PRIVATE FIRMS SEEK PROFIT IN DRUGS WAR

The trend towards reducing the size of government by farming out its
operations is now almost universal in the industrialised democracies. It is
supposed to save money and impose some market discipline on bureaucracy's
natural tendency to swell.

The problem is that by "downsizing" government and "outsourcing" its work,
the profit motive begins to take the place of public policy.

When the issue is delivering the post or cleaning the streets, the
government can set standards and monitor the work of its private
contractors. But what happens when an administration starts "outsourcing"
its conduct of foreign and defence policy, and the contractors deal not in
stamps, postcards, brushes and brooms but lethal force?

Those are the questions now being asked in the United States Congress after
the shooting down of a small plane carrying American missionaries in Peru.
The plane was strafed by a Peruvian air force jet on April 20 in the belief
that it carried drug smugglers. A young American, Veronica Bowers, and her
seven-month-old daughter were killed.

The incident initially appeared to be the over-zealous act of a Peruvian
pilot, but the missionaries' plane had first been spotted and wrongly
identified by a US surveillance aircraft, which carried Americans working
for the CIA and a Peruvian liaison officer. Moreover the Americans were not
CIA staff, but employees of a private firm with a CIA contract. As one
congressional official put it: "There were just businessmen in that plane."

A state department inquiry into the incident is under way, and the sequence
of events is unclear. US government officials have suggested that the
private contractors cautioned the Peruvians against opening fire, but no
one is denying that the US plane initially spotted the missionaries' plane
and labelled it suspect.

The incident has cast light on the creeping privatisation of the drug war.
Of the $1.3bn set aside by congress last year for Plan Colombia - the
programme of military and development aid by which Washington hopes to stem
the supply of narcotics to the US at their source - a great deal is going
to commercial ventures.

The biggest of the companies involved is DynCorp, a huge conglomerate based
in northern Virginia near the CIA's Langley headquarters.

DynCorp's five-year $200m contract with the state department requires it to
fly crop-dusters over the Colombian jungle dropping pesticide on coca
plantations. When crop-dusters come under fire, it is up to DynCorp
helicopter pilots to provide support. In February a DynCorp chopper flew
into the middle of a firefight with the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (Farc) to rescue some Colombian policemen. DynCorp employees also
ferry US-trained Colombian troops into battle.

Other US companies have different slices of the Plan Colombia pie. AirScan
conducts aerial surveillance, and Military Professional Resources Inc
(MPRI) until recently provided training for Colombian officers.

The rise of private contractors was made inevitable by the
counter-narcotics policies of both Bill Clinton and George Bush. They
depend on a largely military solution to a complex problem in a decade in
which manpower in the US armed forces has been cut by more than a third.

Ed Soyster, a retired general and former head of the Defence Intelligence
Agency who works for MPRI, pointed out that pulling eight full colonels out
of the already streamlined US forces for a Plan Colombia assignment would
seriously affect combat readiness. "That's why they come to the
contractors," he said.

All this is not entirely new. Air America used to fly for the CIA in
southeast Asia during the Vietnam war. But that was under the direct
control of Langley. The new mercenaries are independent firms with their
own bottom line. Soyster says the government can exert tighter control on
private contractors than it can on its own employees because the guidelines
and limits for actions are precisely laid out in the contracts.

That may be true of the MPRI contract, which dealt solely with classes for
officers, but it is not necessarily the case for the companies operating in
the Colombian jungle. The DynCorp contract is a study in vagueness. The
section dealing with search and rescue says: "This operation deals with
downed aircraft or hostile action by narcotics producers or traffickers."
It gives no further details.

Information about mercenaries was once draped with a thick blanket of
secrecy labelled "national security". Nowadays the blanket has a new brand
name: "corporate confidentiality". Thus, members of Congress have not even
been officially told which company was flying the surveillance plane on
April 20 over Peru. Their own researchers traced the charter to a
mysterious company called Aviation Development Corporation (ADC), operating
out of Alabama. But no one at ADC has been willing to talk. Neither has the
CIA, the state department or the White House.

Janice Schakowsky, a Democratic congresswoman from Illinois, has been
amazed at the secrecy surrounding companies that receive hundreds of
millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. "We are hiring a secret army," she
said. "We are engaging in a secret war, and the American people need to be
told why."

The danger inherent in the obsessive confidentiality is the implied lack of
control. If Congress is not even being told the names of the companies
involved, it cannot determine whether US funds are being used to aid
rightwing paramilitaries or being drawn into the conflict with Farc. There
is no dividing line between the guerrilla war and the counter-narcotics
war, because many guerrilla leaders are also drug lords.

Meanwhile the companies and their employees have a vested interest in
prolonging and deepening US involvement in Colombia. They are taking risks,
but making good money. No one has thought through what happens when a group
of private contractors are killed or taken hostage. What would their status
be, and would the US intervene on their behalf? As Soyster put it: "That's
something that has got to be figured out."