Third world warriors fight U.S. wars - for dollars a day

[sabra]

Source: Salt Lake Trib

Honduran soldier was among thousands who stood guard over Baghdad embassy, but couldn't legally enter United States.

With U.S. forces stretched thin in Iraq, private security companies have swept in to fill the void. But abuses of third-world security workers abound. And in many cases, those helping to fight our wars can't even cross our borders.

For one year, Mario Urquia guarded the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, protecting American service members and diplomats in one of the most dangerous places in the world.
Now Urquia is living on the edge of homelessness in Ogden - illegal in the nation he once stood to protect.

While the circumstances that led to Urquia's illegal entry into the United States are unusual, the factors that resulted in his deployment to Iraq are not. He is just one of thousands of individuals from impoverished nations recruited to help fight a war for the richest country in the world.
Human rights advocates say it's exploitation. United Nations officials say it's a violation of international law.

But the U.S. government says that, at a time when its military is stretched so thin, third-world security contractors will be standing guard over U.S. facilities for a long time to come.


Read more: http://www.sltrib.com/News/ci_7614726

[annabanana]

1. And we can trust them not to "go native" because. . .

?

(That's a question for the bozos who think this is a good solution. You know, the ones that think we're there for a reason that makes sense.)

[Joanne98]

2. We have our own "French Foreign Legion"

[tom_paine]

3. How is that different from our Third World warriors, both in our Third World Military

and our Third World mercenaries?

Imperial Amerika, since 2000, is a Third World Country. It's Subjects have the same say in national governance (after the bullshit window dressing of lies is tsripped away) and the same rights (or lack of them). The only difference between Amerika, richest of the Third World and our other Third World brethren, is that our tyrants don't have to be violent to control us, though this may change if the slightest resistance is shown to Bushie Criminals.

Then the Bushies will pay these Third Worlders from other Third World nations to come and kill US for dollars a day.

[stillcool]

4. How do they know who is who?

A Very Private War
By Jeremy Scahill
Guardian August 1, 2007
There are now 630 companies working in Iraq on contract for the US government, with personnel from more than 100 countries offering services ranging from cooking and driving to the protection of high-ranking army officers. Their 180,000 employees now outnumber America's 160,000 official troops. The precise number of mercenaries is unclear, but last year, a US government report identified 48,000 employees of private military/security firms.
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While precise data on the extent of American spending on mercenary services is nearly impossible to obtain, Congressional sources say that the US has spent at least $6bn (£3bn) in Iraq, while Britain has spent some £200m. Like America, Britain has used private security from firms like ArmorGroup to guard Foreign Office and International Development officials in Iraq. Other British firms are used to protect private companies and media, but UK firms do their biggest business with Washington. The single largest US contract for private security in Iraq has for years been held by the British firm Aegis, headed by Tim Spicer, the retired British lieutenant-colonel who was implicated in the Arms to Africa scandal of the late 1990s, when weapons were shipped to a Sierra Leone militia leader during a weapons embargo. Aegis's Iraq contract - essentially coordinating the private military firms in Iraq - was valued at approximately $300m (£1147m) and drew protests from US competitors and lawmakers.
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But the mercenary forces are also diversifying geographically: in Latin America, the massive US firm DynCorp is operating in Colombia, Bolivia and other countries as part of the "war on drugs" - US defence contractors are receiving nearly half the $630m in US military aid for Colombia; in Africa, mercenaries are deploying in Somalia, Congo and Sudan and increasingly have their sights set on tapping into the hefty UN peacekeeping budget; inside the US, private security staff now outnumber official law enforcement. Heavily armed mercenaries were deployed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, while there are proposals to privatise the US border patrol. Brooks, the private military industry lobbyist, says people should not become "overly obsessed with Iraq", saying his association's member companies "have more personnel working in UN and African Union peace operations than all but a handful of countries".
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/contract/2007/0801privatewar.htm

UN on the Offensive Against Iraq Mercenaries
By Daniela Estrada and Gustavo González
Inter Press Service
July 13, 2007

Mercenary recruitment agencies that send former soldiers to Iraq have been accused in Chile of human right abuses, illegal association, possession of explosives and unauthorised use of army weaponry, and are the target of a special United Nations mission.
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Navarro said that U.S. private security companies such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, who recruit guards at the request of the U.S. government to send into armed conflict zones to protect strategic installations, tend to subcontract to South American firms like Red Táctica Consulting Group. The owner of the Washington-based Red Táctica is José Miguel Pizarro, a retired general of the Chilean army who lives in the U.S. He is also known as a commentator on Iraq security issues for the U.S. news service CNN. Pizarro had at first agreed to meet with the UN mission in Santiago, but later changed his mind, saying that Gómez del Prado is not impartial and has taken an "anti-American" stance, according to Gómez del Prado himself.
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Chile has been a country of concern to the UNWG since 2004, when it was reported that 124 former Chilean soldiers were in Iraq. Sources in Santiago estimate that there are currently 500 Chilean mercenaries there, while Navarro says there are 1,000. The university experts at the meeting said that Chile has copious legislation on private security services, but mercenaries are not outlawed, so that it is essential for the country to ratify the UN Convention and adjust its domestic legislation accordingly.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/nations/sovereign/military/0713iraq.htm

The corporate takeover of U.S. intelligence
The U.S. government now outsources a vast portion of its spying operations to private firms -- with zero public accountability.
By Tim Shorrock

Jun. 01, 2007 | More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.
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U.S. intelligence budgets are classified, and all discussions about them in Congress are held in secret. Much of the information, however, is available to intelligence contractors, who are at liberty to lobby members of Congress about the budgets, potentially skewing policy in favor of the contractors. For example, Science Applications International Corp., one of the nation's largest intelligence contractors, spent $1,330,000 in their congressional lobbying efforts in 2006, which included a focus on the intelligence and defense budgets, according to records filed with the Senate's Office of Public Records.

The public, of course, is completely excluded from these discussions. "It's not like a debate when someone loses," said Aftergood. "There is no debate. And the more work that migrates to the private sector, the less effective congressional oversight is going to be." From that secretive process, he added, "there's only a short distance to the Duke Cunninghams of the world and the corruption of the process in the interest of private corporations." In March 2006, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., who had resigned from Congress several months earlier, was sentenced to eight years in prison after being convicted of accepting more than $2 million in bribes from executives with MZM, a prominent San Diego defense contractor. In return for the bribes, Cunningham used his position on the House appropriations and intelligence committees to win tens of millions of dollars' worth of contracts for MZM at the CIA and the Pentagon's CIFA office, which has been criticized by Congress for spying on American citizens. The MZM case deepened earlier this month when Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the former deputy director of the CIA, was indicted for conspiring with former MZM CEO Brent Wilkes to steer contracts toward the company.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/01/intel_contractors/

George Tenet cashes in on Iraq
The former CIA chief is earning big money from corporations profiting off the war -- a fact not mentioned in his combative new book or heard on his publicity blitz.
By Tim Shorrock
Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA's hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet's closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.
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The company with the closest ties to the CIA -- and the biggest potential financial payoff for Tenet -- is L-1 Identity Solutions, the nation's biggest player in biometric identification. L-1's software, which can store millions of ID records based on fingerprints and eye and facial characteristics, helps the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence "in the fight against terrorism by providing technology for insurgent registration combatant identification," the company says. L-1 technology is also employed by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for U.S. passports, visas, drivers' licenses and transportation worker ID cards. L-1 clearly hired Tenet for the business he could secure at the CIA. "We want the board to contribute in a meaningful way to the success of the company," CEO Bob LaPenta told analysts during an earnings conference call last year. "You know, we're interested in the CIA, and we have George Tenet."
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Last October, Tenet continued to profit from the defense industry by joining the board of directors of QinetiQ Group PLC. QinetiQ, whose name draws from the fictional British spook who made the gadgets in the James Bond movies, moved aggressively into the U.S. market in 2003 after a majority of its voting stock was acquired by the Carlyle Group. (Carlyle sold off its remaining shares in February, making a $470 million profit on its original investment.)

Here, too, Tenet is profiting from involvement in Iraq and the broader war on terror. QinetiQ's recent acquisitions in the U.S. market include defense contractor Foster Miller Inc., which makes the so-called TALON robots used by U.S. forces in Iraq to neutralize IEDs. QinetiQ also controls Analex Corp., an information technology and engineering company that earns 70 percent of its revenue from the Pentagon. Among the clients listed on Analex's Web site are the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the nation's spy satellites, and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office -- a secretive agency that has been criticized by members of Congress for collecting intelligence on American antiwar activists.
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In a statement TAC released when Tenet was appointed to that company's board last year, Tenet said he would help the company "address critical needs as government and industry work together to fight terrorism." Serving with Tenet on the advisory board there are Alan Wade, Tenet's former chief information officer, and John P. Young, a former CIA senior analyst. TAC is a privately held company and no public information is available regarding compensation for its board members. But between the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and 2006, the company's income quintupled, from less than $5 million in 2001 to $24 million in 2006.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/05/07/tenet_money/index1.html

Silent Surge in Contractor 'Armies'
By Brad Knickerbocker
Christian Science Monitor
July 18, 2007
In Iraq, up to 180,000 contractors

Estimates of the number of private security personnel and other civilian contractors in Iraq today range from 126,000 to 180,000 – nearly as many, if not more than, the number of Americans in uniform there. Most are not Americans. They come from Fiji, Brazil, Scotland, Croatia, Hungary, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Australia, and other countries. "A very large part of the total force is not in uniform," Scott Horton, who teaches the law of armed conflict at Columbia University School of Law, said in congressional testimony last month. In World War II and the Korean War, contractors amounted to 3 to 5 percent of the total force deployed. Through the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War, the percentage grew to roughly 10 percent, he notes. "But in the current conflict, the number appears to be climbing steadily closer to parity" with military personnel. "This represents an extremely radical transformation in the force configuration," he says.
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Senior commanders acknowledge the value of contractors, especially those that are armed and ready to fight if attacked. At his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the multinational force in Iraq, said that the "surge" by US forces in Iraq might not include enough American troops. "However, there are tens of thousands of contract security forces and ministerial security forces that do, in fact, guard facilities and secure institutions," he added. "That does give me the reason to believe that we can accomplish the mission in Baghdad."
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/contract/2007/0718silentsurge.htm

Outsourcing the Pentagon
The following is according to the Center for Public Integrity's Outsourcing the Pentagon:

* "In April <2002>, the Army told Congress that its best guess was that the Army had between 124,000 and 605,000 service contract workers. In October, the Army announced that it would permit contractors to compete for "non-core" positions held by 154,910 civilian workers (more than half of the Army's civilian workforce) and 58,727 military personnel." <11>

* "In 2003, the IG reported that out of 113 service contract actions reviewed (with an estimated value of $17.8 billion), at least 98 had one or more problems, including inadequate competition, lack of surveillance, or inadequate price reasonableness determinations." <12>

* "The Freedom of Information Act applies to "agency" records. Contractors, in this context, are not "agencies," even where they perform decisional roles. Similarly, government officials are subject to a body of conflict of interest provisions, pay caps, limits on political activity, and labor rules that do not similarly constrain contractors who perform similar, even the same, work." <13>

* "Between 1998 and 2003, the Pentagon awarded more than $47 billion in contracts designated for small businesses to companies that have each earned more than $100 million from Defense Department contracts alone during that six year period." <14>

* "The homeland security industry is currently the fastest growing sector of the U.S. economy, predicted to grow from a $5 billion industry in 2000 to $130 billion in 2010, according to the Homeland Security Research Corporation, a private California think tank." <15>
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Private_Military_Corporations#Outsourcing_the_Pentagon

[kineneb]

5. mercenaries by any other name...

Sounds just like the end of the Roman Empire: more foreign mercenaries than Romans in the military.

Their only loyalty is to money.