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From an interview with Jeremy Scahill on Bill Moyers Journal 19 October 2007:
Jeremy Scahill is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. He's reported from Iraq, the Balkans and Nigeria, among other places, he's a co-winner of the George Polk Award For Investigative Reporting.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Erik Prince likes to describe Blackwater as the sort of Federal Express of the national security apparatus. He says if you want a package to get somewhere, do you send it through the post office or do you send it through FedEx? But the fact is, the US military is the junior partner in the coalition that's occupying Iraq to these private companies. There are over 170 mercenary companies like Blackwater operating in Iraq right now. That's almost as many nations as are registered at the UN. And I think this isn't just about Iraq. It's also looting the US treasury.
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BILL MOYERS: Look, these — the journalists we saw, all good journalists, some of them my friends. I admire them. But I was struck that no one confronted Prince about the specifics of his private army. How do you explain that?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I'm — I'm not sure why they didn't do it. I feel like some of these interviews that have been done with him would make the barons of the Soviet media empire blush with embarrassment for how this was handled. I mean, this is a man who is building up nothing short of a parallel national security apparatus. He not only has his Blackwater Security which is what's deployed in Iraq. He has a maritime division, an aviation division. He recently started his own privatized intelligence company called Total Intelligence Solutions that — that's headed by a thirty year veteran of the CIA, the man who led the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Colfer Black, who oversaw the extraordinary rendition program. This is the man who promised President Bush that he was gonna have his operative in Afghanistan chop off Osama Bin Laden's head, place it in a box with dry ice and then have it hand delivered to President Bush. He's now the number two man at Blackwater USA. He's the vice chairman of the company. And he's heading up this private intelligence company called Total Intelligence Solutions. Blackwater has just won a 92 million dollar contract from the Pentagon to operate flights throughout central Asia. This is a company that is manufacturing surveillance blimps and marketing them to the Department of Homeland Security. Their own armored vehicle called the Grizzly. I mean, Blackwater's gonna be around for a very long time.
...Well, there are two things at play here. There's the funding of congressional candidates. And Erik Prince has given over a quarter of a million dollars to Republican candidates. He's also given money to the green party to defeat Democratic candidates in the 2006 election cycle. So, he's a pretty committed supporter of the Republican party. But what I think is more interesting is Erik Prince's connection to radical religious right organizations. I mean, he comes from a family where his father built up a very successful manufacturing empire called Prince Manufacturing. And the invention that they were best known for is the now ubiquitous lighted sun visors. You pull down the visor in your car and it lights up. You have a bit of Blackwater history riding around in your vehicle. And so, Prince grows up in this household where he watches his father using that business as a cash generating engine to fuel and fund the rise not only of the Republican revolution of 1994, but also of several of the core groups that make up the radical religious right. His dad gave the seed money to Gary Bauer to start the family research council. They were very close to James Dobson and his Focus on the Family Prayer Warrior Network. Erik Prince was in the first team of interns that Gary Bauer took on in Washington at the Family Research Council. And Erik Prince's sister Betsy married Dick Devos, heir to the Amway Corporation fortune, the owners of the Orlando Magic basketball team. And together, these two families merged in a kind of marriage that was commonplace in the monarchies of old Europe. And together, they formed this formidable behind the scenes power player in radical right wing politics in this country.
...But Blackwater has emerged sort of as the — it's almost like an armed wing of the administration in Iraq. Because it doesn't work for the Pentagon. It works for the State Department. And the fact that Blackwater is such a politically connected company I think explains why you see this big push back. Because if I was Ambassador Ryan Crocker, I wouldn't want to come within ten countries of the Blackwater body guards. I mean, when your body guards become more of a target than you, maybe it's time to get a different security detail. So, why is it so important to the US government that they keep Blackwater on the job in Iraq? I think part of it is an institutional loyalty. Blackwater is very fond of saying we've never lost a principle. No US diplomat has died under our watch. ...And of course, and, you know, the Republicans in Congress during the hearings said that's the statistic that's most important. But the question needs to be asked, at what price? When you ride into a village and you shoot at cars that come too close to you, that has a ricochet effect that where, the people whose vehicle you shot at now have a perception of what happens when US diplomats come around. And then, they go and they tell someone else.
And maybe you're one of the families of a victim of the Nasoor Square shooting where 17 people were killed and over 25 others were wounded. So, yes, Blackwater can walk around bragging about how they haven't lost a single principle. All of their nouns have been kept alive, as they call it. But at what price? And at what price to the US soldiers in Iraq? You know, I've heard from so many soldiers, veterans who say, you know, we're in a village somewhere. And things are going fine with the Iraqis. And we've reached the point where they're not attacking us anymore. And we feel like there's some good will that's been generated.' And in fact, this is an exact story that a translator attached to a special forces unit told me in an e-mail recently. And he said, you know, and then the PSD guys, the personal security detail guys, they come whizzing through with their VIP and they shoot up the town. And the Iraqis in town don't understand that there's a difference between the private forces and the military. And then they conduct revenge attacks against us. And so, it's having a blow-back effect on the active duty military. The misconduct of these forces.
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I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. And I think we saw a real window into the possible future. You know, I was standing on a street corner in the French quarter on Bourbon Street. And I was talking to two New York City police officer who had come down to help. And this is just a couple of days after the hurricane had hit. And this car speeds up next to us. No license plates on it, a compact car. And three massive guys get out of it. And they have M-4 assault rifles, bullet proof vests, wearing khakis, wrap around sunglasses, baseball caps on. And they come up and they say to the cops, "Where are the rest of the Blackwater guys?" And my head sort of started, you know, I didn't even hear the answer. I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Where are the rest of the Blackwater guys? So, they get back in their vehicle and they speed off. And I said to this cop, Blackwater? You mean the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan? They said, oh, yeah. They're all over the place down here. And so, I said, well, I'd like to talk to them. Where are they? And they said, you can go either way on the street, implying that they're everywhere. So, I walked a little bit deeper into the French quarter. And sure enough, I encountered some Blackwater guys. And when I talked to them, they said that they were down there to confront criminals and stop looters. ...Erik Prince sent them in there with no contract initially. About 180 Blackwater guys were sent into the Gulf. They got there before FEMA. I don't even know if FEMA's there yet. But they got there before FEMA, before there was any kind of a serious operation in the city at all. ...Within a week, Blackwater was given a contract from the Department of Homeland Security Federal Protective Service to engage in security operations inside of New Orleans. At one point, Blackwater had six hundred men deployed down there stretching from Mississippi through — from Texas through Mississippi and the Gulf. They were pulling in $240,000 a day. Some of these guys though had just been in Iraq two weeks earlier guarding the US ambassador. Now, they're in New Orleans. They say, oh, we do this sort of as a vacation. One was complaining to me that there wasn't enough action down here. And when I talked to them, they told me they were getting paid 350 dollars a day, plus a per diem. ...When I got Blackwater's contract with the Department of Homeland Security, it turns out that Blackwater billed US taxpayers 950 dollars per man per day in the hurricane zone.
...When Blackwater was sued — for wrongful death from the four guys killed in Fallujah in March of '04 and then Afghanistan plane crash, the legal argument that Blackwater put forward is quite an interesting one. "We can't be sued." What they said is, "We should enjoy the same immunity from civilian litigation that's enjoyed by the U.S. military." At the same time, their lobbyists and spokespeople are waxing poetic in the media about how it would be inappropriate to apply the uniform code of military justice, the court marshal system, to Blackwater because we're civilians. So, when it's convenient, we're part of the U.S. total force, part of the war machine, and should be treated like the military. And when it's convenient, oh, we can't be subjected to military law. Because we're actually civilians.
...I think that the U.S. government right now is in the midst of its most radical privatization agenda. Seventy percent of the national intelligence budget is farmed out to the private sector. We have more contractors than soldiers occupying Iraq. I think that what this does is it takes — it sanitizes it also for the American people. There's not a draft.
There's been, you know, almost 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq; we don't know how many private contractors. But that's a relatively small number compared to Vietnam, for instance, where we talked about 65,000 body bags coming home. And already, people are outraged at it. And I see this as a real subversion of democratic processes in this country and a subversion of sovereignty of nations around the world. ...I mean, it masks the human cost or the human toll of the war in terms of American lives. Because the contractor deaths are not counted in the official tolls nor are the injuries of them.
And it also masks the true extent of the occupation when over half of your occupation force comes from the private sector. Bush almost never talks about it. He doesn't have to own up to it in front of the American people. He's having enough trouble owning up to the 170,000 troops that are over there right now. And the story is starting to slip out. But you're absolutely right. It keeps the death toll down — in terms of what's being reported. And it keeps protests down as well. What I see in the bigger picture here is what the real revolution is in terms of U.S. politics is that they're taking billions of dollars in public money. And they're privatizing it.
You know, the Pentagon can't give campaign contributions. The State Department can't give campaign contributions. Blackwater's executives can give contributions. DynCore's, Ratheon, Northrop Grumman. And so what they're doing is, they're taking billions of dollars. And it's making its way back into the campaign coffers of the very politicians that make the meteoric ascent of these companies possible. I really view this through the lens of it tearing away at the fabric of American democracy as well. |
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