projects, successful and failed.
As numerous studies have, by now, made clear, the abject failure of the
American occupation of Iraq came about in significant measure because the
Department of Defense sent a remarkably privatized military filled with
incompetent amateurs to Baghdad to administer the running of a defeated
country. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates (a former director of the CIA) has
repeatedly warned that the United States is turning over far too many functions
to the military because of its hollowing out of the Department of State and the
Agency for International Development since the end of the Cold War. Gates
believes that we are witnessing a "creeping militarization" of foreign policy -
and, though this generally goes unsaid, both the military and the intelligence
services have turned over far too many of their tasks to private companies and
mercenaries.
When even Robert Gates begins to sound like president Eisenhower, it is time
for ordinary citizens to pay attention. In my 2006 book Nemesis: The Last Days
of the American Republic, with an eye to bringing the imperial
presidency under some modest control, I advocated that we Americans abolish the
CIA altogether, along with other dangerous and redundant agencies in our
alphabet soup of 16 secret intelligence agencies, and replace them with the
State Department's professional staff devoted to collecting and analyzing
foreign intelligence. I still hold that position.
Nonetheless, the current situation represents the worst of all possible worlds.
Successive administrations and Congresses have made no effort to alter the
CIA's role as the president's private army, even as we have increased its
incompetence by turning over many of its functions to the private sector. We
have thereby heightened the risks of war by accident, or by presidential whim,
as well as of surprise attack because our government is no longer capable of
accurately assessing what is going on in the world and because its intelligence
agencies are so open to pressure, penetration, and manipulation of every kind.
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