We Never Sleep

31Oct07

From our Bad Ideas Live Forever file:

It’s plastered all over the news. Blackwater “private military company” operatives shoot first, never mind asking any questions. And back in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, with nary a FEMA employee in sight, hundreds of Blackwater personnel descended on and patrolled New Orleans, martial law style, even before they’d been contracted by the government to do so.

Facts:
1) Over 90 percent of Blackwater USA business is funded by our taxes.
2) To date Blackwater (just one of some 60+ private security firms we fund in Iraq) has snagged over $1 billion in government contracts.
3) More than two thirds of these contracts have been no bid, meaning non-competitive, hence anti-free market.
4) Blackwater charges U.S. taxpayers six times the equivalent cost of a U.S. soldier for each of its security personnel—$445,000 a year, per operative.

Unlike their official soldier counterparts, no laws—military, domestic or foreign have governed otherwise illegal Blackwater behavior. Simply put, Blackwater, and the many other private security firms we employ in Iraq have been getting away with murder. Now, you might think this sort of “cowboy capitalism” is something new to we here in the land of the free and home of the brave.

But it’s not.

Just ask San Francisco literary icon Dashiell Hammett. Well, okay—he’s dead. But were Hammett still around he’d be the guy to clue us in on our country’s long tradition tolerating, financially supporting and even celebrating private militias like Blackwater USA.

Dashiell Hammett was born in Maryland, May 27, 1894. Hammett began and pretty much ended his writing career in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. The Maltese Falcon is his best known novel. It may be the most evocative story ever penned about The City in the fog.

Hammett’s career pioneering hard boiled detective fiction came directly from years spent working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Hammett and his fellow “Pinks” were the Blackwater of their day.

The Pinkerton Agency was created by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton in 1850. It was a private detective and security firm that gained prominence by uncovering a plot to assassinate then President elect Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln showed his gratitude by hiring the Pinks as his personal body guards. However, they were no longer guarding him when he was actually assassinated.

Much of the Pinkerton work was putting down labor unrest for industrialists like Andrew Carnegie. The agency grew rapidly, it’s covert agents infiltrating labor unions and others violently breaking up organized strikes. Pinkertons hired out as security guards and served as a military force for hire. They came into the national spotlight chasing desperadoes like Jesse James, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

In 1871 Congress appropriated funds for the Department of Justice to investigate, arrest and prosecute persons in violation of federal law. The amount granted couldn’t cover costs to build an arm of the Justice Department expressly to hunt down criminals, so they hired the Pinks.

For the next 23 years the Pinkertons investigated cases as a quasi-government arm of the DOJ. The relationship ended in 1893 with the passage of the Anti-Pinkerton Act, which forbid Pinkerton National Detective Agency employees or any similar agency staff from being employed by the United States Government.

It’s not hard to understand why the Anti-Pinkerton Act became law. The Pinkerton Agency had grown so large its’ operatives actually outnumbered soldiers in the U.S. Army. They owned more tommyguns then the celebrated gangsters of the era could ever hope for. Pinkerton operatives were virtually above the law, protected by government contracts and big money interests. Sound familiar? Ohio so feared Pinkerton’s potential as a militia force they tossed the Pinks out of the state. Ring any bells?

Dashiell Hammett’s personal epiphany came in 1917, while employed by Pinkerton as strike-breaker at the Anaconda Copper Mine in Butte, Montana. Hammett was offered $5,000 to murder labor leader Frank Little. Though Hammett claimed he rejected the offer Little was dragged away by six men masked men, castrated and lynched. While the crime has never been solved, it’s commonly believed Pinkerton Ops were responsible for the murder.

Hammett’s politics shifted dramatically to the left following this incident, though he did return briefly to work for Pinkerton following military service in World War I. A veteran of both world wars, Hammett openly supported a wide progressive agenda. He stood up to HUAC in the early 1950s, paying for his refusal to cooperate with 6 months behind bars.

Meanwhile, back here in the present seventeen unarmed civilians get gunned down by Blackwater Ops in Baghdad. Now we’re told our State Department has promised the perpetrators immunity from prosecution. The Justice Department, naturally, is in the dark. It seems Blackwater’s Dark Prince, Eric, and his personal strike force get off the hook, again.

But even Blackwater, with the world’s largest private army training compound near the aptly named Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, with another camp in Illinois, with it’s proposed facility just north of the Mexican border in Southern California, with its own armored vehicle manufacturing plant and it’s retired Navy Seal, CIA, Ranger and Special Forces hired guns, is just one of innumerable players in today’s ever-growing U.S. private forces marketplace.

It just goes to show how good ol’ American private spy, security, and outright gun-and-run mercenaries not only rate fatter taxpayer take-home pay than our military personnel, but stand guns and holsters above laws applying to everyone else, anywhere.

The Pinkerton single-peeper logo inspired the phrase “private eye”. Their motto “We Never Sleep” is equally apropos, both then and now.

Let’s just hope we citizens manage to remain conscious, too.

Filed under: Blackwater, Dashiell Hammett, San Francisco Bay Area, San Francisco history, blood money, writers   |  1 Comment