It should come as no surprise that the Bush administration would take any opportunity to reward its political friends with lavish no-bid contracts. Still, there is something particularly unseemly about the munificent payments to Blackwater, the State Department's principal private security contractor in Iraq.
With many Iraqis still seething after Blackwater guards killed at least eight Iraqis two weeks ago, it is evident that Blackwater and other security contractors are undermining the military's efforts to win over Iraqis.
Now an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has underscored the lavish extent of Blackwater's payments and its relationship to the Bush administration. The committee, which held hearings on the use of security contractors in Iraq on Tuesday, should investigate these links further.
Former Bush administration officials are peppered throughout Blackwater's highest executive positions. Erik Prince, the former Navy SEAL who founded the company, was a White House intern under President George H. W. Bush and has been a Republican financier since, with more than $225,000 in political contributions.
Prince's sister, Betsy DeVos, is a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party and a "pioneer" who raised $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004. Her husband, the former Amway chief executive Richard DeVos Jr., was the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan in 2006.
Prince denied Tuesday that his connections had anything to do with it, but he certainly has done well under the Bush administration. Federal contracts account for about 90 percent of the revenue of Prince Group holdings, of which Blackwater is a subsidiary. Since 2001, when it made less than $1 million in federal contracts, Blackwater has received more than $1 billion in such contracts - including at least one with the State Department for hundreds of millions of dollars that was awarded without open, competitive bidding.
The congressional investigation found that Blackwater charges the government $1,222 per day for each private military operative - more than six times the wage of an equivalent soldier. And still it uncovered instances of overcharging. It reported that an audit in 2005 by the State Department's inspector general found Blackwater was charging separately for "drivers" and "security specialists" who were, in fact, the same people.
The fallout from Blackwater's heavy-handed tactics is a reminder of the folly of using a private force to perform military missions in a war zone. These jobs need to be brought back into government hands as soon as practicable, and remaining private contractors placed under the jurisdiction of military law.
Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the oversight committee, said Tuesday that if private contractors are meant to provide security on the cheap, it's not working. "It's costing us more money," he said, "and I believe it's causing us problems." Blackwater's contracts should spur Congress to further investigate the Bush administration's practice of using Iraq to slip rich deals to its friends.