The Colonels Corner The Invisible Soldiers Part 7

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Transcript

0:00 How are you today, SR-71? Doing fine, Colonel. Doing fine. Now that all the hospital appointments are over with and everything else, I'm doing absolutely great. Good. Glad to hear it. What happened to Bridget? She was just here. I threw her the co-host and she disappeared. I have no idea, Colonel. I don't see her either. That's interesting. Oh, there she is again. All right. Let's try that again.

0:36 All right, I'm going to go live over here on Rumble. Well, it's starting already. I got blown out and had to come back in. Well, today's the first day I haven't been in a while, so you must have got my curse. I'm good with that, so long as your message gets out. Okay, so you guys, I feel like I've been, as much as we've uncovered, I feel like...

1:16 The last three days working on this Oklahoma thing, I feel like I'm exhausted. It is so crazy, these little breadcrumbs that you find that back, I don't know, at least a year and a half ago, right, Bridget, when we first uncovered the whole link between Waco and Ruby Ridge and Oklahoma and we talked all about it.

1:46 At least. At least. When you go back. I would say in two years. Yeah, when you go back, having learned all of the stuff that we have in the meantime, and you look at the same information, there's so much more there. Plus, you find additional tie-ins. This is just so incredible.

2:16 And probably for the first time in all of this exposure, I think that the show tonight on Alpha Warrior is going to blow out whatever brain cells we have left. I'm just going to say that. It's so crazy. Looking forward to it. Okay. And I already told Alpha.

2:43 It's going to run long because I do not want to break it up into two parts. There's no place to break it up. This is going to be a one shot open cannon show. It's crazy. OK, so we're on Chapter 11, Part 7 in the series about the invisible soldiers, private military contractors. This chapter starts.

3:15 about the critics and skeptics of the new industry. And it says, one way the critics sometimes articulated their concerns was to call the private military the new condotery, referring to the military companies employed by the ruling nobles in the Italian city-states

3:46 14th and 15th century, which of course it is. The condottieri, however you say that word, were mostly military professionals without national or political alliances. They were in great demand because the city-states frequently went to war with each other or defended themselves from attacks by the armies of the Holy Roman Empire.

4:13 Banned by an intricate legal contract, these companies gradually offset the balance of military power. And while their contracts required them to protect their employers and their employers' assets and resources, they eventually became so powerful that they effectively held hostage the governments that had hired them. That's exactly where they think that we're heading.

4:40 Although there were monumental differences between the Italian city-states of the 4th century and the world of the 21st century, the story raised critical questions that deeply concerned critics and skeptics. Could the new privatized military and security forces ever become so powerful that they would rule the governments? And if so, what would be the telling signs? As the military historian,

5:07 Martin Van Crevwell wrote in his classic 1991 book, The Transformation of War, quote, the spread of sporadic small scale wars will cause regular armed forces themselves to change form, shrink in size and wither away. As they do, much of the day to day burden of defending society against the threat of low intensity conflict will be transferred to the booming security business. And indeed, in time, it may become.

5:36 the organizations that comprise the business will like that of old and take over the state, unquote. High on the critics list of fears by 2010 was the real possibility that nations hiring private military could be slowly and irretrievably ceding power. To the critics, the idea of civilians relinquishing the power of national defense and security to private companies was

6:07 a threat to democracy. They could not accept the notion that the private military had become too big to ban or that self-regulation was a solution. After all, the Swiss initiative, no matter how laudable and hopeful the intentions were or how practical and innovative their plans were, had not yet made a difference. While industry leaders and other contributors that had been at the Swiss meeting

6:36 zeroed in on the Swiss initiative's second step, which was the International Code of Conduct. The critics believe that no matter how many nations endorsed this document and how many companies signed a code of conduct, the industry could not be trusted. Though the Swiss initiative was motivated in part by human rights lawyers and advocates, the involvement of companies in the study and negotiations could hinder the potential for true oversight and accountability.

7:06 Once a mercenary, always a mercenary, critics would say. To the advocates of ridding the world of mercenary activity, regulation was a sham. Setting up codes of conduct would require years of negotiations among participating nations and companies. That, in turn, might lead to enough compromises to result in little more than a monitoring mechanism that would be ineffective, superficial, and purely political.

7:35 How would the regulations be enforced? From the critics' viewpoint, however, controls were established that private military companies would always find a way to avoid them. In the United States, for example, private military companies competing for State Department contracts had to obtain a license. However, if they had something to hide, such a record of overspending or lawsuits alleging misbehavior or human rights abuses,

8:06 They did not want to be exposed by applying for a license. They could apply through programs that did not require license. For example, the Pentagon's Foreign Military Sales Program. And contracts for less than $50 million did not require congressional notification. Hence, a larger contract would be broken up into smaller pieces and no legislative oversight, thus effectively avoiding any examination.

8:36 Alison Stanger wrote, the private military sector is distinctive in that it can easily expand quite rapidly without that growth being properly scrutinized. Organizations such as Britain's War on Want took a firm stand against self-regulation as a solution. War on Want was a longstanding advocacy group in London that focused on eliminating

9:06 the root causes of global poverty, one of those causes being war. One of the point of view of the war on want advocates, private military companies helped to sustain conflict and thus to achieve peace, they had to be eliminated. In 2006, the group published a detailed and lengthy report on what it believed to be the peril at hand.

9:32 After noting that private militaries had moved from the peripheral of international politics into corporate boardrooms, becoming a normal part of the military sector, and that was so much a part of war efforts that some major Western countries like the UK and US would now struggle to wage war without them. War on Want demanded that governments move towards legislation to control this sector urgently.

10:01 The group insisted that self-regulation was not an option. War on Want, joined by the Campaign Against Arms Trade and Amnesty International, among others, said that its concern was that private military companies would become embedded in the military and political establishment. Their influence could become entrenched. The use of well-paid lobbyists and well-connected revolving door boards of directors

10:31 many of which were retired military generals who were not always as dedicated to quality as to profits, would secure more power and independence for the private military companies. With time, self-regulation would become more of self and not about regulation. The British government, as if testing public sentiment,

10:56 had announced in 2009 that it was working on a voluntary code of conduct of its own to police themselves in the near future. This place was much like the International Code of Conduct being negotiated in Switzerland. Companies would have to comply with a list of high standards of conduct of the British government to do business with them. The idea caused a stir on both sides of the Atlantic, though mostly in Britain. A director,

11:28 for Amnesty International told The Guardian, quote, if the government does purpose, or excuse me, does propose a self-regulation system, it would effectively grant the companies immunity to, or whatever they do. The arms trade has been poorly regulated for far too long, and we have seen the results. Weapons getting into the hands of dictators, criminals, and child soldiers. We should learn from these mistakes, not repeat them.

11:58 We need a robust system that is backed by legislation, unquote. A spokesperson for the campaign against arms trade based in London was equally concerned. Quote, the government proposal that mercenary groups should self-regulate is frankly ludicrous. We have all learned from hard experience that self-regulation, whether in finance or consumer protection, simply doesn't work.

12:27 It is even more dangerous with corporate mercenaries. Basically, it's a way of letting the companies do exactly what they want, operate wherever they want, whenever they want, and however they want. Did Bridget go down? Yeah. Let me bring her back up. There is no point in saying that the government would only contract companies which would demonstrate they operate in high standards because there would be no independent standard by which to measure them.

12:59 And in any case, many are employed by other governments, work for other companies, and others over whom the government has no control. The government is allowing the mercenary companies to legitimize themselves as respectable private military and security corporations, something we are deeply opposed to.

13:22 To these critics, shifting the control of force from the public sector to the private enterprise undermined the democratic process and threatened state control. The very existence of a military or intelligence organization without effective government oversight enhanced the potential for abuse of power. After all, what could be a greater danger for a democracy than a military and security complex?

13:49 unaccountable to civil authority, or even partly accountable, but not transparent even to a legislative body to which the citizens entrust decisions. What could result other than the defense policy shaped by the profits of the well-connected private sector? Part of the concern for democracy was the issue of empire. To the industry's critics, private military companies

14:17 was emblematic of empires. They were imperial tools allowing nations to use security and military forces for more than self-defense. Behind this is the old colonial structure, American journalist Elizabeth Rubin wrote. Quote, only now it's dressed up as a multinational corporation with suits and cell phones instead of jeeps and parasols, unquote.

14:46 In the U.S., private military made it possible to stretch beyond the capability of traditional military to fulfill the missions required by our foreign policy, conducting what author Bakovich referred to as imperial policing. How else could a nation have engaged in two wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, simultaneously without reinstituting the draft?

15:13 In history of empires, military overreach, for whatever reason, has often led to dependence on private forces, which in turn has allowed the mercenaries to gain power over the nations that they're hired to protect. As in the history of the Italian city-state, from the viewpoint of the privatization critics, America's reluctance to admit to being an empire was based on the fact that the motivation of empire

15:42 ran counter to the ideals of democracy. Private military companies, they believed, allowed the government to maintain an appearance of democracy while proceeding with expansion and the goal of being an empire. Indeed, they would say, the growing presence of private military corporations was the proof that the United States was an empire.

16:09 Without imperial interest in policies, there would be no need for a private sector support for our national security or defense. Whatever their arguments about private military companies, the skeptics and critics had few models for leashing the dogs of war. The old world and new. South Africa was one of them. The privatization of the military had begun in South Africa during the last years of apartheid.

16:38 By some accounts, there was a strategy to shrink the size of the state in general before a new government of Nelson Mandela could come to power, as well as to move the best apartheid military structures into private companies so that those forces would not owe their allegiance to the new government. But President Mandela saw the very existence of private military companies as a threat to the stability of the new government.

17:08 and its foreign policy, which is why his government banned all mercenary activities in South Africa in 1998, and why executive outcomes left South Africa and moved to London. In the United States, by 2010, the cause to phase out private military companies continued with Representative Jan Sikowski.

17:36 teamed up with Senator Sanders, that's Bernie Sanders, again to reintroduce the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, first introduced in 2007. For the advocates of banning armed contractors through legislative action, no industry was too big to conquer. And each year, it seemed there would be more reasons to try. In early 2010, for example, a federal judge in Washington threw out the charges against Blackwater employees accused of

18:06 killing 17 Iraqis at Nassau Square. And as the New York Times noted, the judge highlighted the government's inability to hold mercenaries accountable for crimes they commit. Would you need to say anything else if you can't hold them accountable? Why are they over there? The editorial pointed out that the government had not yet prosecuted any cases of casualties committed by armed contractors overseas. Quote,

18:36 There are many reasons to oppose the privatization of war. Reliance on contractors allows the government to work under the radar of public scrutiny. And freewheeling contractors can be at cross purposes with the armed forces. Blackwater's under-supervised guards undermine the effort to win Iraqi support, said the New York Times. But for industry insiders advocating self-regulation, it was a matter of...

19:05 immense frustration that the rest of the world wasn't seeing their business their way. They scoffed at the label new Condorati. They were certain that the critics and skeptics were not well enough informed to grasp the significance of their company's roles in the quest for global security stability. Yes, we know that you're promoting verbally global security.

19:35 While actually understanding the CIA is creating global insecurity so that you have a paycheck is the real deal. And it wasn't through lack of intelligence to get that. We're not stupid. We can see it. They were confident that the naysayers did not understand how deeply entrenched they were already. Private military were not terrorist groups or thug ridden gangs that could be outlawed. While in fact they are.

20:07 They were part of an establishment. To believe they should be or could be abolished was to live in the past from the point of view of the industry leaders. I have watched the discussions of issues surrounding private military sector regulations, ethical behavior, moral behavior, political influence with a degree of bafflement. Aegis Dominic Donald said, quote, all too often the voice of the sector has seemed to be absent.

20:35 This is partly because the sector is naturally secretive to a considerable degree because of commercial competence and concerns about the competition often mean it can be little else. But it is also because the sector gets drowned out. Its explanations and context tend to lose out to news dynamic and favor the join the dots, dogs of war take on issues.

21:02 This in turn makes the private military company sector yet more secretive. Why explain when it only brings more grief, unquote? In other words, we're just going to shut up because we already basically own your government and we're not going to go away. Donald and other insiders saw two ways of looking at defense and security in a geopolitical sphere of the early 21st century through a lens of the past or a lens of the present.

21:31 In the new century, the world was in flux, moving forward on waves of change in such a way that looking at the present as truthfully as possible was as difficult as it was crucial. Not since the 17th century, when the Treaty of Westphalia mapped out the beginning of the sovereign states, had the world seemed to be heaving with such ferocity.

21:59 and to Donald and his compatriots, their companies were essential to the effort of stabilization. By 2010, there were scholars and experts who agreed with the here-to-stay point of view and could not support efforts to ban. However, they were not necessarily industry boosters either. Allison Stanger, one of the most astute observers of the private contracting surge in American defense and security,

22:28 believed it was far too late to try to stop them. Quote, since privatization is intimately connected to globalization, we cannot turn back the clock on privatization without unwittingly undermining some of the globalization gains. Let me read that again. We can't turn back the clock.

22:51 clock on privatization without unwittingly undermining some of the globalization gains. In other words, I'm all for globalization. And if that requires private military contractors, so be it. Crazy. She goes on. Strategic outsourcing done well can advance U.S. interests. Uncontrolled outsourcing of the sort on display in Iraq creates more problems than it solves. We need to be able to tell the difference.

23:26 She noted that American power was taking on a different shape, in part because of increasing dependence on private sector defense and security. Whatever the pros and cons, whoever the proponents and opponents of reigning them in might be, the Swiss initiative that had begun in Montreux was moving forward. On November 2010,

23:50 Representatives from 58 private military and security companies met at Geneva again to sign the International Code of Conduct. The 17-page code laid out ground rules for screening and training of personnel and reporting of incidences as well as use of force, the illegality of torture, and the banning of human trafficking. The fact that you have to put that in the document should have been shocking to everyone. Over the next several months,

24:21 more than 150 companies from 46 nations would sign the code. By the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in 2013, there would be more than 700 signatures. 700 companies. As with the endorsement of the Montreux document, the 2010 signing attracted little attention, yet it was

24:51 The completion of the second step of an extraordinary process that if successful would establish a global regulatory authority for private military companies, you know, to police themselves. And this in turn would confer validity that the companies were seeking and the permanence that their critics feared. To succeed, however, the code would have to be enforced, which was the third step.

25:18 It would have no value without a mechanism for oversight and governance. On the day of the signing in 2010, the steering committee for developing the oversight system was already in place. It included representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, the UK Foreign Office, the Swiss government, Human Rights First, Red Cross, and three private military companies, Aegis,

25:48 G4S, and Triple Canopy. Among the signers representing the many companies that day was Aegis Spicer, a predictable occurrence considering that Aegis had been actively involved in the Swiss initiative for several years. Spicer signed on behalf of Aegis Group, while Christy Clemons Rogers signed for Aegis Defense Services. Major General

26:17 Graham Benz signed for Aegis Defense. The Aegis website that day announced the signing and noted the importance of the code and the work ahead. Quote, as private security companies face rapid changing missions and increasingly complex and dangerous operating environments, Aegis contends that regulation such as the code is necessary to improve accountability, transparency, and oversight.

26:42 as well as to better serve and protect its clients while enabling their mission. Unquote. Spicer's presence at such an event and his involvement in the cause to regulate, self-regulate that is, should not have surprised anyone. In his 1999 autobiography, he had addressed the issues of regulation in detail. Quote, a first step towards regulation must be to set up a list of private military.

27:11 companies a register. Were such a register to exist, it should have to be monitored and private military companies would have to subject themselves to a procedural audit process whereby the registration body, and this should perhaps be a UN function, of course, conducts an evaluation of the company's compliance with a predetermined set of international defined and accepted operating practices, unquote.

27:42 In his book, he acknowledged the concerns of skeptics, including the potential scenario of private military companies abusing power to the extent that the tail wags the dog. He went on, quote, if a government employs a private military company before long, it is no longer the client government which calls the shots, but the private military company, which having the.

28:06 Control of command and weaponry is in a position to alter the terms of employment and dictate to the host government, unquote. He tells you in his own words, that's what they're doing. But this, he explained, wasn't really a concern, mainly because the number of private contractors typically deployed at any one time was minimal.

28:30 I cannot recall any instance where we have put more than 100 people on the ground and it is usually far fewer, which is a bold. Well, in 1999, that was true. But he knew that was not going to be true forever. By the time Spicer was signing the code, he had been in the business long enough that he was becoming a visionary of sorts, although his enemies would have disagreed. Still.

28:59 it would be hard for anyone to refute the fact that he was among the first to see the sun setting on the old world of Cold War mercenaries and to witness the sun rising on the new industry. By 2010, Spicer was often quoted in articles about global security, maritime risk, and Iraq. He was now an expert. He was interviewed on talk shows, talked at industry conferences.

29:27 and was called routinely by high-level government officials. Articles about Aegis and its CEO less frequently commented on his shadowy past as a mercenary, with his arms-to-Africa scandal, the New Guinea jail episode, his tie-to-coup plotter, Simone Mann, or the controversy over the shooting of Peter McBride. Instead, they dwelled on the new information about him being a rising star.

29:55 Well-known British journalist Stephen Armstrong began an article in a TV interview with the observation, Tim Spicer is the future of warfare. Another writer described him as the closest thing to the father of private security in the military industrial complex. And although journalists were still relatively skeptical, the contrast between his past and dramatic rise was noted as if he had been.

30:24 had been in a dark kingdom where few dared to go and had learned things that might be useful to know. Or perhaps it was simply the alluring intrigue that so-called mercenaries projected and that lingering long after the shareholders and board members had taken over. In 2010, Spicer agreed to an interview with the author of this book.

30:50 a few blocks away from K Street's office in Washington. He looked like an investment banker on holiday. It was hard to imagine him in a Papua New Guinea jail cell or surrounded by rebels in Sierra Leone during a mission to overthrow the government. To be sure, Spicer swinging a nine iron seemed much more probable than him handling an AK-47. Alternately daunting and charming, confident and defensive,

31:22 Witty and sober, he spoke for a long while about the evolution of the sector, as he called it, the private military security industry. Quote, the American companies came later. The British were early, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s. Unquote. And why Britain? Because of its history of being an empire. Part of our past. Well, sort of.

31:50 Spicer saw the trajectory of private military security companies as analogous to the history of the American railroad industry. At first, they were accused of everything, but they were essential as the world was changing and they in turn changed the world. He said the global frontier was like America's Wild West to him. So the analogy made sense to him. He added yet another analogy for his industry.

32:21 You start off wild and then become part of the establishment. Experimental music becoming mainstream. It's like rap. It took 20 years, but now it's just a regular form of music. What should cause a real fuss from his point of view was not how the private sector was behaving, but rather how the public sector was failing its security and defense mandates, letting civilians down all over the world.

32:49 It wasn't as much of an issue that the private militaries were threatening democracy as it was that democracies were threatened by economic and geopolitical instabilities that the private military companies could tackle more successfully than the public sector. That was his opinion. Quote, you can't have huge standing armies. That is not efficient and economically feasible. You have to be able to draw on a labor pool that is skilled.

33:19 Let me just stop right there. You are drawing on the very skilled population of the large standing military. Just thought I'd point that out. You pay for the recruitment of soldiers, the training, the sustainment forever. Every 24 hours, he costs you money, health care until he dies. A contractor, we hire him for a special meaning, purpose, and then we fire him. You hire him and fire him. Oil.

33:50 water, food, pirates, support of future military missions where you want to get involved, unquote. So that's about as callous a statement as I have ever heard. He would be nowhere, absolutely nowhere, without drawing on the source of funded military people at our expense.

34:20 and they're throwaway items for him. They're a line on a balance sheet or expense account, I should say. The future for the sector, he stressed, wasn't about identifying geographical areas and getting work there. It wasn't about Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Africa. It was about roles and functions, having all services available to go anywhere needed, military, expeditionary operations, wherever that happens, NGOs.

34:50 disaster relief, famines, earthquakes, you name it. So support to customs control on the Mexican American border, training in Mexico. Spicer was a determined man with intense blue eyes that could stare down a leopard. Yet there he was seemingly nonchalantly talking about what he does.

35:16 Spicer's favorite book was Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor, a trilogy, a classic work about war, religion, and politics set in World War II. Its three volumes, Minute, Arms, Officer, and Gentleman, and The End of the Battle were mischievous and sober, but mostly satirical. What was important from Spicer's view

35:43 was that she modeled the story on the life of commandos and the regimental life of the British Army. The main character, he said, was much more concerned about his regiment than his nation. The book was meaningful to him because he was fighting for their friends in the context of a strategic purpose. Tribal identity with your regiment is most important. Group cohesion, far more than national ideological.

36:14 He shows that, plus it's terribly funny and well-written, he said. So, what a callous bastard. I'm going to go ahead and get through this next one. It's not very long. It's called The Thicket of Ironies. In the irony of American history, the eminent American ethicist and theologian Reinhard Niebuhr,

36:46 described irony as the unexpected incongruencies in life that upon closer examinations aren't incongruent at all. For example, he said, if virtue becomes vice through some hidden defect in the virtue, if strength becomes weaknesses because of the vanity to which strength may prompt the mighty man or nation, if security is transmuted into insecurity because too much reliance is placed on it,

37:15 If wisdom becomes folly because it does not know its own limits, in all such cases, the situation is ironic. In the story of the rise of private military and security companies, irony is abundant. That an industry making its living from instability and conflict called itself peace and stability industry was perhaps one of the most obvious.

37:42 That a soldier in the U.S. Special Forces whose dreams of becoming a SF officer was shattered by a bullet by a man working for a company employed by the soldier's government, a company that was part of an industry rooted in the history of Special Forces, was another. And the fact that the U.S. State Department defined democracies around the world as those nations in which militaries were accountable to civilian authority.

38:11 While in the U.S., there were private militaries sometimes legally unaccountable to anyone. For Aegis and for Spicer, an ironic situation surfaced in August of 2010 when Aegis established a new non-operating holding company in Basel, Switzerland. The newspaper headline branded the company a mercenary outfit. In the 14th and 15th century, the Swiss were renowned.

38:41 They're excellent mercenaries. The nation has the oldest mercenary unit still in operation, the Swiss Guards, protecting the Vatican. Still, Swiss politicians fretted over the arrival of a new one. The Swiss foreign minister even commissioned a probe into how the presence of such a firm might affect the world's perception of France being militarily neutral with their own mercenary outfit. Earlier in the year,

39:09 Hearings of a bipartisan commission on wartime contracting on Capitol Hill, a University of Maryland professor, had asked AGES president Christy Clemons Rogers, she's the president for the branch that's in the United States, if Tim Spicer was a mercenary. She did not deny that he had been a mercenary in his past, but she explained he had acted only on behalf of governments that were Western allied governments.

39:37 Very soon, however, it wouldn't really matter what the private military security contractors were called. Quote, everyone was busy trying to identify, label, vilify what was really part of the past, the dogs of war, unquote, said Congressman Mercy Kaptur. While something big had developed that obviously needed to be dealt with, whether you call it a mercenary, it's happening.

40:07 The mercenary scare in Switzerland in August was an event of minor significance. For, as Kaptur said, things were happening on a grander scale, though unnoticed and greater ironies were taking shape. While President Obama told Americans about the upcoming drawdown in Iraq, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a 10% decrease in the Department of Defense budget for private military contractors.

40:36 This looked like the action the industry abolitionists were hoping for, but that was not the case. Behind the scenes, private military companies were competing for State Department contracts, one of which was $10 billion for worldwide protective services. While the DOD was planning to shrink its budget for private contractors, the State Department went from $2 billion to $10 billion.

41:08 Another kabuki dance. One of the eight companies winning a piece of the $10 billion contract was International Development Solutions, a private security firm recently purchased by XE, formerly Blackwater. As one writer noted, only a few months earlier, the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan,

41:37 had railed against Blackwater for setting up shale companies in order to keep winning government contracts. Do we even check these things out, he demanded? Do we ask for references? They make representations here which are wildly false. It is Blackwater, regardless of its name. It is just a shale. It is just a name change.

42:02 But the contract was awarded despite presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's pledge in 2008 to ban Blackwater from federal contracts and to show these contractors the door. And while the news of withdrawing troops and cutting the defense budget gave Americans the illusion that the need for private military and security must be ending, the militarization was taking another form. The government was expanding its paramilitary security forces.

42:31 sending the bill to the State Department to allow a replacement, task by task, of the job necessary to make Iraq a secure place for development. You know, Western development. Despite economic recessions and global instability, this industry would actually grow based in part on those very uncertainties, which was one of the biggest ironies of all. Aegis II was one of the winners of...

43:01 part of that $10 billion contract, contracted to train private security contractors to replace troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By now, Aegis was one of the biggest stars in the galaxy. With its U.S. contract in Iraq twice renewed, having garnered nearly $700 million from work with the Pentagon, which ended up being over a billion.

43:27 It operated one national command center in six regional branches across Iraq, out of which it provided daily intelligence for every security firm and the U.S. military. You know, because we want our intelligence from the mercenary who's shooting up Iraq that gets our soldiers killed. Since the 2007 renewal of the defense contract in Iraq, Aegis had won other sizable contracts as well.

43:59 including one from the DOD, to oversee private security companies in Afghanistan, basically setting up another command post in Afghanistan. It monitored their activities and investigating any escalation of force incidents. That's, again, the fox in the hen house. So they're going to investigate any of their peers for malfeasance so they can expand their control.

44:30 The firm was also finding work in Africa, turning its attention to oil and thus following the lead of other private military security companies, such as Control Risk Group, Inris, Triple Canopy and Armor Group. The Niger Delta, for example, had become a bonanza for such companies as Nigerian officials hired them to subdue violence in the oil rich region. There was also work in Algeria.

44:58 and Sudan, as well as Yemen and Djibouti, where Aegis had recently entered negotiations with the government to set up a control center that would monitor piracy threats and disseminate risk information to vessels in the Gulf of Aden. And gosh, let me see. If I'm the guy that's going to get the contract to put security on ships, and I'm also...

45:28 in charge of determining whether there's a threat to put security on ships, what do you think my answer is going to be? I make more money if there's a risk. So regardless of whether there's a risk or not, there's going to be a risk. In 2010, government contracts were still the most lucrative and Aegis received a positive evaluation from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

45:59 the quote-unquote watchdog, that's another irony, for the Iraq reconstruction contracts, which would surely boost the company's respectability. In the report, the inspector general commended Aegis's financial record-keeping and control of inventories and said that the firm had adhered to proper personnel screening and selection processes. But again, keep in mind,

46:26 Most of the actual people were contracted out. They weren't on Aegis' books. They were the money funnel. On the occasion of the audit, columnist Dave Eisenberg wrote a piece for UPI with the tagline, Dogs of War, Contractor Fulfilling a Contract. Imagine that. He began his article with a question of whether it was possible for a private military company to do a good job.

46:55 to do what it was contracted to do without waste, fraud, and abuse? They noted that, of course, the answer is going to be yes. For a company with a history like Aegis, to reach this point was monumental. Aegis, wrote Eisenberg, was now considered to be a model contractor. The audit was clearly a defining moment, one that would distance the firm from its mercenary images and draw more attention to

47:24 its strategies and developments as a thriving enterprise. In 2010, the components of its success were becoming apparent. For example, more board members with political connections. That year, Aegis LLC added two former senior CIA officials from the Bush administration to its board of directors. CIA. One was Robert Reynolds, who once headed

47:56 the CIA's procurement office. And the other was a former number two man at the CIA's clandestine service. You know, the shop of dirty tricks that runs Operation Gladio that causes all the destabilization. So Aegis can run right in and secure it. Yeah, on the board. Crucial to the company's success was its continued focus on public relations, which from the start had been almost revolutionary.

48:26 especially considering this was a business renowned for secrecy. Aegis even opened a charity, because of course they did. That's how they money launder and pay people off. The Aegis Foundation to help dispel the image of a money-making mercenary. Its projects, largely in post-conflict communities like Iraq and Afghanistan, were mostly grassroots.

48:56 In one case, it teamed up with an oil concern in the Gulf region south to spend $450,000 to refurbish a gym. Wonder who got that contract? Another tactic for escaping the mercenary image was litigation, or at least the threat of it. The U.S. government used SIGIR as a watchdog, but Aegis had one of London's leading law firms as its pit bull.

49:27 And in its early years, when it was trying to shape an image and downplay the mercenary part of the owner's past, ages had a reputation for being legacious, particularly with journalists. So if you write a real story, we will threaten to sue you. However, as it began to win respectability, the need to protect its CEO lessened. Success became the new armor for Spicer.

49:58 Ironically, this time, Spicer's wild and unconventional past had become a component of his own success story, the before and after, an impressive image. In late autumn 2010, as a new multi-billionaire state department security contract in Iraq revealed a shift from military to security operations reliant on private military companies, another rather significant irony surfaced.

50:28 And that was that the president, whom the industry feared would curtail his work, especially after Obama and Clinton's pledges in 2008 to escort the contractors to the door, made possible an expansion in the number of private military and security forces. This was proof that by 2011, the private military security contractors were so embedded that they had become a fact of life.

51:02 And we know how Obama did everything the exact opposite of what he said he was going to do. So there you have it. Irony of all ironies. So you could say this is essentially taking Operation Gladio and making it into businesses. Well, yes and no. To some extent. I look at it as the CIA is still going to be doing Operation Gladio.

51:39 causing the instability, which then creates the need for the private military corporations to come in. And this is basically the privatization of the Office of Public Safety. That's the way I would look at it. Because remember, after all the coups in Latin America, it was USAID and the Office of Public Safety that came in and trained all the cops to torture.

52:08 disappear, kidnap, all of that stuff. This is privatizing this to another degree. The private military security companies are going to come in and basically under the auspices of stabilization. But if you're stabilizing a country with a dictator, you are doing the exact same thing the Office of Public Safety did. Does that make sense? Right.

52:40 Yeah. Now, yeah, it makes perfect. Yeah. Now, granted, there were CIA embedded in that operation, too. But the analogy to me would be the Office of Public Safety. Anybody? Absolutely. Yeah. Anybody else got anything? No. No. Well, it's Wednesday night, so I can use the extra half hour. I appreciate that. So I can spend more time blowing my mind.

53:25 um before tonight um so thank you guys again all for being here i really really appreciate it more than you'll ever know um thanks for all the support sr71 go ahead thank you colonel and thank everyone for being here on on spaces and on rumble i was going nuts trying to find a picture of tim spicer and the only place i've he's not

53:55 You don't even get a picture of Tim Spicer on Wikipedia. Okay? I found one on a German website with an article about Sandline. So I did post that in the pill if anybody wants to go look. But trying to find a picture of that man is not easy. That's interesting. That's very interesting, actually. So.

54:32 We will adjourn for now and pick up tomorrow with Shell Games. And again, we've just got like maybe four chapters, so maybe two more days and we'll be done with the book. So thanks for being here, everybody. See you later.

Entities here

private military security industry26 Tim Spicer20 Aegis Defense Services16 U.S. State Department12 Iran9 United Kingdom7 United States7 Switzerland6 International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers5 Blackwater5 USAID5 South Africa4 Afghanistan4 Swiss Initiative4 War on Want4 Washington, D.C.3 Barack Obama3 Dominic Donald3 Christy Clemons2 Hillary Clinton2 Amnesty International2 development2 Pentagon2 Africa2 Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction2 David Eisenberg2 Alison Stanger2 Campaign Against Arms Trade2 Iran-Iraq War2 Operation Gladio2 Triple Canopy2 Marcy Kaptur2 Dogs of War2 Djibouti1 Nelson Mandela1 UK Foreign Office1 Vatican Bank1 Nigeria1 Bernie Sanders1 Sudan1

Claims made here

Martin van Creveld founded The Transformation of War documented ▶ 5:07

“Martin Van Crevwell wrote in his classic 1991 book, The Transformation of War, quote, the spread of sporadic small scale wars will cause regular armed forces themselves to change form, shrink in size …”

War on Want founded Campaign Against Arms Trade host_asserted ▶ 10:01

“The group insisted that self-regulation was not an option. War on Want, joined by the Campaign Against Arms Trade and Amnesty International, among others, said that its concern was that private milita…”

Nelson Mandela overthrew Apartheid host_asserted ▶ 16:38

“By some accounts, there was a strategy to shrink the size of the state in general before a new government of Nelson Mandela could come to power, as well as to move the best apartheid military structur…”

Nelson Mandela removed_from_power Executive Outcomes documented ▶ 17:08

“and its foreign policy, which is why his government banned all mercenary activities in South Africa in 1998, and why executive outcomes left South Africa and moved to London. In the United States, by …”

Jan Schakowsky recruited Bernie Sanders documented ▶ 17:36

“teamed up with Senator Sanders, that's Bernie Sanders, again to reintroduce the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, first introduced in 2007. For the advocates of banning armed contractors through legislat…”

Blackwater carried_out_attack Nisour Square documented ▶ 17:36

Swiss Initiative founded International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers documented ▶ 23:26

“She noted that American power was taking on a different shape, in part because of increasing dependence on private sector defense and security. Whatever the pros and cons, whoever the proponents and o…”

Triple Canopy member_of International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers documented ▶ 25:18

“It would have no value without a mechanism for oversight and governance. On the day of the signing in 2010, the steering committee for developing the oversight system was already in place. It included…”

Aegis Defense Services member_of International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers documented ▶ 25:48

“G4S, and Triple Canopy. Among the signers representing the many companies that day was Aegis Spicer, a predictable occurrence considering that Aegis had been actively involved in the Swiss initiative …”

Tim Spicer headed Aegis Defense Services documented ▶ 25:48

Tim Spicer member_of Aegis Defense Services documented ▶ 26:42

“as well as to better serve and protect its clients while enabling their mission. Unquote. Spicer's presence at such an event and his involvement in the cause to regulate, self-regulate that is, should…”

Tim Spicer carried_out_attack Peter McBride host_asserted ▶ 29:27

“and was called routinely by high-level government officials. Articles about Aegis and its CEO less frequently commented on his shadowy past as a mercenary, with his arms-to-Africa scandal, the New Gui…”

Tim Spicer covered_up Arms-to-Africa scandal host_asserted ▶ 29:27

Tim Spicer traded_network_to Simon Mann host_asserted ▶ 29:27

Tim Spicer founded Aegis Defense Services host_asserted ▶ 29:55

“Well-known British journalist Stephen Armstrong began an article in a TV interview with the observation, Tim Spicer is the future of warfare. Another writer described him as the closest thing to the f…”

Tim Spicer member_of Aegis Defense Services documented ▶ 38:11

“While in the U.S., there were private militaries sometimes legally unaccountable to anyone. For Aegis and for Spicer, an ironic situation surfaced in August of 2010 when Aegis established a new non-op…”

Carl Levin exposed Blackwater documented ▶ 41:08

“Another kabuki dance. One of the eight companies winning a piece of the $10 billion contract was International Development Solutions, a private security firm recently purchased by XE, formerly Blackwa…”

Blackwater front_for shale companies documented ▶ 41:08

Blackwater front_for USAID documented ▶ 41:08

Hillary Clinton ordered_assassination_of Blackwater documented ▶ 42:02

“But the contract was awarded despite presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's pledge in 2008 to ban Blackwater from federal contracts and to show these contractors the door. And while the news of with…”

Barack Obama ordered_assassination_of Blackwater documented ▶ 42:02

Aegis Defense Services funded Iran documented ▶ 43:01

“part of that $10 billion contract, contracted to train private security contractors to replace troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. By now, Aegis was one of the biggest stars in the galaxy. With its U.S. c…”

Aegis Defense Services funded Afghanistan documented ▶ 43:59

“including one from the DOD, to oversee private security companies in Afghanistan, basically setting up another command post in Afghanistan. It monitored their activities and investigating any escalati…”

Aegis Defense Services funded Nigeria documented ▶ 44:30

“The firm was also finding work in Africa, turning its attention to oil and thus following the lead of other private military security companies, such as Control Risk Group, Inris, Triple Canopy and Ar…”

Aegis Defense Services funded Algeria documented ▶ 44:30

Aegis Defense Services funded Sudan documented ▶ 44:58

“and Sudan, as well as Yemen and Djibouti, where Aegis had recently entered negotiations with the government to set up a control center that would monitor piracy threats and disseminate risk informatio…”

Aegis Defense Services funded Yemen documented ▶ 44:58

Aegis Defense Services funded Djibouti documented ▶ 44:58

Aegis Defense Services funded Gulf of Aden documented ▶ 44:58

Aegis Defense Services member_of Robert Reynolds documented ▶ 47:24

“its strategies and developments as a thriving enterprise. In 2010, the components of its success were becoming apparent. For example, more board members with political connections. That year, Aegis LL…”

Aegis Defense Services funded Ford Foundation host_asserted ▶ 48:26

“especially considering this was a business renowned for secrecy. Aegis even opened a charity, because of course they did. That's how they money launder and pay people off. The Aegis Foundation to help…”