By PHK
Not every cloud has a silver lining but the Blackwater contingent’s shoot-em-up at Baghdad’s Nisour Square on September 16, 2007, may be one that does.
Could this turn out to be one of those unanticipated but defining events that signal an about-face in how the American public views the hollowing out of the federal government and the take-over by the private sector of functions public servants – whether civilian or military - once did? Or not.
Having overseen contracts to private sector US international educational exchange organizations – among the most innocuous and smallest of federal government work outsourced – I shudder to think of the enormity of the problems connected with military and security contractors. How could an over-stretched, shrunken bureaucracy fraught with politicized inspector generals and too many other politically connected incompetents begin to hold accountable the work of powerful administration-connected contractors operating in a war zone apparently governed by Wild West law?
Kudos to the Waxman Committee for holding the October 2, 2007, hearings on Blackwater and the various news media for covering them.
This public scrutiny needs to continue.
House Committee members raised far more questions about Blackwater and its operations than were answered – but that’s as it should be. The more people with clout who demand answers, the more likely the contours of this murky swamp will be revealed. Draining might be useful too.
The fact that the US government is now conducting multiple investigations: three by the State Department, one by the FBI (which could lead to criminal charges) and another by the Pentagon indicate lax oversight and questionable judicial accountability of all private security contractors working in Iraq regardless of agency since the 2003 invasion.
The high-level State Department review team which Ambassador Patrick Kennedy heads has recommended that the Department “place its own diplomatic security agents in all Blackwater convoys, mount video cameras in Blackwater vehicles and record all radio transmissions to ensure an ‘objective’ record.” How practical this will be to implement is another question. Yet, without an about-face in the whole contracting out approach to government particularly with respect to security guards - what else are the options?
Over 800 Blackwater security guards currently work for the Department in Iraq. State’s office of Diplomatic Security (D/S) in Iraq contains only 36 of its own employees. The WaPo reported that there are about 1,400 State Department D/S employees worldwide. The New York Times wrote that D/S numbered 1,450. Regardless of the precise figure, it’s clear that the Department’s own security officers could not take over for Blackwater any time soon: there are not enough of them. After all, they have to cover over 240 US Embassies and Consulates around the world plus Washington Headquarters.
Kennedy’s team has suggested that the close monitoring of Blackwater convoys would require double the number of State’s own security agents. Rice has agreed to the team’s recommendations as indicated above. Where the additional D/S agents will come from and where the funds will be found to support even this enhanced presence remains a mystery. The additional costs to the public should be subtracted from the Blackwater contract – but I’m skeptical that will happen any time soon.
At least one US Representative thinks that all private security guards in Iraq should be replaced with federal government employees – but that would be even more difficult to implement in the short run. As various news reports have pointed out, State Department’s overseas security was outsourced to a group of private security firms – Blackwater in the lead - a couple of years ago. According to what I’ve read, this is an umbrella contract that covers about 27 Embassies. If anyone has unearthed the amount dedicated to Blackwater’s Iraq operation please let me know – the breakdowns seem to be trickling out as rapidly as cold molasses in a Vermont winter.
If Blackwater costs the Department $1,222 per day per American guard – as was disclosed last week in a State report to Congress – then this amounts to about $977,600 per day or $11,731,200 per year. As The New York Times and others point out, this equates to six to nine times the pay for a sergeant in the US military or as Walter Pincus of The Washington Post wrote - less than half of that paid to General David H. Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq who oversees more than 160,000 troops. How could Blackwater's contract possibly be cost effective?
But these figures are clearly just the tip of an enormous iceberg. The nearly $12 million per year for Blackwater contract guards in Iraq - out of a total of $473 million per year for Blackwater services world wide from State's umbrella contract – according to Richard Griffin, head of D/S, leaves a lot unaccounted for.
How much of the remaining $461 million goes to the Iraq operation is obscure. How much is charged for overhead, for example? Non-American security guard protection? What about the costs of supplies, ammunition, weapons, protective armor, food, housing, transportation, vehicles? What else is missing? Training? Upkeep of a compound rimmed by concrete blast walls and concertina wire in the center of the Green Zone as reported by The New York Times on September 28? How much goes to support Blackwater's head Eric Prince in the manner to which he has become accustomed? And how does this compare with Blackwater’s fees to the Defense Department for the approximately 7,300 private security guards it supplies them?
Why do the breakdowns remain a secret?
Could State cancel the contract based on Blackwater’s bad behavior and use the funds to increase the size and responsibilities of D/S? Or would this be advisable? After all, the number of D/S personnel is already double that of all of State’s approximately 700 public diplomacy officers – posted at home and abroad.
Or might those funds be better transferred to the Pentagon – after all the US Marines have proudly guarded US Embassies and Consulates for decades. But if so, would the Pentagon be able to produce the requisite additional security guards for State given its own personnel shortages? Or maybe, if State shrank the over all size of its mission in Iraq – since it doesn’t seem to be able to do much of what diplomats should be doing anyway – fewer guards would be required and the costs and numbers could thereby be reduced.
Meanwhile, a Pentagon review of Blackwater’s activities which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates initiated two weeks ago in a faster-than-Condi-off-the-mark response to the Nisour Square tragedy also found inadequate US military monitoring of the 7,300 private security contractors operating in Iraq under the military’s own contractual arrangements.
So it’s not only the State Department that has been remiss.
It’s heartening that both the State Department and the Pentagon have finally been made to see that run amok private security guards are detrimental to US policies and interests in Iraq. The Maliki government has been trying to tell them that for some time – but both bureaucracies seem to have had tin ears. Whether murdering innocent Iraqi civilians in the center of Baghdad or running them off the highway and into a wall en route to Irbil – as described by a former US Embassy Iraq political officer in The Los Angeles Times over the weekend – is just plain repugnant.
But why the lax oversight on the parts of both State and Defense – and why for so long?
My guess is that much relates to the politicization of Inspectors General throughout the federal government under the W administration. This more than 25 year old institution was established to keep a lid on executive branch waste, fraud and mismanagement and it worked pretty well. That is – until W.
Such politicization, as Congressman Henry Waxman pointed out in his October 21, 2004, report, runs counter to the Congressional requirement that IGs be nonpartisan and that they be appointed “solely on the basis of integrity and demonstrated ability” in areas such as accounting and financial analysis.” It also runs counter to the mostly non-partisan IG appointments made by President Clinton, W’s predecessor.
It didn’t take much Googling to discover that both the Department of Defense and the State Department have been fraught with inept, politically-directed Inspector Generals under the Bush II administration.
Pentagon IGs
In September 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported that Joseph E. Schmitz, then Pentagon Inspector General, resigned under a cloud “amid accusations that he stonewalled inquiries into senior Bush administration officials suspected of wrong doing.” Schmitz, the son of the conservative Republican Congressman from Orange County, had been a private sector lawyer before his IG appointment in 2002 – not a profession normally known for skill in either accounting or financial analysis. Upon leaving the Pentagon, Schmitz immediately went on to work for Blackwater as its General Counsel. He is now COO and general counsel for the Prince Group, Blackwater's parent company. DOD was then left with no IG for an office of 1,250 military and civilian officials, according to the Washington Post in 2006. This was in part because the Senate stalled confirmation of yet another questionable political light-weight nominated by W.
In the interim, the office was headed by acting IG Thomas F. Gimble, a Pentagon careerist, who himself came under strong criticism because his office had no personnel on the ground in Iraq despite the “hundreds of billions of dollars being spent in there.” Since then a “handful of auditors and inspectors have been rotating into Iraq from an office in Qatar.” Gimble was also accused of not “delving into the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program.”
The current Pentagon IG Claude M. Kicklighter, a retired US Army Lieutenant General with a lengthy and impressive military record and various stints elsewhere, was only confirmed on April 30, 2007.
Krongard at State
My guess is that the appointment of the current and controversial Howard J. (Cookie) Krongard as Inspector General of the State Department represents another part of the problem. He, after all, is reputed to be close to former career CIA officer Cofer Black who would have been close to Krongard’s brother Buzzy when he worked apparently as a political appointee at the CIA. Both Buzzy and Black left the CIA when Porter Goss became its director in 2002.
Black left after heading the CTC (Counter Terrorism Center) to which he had been appointed by George Tenet in 1999. Black then served as Coordinator for Counter Terrorism - a “roving Ambassador at large” at the State Department from 2002-4.
Black became a Blackwater Vice President in 2005 and is now listed as a member of the board. He formed his own company Total Intelligence Solutions (TIS), and has recently become a consultant to presidential hopeful Mitt Romney. TIS, according to the investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, is apparently bankrolled by Eric Prince – Blackwater’s founder.
Meanwhile, there’s much more on Krongard, a private sector lawyer from Baltimore, who earned his State Department position because of who, not what, he knows. Krongard is now under investigation by the House Government Oversight Committee on a variety of charges including mistreatment of staff as well as threatened by a restraining order by his son and daughter-in-law.
But in the end, this all just represents a few pieces of the tangled web of deceit, incompetence, nepotism, cronyism and mismanagement which the Bush administration has spawned that demands the light of day.