Did Blackwater (XE) have whistleblowers killed?

Jeremy Scahill, the reporter who has written the most about the contract mercenary company Blackwater, reports that Blackwater is being accused of having people who spoke to investigators or who threatened to speak to those investigators.

It looks like it was not just the members of the Bush administration who conducted criminal actions. So did their contractors. And yes, I understand that to be accused or implicated in such assassinations is not the same as being found guilty in court, and may not be the same as actually being guilty. But I'm not on any jury, and Erik Prince (founder of Blackwater) just looks guilty to me. He's going to have to prove himself innocent to me.

State Department report on Blackwater's Baghdad killings was written by a Blackwater contract employee.

The Department of State Bureau of Diplomatic Security issued a report on the now famous incident in which Blackwater security personnel killed a number of civilians in downtown Baghdad. It seems that the individual who investigated the incident and wrote the report was Darren Hanner, RSO TOC Watch Officer, Baghdad.

Mark Kleiman points out that Darren Hanner is a contract employee from Blackwater.

The FBI is sending a team to Baghdad to investigate the incident. I hear that the FBI team investigating the actions of Blackwater in Baghdad will be given security services by Blackwater security personnel.

This Blackwater stuff is getting out of hand.

Blackwater, USA - a private militia belonging to Republican social conservatives

As we try to get the Iraqi government to disband the secular militias and take back a monopoly of the use of force for the central government. Having a monopoly of of the use of force is a critical characteristic of an effective government. National governments without a monopoly of power are ineffective (as shown in Iraq, Colombia and Afghanistan) and frequently are subject to coups.

So what does it say about the Bush administration that it has been privatizing the military and handing both military and Intelligence functions over to private security firms (of which Blackwater, USA is currently the largest?) Blackwater is a large organization. "Blackwater has drawn contractors from their international pool of professionals, a database containing "21,000 former Special Forces troops, soldiers, and retired law enforcement agents," overall."

The owner of Blackwater, USA is scheduled to testify before congress about the recent Blackwater Baghdad Shootings in which at least eleven Iraqi civilians were killed. There is at present no evidence that the Blackwater shooters were under fire from any enemy source, and allegations that they were simply out of control.

Josh Marshall at Talking Point Memo describes Eric Prince's connection with both the Bush administration and with Prince's actions in creating and funding the social conservative ultra-right-wing organization The Family Research Council.

"Erik Prince is 37 years old. He founded Blackwater in 1997 with money he inherited from his father, Edgar Prince, the head of Prince Automative. The elder Prince and his wife were major Republican and conservative activists and funders. And Prince himself co-founded The Family Research Council with Gary Bauer and apparently provided the key early funding for the group.

According to Bauer, "I can say without hesitation that, without Ed and Elsa and their wonderful children, there simply would not be a Family Research Council."

Prince's sister, Betsy DeVos, is married is the former Chair of the Michigan Republican Party and her husband is Dick DeVos, failed candidate for governor of Michigan and scion of the DeVos family, founders of Amway and major funders of Republican and conservative causes.

Amway is privately owned by the DeVos and van Andel families. And to give some sense of the scale of their political giving, according to a 2005 Center for Public Integrity study, Dick & Betsy DeVos were the fifth largest political givers in the country during the 2004 election cycle. Richard DeVos Sr. & his wife were ranked third. And Jay Van Andel was ranked second.

Let's just say they give some real money to the Republican party and its candidates. And of course there are the DeVos Family Foundations which give money to conservative causes.

Back back to Betsy's brother Erik Prince, founder and CEO of Blackwater. Back in 1990 Prince interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Blackwater's lobbyist in DC is Paul Behrends, a former Rohrabacher aide who he met when the two worked for the congressman. Later he interned in the first Bush White House. But after doing so, he and his father broke with President Bush and supported the insurgent candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan.

The then-22 year old Prince told the Grand Rapids Press, "I interned with the Bush administration for six months. I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with -- homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns."

In addition to running Blackwater Prince also serves on the board of Christian Freedom International."

Wikipedia provides an article on Eric Prince.

There are a lot of problems caused by having the government depend on contractors like Blackwater for what are essentially military and law enforcement functions, as well as the fact that they essentially use the government to train their personnel and then poach them away at a time the government is most in need of them. But the most significant is the lack of government control of their operations.

Eric Prince's testimony before Congress today will be a melange of conservative and social conservative ideology, presented by a multi-millionaire who inherited a fortune and does not want to pay any taxes. He wants to run his own country, and has no room for most of us who consider ourselves to be Americans. His activities are part of the reason for the Republican incompetence in running government. Count on it.

Blackwater in Baghdad - "may be worse that Abu Ghraib"

Now even the military is privately piling on the Blackwater cowboyswho shot up civilians in Baghdad, and the Department of State has gone into "hunker-down" mode. Here are a few choice quotes from the Washington Post:

In high-level meetings over the past several days, U.S. military officials have pressed State Department officials to assert more control over Blackwater, which operates under the department's authority, said a U.S. government official with knowledge of the discussions. "The military is very sensitive to its relationship that they've built with the Iraqis being altered or even severely degraded by actions such as this event," the official said.

"This is a nightmare," said a senior U.S. military official. "We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we're trying to have an impact for the long term."

In last week's incident, Blackwater guards shot into a crush of cars, killing at least 11 Iraqis and wounding 12. Blackwater officials insist their guards were ambushed, but witnesses have described the shooting as unprovoked. Iraq's Interior Ministry has concluded that Blackwater was at fault.

"This is a big mess that I don't think anyone has their hands around yet," said another U.S. military official. "It's not necessarily a bad thing these guys are being held accountable. Iraqis hate them, the troops don't particularly care for them, and they tend to have a know-it-all attitude, which means they rarely listen to anyone -- even the folks that patrol the ground on a daily basis."

the military has long been wary of private security guards, especially those who, in the military's view, don't follow the rules of engagement that govern soldiers. Often, private guards quickly drive away from the scene of an incident, leaving soldiers to deal with the aftermath, officials said.

"I personally was concerned about any of the civilians running around on the battlefield during my time there," said retired Army Col. Teddy Spain, who commanded a military police brigade in Baghdad. "My main concern was their lack of accountability when things went wrong."

"They are immature shooters and have very quick trigger fingers. Their tendency is shoot first and ask questions later," said an Army lieutenant colonel serving in Iraq. Referring to the Sept. 16 shootings, the officer added, "None of us believe they were engaged, but we are all carrying their black eyes."

"Many of my peers think Blackwater is oftentimes out of control," said a senior U.S. commander serving in Iraq. "They often act like cowboys over here . . . not seeming to play by the same rules everyone else tries to play by."

"The deaths of contractors from Blackwater helped precipitate the debacle in Fallujah in 2004 and now the loss of Blackwater is causing disruptions in the war effort in 2007," a military intelligence officer said. "Why are we creating new vulnerabilities by relying on what are essentially mercenary forces?"

It should not be forgotten that this Blackwater incident occurred as they were providing security to officials from the Department of State and Blackwater was working under a contract with the Department of State, not the Department of Defense. While the Iraqi people are going to blame "The American Troops" for what Blackwater did, The Blackwater cowboys were not operating under the control of the U.S. military. They are the responsibility of Condi Rice and the Department of State.

So what reaction have we gotten from Condi and the DoS? Josh Marshall writes:

the Department of State is telling Blackwater the company may not answer Congress's question without the specific approval of the State Department. What's more, Condi Rice has told Chairman Waxman (who plans an investigation of the incident) that she will not testify about Blackwater or contracting corruption cases in general.

Congress and Henry Waxman have the Constitutional power to perform oversight hearings as needed at their discretion.

There is no legal justification for Condi or Blackwater to defy a subpoena from Henry Waxman's committee. Does Condi expect the Department of Justice to simply not act on Congressional legal action to enforce a subpoena?

If so, then the cowboy antics of Blackwater become very clearly reflective of the Unconstitutional cowboy antics of the Bush White House in general. This administration was also responsible for Abu Ghraib. The timing of these incidents may be accidentle, but they are the natural outcome of the mismanagement, incompetence and crony-capitalist corruption of the Bush administration.

The systemic problem in using Blackwater in a combat zone

As described in my previous post the Blackwater mercenary bodyguards working for the Department of State were caught on tape killing at least eight Iraqis caught in Baghdad traffic. I described there how detrimental the killings were to any effective counterinsurgency effort in Iraq. Here I want to explain why I think they did what they did. It was a natural and normal mistake which is seen in infantry training exercises regularly, and is corrected only by good leadership and a lot of unit-level training.

Operating in a combat zone is a scary situation. You don't have to be paranoid to think everyone you see is out to kill you, because a lot of them really are. You understand that every time a you hear a shot fired anywhere.

So any time a person hears the shooting start they immediately find targets. Frequently they consider any movement or unexpected sound to be a target. In Baghdad, where the major weapon of choice is a car bomb, and moving car is a target. If not restrained the soldier will fire on the selected targets.

This is the natural, normal reaction of any group of armed soldiers who think they have come under fire. But few individuals can tell the difference between those shots fired at them and those fired by their fellow soldiers. A well-trained unit will not return fire until directed and released to do so by a commander they know and trust.

That trust takes a lot of time, experience and training as a unit to develop. A unit cannot go out and hire an experienced individual and make him into a leader his subordinates trust simply by assigning the rank and position. The trust and respect come only from training and experience as a unit. But mercenary units - like Blackwater, USA - have strong incentives NOT to spend time conducting unit level-training.

A mercenary unit is not paid to train. They are paid to perform the final function they were hired for. Training beyond simple entry-level indoctrination is not a cost their masters will want to pay for, and someone will offer their services without those costs built in, so the contracting process guarantees minimally trained units will be hired. Besides, effective extensive training cuts very heavily into the bottom-line of the owner of the mercenary organization. The result is that experienced well-trained units of government troops will almost always perform better than mercenaries will.

Roman troops were highly trained using effective organizational tactics, so that unless they were ambushed or very much outnumbered, then usually defeated their opponents. During the Thirty years war, government troops usually defeated mercenaries. War, or a counterinsurgency like Malaya, Vietnam and Iraq, is not fought by individuals as much as by organizations.

It is my opinion that the Blackwater troops in Baghdad suffered from a failure of leadership. Even in a convoy of only four SUV's, someone should have been in charge. The troops should not have fired until released, and if they did start shooting on their one, the leaders should have stopped the shooting before eight civilians were killed. The very system of using overpaid private contractors instead of trained government troops means that such control will be unlikely.

Blackwater will rightfully be blamed, but this is also another cost of trying to deal with the counterinsurgency that resulted from the ill-advised occupation of Iraq with too few forces. That blame goes directly back through Rumsfeld and Cheney to George W. Bush.

Blackwater mercenaries unjustified shootings were caught on tape.

Blackwater USA has proven what Europe knew at the end of the Thirty-Years War. Mercenary armies are over-priced and lack the professionalism, training and control necessary to achieve effective results in a combat situation, even assuming they can be convinced to fight.

While Blackwater may be keeping American diplomats alive, their murderous cowboy antics lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the local population in the Iraqi counterinsurgency. They proved it again when they shot up a bunch of civilians because a car did not get out of their way fast enough in Baghdad traffic. The New York Times provides the report based on the investigation conducted by the Iraqi government.

BAGHDAD, Sept. 21 — Iraq’s Ministry of Interior has concluded that employees of a private American security firm fired an unprovoked barrage in the shooting last Sunday in which at least eight Iraqis were killed [Snip]

In the first comprehensive account of the day’s events, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior said that security guards for Blackwater fired on Iraqis in their cars in midday traffic.

The document concludes that the dozens of foreign security companies here should be replaced by Iraqi companies, and that a law that has given the companies immunity for years be scrapped. [Snip]

In the Interior Ministry account — made available to The New York Times on Thursday — Iraqi investigators interviewed many witnesses but relied on the testimony of the people they considered to be the four most credible.

The account says that as soon as the guards took positions in four locations in the square, they began shooting south, killing a driver who had failed to heed a traffic policeman’s call to stop.

“The Blackwater company is considered 100 percent guilty through this investigation,” the report concludes.

The shooting enraged Iraqis, in part because they feel powerless to bring the security companies to account.
[Highlighting mine - Editor, WTF-o.]

Here is the description of the event as described in the report of the Iraqi government investigation:

The report said that Mr. Maliki had “demanded” that the State Department drop Blackwater as a protector, “for the sake of the two nations’ reputation.”

In the Interior Ministry’s version of that day, the events began unfolding when a bomb exploded shortly before noon near the unfinished Rahman Mosque, about a mile north of Nisour Square. Embassy officials have said the convoy was responding to the bomb, but it is still unclear whether it was carrying officials away from the bomb scene, driving toward it to pick someone up or simply providing support.

Whatever their mission, and whoever was inside, the convoy of at least four sport utility vehicles steered onto the square just after noon and took positions that blocked the flow of midday traffic in three directions. But one family’s car, approaching from the south along Yarmouk Street, apparently did not stop quickly enough, and the Blackwater guards opened fire, killing the man who was driving, the ministry account says.

“The woman next to the driver had a baby in her arms,” said an official who shared the report, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to share it. “She started to scream. They shot her,” the official said, adding that the guards then fired what appeared to be grenades or pump guns into the car as it continued to move. The car caught fire.

“The car kept rolling, so they burned it,” the official said.

The account said that the guards entered the square shooting, although Ali Khalaf, a traffic policeman who watched events from a flimsy white traffic booth on the edge of the square and spoke in an interview on Thursday, said a guard got out of the sport utility vehicle and fired.

Mr. Khalaf, who has also been interviewed by American investigators, spoke standing near his traffic booth on Thursday afternoon. He said that he had tried to reach the woman in the seconds after the man she was riding with was shot. But a Blackwater guard killed the woman before he could reach her, Mr. Khalaf said.

What is still unknown is when, or if, Iraqi security forces stationed in at least two compounds adjacent to the square began firing their own weapons.

If the Iraqis began firing early in the episode, investigators could conclude that the Blackwater guards believed they were under attack and were justified in conducting what they might have considered to be a counterattack. Some of the casualties could also have been caused by bullets fired by Iraqis.

Mr. Khalaf, though, said that he never fired a shot. When one of the American investigators asked why he did not fire at the Blackwater convoy, Mr. Khalaf said, his answer was simple.

“I told him I am not authorized to shoot, and my job is to look after the traffic,” Mr. Khalaf said.

CNN reports that the Iraqis have videotapes of the incident raqi official says video shows Blackwater guards firing on civilians.

For what it's worth, I do not blame the individual Blackwater troops for this incident. Any combat zone is an extremely frightening place to be, and professional soldiers have an ethic that instead of running from where the shooting is, like civilians, instead they run to the sound of gunfire. I have no doubt that the Blackwater employees are that kind of professional.

Beyond the eight civilians killed, this incident is as much a loss in the counterinsurgency in Iraq as Abu Ghraib was. It was a failure of leadership of a type much more common to mercenary troops than to trained government troops, and it doesn't help that the contract that Blackwater has is with the Department of State, not with the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense simply does not have the necessary professional expertise required to properly control Blackwater or any other mercenary force operating in a combat zone.

See my next post for the mechanics of the problem.

Blackwater in Iraq under no effective control

The private mercenary firm, Blackwater, has been in a lot of trouble with the Iraqi government over the killing of a number of Baghdad civilians last Sunday. Blackwater spokesmen say that their employees were providing protection to a Department of State convoy when the convoy was hit by an explosive device and came under fire from insurgents. The company spokesman says they returned fire. The Department of State Incident Report gives the company's version of events.

Prime Minister Maliki of the Iraq government disputes the story told by Blackwater, saying that, while an explosive device did go off, it was nowhere near the convoy and that the contract security people responded with excessive force, firing on civilian vehicles which were not threatening in any way and even using helicopters to fire on the civilians. Maliki has ordered Blackwater to leave Iraq. The Baltimore Sun provides a good article on the differing reports from Blackwater spokesman and from Prime Minister Maliki of the Iraqi government.

This gets especially interesting, more that just the cowboy antics that Blackwater is once again accused of. It is interesting in two ways. First, because Blackwater is not under the same regulations as most of the security contractors working in Iraq. Most security contractors in Iraq work under contracts from the Department of Defense. Because of similar incidents in which such security contractors (the euphemism for Mercenaries)Congress passed a law requiring that such mercenaries be brought under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ.) While apparently no DoD contractor has ever been charged under UCMJ, there is at least some effort by DoD to get incident reports and gather some information on alleged incidents they are involved in. Blackwater is not under the UCMJ because it has a contract with Department of State rather than with Department of Defense, and DoS has not made significant efforts to control them.

The second question is whether PM Maliki, as the leader of the government of Iraq established by the United States after the earlier government of Saddam was totally dismantled, will have any control over the criminal actions of the mercenaries that the U.S. government has contracted to operate in that country. PM Maliki has lifted the license Blackwater has to operate in Iraq. As the New York Times pointed out "Early in the period when Iraq was still under American administration, the United States government unilaterally exempted its employees and contractors from Iraqi law."

The efforts of Congress to bring the security firms under control have all given the DoD the power to control those firms it contracts with, but those the State Department contracts with are outside those controls. Much more important, the U.S. has no Status of Forces Agreement with the supposedly independent government of Iraq. Blackwater, USA is a private contractor owned and operated by the ultra conservative Erik Prince who has close ties to the Republican Party. Will the Bush administration and Condoleeza Rice permit PM Maliki to kick Blackwater out of Iraq?

There is little reason to doubt that the security contractors operating in Iraq have suffered from a lack of effective control of their operations. The conflict between what the government of Iraq accuses Blackwater of and what the Blackwater spokesman says they did is at present a "He said - He said" argument. It is hard to decide which side is telling the greater truth since there are few independently obtained reliable facts currently available to the rest of us.

Still, the best bet is that Blackwater did use excessive or even unnecessary force since it has operated without controls and has been encouraged to be highly aggressive in the performance of its defensive duties. Blackwater operatives have a reputation for such aggressive, even cowboy tactics. Using helicopters to fire on civilians inside the city of Baghdad demonstrates that they weren't very careful who they were shooting at.

Then, too, a reputation for such aggressiveness could be considered good for sales of their services. When someone is buying protection service and it comes down to a choice between two firms with equal apparent capabilities, the one that has a reputation for being more aggressive is likely to get the contract. This is, of course, speculation, but it is quite reasonable speculation when looking at someone selling the services of armed soldiers.

The trouble is, America is trying to fight a counterinsurgency as well as attempting to tamp down a civil war in Iraq, and success in a counterinsurgency goes to the side that gains the hearts and minds of the people of the country. The Blackwater incident is another indicator that the U.S. is not serious about trying to fight a counterinsurgency in Iraq. Blackwater's reputation for aggressive cowboy tactics will add to the reasons for the Iraqi people to demand that the American troops leave their country. Why shouldn't they? This incident with Blackwater demonstrates that the U.S. occupation of Iraq is part of the problem, not part of the solution to violence in Iraq.

The use of mercenary troops by the U.S. means using armed forces which are under no effective political control in a combat zone. At best they are handed a set of Rule of Engagement which are not enforced. That never works in a counterinsurgency because it makes enemies of those we need to befriend. But we can't replace the mercenaries in Iraq with government soldiers unless we start a draft. A draft is a political impossibility today in America.

That means we do not have enough trained and controlled troops to win in Iraq and no way to raise them other than hiring mercenaries. The mercenaries are beyond effective control. The best answer would be to get out of Iraq. Yet we also are convinced that we can't leave as quickly as logistically possible since that would leave Iraq as a failed state. America's invasion and incompetent occupation has left no remnant of effective central government in Iraq.

So we can't leave, but can't stay in Iraq and win without using the mercenaries. Talk about poor planning! Still, it is the lack of control over the mercenaries that is their worst fault. So the mercenaries must remain for a while longer, but be brought under tight and effective control. Not only must they be brought under control, they must be shown to be brought under control by very publicly charging, convicting and punishing some of the worst offenders and by placing ALL security contractors in Iraq under close and public inspection. If the Iraqi people are not convinced that all the American troops - including the mercenaries - are working for their betterment, then America has lost the counterinsurgency in Iraq and staying longer will just make the damage worse.

Unfortunately, this solution runs counter to the radical free-market ideology of the Bush administration and the Republican Party. Efforts to attempt such controls will quickly be derailed by politically connected Republican donors, particularly those in the security industry. Then, even if a solution is was attempted, the Bush administration has repeatedly demonstrated that it is incompetent at conducting such control over any organization, even those like FEMA that are integral to the government itself. The complexities of actually doing something effective are beyond the abilities of the Bush administration.

While the Bush administration has repeatedly proven that it cannot "make the trains run on time," they are brilliant at public relations. Instead of fixing the problem they will instead do their usual action of trying to treat the problem as a public relations problem. In place of actually solving he problem, they will work to convince the American public that there is no problem. Oddly, since the real problem is public perception of American troops by the Iraqi public, they will not work as hard there to fix the PR problem. That's because they have fewer effective PR tools in Iraq and don't understand the public perceptions there. The PR effort there will be less intense.

What will not happen is any effective, centrally controlled effort by the Bush administration to actually fix the problems in Iraq caused by the out-of-control mercenaries there. That's just another can they will kick down the road to the next President, providing further fodder for conservatives to use to attack the incoming Democratic President in 2009 for losing Iraq.

The problems caused by the use of uncontrolled mercenaries in Iraq is a real one. They stem from poor planning and inadequate organization by the Bush administration both in the invasion of Iraq and the resulting occupation. Solving those problems will not provide a benefit to the Republican Party, so Congressional Republicans will block any effort to solve those problems, just as the Republicans are currently doing their best to prevent the Democrats from passing any legislation that solves American problems. Meanwhile the Bush White House will sit on its hands rather than recognize the difficulties it has created.

It's not a pretty picture.

NPR's Fresh Air covers Blackwater - the Mercenaries.

You've seen the book listed at the side of my magazine. It's titled "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" by Jeremy Scahill. Terry Gross of Fresh Air interviewed Jeremy Scahill today. Here is the NPR podcast of the interview.

It is just a little over 30 minutes. Listen to it.

Then if you are interested, click through here and buy the book. [It's too new to get a good deal on a used one.]


Blackwater: The Rise of the Most Powerful Mercenary Firm in the World

Want a list of Mercenary firms in Iraq? Ask the Dept of State.

This is an interesting list posted on the Department of State's Website. It is entitled "Security Companies Doing Business in Iraq".

I count 28 of them, and Blackwater USA is NOT listed.

The world's largest mercenary army - Blackwater

Most of us who have followed the military action and politics in Iraq have heard of the private contractor "Blackwater." The four men killed in Fallujah whose bodies were strung up on the bridge were Blackwater contract employees. This led to the first abortive attack on Fallujah by the U.S. Marines (apparently ordered by G. W. Bush in a fit of pigue at the deaths of the Blackwater guys) and then when the failure of that attack became celebrated by insurgents as an American defeat, the later attack that effectively levelled the town.

Apparently there is a great deal more to the Blackwater story, a tale involving Cheney's efforts to outsource military activities that go way beyond what he took advantage of at Halliburton. Let the reporter Jeremy Scahill describe what Blackwater really is. If nothing else, it will show why my list of recommended books on the right side of this screen includes books on politics, war, terrorism and right-wing fundamentalist Xtianity. Here is a quick summary from Scahill:

JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater is a company that began in 1996 as a private military training facility in -- it was built near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. And visionary executives, all of them former Navy Seals or other Elite Special Forces people, envisioned it as a project that would take advantage of the anticipated government outsourcing.

Well, here we are a decade later, and it’s the most powerful mercenary firm in the world. It has 20,000 soldiers on the ready, the world’s largest private military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships. It’s become nothing short of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's so-called global war on terror. And it’s headed by a very rightwing Christian activist, ex-Navy Seal named Erik Prince, whose family was one of the major bankrollers of the Republican Revolution of the 1990s. He, himself, is a significant funder of President Bush and his allies.

And what they’ve done is they have built a very frightening empire near the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. They’ve got about 2,300 men actively deployed around the world. They provide the security for the US diplomats in Iraq. They’ve guarded everyone, from Paul Bremer and John Negroponte to the current US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad. They’re training troops in Afghanistan. They have been active in the Caspian Sea, where they set up a Special Forces base miles from the Iranian border. They really are the frontline in what the Bush administration viewed as a necessary revolution in military affairs. In fact, they represent the life's work of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, the “life's work”?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Dick Cheney, when he was Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush during the Gulf War, one of the last things he did before leaving office was to create an unprecedented lucrative market for the firm that he would go on to head, Halliburton. He commissioned [a] Halliburton [division] to do a study on how to privatize the military bureaucracy. That effectively created the groundwork for the absolute war profiteer bonanza that we’ve seen unfold in the aftermath of 9/11. I mean, Clinton was totally on board with all of this, but it has exploded since 9/11. And so, Cheney, after he left office, when the first Bush was the president, went on to work at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which really led the push for privatization of the government, not just the military.

A 20,000 man army is the size of an American division, but Blackwater is unlikely to have support troops like Artillery, Engineers, and such.

The book below (available February 28, 2007) is published by Avalon Publishing Group. The following is their description it.

From Our Editors

In company handouts, Blackwater USA claims to run the largest privately owned firearms training facility in the country, but according to award-winning journalist Jeremy Scahill, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Although it's only ten years old, this North Carolina-based private military contractor has already been called "George Bush's favorite mercenary company," "the world's most secretive and powerful mercenary firm," and "the fastest-growing private army on the planet." Founded by a far-right, super-rich ex-Navy SEAL, this quasi-military group operates clandestinely in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Scahill's detailed, 288-page Blackwater represents the fullest disclosure yet of this very shadowy organization.

From the Publisher

Meet BLACKWATER USA, the world's most secretive and powerful mercenary firm. Based in the wilderness of North Carolina, it is the fastest-growing private army on the planet with forces capable of carrying out regime change throughout the world. Blackwater protects the top US officials in Iraq and yet we know almost nothing about the firm's quasi-military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and inside the US. Blackwater was founded by an extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian mega-millionaire ex- Navy Seal named Erik Prince, the scion of a wealthy conservative family that bankrolls far-right-wing causes.

Blackwater is the dark story of the rise of a powerful mercenary army, ranging from the blood-soaked streets of Fallujah to rooftop firefights in Najaf to the hurricane-ravaged US gulf to Washington DC, where Blackwater executives are hailed as new heroes in the war on terror. This is an extraordinary exposé by one of America's most exciting young radical journalists.

Blackwater: The Rise of the Most Powerful Mercenary Firm in the World