After the deadly mayhem of September 16th, when gunmen paid by the private army Blackwater killed 17 civilians in Baghdad, Condoleezza Rice created a panel to review the State Department’s use of mercenaries and propose new rules for their conduct:

Neither the U.S. military nor the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service is prepared to assume responsibility for guarding diplomats and other official U.S. civilians, according to a Rice-appointed review panel that recommended the changes... The future of Blackwater, the security company involved in the Sept. 16 shooting incident, remains unresolved. Once the FBI completes an investigation in Iraq, the panel's report said, the embassy should recommend to Rice whether Blackwater should be allowed to continue working in Iraq. The Baghdad government has publicly insisted that the company be held culpable but has made no formal demands, an administration official said. "But my gut feeling is they have to leave," the official said. [...] "We don't see the clarity here," agreed Patrick F. Kennedy, the State Department official who headed the review. The panel was "unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law" and recommended that State "urgently engage" with the Justice Department "and then with Congress, to establish a clear legal basis" for accountability. [...] They concluded that there is no real alternative to the use of private contractors to protect U.S. diplomats traveling outside the protected Green Zone in Baghdad. The military, the report said, "does not consider it feasible or desirable . . . to take on responsibility" for diplomatic protection, although the need for such security will increase as U.S. troops begin to draw down.[emphasis added]

According to this report, the Iraqis have not made a "formal demand" that Blackwater leave Iraq, which contradicts earlier reports, and implies that all those public statements Iraqi prime minister Maliki has made were, I dunno, friendly suggestions. This new report also implies that Blackwater will probably avoid any legal repercussions for its gunmen’s wilding last month in Baghdad. And what do we do about the problem? According to this report, there’s nothing we can do: we’re screwed. But we already knew that:

In the short term, taking over in Iraq would require pulling [Diplomatic Security Service] agents from other assignments. Training new agents "would take anywhere from 18 months to two years to identify them, do all the backgrounds, do the clearance work, seven months of basic training [and] follow-up training for high threats," said Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary of state for Diplomatic Security, in recent testimony... But as criticism of State's security operations grows, the downside of having a contractor army at its disposal -- and under its responsibility -- has become more apparent, the official said. "With perfect 20/20 hindsight," he said, "maybe four years ago we should have seen this coming."

This isn’t just another example of the catastrophic incompetence of the Bush administration to plan for anything in post-invasion Iraq. It’s a perfect example of something I’ve been writing about recently, the radical privatization of government. We’re paying for-profit entities to do something the government should be doing. [And Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker points out that in the past the military did protect diplomats in war zones.]

But think about the claim that the government can’t field sufficient numbers of properly vetted and trained personnel to protect US diplomats. It leads to one of two possible conclusions. There are qualified people but they tend to work as independent contractors for the only three private contractors (Blackwater, Dyncorp and Triple Canopy) authorized to bid on these contracts and not for the federal government. The private companies offer no long-term job security or protections, they offer no health insurance when the mercenaries aren’t in the field, and they offer no pensions or other long-term benefits. Therefore, we would have to conclude the individuals either don’t want all the comparative perks of direct government employment, or the DS just won’t hire the qualified people already vetted, trained and available to do the job.

The other possible conclusion, of course, is that diplomats are getting sub-standard protections from private gunmen who don't meet the high standards of full-time agents employed by the DS.

Neither conclusion is acceptable. Either the federal government is giving private armies money that should and could be spent on soldiers or government employees, or it’s giving money to private armies that aren’t qualified for the tasks they’re being asked to perform.

The new rules authorized by Rice call for additional training of the gunmen working for the private armies. You can bet the extra costs of the training won’t be eaten by the private armies, but will just be added to the rising bill already being paid by taxpayers.

Since the State Department has increased payments to private armies from $1 billion to $3 $4 billion per year since 2001, one would think that State would also expand it’s auditing and oversight capacity to meet this change. Well, one might think that if we weren’t talking about an administration determined to give away to private crony businesses as much public money as possible:

Today, the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the small State Department office that oversees the private security contractors in Iraq and elsewhere, is overwhelmed by its responsibilities to supervise the contractors, according to former employees, members of Congress and outside experts. They say the office has grown too reliant on, and too close to, the 1,200 private soldiers who now guard American officials overseas. [...] But the number of government employees issuing, managing and auditing contracts has barely grown. "That’s a criticism that’s true of not just State but of almost every agency," said Jody Freeman, an expert on administrative law at Harvard Law School.

Indeed, this is simply one of the more extreme and public cases of the federal government giving away more public money and not bothering to figure out if it’s being properly spent. We are now reaching the point where if the World Bank had lent us the money we’re tossing around to private contractors in almost every area of government, we’d probably be criticized as having lax financial controls and be accused of being a kleptocracy. And with the amount of money ending up in the hands of private armies, pretty soon another epithet might end up applied to the recipients of our tax dollars: warlords.