Blackwater by The NumbersTomorrow morning, the House oversight committee will hear testimony from Erik Prince, the owner of embattled private-security company Blackwater, about his company’s operations in Iraq. Blackwater is in the news right now for the disputed shootings on September 16 in Baghdad that left 11 Iraqis dead. But the committee’s Democratic staff has put together a compendium (pdf) of questionable incidents and practices that Prince will surely be asked about tomorrow. Here’s a sampling:
* Blackwater has been involved in 195 “escalation of force” incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 shooting incidents per week. From January 2005 to April 2007, Blackwater employees used their weapons 168 times, compared to 102 times for rival DynCorp and 36 for rival Triple Canopy during that same time frame.
According to the majority staff, Blackwater operatives fired the first shot in 80 percent of those cases, though its contract with the State Department only permits the use of “defensive” force.
* A single Blackwater security contractor costs the government $1,222 every day to guard U.S. civilian personnel, or $445,000 per year. That’s six times the cost of getting a U.S. Army soldier to perform the same function. As P.W. Singer observed last week, private security companies increasingly exist to free up tasks for U.S. troops, ensuring a sort of dependence on contracting occurs for a military coping with the strain of deployments for two wars.
* The State Department’s attitude to Blackwater shootings is most often a directive to compensate the victim’s family, “rather than to insist upon accountability or to investigate Blackwater personnel for potential criminal liability.”
* Blackwater’s initial contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq, in 2003, was a no-bid contract. So was its 2004 successor. On that one, Blackwater stood to earn a maximum of $338 million, but actually received $488 million from State between June 2004 and June 2006. In total, Blackwater has earned upwards of $1 billion in government contracts since 2001.
Nor is that all. A previously unknown incident revealed in a Blackwater incident report, Blackwater guards in Mosul in 2005 fired into a vehicle approaching a convoy guarded by the security company. A civilian bystander was hit in the head by a Blackwater-fired bullet that passed through the car. Blackwater kept the convoy moving along, and it’s not clear if any compensation was offered to the victim’s family. On at least two other occasions, Blackwater guards were found to have covered up improper or dubious uses of force. Among those: after a Blackwater-guarded convoy struck 18 (!) different Iraqi vehicles, one of the contractors in the motorcade said his boss “openly admitted giving clear direction to the primary driver to conduct these acts of random negligence for no apparent reason.”
