Seems that they’ve been caught setting up shell companies and things to cover up who is involved in what, since they kind of have a bad name from all the shit they’ve done in Iraq and Afghanistan (like killing innocent civilians for no reason).
It worked some of the time, too, as the NY Times has found at least 3 US Gov’t contracts which were awarded to some of these shell companies.
I wish I could find that chart online. I bet it’s pretty interesting.
I hate these thugs, and I wish there were some way to outlaw them.
The chart is page 216 of the committee’s report (PDF here) – unfortunately, the resolution is poor, and it’s headachey to read.
However, it should be noted that Blackwater has always had several divisions, most of which have nothing to do with the [del]mercenary[/del] contract security activities for which they’re notorious. This 2008 chart from Mother Jones shows that they already had 20 divisions, subsidiaries, or affiliates, most of which appear on the Senate chart, and most of which are involved in manufacturing, construction, or finance activities.
It does appear, though, that Blackwater or Xe, or whoever they are now, created additional organizations for the purpose of acquiring contracts that they could not have won under the Blackwater/Xe name.
The thing I don’t quite understand is what the US government needs with these fucks in the first place. I could understand some tinpot banana republic hiring mercenaries - they come with their own hardware, they’ve got helicopters, tanks, zero morals, it’s a good deal.
But the US government ? For Elvis’s sake, you guys pour metric fucktons of money into your big dick military, then you go and buy yourself mercenaries instead ? Even if they weren’t warcrimes waiting to happen like the Blackwater goons, explain to me how that make any sense.
Even pretty hard core libertarians will tell you that private enterprise isn’t always better than the government. The armed forces is one rather obvious example.
I, too, am a little confused as to why the country that spends as much money on its armed forces as the rest of the world combined needs to hire mercenaries.
It’s politically expedient to have 50,000 troops in Iraq instead of 100,000 troops, and we do that by hiring 50,000 private contractors to do the work that soldiers used to do.*
numbers completely invented for rhetorical purposes, but its tens of thousands anyway.
Also you don’t have to count mercenaries in your official military death toll.
If there are any military vets around, I’d like to hear their opinions on Blackwater. I used to work with a guy who was in the special forces (or at least claimed to be anyway) and he had nothing but bad things to say about them.
Oh yes. Lower official death toll. Lower official casualty rate. Lower official troop levels. Lower cost for veteran’s health care. Lower accountability. No GI benefits.
Erik Prince is a fucking real life Bond villain waiting to happen. He’s also a whirling mass of contradictions: a hardcore conservative Christian (currently Catholic) who rents out private armies for a multibillion dollar living and just moved to a Muslim country.
Blackwater is are paid something like $1,500 per day per goon (googling brings up figures from $1200 to $1800 so I’ll go with the middle). Anybody have any ideas how much of this is paid to them in salary? Or how much it costs to keep a U.S. soldier there (not just salary but food/lodging/uniform/weaponry/etc.), because I’m curious if it’s more expensive or cheaper to hire Blackwater.
Yeah, but then I’d wager the domestic political fallout from “oops, it seems our contractors have been smuggling weapons to terrorists and going on civilian killing & raping sprees” is a bit more severe than soldiers dying in the line of duty. If it isn’t, it fucking should.
Once it was clear that we weren’t going to be able to make a particularly quick exit from Iraq (by April 2004 at the latest), it was also clear that our army really wasn’t big enough to keep the peace over there, either. And the Bush Administration was doing all sorts of tricks to try to effectively make the army bigger without actually increasing the number of people in uniform: stop-loss, condensing the rotation schedule, using reserves and the National Guard to an extent previously unheard of outside of a total mobilization, lowering recruiting standards, and a whole bunch of other stuff I’ve forgotten over the years.
A number of Dems kept on saying that if we wanted to keep fighting this war, we’d need a draft.* And really, we did. But that would have killed public support for the war, and while Bush’s team may have been morons with respect to policy, they were pretty smart politically, and they knew this.
Ultimately, “security contractors” were the largest single piece of the filler between the army we had, and the army we needed for Bush’s wars.
*Once it was clear that Iraq wasn’t going to be a Gulf War-style cakewalk, expanding the army via volunteers wasn’t an option. We drastically lowered recruiting standards during the Iraq War just to stay roughly even in terms of manpower. All those young Republicans cheering the war effort on from the homefront had close to zero interest in actually fighting in it. All hail the 101st Fighting Keyboarders!
Not mercenaries but politically connected, religiously connected and friends with the top of the Republican party. These were not just enterprising businessmen providing a need, but rich people being set up to feed at the public tax trough.
Erik Prince is connected to the DeVos family. His sister,Betsy,married into them. They founded Amway ,the huge pyramid company. She was president of the Mich. Republican Party. She quit when the rep. choice for governor would not support vouchers for public schools.
Princes father founded the Family Research Council, a repub right wing organization. They are deeply involved in far right wing politics. They did quite well when Bush was in power.
