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‘Distancing Acts’: Private Mercenaries and the War on Terror in American Foreign Policy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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“I do this job for the opportunity to kill the enemies of my country and also to get that boat I always wanted… . [W]hen engaged I will lay waste to everything around me.” – Contractor slogan.
“It’s the perfect war… everybody is making money.” - US intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
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References
1 Col. Gerald Schumacher, A Bloody Business: America's War Zone Contractors and the Occupation of Iraq (New York: Zenith Press, 2006), 175-187; “Heavy Metal Mercenary,” Rolling Stone, November 9, 2004. Weiss comes from a family with a long history of criminal activity. His father was a bookie murdered after skimming the top off of laundered money he delivered to gangsters. His sister was indicted for stabbing his mother, Rose Weiss, 69. Adam Foxman and John Scheibe, “Daughter Held in Fatal Stabbing of Simi Woman,” Ventura County Star, February 7, 2008.
2 Steve Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 2009), 22; Moshe Schwartz and Jennifer Church, “Department of Defense's Use of Contractors to Support Military Operations,” Congressional Research Service, May 17, 2013; Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012). PMCs can be defined as profit-driven organizations that trade in professional services linked to warfare.
3 Suzanne Simons, Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 158; Rod Nordland, “Risks of Afghan War Shift from Soldiers to Contractors,” New York Times, February 11, 2012; Dana Priest and William Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (Boston: Little & Brown, 2011), 184.
4 A list of 33 countries that ratified the treaty is available here. Notably absent are supposedly “civilized countries like Canada, Britain, France and Japan. See also José L. Gomez del Prado, Chairperson, UN Working Group on the Use of Mercenaries ”Mercenaries, Private Military and Security Companies and International Law,“ University of Wisconsin Law School.
5 See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
6 Michael Schwartz, War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2007); Greg Muttit, Fuel on the Fire: Oil Politics in Occupied Iraq (New York: New Press, 2012); Juan Cole, “The Fall of Mosul and the False Promise of Modern History,” History News Network, June 12, 2014; Timothy Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 52.
7 Simons, Master of War, 143; Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: The Nation Books, 2007), 55. Blackwater was renamed Xe Services in 2009 and Academi in 2011.
8 Donald H. Rumsfeld, “Transforming the Military,” Foreign Affairs (May-June 2002); Stephen Armstrong, War PLC: The Rise of the New Corporate Mercenary (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 80; Allison Stanger, One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 86.
9 See Carl Boggs, “The Corporate War Economy” in The Global Industrial Complex: Systems of Domination, ed. Steven Best et al. (Boston: Lexington Books, 2011); Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1956); C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: 1956).
10 On U.S. public opinion and war, see Adam J. Berinsky, In Time of War: Understanding American Public Opinion From World War II to Iraq (University of Chicago Press, 2009). A recent poll showed that 58 percent supported significant reductions in military spending. On the growing democracy deficit, see Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
11 Nick Turse, The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).
12 See Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: McMillan, 2013).
13 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Viking Press, 2000), 189.
14 See Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, rev ed. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007).
15 See Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War, with new preface by Alfred W. McCoy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1972). In the PBS history of the Vietnam War, CIA Director William Colby bragged that the Hmong army kept the North Vietnamese at bay for over 10 years in a cost effective policy that aroused very little opposition because few knew about it.
16 On the importance of Korean units, known for their brutality, to U.S. military operations in Vietnam see Frank Baldwin, Diane Jones and Michael Jones, America's Rented Troops: South Koreans in Vietnam (American Friends Service Committee, 1971).
17 The Carlyle Group's board has included George H. W Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major. Tony Geraghty, Soldiers of Fortune: A History of the Mercenary in Modern Warfare (New York: Pegasus Books, 2009), 30. Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (New York: 1991).
18 See James Carter, Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building, 1954-1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
19 See David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, rev ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); Jeremy Kuzmarov, The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009).
20 On the strength of the antiwar movement and its impact, see Marilyn B. Young, “Resisting State Terror: the Anti-Vietnam War Movement” in War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 235-251.
21 Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror: the Rogue CIA, The Legacy of America's Private Intelligence Network and the Compromising of American Intelligence (London: Carroll & Graf, 2005). For the case of Mike Echanis, a martial arts master who trained Nicaraguan commandos under Dictator Anastasio Somoza, see Jay Mallin and Robert K. Brown, Merc: American Soldiers of Fortune (New York: McMillan, 1979), 164.
22 Wilfred Burchett and Derek Roebuck, The Whores of War: Mercenaries Today (London: Penguin Books, 1977); John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York: Norton, 1978), 220, 225; Mallin and Brown, Merc, 179; Carey Winfrey, “Texan in the Rhodesian Army Says He Fights for Love, Not Money,” New York Times, September 2, 1979. Daniel Gerheart, 34, was executed by the Angolan government who called him and his comrades “dogs of war with bloodstained muzzles who left a trail of rape, murder and pillage across the face of our nation.”
23 Kathi Austin, with William Minter, Invisible Crimes: U.S. Private Intervention in the War in Mozambique (Washington, D.C.: Africa Policy Information Center, 1994), 16; Ken Silverstein, Private Warriors (London: Verso, 2000), 148. A cross-border raid by mercenaries affiliated with the Rhodesian Selous Scouts killed 1,184 “terrorists” in Manika Province, Mozambique compared to only four friendly casualties. A captain in the South African army, Mackenzie went on to work with death squad regimes in El Salvador and Sierra Leone, where his liver was eaten by RUF rebels after his capture. The Vietnam vet was part of a plan to assassinate Zimbabwe's first president Robert Mugabe.
24 See Richard Harding Davis, Real Soldiers of Fortune (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1912). MacIver's storied career included time in India as an ensign in the Sepoy mutiny, in Italy as a lieutenant under Garibaldi, in Spain as a Captain under Don Carlos, in Mexico as a Lieutenant Colonel under Emperor Maximilian, a Colonel under Napoleon III, inspector of Cavalry for the Khedive of Egypt and chief of Cavalry under the King of Serbia.
25 Thomas A. Reppetto, The Blue Parade (New York: Free Press, 1978); Howard H. Elarth, The Story of the Philippine Constabulary (Los Angeles: Globe Print Co., 1949). On the history of the constabulary, see Alfred W. McCoy's masterpiece, Policing America's Empire: The U.S., the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
26 See Lester D. Langley and Thomas Schoonover, The Banana Men: American Mercenaries and Entrepreneurs in Central America, 1880-1930 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 59, 72, 156. Davila's replacement, Manuel Bonilla awarded Zemurray 10,000 acres of banana land, allowing Zemurray to become the “uncrowned king” of Central America. Cabrera donated $10,000 to Theodore Roosevelt's presidential campaign. Christmas' counterparts Guy Molony was a political fixer in New Orleans who provided information on Nicaraguan nationalist Augusto Cesar Sandino.
27 See Burchett and Roebuck, The Whores of War; and Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana and Washington in Africa, 1961-1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); “Kwame Nkrumah Letter to British Prime-Minister,” November 19, 1964, PREM 13, 042, British National Archives, Kew Gardens, London.
28 William D. Hartung, “Mercenaries Inc.: How a U.S. Company Props Up the House of Saud,” The Progressive, April, 1996; Deborah D. Avant, The Market of Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 148; Tony Geraghty, Soldiers of Fortune: A History of the Mercenary in Modern Warfare (New York: Pegasus Books, 2009), 30. Vinnell served as a cover for CIA agents such as Wilbur Crane Eveland. On the special U.S.-Saudi relationship, see Robert Vitalis, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007).
29 Silverstein, Private Warriors, 181; Dr. J. Robert Beyster, The SAIC Solution: How We Built an $8 Billion Employee-Owned Technology Company (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 49. On Booz Hamilton, which assisted CIA counterinsurgency operations in Philippines under Edward Lansdale, see Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 182, 186. Carlucci was Deputy Director of the CIA under Jimmy Carter and a consul in the US embassy in Congo during the early 1960s where he allegedly had a role in Lumumba's murder. He was subsequently thrown out of Tanzania for plotting against the socialist government. See Francis Schor, “The Strange Career of Frank Carlucci”.
30 Ward Churchill, “The Security Industrial Complex” in The Global Industrial Complex, ed. Best et al, 53 discusses the limitations of the anti-Pinkerton bill; Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall and Jane Hunter, The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987); Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, The Illegal Arms Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987). British and American mercenaries like Jack Terrell were sent into Nicaragua to perform sabotage operations. American mercenary pilots like Adler Barriman Seal trafficked in narcotics to finance the operations as they had done in the secret war in Laos.
31 See H. Bruce Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000) and Susan Jeffords, The Remasculanization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
32 David Holthouse, “The Dark Side of Soldier of Fortune Magazine: Contract Killers and Mercenaries for Hire,” Alternet, September 15, 2011; James “Bo” Gritz, Called to Serve (New York: Lazarus, 1991). Mitchell Werbel III, a veteran of Cuban exile missions and representative of the Nugan Hand bank which was involved in intelligence financing and drug smuggling, with Frank Camper, a Vietnam Special Forces and undercover FBI officer set up a paramilitary training camp in Georgia where mercenaries were schooled in the art of assassination. See Frank Camper, Live to Spend it: A Mercenary Guide for the 1990s (El Dorado, Az: Desert Publications, 1993). Graduates went on to fight in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Lebanon, South Africa and Afghanistan. Two Sikh terrorists who had been at the school also bombed an Air India flight after Camper sold them explosives in a botched sting operation.
33 See James W. Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1994). One subscriber was Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber and a Gulf War veteran. He was found with a copy of a white supremacist magazine after the attacks distributed by Brown, a former member of the Rhodesian Selous Scouts. For insights on the right-wing paramilitary culture, see also Jerry L. Lembcke, Hanoi Jane: War, Sex & Fantasies of Betrayal (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
34 Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 15. Halliburton, contractor of Brown, Kellogg and Root (KBR), which built 85 percent of military infrastructure in Vietnam and hired former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney as its CEO, was awarded a deal for base construction and maintenance around the world. See Pratap Chatterjee, Halliburton's Army: How a Well Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War (New York: The Nation Books, 2010).
35 Leslie Wayne, “America's For Profit Secret Army: Military Contractors Are Hired to Do the Pentagon's Bidding Far From Washington's View,” New York Times, October 13, 2002, B1.
36 Singer, Corporate Warriors, 50.
37 Lynne Duke, “US Military Role in Rwanda Greater Than Disclosed,” Washington Post, August 16, 1997, A1; Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1999), 197, 200, 439; Avant, The Market for Force, 154; Steve Coll, Private Empire: Exxon-Mobil and American Power (New York: Penguin, 2012), 147-148; Boggs, “The Corporate War Economy” in The Global Industrial Complex, ed. Best, 32. Initially, the State Department rejected the MPRI contract in Equatorial Guinea, but subsequently approved it after significant petroleum reserves were discovered which it was feared would be taken over by French oil interests.
38 Avant, The Market for Force, 110;Genocide Victims of Krajina v. L-3 Communications Corp. and MPRI Inc., in the United States District Court Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
39 Wayne, “America's For Profit Secret Army,” B1; Singer, Corporate Warriors, 126; Silverstein, Private Warriors, 172; Armstrong, War PLC, 73, 74. For a critical view of “humanitarian intervention,” see David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).
40 Genocide Victims of Krajina v. L-3 Communications Corp. and MPRI Inc., in the United States District Court Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. The judge said that he was not qualified to preside over the case because the crimes occurred in Bosnia. Croat army units trained by MPRI killed 185 Serb civilians in Mrkonjic in southwestern Bosnia. See also Geraghty, Soldiers of Fortune, 175.
41 Singer, Corporate Warriors, 126; Robert Capps, “Outside the Law,” Salon, June 25, 2002; “Sex Slave Whistle-Blowers Vindicated,” Salon, August 6, 2002. DynCorp also played a role in training Kosovo's police service following the NATO bombing.
42 Singer, Corporate Warriors, 13.
43 Uri Dowbenko, Bush Whacked: Inside Stories of True Conspiracy (National Liberty Press, 2003); Gretchen Morgenson, “Sticky Scandals, Teflon Directors,” New York Times, January 29, 2006, B1.
44 Tim Weiner, “Clinton Chooses Retired General to be CIA Head,” New York Times, February 8, 1995, A1. A decorated Vietnam Air Force veteran, Carns was appointed to the Board of Thickol Corporation, a leading missile manufacturer, two weeks after his retirement. His nomination was blocked because he had violated labor laws in hiring a Filipino maid. Other DynCorp Board members included Russel E. Dougherty, a former chief of staff of the allied command of Europe and Dudley Mecum, former managing director of Citigroup. For a profile of Woolsey, see Laura Rozen, “James Woolsey, Hybrid Hawk” Mother Jones, May/June 2008.
45 Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1996 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1999), 339; Silverstein, Private Warriors, 184; Ted Galen Carpenter, Bad Neighbor Policy: America's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2003), 54.
46 Priest andArkin, Top Secret America, 188; Stanger, One Nation Under Contract, 2.
47 See Matt Kennard, Irregular Army: How the How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror (London: Verso, 2012).
48 Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, 278; Camillo Mejia, The Road from Ar Ramadi: The Private Rebellion of Staff Sergeant Mejía: An Iraq War Memoir (New York: The New Press, 2007).
49 John M. Broder and David Rhode, “State Department Use of Contractors Leaps in 4 Years,” New York Times, October 24, 2007;Mark Mazetti, “Blackwater Loses a Job for the CIA,” New York Times, December 12, 2009; Robert Y. Pelton, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006).
50 Faniaru, Bad Boy Rules, 140.
51 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 182, 186; Shorrock, Spies for Hire; Anne Hagedorn, The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014); James Glanz, “Contractors Outnumber U.S. Troops in Afghanistan,” New York Times, September 2, 2009; Moshe Schwartz and Jennifer Church, “Department of Defense's Use of Contractors to Support Military Operations,” Congressional Research Service, May 17, 2013.
52 Shorrock, Spies for Hire, 52, 53; Shane Harris, The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State (New York: The Penguin Press, 2010). In 1995, in a second act of his career, Admiral Poindexter, a nuclear physicist by training, went to work in the private sector developing computer surveillance and data mining technology and was hired by the Pentagon after 9/11. Though pushed out of government by 2003 because his views were considered too extreme, his system became the basis for NSA warrantless surveillance programs. Poindexter continued to advise government leaders and sat on the board of Saffron, a Pentagon contractor which developed memory technology used to track the insurgency in Iraq and predict where IEDs would be located, and which Poindexter believes will help revolutionize intelligence analysis.
53 For a historical perspective, see Jerry Sanders. Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment(Boston: South End Press, 1999) and Edward S. Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan, The ‘Terrorism’ Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
54 Solomon Hughes, War on Terror, Inc: Corporate Profiteering From the Politics of Fear (London: Verso, 2007), 14-19; Herman and O'Sullivan, The ‘Terrorism’ Industry, 129, 130, 131. Wackenhut consisted of many John Birchers and had on its board Frank Carlucci III, William Raborn, former CIA director, and Clarence Kelley a former director of the FBI. Several members of the company engaged in a scheme to kidnap the US ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin Corr, and blame it on the leftist FMLN in a classic black flag operation. Jefferson Morley, “The Vanishing Kidnap Plot,” The Nation, July 30-August 6, 1988.
55 See Steve Fainaru and Alec Klein, “In Iraq, a Private Realm of Intelligence Gathering,”Washington Post, July 1, 2007; Armstrong, War PLC, 43, 54, 160; Hughes, War on Terror, Inc., 103-105; Adam Roberts, The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs, and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an oil Rich Corner of Africa (New York: Public Affairs, 2006). Aegis also won a major contract to protect the Green Zone. Winston Churchill's grandson, the conservative MP Nicholas Soames, was on its board. McFarlane admitted to obtaining millions from Saudi Prince Bandar to illegally finance Contra operations.
56 Armstrong, War PLC, 151, 152; Hughes, War on Terror Inc, 149, 163; David Isenberg, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq (New York: Praeger, 2008), 96.
57 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules.
58 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules, 19; Geraghty, Soldiers of Fortune, 199.
59 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules, 19.
60 Dina Rasor and Robert Bauman, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2008), 127; Isenberg, Shadow Force, 87.
61 Bacevich, Breach of Trust, 132, 133. Some believe that Westhusing, a military ethicist was murdered as a means of keeping the allegations which the army denied secret much as they believe Pat Tillman, who had turned against the war in Afghanistan, was “fragged” by members of his unit to prevent him from becoming a whistleblower.
62 Hughes, War on Terror, Inc., 24; Janis Karpinski, One Woman's Army: The Commanding General of Abu Ghraib Tells Her Story (Miramax Books, 2006). According to Karpinski, Deland and his colleagues photographed themselves sitting on “piles of cash” about the size of a “barbecue” and holding a “fistful of dollars,” with more bills sticking out of their pockets. The money came partly from Iraqi oil receipts allegedly. On SAIC see Beyster, The SAIC Solution. One of the defense secretary's on its board was Robert Gates.
63 Shorrock, Spies for Hire, 15, 281; Isenberg, Shadow Force, 115; Mark Benjamin and Michael Scherer, “The Abu Ghraib Files,” Salon, March 14, 2006; “Big Steve and Abu Ghraib,” Salon, March 16, 2006. CACI employee Daniel Johnson allegedly directed a subordinate to abuse detainees and “put his hand over the month of [an uncooperative prisoner] to stop his breathing.” The other main culprit “Big Steve” Stefanowicz allegedly gave orders to Charles Granger which led ultimately to Granger's prosecution though he himself was never fired from CACI, or prosecuted by the DOJ. Armitage was a former CIA agent linked to covert operations in drugs in Indochina and Central Asia and illegal weapons transfers to the Contras while serving as Reagan's assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security affairs. In 1984, he was investigated by the national commission on organized crime for links to gambling and prostitution.
64 See James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2014), 65, 66; Mike Unger, “How Jack London Built CACI into a Billion Dollar Defense Behemoth,” Smart CEO. Son of an Oklahoma Sooner, London served with U.S. Navy “hunter-killer” task forces arrayed against the Soviet Union's strategic nuclear submarine threat during the era of the Cuban missile crisis, and was an aide to a top naval commander during the Vietnam War. He penned a defense of CACI after the Abu Ghraib scandal, Our Good Name (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2008).CACI was founded in 1962 by RAND Corporation analysts Herb Karr and Harry Markowitz who in 1990 won the Nobel Prize for economics. Operating under the slogan “ever vigilant,” CACI was awarded multi-million dollar contracts for developing censor technology for the U.S. army and digital mapping services and a $62.5 million contract for counter-narcotics operations in Afghanistan in 2014.
65 See Robert Jay Lifton, Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans Neither Victims Nor Executioners (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973).
66 See Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Holt, 2000) and Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity after World War II (New York: Routledge, 2006), 96-102.
67 Bruce Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989), 686, 707.
68 Nick Turse, ‘Kill Anything that Moves:‘ The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 206-207, 211; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
69 See Iraq Veterans Against the War, with Aaron Glantz, Winter Soldier: Afghanistan and Iraq: Eyewitness Accounts (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008); Chris Hedges and Laila al Arian, Collateral Damage: America's War Against Iraqi Civilians (New York: The Nation Books, 2009).
70 Mark Mazetti, “Panel Faults CIA Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Interrogations,” New York Times, December 9, 2014. On the historic adoption of torture by the CIA, see Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation From the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
71 An example would be the French foreign legion which was accused of burning Algerians in ovens during the brutal colonial war there among other transgressions. See Douglas Porch, The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (New York: Skyhorse, 2010).
72 Douglas Wissing, Funding the Enemy: How US Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban (New York: Prometheus Books, 2012), 119.
73 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules, 23.
74 Rasor and Bauman, Betraying Our Troops, 60.
75 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules, 51, 195.
76 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules, 73.
77 Priest and Arkin, Top Secret America, 188; Shorrock, Spies for Hire, 21; Wissing, Funding the Enemy, 100; T. Christian Miller, Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives and Corporate Greed in Iraq (Boston: Little & Brown, 2006). Kyle Foggo was the CIA's number three executive, and Randy Cunningham, the California Congressman taken down. Corruption was pervasive among U.S. army officers charged with handling millions of dollars flown in from the New York Federal Reserve on secret flights to Baghdad. Risen, Pay Any Price, 12, 13.
78 Wissing, Funding the Enemy, 62, 244, 245; John Tierney, Warlord Inc.: Extortion and Corruption Along the US Supply Chain in Afghanistan, Report of the Majority Staff, Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, U.S. Senate, June 2010.
79 Wissing, Funding the Enemy, 193; Aram Rostom, “How the U.S. Funds the Taliban,” The Nation, November 11, 2009; Rasor and Bauman, Betraying Our Troops; Jean Mackenzie, “Funding the Afghan Taliban,” GlobalPost, August 7, 2009; Tierney, Warlord Inc.
80 Chatterjee, Halliburton's Army, 192; Rasor and Bauman, Betraying Our Troops, 145; Stanger, One Nation Under Contract, 3; Hughes, War on Terror, Inc., 89.
81 Van Buren, We Meant Well, 42; Risen, Pay Any Price. Ugandans, many of them former child soldiers, for example were subcontracted to guard US military facilities because they were paid far less than Americans, while Bangladeshis worked in food and laundry services.
82 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules, 55.
83 Robert Mackey, “Taliban Blames ‘Blackwater’ for Pakistani Bombs,” New York Times, November 17, 2009. The CIA has long promoted these kinds of operations. See Daniele Ganser, NATOs Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Routledge, 2005).
84 Pelton, Licensed to Kill, 249; David Rhode, “Portrait of a US Vigilante in Afghanistan,” New York Times, July 11, 2004, N4; Peter Bergen, “The Shadow Warrior: Jack Idema: How Did a Convicted Con Man and Former Special Forces Soldier End Up in an Afghan Prison?” Rolling Stone, May 2005.
85 “Pentagon Boss Set Up His Own Army of Jason Bourne Spies to Hunt Islamic Extremists,” London Daily Mail, March 16, 2010; Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazetti, “Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants,” New York Times, March 14, 2010.
86 Mark Mazetti, “Former Spy With Agenda Operates a Private CIA,” New York Times, January 22, 2011. See also Mazetti, The Way of the Knife: The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 2014). Now in his early 80s, Clarridge came to run his own intelligence agency from his comfortable home in San Diego and was at one point hired to assist in the recapture of New York Times journalist Daniel Pearl and to find POW Bowe Bergdahl in Taliban captivity.
87 Jeremy Scahill, “The Secret U.S. War in Pakistan,” The Nation, November 23, 2009; Mark Mazetti, “CIA Sought Blackwater's Help to Kill Jihadists,” New York Times, August 19, 2009. DynCorp was also given a contract to protect Pakistani diplomats, prompting concerns among local officials that it was being used as a cover for the development of a parallel intelligence structure. Jane Perlez, “U.S. Push to Expand in Pakistan Meets Resistance,” New York Times, October 6, 2009.
88 Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield (New York: The Nation Books, 2013), 415; Mark Mazetti, “How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the U.S.,” New York Times, April 9, 2013.
89 Scahill, Blackwater, 59, 60; Chatterjee, Iraq Inc., 129. Receiving six figure salaries, employees were recruited from all over the world, including from the armed forces of repressive regimes like Augusto Pinochet's Chile.
90 Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2014), 235; Matthew Hastings, The Operators (Blue Rider Press, 2012); Shorrock, Spies for Hire, 118. An Achakzai who targeted the rival Noorzai, Raziq profited from the regional opium trade and bragged about not taking any prisoners alive.
91 Scahill, Blackwater, 13, 169; Simmons, Master of War; Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Dana Hedgpeth, “Building Blackwater,” The Washington Post, October 13, 2007.
92 Scahill, Blackwater, 20.
93 Scahill, Blackwater, 16.
94 Scahill, Blackwater, 21; John F. Burns, “Risky Business: The Deadly Game of Private Security,” New York Times, September 23, 2007.
95 Fainaru, Bad Boy Rules, 140.
96 Simons, Master of War; “The Blackwater Verdict: Finally Some Accountability for a Massacre in Iraq,” The Nation, November 17, 2014, 4.
97 Simon Chesterman, “Blackwater and the Limits to Outsourcing Security,” New York Times, November 13, 2009; Andrew Feinstein, The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade (New York: Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2011), 409. Incredibly Joseph Schmitz, Blackwater's General Counsel was in 2010 given a contract to monitor the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction's (SIGAR) efforts to alleviate deficiencies in its investigations division.
98 “A Verdict on Blackwater,” New York Times, October 22, 2014; Scahill, Blackwater, 3, 56; Mark Mazetti and James Risen, “Blackwater Said to Pursue Bribes to Iraq After 17 Died,” New York Times, November 11, 2009.
99 “The Blackwater Verdict: Finally, Some Accountability for a massacre in Iraq,” The Nation, November 17, 2014, 4.
100 On failure to hold Bush administration officials for torture and other war crimes and its consequence, see Alfred W. McCoy, Torture and Impunity: The CIAs Coercive Interrogation Doctrine (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).
101 Churchill, “The Security Industrial Complex,” in The Global Industrial Complex, ed. Best et al., 67; Scahill, Blackwater, 321, 327-330; James Ridegway, “The Secret History of Hurricane Katrina,” Mother Jones, August 2009. On the militarization of domestic police forces generally, see Radley Balko, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces (New York: Public Affairs, 2013).
102 James Risen, “Blackwater Reaches Deal on U.S. Export Violations,” New York Times, August 20, 2010; Feinstein, The Shadow World, 409.
103 Mark Mazetti and Emily Hager, “Secret Desert Forces Set up by Blackwater's Founder,” New York Times, May 14, 2011. The UAE contract was supported by the Obama administration. A spokesman commented that “the Gulf countries and U.A.E. in particular don't have a lot of military experience. It would make sense of they looked outside their borders for help. They might want to show they are not to be messed with.” A company run by former counter-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke also won several lucrative contracts to protect the kingdom's infrastructure.
104 Keith Johnson, “Mercenary Secrets Revealed,” American Free Press; Michael B. Kelley, “Hacked Stratfor Emails: The U.S. Government Sent Blackwater Vets to Fight in Libya and Syria,” Business Insider, March 20, 2102.
105 See James Glanz, “Security Guard Kills Iraq Driver: Eyewitnesses Say Taxi Posed No Threat,” New York Times, November 12, 2007, A1 and on police training and its pitfalls, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), conclusion.
106 Risen, Pay Any Price, 65, 66. Robert McKeon, the owner of the private equity firm which bought out DynCorp, Veritas Capital, committed suicide in 2012 just two years after scoring one of the biggest paydays from the War on Terror. On DynCorp misdeeds, see Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle, Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror: U.S. Imperialism and Class Struggle in Colombia (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 4; Silverstein, Private Warriors, 185; September 24, 2009, from the State Department in Washington to the US Embassy in Bogota, BLUE LANTERN: VERIFYING BONA FIDES OF REGISTERED BROKER FERNANDO LOPEZ -CASE NO. K-2547.
107 Isenberg, Shadow Force, 91–94; Wissing, Funding the Enemy, 123; Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, conclusion. Between 2005 and 2009, DynCorp also received over $1 billion to help run the War on Drugs in Latin America, performing intelligence functions and training police and army units. At one point it employed as a subcontractor a company that had run arms to the contras for Oliver North. Counter-Narcotics Contracts in Latin America, Hearings Before the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, U.S. Senate, 111th Congress, 2nd Session, May 20, 2010.
108 Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (London: Verso, 2007) 194; Robert Cole, Under the Gun in Iraq: My Year Training the Iraqi Police, as told to Jan Hogan (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2007), 60–61; (Enemy Action) Direct Fire RPT (Small Arms)_West/SE_IP:_ISF KIA_CIV KIA_UE KIA; “Drive By Shooting on Police, Vic Ar Ramadi,” January 3, 2004; “Attack on Police Chief and Bodyguard,” January 17, 2004; and “Attack on Haditha Police Station,” January 27, 2004, www.wikileaks.org. Over 100 DynCorp employees are estimated to have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars.
109 Cole, Under the Gun in Iraq, 60–61. See also Mark R. Depue, Patrolling Baghdad: A Military Police Company and the War in Iraq (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
110 See e.g. David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York: Hailer, 2005).
111 On the latter point, see Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of the Spectacle (New York: The Nation Books, 2010).
112 See Turse, The Changing Face of Empire; Risen, Pay Any Price.
113 See Noam Chomsky, Profits over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order, rev ed. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011); Boggs, “The Corporate War Economy” in The Global Industrial Complex.
114 Rasor and Bauman, Betraying Our Troops, 172.
115 Rasor and Bauman, Betraying Our Troops, 168, 171. Since 2000, Halliburton has spent $4.6 million buying influence via donations and lobbying, with its board of directors and their spouses giving $828,701 to congressional and presidential candidate. They have gotten an important return on their investment: In 2005, the company received almost $6 billion in federal contracts.
116 Armstrong, War PLC, 83; J.P. Zenger, “Blackwater USA Funding PA Green Party,” Philadelphia Daily News, October 19, 2006.
117 David Vine, “We're Profiteers” How Military Contractors Reap Billions from U.S. Military Bases Overseas,“ Monthly Review (July-August 2014), 97; Beyster, The SAIC Solution; 177; Harris, The Watchers. On the corruption of democracy, see Jonathan Nichols and Robert McChesney, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America (New York: The Nation Books, 2013). Beyster, a Republican also worked as a physicist at General Atomic (GA – developer of drones). Employing major scientific brainpower, SAIC has had contracts with the DOD, Homeland Security, NSA, Department of Energy, NASA, British Petroleum (BP) and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a descendant from the Manhattan project which studies nuclear technology. SAIC is involved in medical research, developed weather forecasting systems, pioneered nuclear disposal technology and created a robotic censor that can detect and destroy IEDs as well as iris scans and fingerprint readers among other innovations. An NSA inspector found that the surveillance program run by SAIC known as Trailblazer, which had built on John Poindexter's system in mining personal records, was an abject failure; it suffered from ”inadequate management“ and oversight of private contractors and overpayment for the work that was done, and that SAIC did not provide the proper technical expertise.
118 Scott, American War Machine, 184, 186; Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele, “Washington's $8 Billion Shadow,” Vanity Fair, March 2007. See also Herman and O'Sullivan, The ‘Terrorism’ Industry. The employee Dr. Steven Hatfill had previously worked at the army's biological warfare center at Fort Detrick, Maryland. SAIC also served as paymaster for a secret Pentagon program run by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that supported Iraqi exiles who backed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Three company members including Gordon Oehler, an ex-CIA man, were later part of a Pentagon commission on the WMDs in Iraq which kept away from the issue of whether senior policymakers deliberately manipulated intelligence.
119 Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008) is an excellent study on the military complex though pays short shrift to PMCs and their unprecedented influence.
120 William Hartung, “Bush Military Budget Highest Since World War II,” February 10, 2007, Common Dreams.
121 Nicolas J.S. Davies, “From Ohlendorf to Obama,” Z Magazine, September 2013. Obama's mother and stepfather may have had strong connections to the Pentagon and CIA during its operations in Indonesia under the Suharto dictatorship and Obama worked for a CIA outfit which provided research analysis after graduating from Columbia University. See Wayne Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President: The CIA's Insertion of Barrack Obama Jr. Into the White House (self published, 2012).
122 Hagedorn, The Invisible Soldiers, 246; Adam Weinstein, “Wikileaks Goes Inside Corporate America's Wannabe CIA,” Mother Jones, February 27, 2012. Emails hacked by an affiliate of Wikileaks revealed the importance of one firm, Strategic Forecasting Inc. a geopolitical intelligence and consulting firm founded by neoconservative political science professor George Friedman which functions as a “shadow CIA.” Its wide ranging activities included spying on Occupy Wall Street activists under a contract with the Department of Homeland Security.
123 On PMCs and the war on drugs, see Christopher Hobson, “Privatizing the War on Drugs,” Third World Quarterly, 35, 8 (December 2014).
124 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Everyman Library, 1994), 4: 117-127.
125 Alfred W. McCoy, “Fatal Florescence: Europe's Decolonization and America's Decline in Endless Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse and America's Decline, ed. Alfred W. McCoy, Joseph M. Fradera and Stephen Jacobson (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), 3-43. The U.S. was at the peak of its power in geopolitical, economic and financial terms in 1945, and its hegemonic position in all these areas subsequently declined.
126 For a future vision, see Francis Goldin et al. Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA (New York: Harper, 2013).
127 “The Blackwater Verdict: Finally, Some Accountability for a Massacre in Iraq,” The Nation, November 17, 2014, 4.
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