For a truly distressing day you could do no worse than read Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Scahill appeared in a long interview by David Martin, CBS national security correspondent on BookTV.org this Sunday. Martin is a thoughtful and non provocative interviewer and the story Scahill tells is absolutely chilling.
He, like many Americans, first became aware of private armed forces in Iraq through the horrific incident of “civilians” being attacked, hacked, dragged behind vehicles, burned and hung from a bridge in Falluja, on March 31, 2004. These civilians were in fact employees of Blackwater USA and hired to be in Iraq to do any number of tasks. On the day of their murder they were transporting kitchen equipment. More usually Blackwater is engaged in all manner of armed interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, from protecting visiting dignitaries (and even Paul Bremer when he was the man in charge in Baghdad) to fighting alongside US troops in day long fire-fights. Scahill, who had been in Fallujah in the years before the invasion, paid more attention than many to the details of the mob actions, the locations, the victims and the aftermath. He didn’t know he was onto a major story though until on a reporting visit to New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Armed Blackwater employees were all over the city, hired by Homeland Security, patrolling with weapons no policeman could own. The result of Scahill’s investigation is this book.
The implications of this Cheney/Rumsfeld driven outsourcing of national security tasks are profound.The bottom line for Blackwater depends on warfare: no fighting, no income. The success of Blackwater in its mission — the provisioning of elite fighting units — depends on attracting men out of the Armed Forces. Kids who were making $28,000 a year in the Army are now making $40,000 a month for Blackwater. Since there are about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, alongside about 150,000 troops the implications for troop morale and cost of fighting are enormous. The presence of Blackwater squads in the war zone confuses and up-ends the chain of command — who decides to do what,when. Scahill documents cases in which Blackwater men issued orders to begin firing on Iraqis to US soldiers. Discipline for Blackwater employees is controlled not by the Armed Forces but by the corporation; while US Soldiers have been court-martialed and jailed for behavior at Abu Ghraib, contract troops were simply sent home — where they could seek employment from another contractor. And this just begins the story.
The killing of the contractors in Fallujah led to a full scale invasion of the city by US Marines, destruction of much of it and radicalization of the population — an invasion which likely would not have happened without the Blackwater trigger.
Families of the slaughtered men are suing the company which is trying to hide behind a “composition of forces” argument which says it can no more be sued than can the US Army. It is from these families that Scahill got lots of his information including charges that the company’s attention to its bottom line diverted it away from proper training and protection of its own employees.
The founder of Blackwater, Eric Prince, is the scion of a Michigan family which has deep ties to the Christian Right and to influential men in the Bush administration. [See third Scahill paragraph.] Its attorney of record is Kenneth Starr and its former lead attorney is Fred Fielding the recently appointed White House council.
For those of you with interests in military and national security affairs this is a must read, with vertiginous implications
The audio isn’t available yet on BookTV.org but when it is, you should be able to find it here, dated April 1.
Meanwhile, you could watch a clip of Scahill, or read a short piece by him, over at The Nation, for which he often writes. Some of the pieces are listed here.
Truthdig also did a longish interview which looks like it covers much of the same ground at BookTV.org, here – mp3 and transcript.
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