http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0513-06.htmPublished in the April, 1996 issue of The Progressive
Mercenaries Inc.: How a U.S. Company Props Up the House of Saud by William D. Hartung
We were shocked and saddened to hear about the attacks in Saudi Arabia and the deaths of at least 91 people there, including ten Americans.
But the fact that one of the targets was a U.S. private military corporation called Vinnell raises serious questions about the role of "executive mercenaries," and corporations who profit from war and instability. This is the second time in eight years that Vinnell's operations in Saudi Arabia have been the target of a terrorist attack. In 1995 a car bomb blasted through an Army training program Vinnell was involved with. The following year, Bill Hartung, a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute wrote this article for the Progressive magazine.
The sanitized version of American foreign policy asserts that the United States is hard at work promoting democratic values around the world in the face of attacks from totalitarian ideologies ranging from communism during the Cold War to Islamic fundamentalism today. Every once in a while an incident occurs that contradicts this reassuring rhetoric by revealing the secret underside of American policy, which is far more concerned with propping up pliable regimes that serve the interests of U.S. multinational corporations than it is with any meaningful notion of democracy. The November 13, 1995 bombing of the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG) headquarters and an adjacent building housing a U.S. military training mission is one such incident.
President Clinton tried to paint the bombing as just another senseless act of terrorism perpetrated by armed Islamic extremists, but the target was chosen much too carefully to support that simple explanation. The Saudi National Guard is a 55,000 man military force whose main job is to protect the Saudi monarchy from its own people, using arms from the United States and training supplied by roughly 750 retired U.S. military and intelligence personnel employed by the
Vinnell Corporation of Fairfax, Virginia. A January 1996 article in Jane's Defence Weekly describes the SANG as "a kind of Praetorian Guard for the House of Saud, the royal family's defence of last resort against internal opposition." The November bombing -- which killed five Americans and wounded thirty more -- was certainly brutal, but it was far from senseless. As a retired American military officer familiar with Vinnell's operations put it,
"I don't think it was an accident that it was that office that got bombed. If you wanted to make a political statement about the Saudi regime you'd single out the National Guard, and if you wanted to make a statement about American involvement you'd pick the only American contractor involved in training the guard: Vinnell."
The story of how an obscure American company ended up becoming the Saudi monarchy's personal protection service is a case study in how the United States government has come to rely on unaccountable private companies and unrepresentative foreign governments to do its dirty work on the world stage, short-circuiting democracy at home and abroad in the process. In the wake of the Iran/contra scandal and the end of the Cold War, many observers of U.S. foreign policy have assumed that this penchant for covert policymaking has been put aside, but Vinnell's role in Saudi Arabia puts the lie to that comforting assumption.
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