ITAR Violation of the Week #2: That Time Someone Signed for 200 AK-47s as “Eric Cartman”
In which the Pentagon, South Park, and Blackwater guest star in an imports export violation costing over 42 million dollars and several lives
War is peace: geopolitics
ITAR Violation of the Week: That Time Someone Signed for 200 AK-47s as “Eric Cartman”
In which the Pentagon, South Park, and Blackwater guest star in an imports export violation costing over 42 million dollars and several lives
There are many known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, but if there’s anything I’m certain of, it’s that truth shows itself time and time again to be stranger than any possible fiction.
In September 2008, someone walked into Bunker 22, a U.S. military weapons storage facility near Kabul, signed for more than 200 AK-47 assault rifles using the name “Eric Cartman” from something called the “Blackwater Counter-Narcotics Training Unit,” and then simply walked out with the guns never to be found again. Those 200 assault rifles were actually supposed to go to the Afghan National Police. They did not go to the Afghan National Police.
If the name Eric Cartman rings a bell, it’s because Cartman’s the portly and sociopathic fourth grader from the adult cartoon South Park whose catchphrase is “Respect my authoritah!”
More than two years later in 2010, when Senate investigators found this out, a Blackwater lawyer confirmed that no employee by that name had ever worked for the company.
So how did Blackwater, a private military contractor, end up getting involved in the same serious sentence surrounding the signature of a sociopathic fourth-grader?
Here’s where the truth gets properly insane. Blackwater, fresh off the heels of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre where Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians, had become toxic. That’s why they created Paravant LLC, a shell company with zero employees whose sole purpose was to win government contracts that Blackwater could no longer get under its own name.
Brian McCracken, Paravant’s vice president, told Senate investigators with remarkable candor that Paravant was created “to be like a company that didn’t have any Blackwater on it” so they could “go after some business.” When asked about concerns with the Blackwater name, he said simply, “the reputation, the baggage.” In fact, defense contractor Raytheon specifically requested Blackwater adopt a different name when negotiating the subcontract. The transcript of the hearing is quite remarkable:
“According to Mr. McCracken, Raytheon paid Blackwater for services rendered by Paravant and Paravant relied on Blackwater for its billing. Paravant and Blackwater were ‘one and the same,’ according to Mr. McCracken, and he added, Paravant was only created to avoid the ‘baggage’ associated with the Blackwater name.”
Thus spake the fake company with zero employees which won a $20 million task order in September 2008 to train the Afghan National Army. Their proposal claimed “many years of experience” and “2,000 employees deployed overseas.” All false. The Army contracting officer testified he had no indication Paravant was connected to Blackwater and did not check references. He managed about a billion dollars in contracts from Orlando, Florida with no one deployed to Afghanistan until May 18, 2009, eight months after the contract began.
Between 2008 and 2010, Paravant LLC obtained over 500 AK-47s from Bunker 22 on at least three documented occasions. The weapons were stored there for the Afghan National Police, not for contractor use. General David Petraeus confirmed there was no written policy allowing contractors to access those weapons. Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who signed over the weapons, told investigators he thought they were going to the Afghan police. They were actually being distributed to Blackwater/Paravant contractors like party favors.
Every new hire’s first stop was picking up an AK-47.
If you’re wondering how Eric Cartman felt the confidence to sign out weapons, perhaps the quality control measures for determining who obtained these weapons is worth noting for its spectacularity. Employees of Paravant later charged and sentenced to prison for the deaths of Afghan nationals in 2011 included Christopher Drotleff who had a military record including assault, AWOL, and larceny, plus a civilian record with DUI and resisting arrest and Justin Cannon, who was discharged from the Army after going AWOL for 22 days and testing positive for cocaine. Blackwater had no military service records on file for either when they hired them.
In December 2008, a Paravant trainer jumped on the back of a moving vehicle with a loaded AK-47 and rode it in the manner of a stagecoach, which is how tragically, in a moment the vehicle hit a bump, the trainer’s weapon discharged and shot another contractor in the head, partially paralyzing him. Senator Levin noted the bitter irony in how Paravant was hired to teach the Afghan National Army how to safely use weapons. The incident was reported to Raytheon and the Army. No investigation was conducted.
Five months later, on May 5, 2009, Drotleff and Cannon were drinking alcohol in violation of General Order 1, carrying those unauthorized weapons, when they got into a traffic incident with Afghan civilians on Jalalabad Road in Kabul where they fired approximately 30 rounds, resulting in two Afghan civilians dead.
As Senate investigators tracked individual weapons by serial number, they discovered that one specific rifle signed out by “Eric Cartman” in September 2008 was issued to a Paravant deputy program manager and was not returned to the Afghan government until January 25, 2010. That was more than 16 months later and only after Senate staff started asking pointed questions. In June 2009, Blackwater claimed that all weapons had been returned yet 90 weapons were not returned until January 25, 2010, just weeks before the hearing, and with some weapons being destroyed by Blackwater rather than returned.
By the subsequent summer of August 2010, the scandal led to Xe Services (also known as Blackwater Worldwide) being hit with a $42 million ITAR violation and settlement covering 288 violations from 2003 to 2009. The collective violations spanned across Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Colombia, and included the unauthorized training of foreign security forces. From Cartman to Colombia, Blackwater and its entrepreneurial corporate personhoods made false statements to regulators, lost weapons, and continued unauthorized activities even after being ordered to stop.
My take on this story and why I shared it for this week is because of its sheer audacity. Audacity requires some type of complicity, condoning, or coercion to embolden it in the first place, since audacity also requires a comfort with finding something more absurd than average. That means someone felt comfortable enough signing for military weapons using a cartoon character’s name. That audacity devolved to its lowest level of impunity is reflected in how contractors operated within Afghanistan while the U.S. military was supposedly winning hearts and minds. The Cartman incident is a testimony to how completely the system had broken down, how audaciously bad it had become.
When your oversight is so nonexistent that people think it’s funny to seriously, physically, literally, really, concretely, absolutely actually use South Park references on weapons transfer forms, you’ve created the perfect conditions for civilian casualties. The fact that Blackwater just rebranded as Paravant and kept getting contracts reinforces the notion that escaping one tainted reputation through cover of a moniker was not just a shell company here, it became literal as shells on the ground were the result of these consequences and how those shells passed civilian lives to get there.
