Who Needs Allies?

Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon … While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground … Dyncorp, for example, a Pentagon favourite, has the contract worth tens of millions of dollars to train an Iraqi police force. It also won the contracts to train the Bosnian police and was implicated in a grim sex slavery scandal, with its employees accused of rape and the buying and selling of girls as young as 12.

Middle-aged men having sex with 12- to 15-year-olds was too much for Ben Johnston … the former DynCorp aircraft mechanic [says] “in the latter part of 1999 Johnston learned that employees and supervisors from DynCorp were engaging in perverse, illegal and inhumane behavior [and] were purchasing illegal weapons, women, forged passports and [participating in] other immoral acts. Johnston witnessed coworkers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased.”

Some soldiers said privately that the soldiers-for-hire walk around with their weapons in full view as if they belong to a coalition army. They worry that the private-sector soldiers might not be constrained by the same rules of engagement and that any rogues among them who kill or hurt Iraqis could bring reprisals on all foreign forces. “What are the rules of engagement [for the PMCs]?” asked one coalition military official in Baghdad. “Are they civilians or are they military? I don’t know who they are, and I don’t want to go anywhere near them.”

[DynCorp was] a substantial financial backer of Bush’s election campaign, the company employs almost 25,000 staff, many of them former US military personnel, working in areas from security to aircraft maintenance … Several DynCorp employees were also accused of videotaping the rape of one of the women.