Prince himself managed to escape scrutiny, despite his ties to Rudy and his connection to Abramoff. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, of which Erik Prince is a vice president and his mother is president, gave at least $130,000 to Toward Tradition,67 an organization that described itself as a “national coalition of Jews and Christians devoted to fighting the secular institutions that foster anti-religious bigotry, harm families, and jeopardize the future of America.”68 Abramoff served as chairman of the organization, run by his longtime friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin, until 2000, and remained on the board until 2004.69 Toward Tradition surfaced in Abramoff’s plea agreement as a “non-profit entity” through which “Abramoff provided things of value… [w]ith the intent to influence… official acts.”70 Abramoff clients eLottery, an Internet gambling company, and the Magazine Publishers of America each donated $25,000 to Toward Tradition.71 The $50,000 was then paid to Tony Rudy’s wife, Lisa, in ten $5,000 installments for consulting services.72 At the time, Rudy was DeLay’s deputy chief of staff and was helping eLottery to fight a bill that would outlaw Internet gambling and helping the MPA to fight a postal rate increase.73
Despite the ASG scandal in early 2006, the head of the IPOA, Doug Brooks, told Roll Call that the association with Behrends would continue, saying IPOA found him “helpful in terms of what we were working on.”74 While the ASG lobbyists scrambled to set up new shops with different names and clients tried to distance themselves from the scandal, Behrends began working for powerhouse law firm Crowell & Moring’s lobbying arm, C&M Capitol Link—a company he had previously worked with on behalf of Blackwater in 2004.75 Still, some questioned the hiring of a DeLay-linked lobbyist. “We did our homework. We did all the right due diligence, as you might guess,” said John Thorne, head of C&M Capitol Link. “[Behrends’s] reputation is solid. Everyone we talked to said he was completely out of that other business.”76 But Behrends was not out of the mercenary business in general nor Blackwater’s stake in it specifically. The bond between the influential lobbyist and Erik Prince was far too strong not to weather a mere political scandal. Besides, major projects were on the horizon.
The company would soon begin expanding its global reach and its appetite for international contracts, putting its forces forward as possible peacekeepers in places like Darfur—a crisis zone located in Cofer Black’s old stomping ground, Sudan. Eight years after Blackwater’s quiet beginnings, the company had become a major player in the neoconservative revolution and would enthusiastically act as the Pied Piper of the neo-mercenary rebranding movement.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE”
BY THE time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned in late 2006, he had indeed, as President Bush declared, overseen the “most sweeping transformation of America’s global force posture since the end of World War II.”1 By Rumsfeld’s last day in office, the ratio of active-duty U.S. soldiers to private contractors deployed in Iraq had almost reached one to one,2 a statistic unprecedented in modern warfare. Vice President Dick Cheney called Rumsfeld “the finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had.”3 The praise was understandable coming from Cheney. The dramatic military privatization scheme launched during Cheney’s time as Secretary of Defense during the 1991 Gulf War had grown beyond his wildest expectations under Rumsfeld and has forever altered the way the United States wages its wars. And yet despite the unprecedented level of private sector involvement on the battlefield, the U.S. military has seldom been stretched more thinly or faced more perilous times. The Bush administration’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan taxed U.S. forces to the point where former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in late 2006 that “the active Army is about broken.”4 In the midst of such striking commentary from one of the country’s most celebrated military figures, President Bush announced his intent to increase the size of the American armed forces to “position our military so that it is ready and able to stay engaged in a long war.”5 In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush called for an increase of ninety-two thousand active duty troops within five years and proposed a Civilian Reserve Corps to supplement official U.S. forces.6
While the “bleeding” of the U.S. military was without question the result of the administration’s aggressive policies and unpopular occupations, the new Democratic Congressional leadership, which swept to power in November 2006, seemed more than willing to go along with Bush’s aspirations for an even larger military, rather than questioning the insatiable appetite for conquest that made it a necessity. Among the few forces that could take comfort in this situation are those that have benefited the most from the war on terror—the companies of the war industry. Few have gained as much in the Bush years and few stand to benefit more from the projected U.S. course in the future than Blackwater USA. Erik Prince knows this. In fact, he has offered up a remedy of his own for the numbers crisis in the military—the creation of a “contractor brigade.” As for the official Army plan to increase its size by thirty thousand troops, Prince asserted, “We could certainly do it cheaper.”7 Those are the words of a man empowered by success and confident in his future. They are the words of a man with his own army, hailed by the neoconservative Weekly Standard as “the alpha and omega of military outsourcing.”8
In the years since Blackwater began in 1997 as a firing range and lodge near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, it has grown to become one of the most powerful private military actors on the international scene. Blackwater in 2006 had some twenty-three hundred private soldiers deployed in nine countries around the world and boasted of a database of another twenty-one thousand additional contractors on whom it could call should the need arise. In 2006, one U.S. Congressperson observed that, in terms of military might, the company could single-handedly take down many of the world’s governments. Its seven-thousand-acre facility in Moyock, North Carolina, has now become the most sophisticated private military center on the planet, while the company possesses one of the world’s largest privately held stockpiles of heavy-duty weaponry. It is a major training center for federal and local security and military forces in the United States, as well as foreign forces and private individuals. It sells its own line of target systems and armored vehicles. Blackwater’s state-of-the-art sixty-thousand-square-foot corporate headquarters welcomes visitors with door handles made from the muzzles of automatic weapons. It is developing surveillance blimps and private airstrips for its fleet of aircraft, which include helicopter gunships.9
Blackwater opened a facility, called “Blackwater North” in Illinois, but was forced to abandon projects in California and the Philippines after resistance from local communities. The company holds more than a billion dollars in U.S. government contracts, among them “black” contracts kept from public oversight, and has begun marketing aggressively to corporations. It has deep connections to the U.S. intelligence and defense apparatus and has become nothing short of the administration’s Praetorian Guard in the war on terror. While Blackwater executives may have initially set their sights high in aiming to be a wing of the military—like the Marines or the Army—now, reeling from its successes, the company is no longer content to be subordinate to the United States. While it still maintains its pledge of loyalty and patriotism, Blackwater strives to be an independent army, deploying to conflict zones as an alternative to a NATO or UN force.