While the military has built up troops in an ongoing campaign to secure Baghdad, the security companies, out of public view, have been engaged in a parallel surge, boosting manpower, adding expensive armor and stepping up evasive action as attacks increase, the officials and company representatives said.
Blackwater and other private contractors are no longer random, richly rewarded paramilitaries, a scattering of forces on pay scales far exceeding those of our military. They're now virtually official, an integral part of the scene, partners of the American military in service to an ever more imperialistic United States.
"The whole face of private security changed with Iraq, and it will never go back to how it was," said Leon Sharon, a retired Special Operations officer who commands 500 private Kurdish guards at an immense warehouse transit point for weapons, ammunition and other materiel on the outskirts of Baghdad.
U.S. officials and security company representatives emphasized that contractors are strictly limited to defensive operations. But company representatives in the field said insurgents rarely distinguish between the military and private forces, drawing the contractors into a bloody and escalating campaign.
The casualties they take haven't been reported until recently, and the rate is growing now. Still, they will remain in Iraq as long as American bases are there: they provide base security.
The military plans to outsource at least $1.5 billion in security operations this year, including the three largest security contracts in Iraq: a "theaterwide" contract to protect U.S. bases that is worth up to $480 million, according to Scott; a contract for up to $475 million to provide intelligence for the Army and personal security for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; and a contract for up to $450 million to protect reconstruction convoys. The Army has also tested a plan to use private security on military convoys for the first time, a shift that would significantly increase the presence of armed contractors on Iraq's dangerous roads.
Steve Fainaru's Washington Post report gets up-close-and-personal with a British security company, Armor Group, working in Baghdad.
What we don't get a sense of in this report are the secretive workings of American private contractors who are not accountable to Congress and who are building small regional empires in the US. Jeremy Scahill described one big private army's mission creep.
What we find is that Blackwater, both at home and abroad, is serving the radical privatization agenda of the Bush administration. It's rapidly expanding its operations in the US, opening a new facility in Illinois called "Blackwater North," and in California they're calling it "Blackwater West." And then they have a 7,000-acre private military facility in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. So this company really embodies so much of what's happening in this country and around the world in the wake of 9/11.
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