OK, I’ll start out with one. There are so many stories to cover in a war zone. Steve, why did you decide to focus on mercenaries?

-nms

Steve, Welcome to the Lake and congratulations on the Pulitzer.

Noah, Thank you for Hosting this Book Salon.

Welcome to FDL and thanks for your time today.

Do any soldiers-for-hire you interviewed have the sense that there’s something very wrong with their role in this war? Do any of them understand why so much of what they do is viewed the way it is? Do they get it?

Thanks.

Hey Steve. How easy did you find it to get mercs to talk? Every one of my admittedly few experiences talking to Triple Canopy or CACI employees in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Washington) falls into epic-fail territory, while it’s easy to talk to soldiers and marines.

Hey Noah,

Thanks to Firedoglake for having me here. My son Will is watching so don’t be too mean :)

I started going to Iraq in Sept. 2007, and continued till the end of 2007. I think I could have written any number of books about the war, but to me the mercenaries seemed to symbolize many things about what Iraq became. There are 190,000 private contractors in Iraq, 30,000 more people than there are conventional troops. The mercenaries and their use have hidden the true costs of the war — human, physical, financial. To many people, Iraq is a paycheck.

Steve, I should as well have congratulated you on your Pulitzer. What do the various private-security contractors think about the “mercenary” term? We all remember when the right threw a fit after Markos called the lynched Blackwater contractors “mercenaries,” a term that seems perfectly descriptive, back in 2004. Does it offend the mercenaries to be called mercenaries, or do they embrace it, or…?

Hello, guys. i should read this book because i have painted every merc as a horrible stereotype.

This is a really good question. For many, I think they do, at least in their most honest and lucid moments. Many of them also blame companies like Blackwater and Crescent for creating the widespread contempt. But I think many people in Iraq — in the military and among the mercenaries — are blinded by their own reality: the dangers they face, their day-to-day jobs, and they don’t see themselves the way Iraqis and many Americans see them.

Most of them are offended by it; they think it misrepresents what they do. To me, we should call it what it is. These are people who are fighting the war for money. The principal reason they are there is money. In many instances, they are killing people, and they are getting killed themselves. Private Security Contractor is a meaningless war term, like collateral damage and improvised explosive device. It’s designed to sanitize, not explain.

I think one of the things that really struck me when I began reporting on this bizarre world was how diverse the population really is. There are people who fit the stereotypes — tatted up, ‘roided up, trigger-happy — people who have no business getting anywhere near Iraq with a gun. And there are professionals who got out of the military, many after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan, and simply used those specialized skills to get a U.S.-government sanctioned job that paid them multiple times more than they would have ever earned back home. They wanted money for school or to put a new addition on the house or pay down debt.

Welcome Noah and Steve. So glad you could join us today.
Hola, Bev!
Steve, if the mercenaries you met were to recruit others into their forces, what would be their pitch?

Steve: Blackwater and some of the other contracting companies present themselves as hiring only the cream-of-the-crop, like former U.S. special forces. Does that match what you found in Iraq?

I found that it was a mixed bag. Some companies, like Blackwater, wouldn’t let me get anywhere near them. Others like Crescent, ArmorGroup, Triple Canopy and Aegis were more forthcoming. It was really case to case. As you say that’s a lot different than the military, which usually was quite cooperative. And once you were on the ground with the military everyone wanted to talk. Not so with the mercs, although once you got past the company screeners most of them wanted to tell their story, partly, I think because they were so heavily involved in the war and very few people really knew.

There pitch was easy: Dude, you can make 20 grand a month doing what you did making $1,500 a month in the military. And without any rules. As one of them said to me: “You got all the great things about the military without any of the bullshit rules.” He meant the comraderie and the addictive thrill and the chance to blow shit up. But of course as a policy matter that’s pretty problematic.

Welcome to FDL and thanks for your time.

…the Iraq war’s “original sin,”

Too few troops truly created much of the mess we’re in, Wolfie’s ‘Wildly off the mark’ remark is forever seared into my mind…!

Aloha, Noah and Steve! Thank you and welcome to the Lake!

In some cases, yes, but often no. When you look at the guys indicted in the Nisoor Sq massacre, none of them had any more experience than the mercs who worked for Crescent Security Group, which I describe in BBR as the K-Mart of private security. There’s only so many elite troops available. When you hired tens of thousands of hired guns, you’re inevitably going to water down the suppy. And that doesn’t even include the guys from places like Peru, Fiji, Colombia, Nepal. . . and Iraq. There were plenty of barely screened Iraqis working for these companies.

Steve: Now that the U.S. has started using mercenaries, is there any way to stop — especially during counterinsurgency-type conflicts? Or are we stuck with these guys?

In educating the Iraqi’s about Democracy I doubt anyone mentioned the Posse Comitatus Act . Did the private military contractors have any awareness of it?

Yeah, some people would say the original sin was getting into this awful war in the first place, the lies about WMD, etc. I’m talking about the original sin in the prosecution of the war. If from the outset the administration had heeded the warnings of Shinseki, et al, about the need for more troops, this book would never have been written, and Iraq almost certainly would be a vastly different place.

There was really no consideration about ANY legal restrictions. When I asked one guy what law applied to him, he told me his supervisor told him that if he ever got in trouble the company would spirit him out of the country in the back of a car in the middle of the night. Even now — nearly six years into the war — it’s unclear whether the mercs are covered by any law. As I understand the Blackwater defense, it’s essentially that they were operating under Big Boy Rules.

Steve, Where is Jon Cote now and how is he doing?

Yes, I did mean the prosecution of the war aspect… I’ve been doing some diaries on the SIGIR report and Bowen frequently cited the lack of troops as a major contributor of wasted funds and efforts…!

Well, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s definitely gonna continue. Blackwater’s days there appear to be numbered, but the industry may actually grow there, I think, as the military draws down. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the government is cutting new security contracts even as we speak, and there are already thousands of mercs there. Basically, the companies go where the money is, and the money is where there’s conflict. They’re in Somalia, Sudan, Mexico….at least 100 countries. It’s a $100 B industry.

Well, not to spoil too much of the book, but it’s been in the news. About a week after I met him, Jon and four of his colleagues were kidnapped on Iraq’s main highway. A year later, an informant delivered their severed fingers to a military base in Basra. A month after that, the same informant turned over their dismembered corpses.

That is fucked…! 8-(

Steve, if/when Obama brings troops home, will he take an equal percentage of mercs off the streets or will they morph into the next phase of the war?

Sorry, you already answered.

There’s really no way to overstate the significance of it. It would have changed the dynamic completely — the initial looting, the problems in places like Fallujah and Sadr City, the explosive growth of the insurgency. And of course the outsourcing of the war, which to me is one of the most obscene and tragic aspects of the whole conflict.

It’s worth expanding on, because I don’t think Obama has much control over it in the end. and so he could end up drawing down, but if the number of mercenaries increases, how do you quantify that, and what does it ultimately mean to the U.S. mission and Iraq? I do think Big Boy Rules is coming to an end, at least as far as Blackwater is concerned. It seems inconceivable to me that Obama and Hillary are gonna get in bed with those guys.

Steve, with the recent passage of the SOFA, with much of the immunity stripped away for the mercs, have you seen or heard of how chilling an effect it’s having on their efforts now…?

Especially if they are virtually uncontrollable.

Steve: You’re unsparing in your criticism of the merc industry. Yet you’ve painted this incredible nuanced portrait of individual mercs in your book. So I’m wondering: What’s been the reaction in the merc community to “Big Boy Rules.” Are people pissed? Happy? Both? Neither?

I think the idea of being a non killing miserable in drunk in Florida just got a whole lot better.

Amen, brother! It’s amazing how that fact is glossed over by much of the MSM/Beltway Denzens…!

After Viet Nam a number of vets had that “did not fit in” syndrome and hired out to various people to fight in places like Angola. Do you think there’s any difference between those guys and the mercs now?

WHo knows if they even read it, but one of my first suggestions submitted to change.gov was that they should remove all contractors first, before a single soldier.. and insure non American contractors do get home.

Thanks very much.

We’ll have to see. The number of shooting incidents involving private contractors has gone down considerably in the past year; I attibute that to the uproar after the Nisoor Sq. massacre, which pissed off just about everyone in Iraq, especially the U.S. military. Everyone knew that after five years of basically looking the other way, the heat had suddenly been turned way up.

My question about the SOFA is what happens if and when the Iraqi security forces try to arrest and prosecute a merc. That happened in 2007 after Blackwater shot and killed a civilian outside the Ministry of Interior. It led to a near bloodbath as Blackwater and the Iraqis drew down on each other in the middle of Baghdad. The U.S. military intervened, and Blackwater was led back to the Green Zone by the State Department, which of course immediately announced: case closed.

All in the book, btw.

You’re unsparing in your criticism of the merc industry. Yet you’ve painted this incredible nuanced portrait of individual mercs in your book

Well put.

Related …

The Morongo office of the California Highway Patrol (CHP) in conjunction with the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department and the USMC military police will conduct a joint sobriety/driver license checkpoint on Friday, December 12, 2008, somewhere in the unincorporated/incorporated area of San Bernardino County.

Not really, except that this is all sanctioned by the U.S. government. After the genie was out of the bottle in Iraq, DoD changed the law to allow civilians to use deadly force in execution of their contracts. That was a first, but it was essentially just codifying reality, since tens of thousands of civilians were already participating in combat in Iraq.

Noah, I’m glad you feel that way after reading it. My feeling basically is that it’s the height of cowardice and the ultimate obscenity to outsource the responsibility for deciding who can kill and die for our country to private companies explicity in Iraq to make money. And at the same time I found it difficult to judge people who are taking these jobs for totally understandable reasons.

The reaction I think has been mixed. Many people are apoplectic over my liberal use of the word mercenary. Many people think I captured the industry accurately. Some people think I’ve been overly sympathetic to these people and think they got what was coming to them. Frankly, I’m gratified by that, because there are a lot of different ways to look at the book. I don’t really want to impose my views on anyone. People can make their own judgments about it. I just wanted it to be real.

If, after 20 Jan, new policies are put forward that will no longer authorize the use of private contractors for security of State Department officials, what do you see as the future of Blackwater et al?

Perhaps you cover this in your book, but has there been any study of returning mercs, outside of their veteran status? I guess I’m asking if there’s any indication that returning mercs have any harder time adjusting to civilian life than their non-merc veteran counterparts.

Steve — thanks so much for all of the work that went into this book and all of your reporting. And thanks to Noah for a great intro today. Sorry I’m late chiming in — family Christmas stuff today is keeping me busy.

But I wanted to ask what either of you thought about the recent IG report about Blackwater and the State Department — and whether you think they really will lose their license for government contracts altogether or just with State, given the level of noncompliance and refusal to cooperate with investigations and such that I keep hearing about over and over again from folks who have to deal with them?

Your book has just risen to the top of my ‘Must Read’ list…! ;-)

I’d seen a report awhile back that said the first US Army patrol that arrived on the scene at Nisoor were forced to lay down their weapons and to lie prostrate on the ground… Fomenting the bad blood between the mercs and the Army…!

Well, I may be wrong, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. They’re too embedded in the war, and it would take too long for State to ramp up its own security force. But Blackwater is gone, I’m totally convinced of that. As soon as their contract is up in the spring. The question is who and what replaces Blackwater. It might be Blackwater under another name.

Pirate pursuit, shooting American citizens in distress (Katrina), pay to play drug running poppy Afghan security flight contracts… and so on.

Thanks! I don’t think that’s true, though, about the military. At least I’ve never heard it. In fact the U.S. military arrived on the scene shortly after and started investigating, and soon had concluded that Blackwater was unprovoked before it went on this rampage.

Welcome Steve and Noah – what a great discussion.

Steve, your comments about an increase in mercenaries when troops are drawn down are really chilling. As is the increase in their use in Afghanistan – we seem determined to repeat the same mistakes over and over.

Oh, and Steve — huge congratulations on the Pulitzer. You’ve earned it and then some with all the work the past few years. I would imagine your series for the WaPo got you a lot of flack inside the Beltway from some folks, but it needed a public airing, so thanks so much for writing it.

I’ve dealt with some who had been in Angola and their experiences only exacerbated their PTSD from Nam. Many had realized the truth of what a SEAL chief petty officer once told us, “No matter how good or lucky you are, you get into enough firefights you’re gonna get killed.”

Not to mention birthday parties, weddings and the next Altamont….

Thanks, It wasn’t from a very credible source… Even less credible now…! ;-)

And the thing is, aren’t we supposed to be “winning the hearts and minds” of these people? Imagine having your country occupied by another nation’s military, and ON TOP OF THAT, you have tens of thousands of refugees from a Mad Max film festival going around shooting your fellow citizens, with absolutely no law that applies to their actions. That is, you are powerless to prosecute them. Amazing policy…..

I’m guessing the answer is “no,” there haven’t been studies of returning mercs. (But I’d sure like to see ‘em, if they exist.)

Steve, do you know of any?

Thanks! There really wasn’t much pushback in DC. What was interesting was the response from State and the military when I would go to them with questions. In the immortal words of one of my friends, they acted as if I’d used their toothbrush. Like I was crazy. It wasn’t until Nisoor Square that anyone seemed to take the issue seriously. It was as if the whole thing didn’t exist.

Steve, one thing that has been very worrisome is the racism reported from military briefings for newly arriving troops, etc – the use of terms like “haji” etc. Do the mercenaries receive similar “pep talks” or is the “no rules” attitude enough to lead to the number of attacks on civilians?

No, none. But you can imagine the ramifications. Many of these people are seeing more combat than they did in the military and there’s absolutely no outlet for dealing with that once you get back.

Given the lack of oversight and accountability in so many other areas — and the pushback that the few folks who were doing it (like Bunny Greenhouse) got — I’m not surprised. I’d love to think otherwise, but sadly I think a lot of it was a deliberate desire to either not know unless forced to do so, or people too green in the particulars not to know any better.

I hope I’m wrong. But I’ve watched too many Congressional hearings the last few years with people who should have known better and either didn’t or who suffered from deliberate obtuseness…

I wouldn’t call it racism as much as the de-humanization of entire culture. And the thing is, you can see where it comes from: day after day as a target, seeing your friends get shot and blown up, and rarely ever actually seeing an insurgent. That’s the Iraq war. The only difference between the mercs and the military is that the mercs, at least until recently, weren’t constrained by any laws, whereas everyone in the military knows that violations are likely to be prosecuted in full.

Exactly. I write a lot about the treatment of Iraqis in my posts here and the complete lack of respect for them as human beings remains so stunning. You’d never guess the apparent ”mission” of this war/occupation was ”liberation” – then again, we know it wasn’t really and it shows.

I can understand that. But I think part of it was that in the first several years of the war, everyone — the military, Congress, the White House, State, and especially the media — was preoccupied with the insurgency and the military’s apparent failure. In the meantime you had this parallel war going on involving tens of thousands of “private troops” and many of them were operating totally off the grid. People couldn’t get their head around that. I had been in Iraq for a year and a half before I started covering the mercs, and I was absolutely stunned by the magnitude of what was going on.

But the prosecutions have been so mangled and so inept. When you look at, for example, the ACLU’s FOI results, it’s horrific.

And the thing is, even now we don’t know what it was.

Noah, Steve, thanks so much for being here, I can’t wait to get my copy of this book.

I don’t know how common it was in the early days of the war to ‘recruit’ specific veterans for private contractor duty, but a dear old friend was one such decorated Gulf War I vet, who was one of the men killed, and hung from the bridge in Fallujah. It had been an honor, as far as he was concerned, to be requested for the very specific duty he was called upon for, that turned into a devastating tragedy.

This makes the critical remarks towards the ‘mercs’ often hard for me to take. I understand where they are coming from, of course, but I wonder how many of the men went over there with some grand idea of their purpose only to watch it turn into the industry as it is today?

-Diane Sweet

What prosecutions (except Blackwater)? You mean general contractors like Halliburton?

Steve: During these wars, there’s been a lot of talk about the so-called “strategic corporal” — the seemingly low-level grunt who suddenly changes the conflict entirely (think Abu Ghraib.)

You’ve talked about the merc companies being brought under the law. But is anyone — in the military, at the State Department — tracking the mercs’ actions? In other words, is there someone in our government who knows where the strategic corporals-for-hire are, and what they are doing?

This is a wonderful point. I think a lot of people who went back felt like they were both making money and supporting a war they believed in. After all, the U.S. government sanctioned these jobs; they were critical to mission, which, in the absence of more troops, or a draft, would have imploded without them.

Sorry I was very unclear there. I was thinking of the prosecutions by the military of troops involved in killings of civilians. In cases like Haditha, the results have not looked like justice to me – and I’m sure not the the Iraqis. With the mercenaries under even less constraint, we have created a nightmare for Iraqis who have these people imposed on their communities.

Won’t any blowback be on the VA, though? I mean, almost all the US-citizen mercs are vets, right? And will the VA be able to say, “No, your PTSD is from your merc service, not your military service.”

On second thought, knowing what little I do about Bush’s VA, I guess I know the answer to that…

Noah, as far as Abu Ghraib is concerned it was nice to see that recent findings lay the blame properly at the Deciderer’s feet and not merely Lyndie’s fault…

This is a complicated question, because the contracts are so diffuse. Some of the companies are under contract to State, some to DoD, some to the Iraqi govt, some to private companies, etc. And there are thousands of contracts out there. The military and, since Nisoor Square, State, have tried to coordinate the movements of armed contractors on the battlefield, with more success lately than in the first five years of the war. The contractors use transponders in their vehicles that connect them to tactical operations centers, and so if there’s an incident theoretically they should be able to track it. But in reality it’s never been that easy, and it’s hard to account for these dozens of companies that are accountable to no one.

I totally agree. And I would just add that the Blackwater case, to me, is a joke. They’re prosecuting five guys (a sixth flipped), and ignoring both the company and the State Department officials who created an entire culture of impunity in which Blackwater killed not only these 17 people but many, many others. The State Department’s indifference to Blackwater’s trigger-happy culture is stunning (see book for further details :) )

Right. Another totally unanticipated ramification of this ad hoc policy. And many of these companies didn’t work directly for the U.S. govt. Crescent for example, was working for the Italian military, making it even harder to seek treatment.

Steve, I’m wondering – and I am sorry I have not yet had a chance to read your book but have ordered it – whether you have much access to Iraqis during your reporting and were able to report on their thoughts on the mercenaries. I have contacts in Iraq who are involved in humanitarian work there and they consistently say that they would not assist a mercenary under any circumstances. They despise the “fighting for greed” and see them as “unlawful combatants” and fair game. They say that the killing of the Fallujah mercenaries was “good riddance to bad garbage” but they were upset at the desecration of the bodies as that is strictly forbidden under Islamic law.

The Italian military…? It should be interesting to see what transpires from Iraq’s recent refusal to renew the UN’s Coalition mandate for all the Coalition partners… Especially, the Brits…!

The Iraqis hate them — the government and the population. Once I looked into a case in which an Australian company, Unity Resources Group, shot and killed two women on Karrada Street, a six-lane boulevard crammed with retail shops, and schools and mosques. When I started walking around the neighborhood, it turned out the same company had shot and wounded a guy like 250 yards up the street about three months earlier, and another company had killed another guy in the same area about three months earlier. It was like they had turned Upper Broadway into a shooting gallery.

And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about the so-called “coalition.” Italy had outsourced its own withdrawal to a rogue private company to avoid putting its own troops in harm’s way. That’s commitment.

Steve: We’ve spent most of the discussion talking about guns-for-hire. But that represents just a fraction of the military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, right? Can you give us a sense of how many of these other contractors there are? And how vital they are to the American war effort?

And how…! The Coalition was always a farce from it’s very inception…!

You’re talking about the guys who run the chow halls and drive trucks and serve as explosives disposal experts, etc? Without them the war would stop. It’s that simple.

There’s a scene in the book where Jon Cote and I are driving around and he’s talking about the amazing amounts of money in Iraq. “This place, it’s a money-making machine,” he says. It’s so true. You read about the unreal numbers that are thrown around, but to actually see it in action, it’s breathtaking. It’s like a giant factory churning out money.

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated 190,000 private contractors in Iraq.

As we come to the end of this Book Salon,

Steve, Thank you very much stopping by the Lake and spending the afternoon with us discussing your new book and the topic of mercenaries and the Iraq War.

Noah, Thank you for Hosting this great Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought this great book yet, there is a link above.

Thanks all.

So one of the big arguments for hiring all of those contractors is that it costs less than having GIs do the same job. Have you found any evidence that definitively supports or debunks that theory? Or is it all based on best guesses?

Thanks to everyone for checking in. And thanks, Noah, for your expert moderating. Anyone who wants to folo up with me can reach me at fainarus@washpost.com.

Happy Holidays!

I’ve never seen a study. Not one. Basically it’s an assertion put forth by the private security industry.

Thanks Steve.

Essentially, every meal that isn’t a MRE is served by PC’s right? And they’re the ones delivering the MRE’s… Pitiful…

Thank you Steve and Noah. The more information about how the occupation of Irak was carried out the better we can avoid the next such scheme.

Exactly. In all my time in Iraq I was only in two chow halls that were not run by contractors. One was at a remote base in Balad, the other was in Husaybah on the Syrian border, which was like being on the moon it was so remote.

Much Mahalo, Steve and Noah! I truly appreciate all your efforts and congrats on your well-deserved Pulitzer! ;-)

Thanks!

Thank you Steve and Noah – it’s very heartening to see such good reporting!

This outsourcing was all developed, of course, by SecDef Cheney during Bush1 by Halliburton/KBR. Isn’t it odd that there was, amazingly, such an incredible fertile war theatre for such moneymaking?

Heh, Hasn’t the entire PNAC crew profited mightily? Tis a shame that it’s hard to spend the ill-gotten goods from behind bars, if Karma really is a b*tch…! ;-)