E-mail a friendJeremy Scahill
airdate June 30, 2008
An award-winning investigative journalist, Jeremy Scahill is a frequent contributor to The Nation and a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! He's also a Puffin Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and serves as an election correspondent for HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. Scahill has reported from post-Katrina New Orleans, Yugoslavia, Nigeria and Iraq and is a vocal critic of private military contractors, particularly Blackwater Worldwide, the subject of his book, Blackwater.
Investigative journalist explains what Blackwater is, how it rose to power and why the U.S. needs a private army in Iraq. (4:10)
Full Interview. (14:11)
Jeremy Scahill
Tavis: Jeremy Scahill is an award-winning investigative reporter whose work exposed the private army known as Blackwater. His bestselling book on the subject is called "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." It's been updated for its paperback release, and I'm honored to have Jeremy here. Jeremy, good to see you.
Jeremy Scahill: It's my honor, Tavis.
Tavis: Oh, man, glad to have you here. Let me start with the obvious. For those who have heard this name a million times in various news reports and news accounts, what is Blackwater?
Scahill: Well, Blackwater is one of 630 corporations that are on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq. Tavis, we spend about $2.3 billion every week occupying Iraq. Forty cents of every dollar goes straight to a war company. And Blackwater is not like KBR. These aren't guys driving trucks and doing laundry for the U.S. military.
This is a private army that has been hired by the Bush administration to essentially be the Praetorian Guard, the advance guard for the occupation. So it's a company that didn't even exist a decade ago and it's risen to become one of the most powerful for-profit corporations working for the U.S. war machine.
Tavis: If we have a military, why do we need a private army called Blackwater?
Scahill: Right. Well, the fact of the matter is that this is an incredibly unpopular war. Bush doesn't want to implement a draft because it would make the war politically untenable. He can't find nation-states that are willing to give their soldiers to occupy Iraq, and so he uses companies like Blackwater to essentially rent an Army, and Blackwater is not limited only to hiring U.S. citizens.
They've hired people from across the world, including from countries with horrible human rights records. Blackwater has deployed men in Iraq that served in Pinochet's military in Chile. There are people from over 100 countries around the world working for these for-profit corporations in Iraq.
So really, it's the product of an administration bent on waging unpopular wars of occupation that the world is against.
Tavis: Take me inside Blackwater and tell me over the last 10 years, to your earlier point, how they became so big and so profitable.
Scahill: Well, one of the most disturbing parts of Blackwater's story is the fact that it is owned by one man named Erik Prince who comes from a very powerful, conservative family in the state of Michigan. His dad was one of the premiere bankrollers not only of the Republican revolution but of several of the key groups that make up the radical religious right.
So the owner of the company is close to Gary Bauer, who runs the Family Research Council, James Dobson, Focus on the Family, Prayer Warrior Network, Chuck Colson, who was Nixon's hatchet man during Watergate. Now he's an evangelical minister and an adviser to President Bush.
And so this man is now at the helm of a force that has armed men operating in Iraq as part of a war that President Bush called a crusade. So it's a mixture of radical right wing - well, they say Christian politics, but I think their interpretation of Christianity is very narrow - with this power structure inside of the United States of very conservative movements.
Tavis: Tell me what they're actually doing in Iraq.
Scahill: Right. Well, officially, Blackwater is the elite bodyguard service for the occupation. They guard the ambassador, all of the senior occupation officials. When members of Congress go over to Iraq, they protect them. But what we've seen over the five-plus years that Blackwater has been in Iraq - and I should say that their work there began when Paul Bremmer was sent in in 2003.
Blackwater was given a $27 million no-bid contract to provide Bremmer's security. Over the past five years, that's grown to over $1 billion, and so they're they elite bodyguards -
Tavis: Stop, stop. First of all, did it take $27 million to guard Paul Bremer?
Scahill: (Laughter) It actually ended up being more than that. That was just the initial contract. These guys, after that first year, the contract was expanded from $27 million to over $300 million for one year of operations in Iraq. It's an incredible amount of money that this company has made.
Now, they've also lost 30 of their men in Iraq, but Tavis, those deaths don't get counted in the official death toll, nor do the deaths of any of the personnel who work for the 630 corporations that U.S. taxpayers are paying for in Iraq. It truly is a shadow army. And the flip side of this is not only that their deaths don't get counted, their crimes go unpunished.
We've had over 70 U.S. soldiers court-martialed for murder-related charges in Iraq alone. Not a single member of an armed security company working for the U.S. government has ever been charged with any crime under any system. Bush banned the Iraqi government from prosecuting them, no U.S. civilian prosecution has taken place, and no court-martial has taken place. They literally have been above the law for five years.
Tavis: Tell me why the Bush administration thinks that the - well, you may have just answered it; because they protect them so well. But tell me why they feel the need to protect them. Put another way, why is the advantage of having a Blackwater in Iraq, why does that outweigh the disadvantage or the risk?
Scahill: Right. Well, first of all, I think that it goes to my earlier point, which is that this is a way of really subverting democratic process in the U.S., and eliminating the need to negotiate with other countries. But I think there's something more insidious at play.
This is a force that essentially serves as shock troops for the occupation. They have one job, and it ain't hearts and minds, and it's not counterinsurgency. Their one job is to keep alive the U.S. official they're protecting by any means necessary.
If that means shooting up a civilian vehicle because you said, "Oh, well, it could have been al Qaeda or it could have been Mahdi Army," and it turned out to be an Iraqi family, well, that's just part of the job. And so you realize a benefit for Bush is having a force that is effectively above the law, that operates, for all practical purposes, in a zone void of any effective congressional oversight, and the crimes of these individuals don't get prosecuted at all.
So it really, in the words of one U.S. Congress member I interviewed recently, it's an armed wing of the administration. These guys don't answer to the military command. They answer to the owner of the company, the State Department, and the White House.
Tavis: You felt the need to update this book before its paperback release, and the reason for wanting to update it around what subject matter was what?
Scahill: Well, one of the things that I did - there's over 100 pages of new material in the book. One of the things I did is I went deeply inside with an investigation of a very famous shooting that happened last September in Baghdad's Nisoor Square, when Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians. Among the dead were women and children.
And that shooting began when Blackwater operatives opened fire on a civilian car with a 20-year-old Iraqi medical student and his mother. Fifteen minutes later, 17 people were dead, a nine-year-old boy named Ali shot in his head, and it created this crisis where the Iraqi government was under the misperception that Nuri al-Maliki is actually the prime minister of the country.
And you remember this - they said Blackwater has to leave; we're going to prosecute these guys. The fact is that Blackwater not only did not go anywhere, its contract was renewed by Bush for yet another year just this past April. So I go deep inside of that, and then I look at the future of the industry beyond Bush - what would happen if Barack Obama was president, or John McCain?
Tavis: Let's talk about it.
Scahill: Well, John McCain - there's no question that the Republicans could run a head of lettuce for president and the head of lettuce would be the candidate of the war industry. (Laughter) They'd talk about head of lettuce is a patriot, head of lettuce is going to defend - head of lettuce is a green revolutionary or something like that.
So there's no question they would love John McCain. In fact, John McCain's senior adviser, Charlie Black, who recently made these insidious comments about if there's a terrorist attack it'll benefit the Republicans, and he worked for Blackwater as a PR guy right after that shooting I mentioned in Nisoor Square.
But on the other side of it is Barack Obama. Now conventional wisdom would say Obama's going to shut this industry down. There's no question Obama has been a leader on this in the Senate. He introduced legislation seeking to bring oversight and accountability to this industry eight months before Blackwater's name was known to the world - eight months before that shooting in Nisoor Square.
Now the fact is, though, that Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers have told me on the record that he cannot and will not rule out using these companies, and he won't sign on to legislation to ban them. Now, it's not because Obama loves these companies. He's been more outspoken than anyone in the Senate on this.
The reality is that he has an Iraq plan that is not really intended to end the occupation but to downsize it and sort of re-brand it. He'll keep a substantial number of troops in Iraq. Now, some of his advisers disagree with his Iraq plan; I talk to them regularly. But the reality is that these companies are so deeply embedded in the U.S. operations in Iraq right now that he would not be able to implement his Iraq plan, particularly the diplomatic side.
Remember, they guard the diplomats, they guard the unarmed individuals. Obama would require using these forces for, by my analysis, at least two to three years. So he's painted himself into a bit of a corner because his Iraq plan will ultimately continue to give them business.
Tavis: This takes us all the way back to the beginning of the conversation, one of my earlier questions. If we have a military that is trained to do the same thing that Blackwater is trained to do, and when they misbehave, because they're part of the military they can be brought to justice, which is the American way - pardon the pun. Why would a guy like President Obama not be able to shut this thing down?
If everything you're saying in this book about Blackwater is true, why would a guy who believes in human rights, etc., etc., who wants change we can believe in, not shut something like this down?
Scahill: Not just that. As I said, Obama has been a leader on this issue. Here's the fact of the matter, though, Tavis. The U.S. military does not want to do this job. The U.S. military does not want to put soldiers in a position -
Tavis: Since when do they do what they want to do? (Laughter) They do what the commander in chief tells them to do.
Scahill: Well, if Obama wanted to do that it would be a departure from recent U.S. military history. Obama may decide ultimately that the risk is greater for using these companies than to have the military do something that it says it ultimately doesn't want to do. But the reason why the military doesn't want to do it is not because the U.S. military can't do it, it's because they don't want to put soldiers in regular conflict with Iraqi civilian vehicles.
Most of the victims of these private armed companies have been cars that come too close to them. Bush's own Secretary of Defense Gates said that the work of these companies is often at cross purposes to the U.S. military mission of counterinsurgency and winning hearts and minds.
The other thing that Obama has suggested he wants to do is to only use official government employees as diplomatic security in Iraq. But when you talk to the State Department, they say it would take a minimum of two to three years to recruit, train, and deploy a force the size of Blackwater's.
Blackwater, Tavis, in Baghdad right now, has two-thirds - this is a staggering statistic - two-thirds as many armed operatives as the United States State Department has diplomatic security agents in every country in the world combined. So it's grown radically. So Obama, I do have faith that Obama is going to be looking very seriously at this issue.
The unfortunate part of this is that he now has a foreign policy team that is made up of sort of the old Clinton guard. He brought on Madeleine Albright, Warren Christopher, Tony Lake, some of the more progressives have been pushed aside. And the Clinton administration was a major supporter of the growth of these industries, so the real question here is going to be is Obama and the fight that he's waged against these companies going to rule out over these old hands from the Clinton years?
Tavis: Okay, so humor me here. What would be, since the military, for its reasons, doesn't want to do it, although we are in a war that they are in charge of leading, what would be the alternative to it? I've got this dense text in front of me telling me everything wrong with Blackwater, and yet I don't hear what the alternative with be - a righteous alternative would be to a Blackwater.
Scahill: Well, there is legislation, which unfortunately Obama is not supporting, that was brought forth by Representative Jan Schakowsky in the House, who probably has been the best person in the Congress on this, and Bernie Sanders in the Senate. It's called the Stop Outsourcing Security Act.
This would seek to ban the use of these companies for mission-critical activities in Iraq or any U.S. warzone, and to essentially phase them out in a period of six to nine months and attempt to replace them with fully burdened and accountable U.S. government employees.
It would really require a different Iraq plan on the part of Obama. Jan Schakowsky, the person I just mentioned, she's the national campaign co-chair for Obama. She's the number one expert in the Congress on this. I think it would take a serious conversation between Jan Schakowsky, who's also on the Intelligence Committee, and Barack Obama to say let's take this a little bit more seriously in its practical application.
I would say a good first step would be Senator Obama putting his tremendous political weight behind this legislation. Other Democrats would fall in line. It's really a matter of rethinking the policy, and I'm not alone in saying this. Obama has very senior advisers who agree with this position, and I think that there's going to be a debate that will rage within those circles because Obama understands this issue.
Tavis: Do you have any idea, over that 10-year period or so that we talked about earlier where Blackwater has really grown, how much of our money, taxpayers' money, they have seen go into their coffers?
Scahill: Well, put it this way, Tavis. I've had members of Congress call me and ask me that question, and I laugh and say, "Wait, shouldn't -"
Tavis: (Laughter) They're calling you.
Scahill: "Shouldn't this be the other way around? I work for 'The Nation' magazine." But in all seriousness, 90 percent of Blackwater's business is done with the government. We pay 90 percent of the salaries of their executives, who won't say how much they get paid, and there's been very little documentation of it.
We know that in Iraq alone, and I know this from reviewing federal contract data, that Blackwater has made over $1 billion. That's just one operation in Iraq. Blackwater does the same thing in Afghanistan, and right now, Tavis, Blackwater's started its own private CIA called Total Intelligence Solutions.
They're putting what they call CIA-type services on the open market, and they're pushing their services to Fortune 500 corporations and governments. Seventy percent of the U.S. national intelligence budget is outsourced right now - 70 percent of the combined budget of the 16 intelligence agencies. So Blackwater's getting into that.
They want to go into Latin America and fight the so-called war on drugs. And the reality is we have seen an almost incredible inability on the part of our elected officials to hold them accountable or to get accurate data on them. So how much have they made? We don't really know. We know they've made $1 billion off of Iraq, we know that they've made millions and millions of dollars off of their work with various agencies of the federal government, and they were in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
They made $70 million off their operations there in New Orleans. When people desperately needed food, water, and rescue, what they got instead were private soldiers from Blackwater pulling in $950 per man per day on the federal payroll.
Tavis: I think you and I are in the wrong business. (Laughter)
Scahill: I think we're in a business that's much more noble.
Tavis: Yeah, I'll take that.
Scahill: Thank you, Tavis, for all the work.
Tavis: Thank you. No, thank you for the work you're doing. I'm glad that people like Jeremy Scahill are around to do the kind of investigative journalism that we can showcase on this show but don't have the resources to do. So I'm glad that Jeremy's here.
His new book, out in paperback, I should say now, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Add it to your collection. Jeremy, nice to have you on the program.
Scahill: Thank you, Tavis.
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