Journalist Scahill Charts the Rise of Blackwater USA

DATE March 19, 2007 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Jeremy Scahill, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's
Most Powerful Mercenary Army," on the Blackwater army, its hiring
by the US government, its secrecy, and the rise of privatized
military contracting
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The war in Iraq has been partly outsourced to private military contractors
which have performed many of the services that used to be done by the
military. My guest Jeremy Scahill has written a book about one of those
companies, Blackwater, which he describes as the world's most powerful
mercenary army and the embodiment of the Bush administration policy of
privatizing military functions.

The company, which was founded in 1996, made headlines in 2004 when four of
its men were ambushed and set on fire by Sunni gunmen in Fallujah. The
charred remains of two of the men were hung on a bridge for public display.
The families of the four men are suing Blackwater for wrongful death, raising
a lot of questions about accountability and oversight when private contractors
play a major role in war.

Jeremy Scahill is a Polk award-winning journalist who is a frequent
contributor to The Nation and the correspondent for the radio and TV show
"Democracy Now."

Jeremy Scahill, welcome to FRESH AIR. If you wanted to write about a private
military contractor, why did you focus on Blackwater?

Mr. JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, as a reporter, I began going to Iraq in 1998 in
the lead up to the Clinton administration's bombing there in late December of
1998, and it was the first of many trips that I would take to Iraq between '98
and 2003, when the US occupation began. And I had spent time in the city of
Fallujah. In fact, in the summer of 2002 I had actually camped out there.
And having spent so much time there, I paid particular attention to an event
that happened on March 31st, 2004, when four American contractors were
ambushed and killed, their bodies burnt and dragged through the streets of
Fallujah in a very gruesome, macabre display. And the people of Fallujah
literally ripped these four men apart and hung their bodies from a bridge
going over the Euphrates River.

And so I was paying very close attention to the events and very worried that
the United States was going to crush Fallujah, because there had already been
a tremendous level of violence in the city. And indeed, the Bush
administration laid siege to Fallujah a few days after that ambush happened
and absolutely destroyed the city, killing hundreds of people, forcing
thousands from their homes and, as it emerged that the four men who were
killed were from a private military company called Blackwater USA--I had never
heard of them before--I said to myself, `I want to investigate this company.'

GROSS: Private contractors like KBR, which is a former subsidiary of
Halliburton, provide services like getting food and other supplies to troops.
Private contractors often, you know--they build things, they bring supplies,
they protect people. Would you consider Blackwater like a company of
mercenaries or of the kind of contractors who, you know, get food and other
kinds of supplies and offer protection?

Mr. SCAHILL: Oh, I mean, the very essence of a mercenary is a soldier of
fortune and one of the primary motives for becoming a mercenary is monetary
gain. Blackwater's heavily armed forces are paid several times the wages of
an average soldier and they serve in Iraq as sort of the vanguard for the Bush
administration's occupation. The Bush administration has outsourced one of
the most mission-critical tasks in Iraq to Blackwater. Blackwater guards the
US ambassador Zalmay Kalilizad. They guard several regional occupation
offices in the country.

But then another fact that goes largely unreported is that, while Blackwater
portrays itself as a sort of American Pie business, an all-American company,
they actually have recruited mercenaries from some serious human rights
violating countries--Chile, Columbia and elsewhere--and deployed them as part
of their force in Iraq.

GROSS: Have they been involved in combat operations at all?

Mr. SCAHILL: Oh, absolutely. I mean, there was one incident that happened
in April of 2004 in Iraq, where Blackwater was guarding a regional
headquarters of the occupation and Muqtada al-Sadr's followers were engaged in
an uprising after the US arrested one of Muqtada al-Sadr--the fiery Shiite
cleric--one of his top aides. And this massive demonstration hit Najaf, where
a handful of Blackwater guards were guarding the building. And that day,
April 4th, 2004, Blackwater mercenaries engaged in a day-long firefight with
the Mahdi army. And in fact, during that battle, there happened to be some US
Marines in the area and a young Marine, Lance Corporal Lonnie Young actually
was aiming his weapon down at the crowd below and there was no commanding
officer on the scene, and so he asked the Blackwater guys for permission to
open fire. He said, `Sir, I have acquired a target. Can I open fire?' And
the Blackwater guys gave him permission to open fire, and he described the
sort of conflicting emotions of killing people that day, and the fact was that
Blackwater mercenaries were in overt command of an active duty US soldier.

That's one of many incidents where Blackwater has been engaged in firefights
with Iraqis. They've been ambushed by Iraqis. Their helicopters have been
brought down, so Blackwater has been very much in the thick of things in Iraq.

GROSS: Can you continue to give us an overview of the role Blackwater
employees are playing in the Bush administration-run war on terror?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, I call Blackwater the Praetorian Guard of the war on
terror--the Praetorian Guard, of course, being the famed Roman mercenaries.
Because what you find with Blackwater is that you find they're deployed in the
key areas of the war on terror. Their men were among the first people
deployed into Afghanistan after 9/11 on a covert CIA contract, their training
forces in Afghanistan. Blackwater has a massive contract with the US State
Department to provide what's called diplomatic security.

I recently filed a FOIA request and determined that Blackwater has been paid
$750 million by the State Department alone since the summer of 2004 to guard
senior US officials in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Blackwater also has
been deployed in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Several
hundred Blackwater contractors were deployed in the hurricane zone, and what's
interesting is that Blackwater billed the federal government $950 per day per
man in New Orleans, and their men on the ground that I interviewed in New
Orleans told me that they were being paid $350 a day, so there's a serious
question of where that $600 went.

And so what we find is that Blackwater, both at home and abroad, is serving
the radical privatization agenda of the Bush administration and it's rapidly
expanding its operations in the United States, opening a new facility in
Illinois. They're calling it Blackwater North. And in California, they're
calling it Blackwater West. And then they have a 7,000-acre private military
facility based on the great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. So this company
really embodies so much of what's happened in this country and around the
world in the wake of 9/11.

GROSS: What do they do at the private military facility?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, they train federal troops. They train troops from
various branches of the US military. They train local and federal law
enforcement. They provide a shooting range for gun enthusiasts. They also
train in amphibious landings. They have a manmade lake on their property that
they use to train in amphibious landings. They train in defensive driving.
Blackwater's manufacturing surveillance blimps that they're marketing to the
Department of Homeland Security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border.
This really is a company that's been at the cutting edge of fourth generation
warfare and has become one of the primary players, perhaps the most
significant private actor in the war on terror.

GROSS: Blackwater got a contract in July of 2004 in the oil-rich area of the
Caspian Sea. How are they being used there?

Mr. SCAHILL: Blackwater was sent by the Bush administration into Azerbaijan
to set up a special forces unit of the Azerbaijani military. It was a 90-man
unit modeled on the US Navy Seals. At the same time, Blackwater built up, in
the port city of Baku, a command and control center that had been a special
forces base of the Soviet Union. And so Blackwater sets up this command and
control center and builds up this 90-man Azer unit based on the US Navy Seals
right in Iran's backdoor.

And so the point of that contract was for Blackwater to set up a military
presence, a heavy military presence, in a strategically important area. The
Caspian Sea, of course, is wealthy with oil and natural gas, but also it's a
strategic area--and some analysts have said that it could be used as a forward
operating base in attack against Iran. The Iranians took this as a very
hostile act and, in fact, deployed a special unit of the Iranian Navy in the
Caspian Sea as a direct response to Blackwater's presence there.

GROSS: You're talking about ways they might possibly be used, but what
exactly are they doing now?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, it's unclear. Because I've tried repeatedly to get
updates on the original contract that I obtained and I've been stonewalled in
my efforts to get those contracts. So we literally don't know what Blackwater
is doing right now in Azerbaijan.

GROSS: Now, is that one of your criticisms of the use of private military
contractors, that there's no way for citizens to find out what exactly, like,
how they're being used and why they're being used there? I mean, can Congress
find that out?

Mr. SCAHILL: Oh, I mean, I've interviewed several congresspeople who said
that they've tried for years to get detailed information on Blackwater's
contracts and other war contractors, arrangements with the government and
they've been stonewalled and stifled, and the fact of the matter is that
Blackwater has repeatedly refused to hand over documents requested by
Congress. And what's ironic is that when Blackwater refuses to hand over
these documents, they say that they're classified. I mean, the irony of
telling Henry Waxman, chair of the government oversight committee, that they
can't give him a document because it's classified, is stark. I mean, I'm a
journalist and you know, Terry, that, you know, you're fighting to try to get
documents all the time from the government, but when Congress can't even get
them, that should raise major red flags for people in this country as to what
exactly these companies are doing with their money and in their names.

GROSS: Well, how well are those costs actually masked? I mean, doesn't the
government has to account for the money it's paying Blackwater?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, you know, it's interesting, because Representative Henry
Waxman of California, since November of 2004, has been trying to get
information on one Blackwater contract in Iraq, and it's taken him nearly
three years to get an answer as to who actually was paying Blackwater for
security services in Iraq, and who they ultimately were working for under
these, you know, multilayered tiers of subcontracts. And so if you just take
that one example of one pretty influential congressperson's attempt to find
details on one contract and you replicate that over and over, you find that
this is essentially a shadow army that regularly defies Congress.

GROSS: If Congress can't even find out what they're being paid and what the
contracts are, how are the private military contractors being funded? I mean,
where does the money come out of, what budget?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, Blackwater, for instance, the overwhelming majority of
its work in Iraq, is actually through the US State Department. A lot of
people erroneously believe that all contractors are working for the US
military. Blackwater has been paid $750 million since June of 2004 by the US
State Department, and that represents its single largest contract in Iraq.
But also the Pentagon pays these war contractors. The United States Agency
for International Development. I mean, basically the federal feeding trough
is broken down into various federal agencies, and Blackwater just happens to
have attached itself to the State Department portion of that.

GROSS: When we're told by the Bush administration how much money we're paying
for the war in Iraq, does that include the money that we're paying private
military contractors?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois estimates that
40 cents on every dollar spent on the occupation of Iraq goes to the private
sector, and of that, four billion dollars is being paid out to private
military companies, according to Henry Waxman. So yes, I mean, this is a big
part of the cost of waging war in Iraq.

GROSS: But it's part of the official cost. It's included in the official
cost?

Mr. SCAHILL: Yes. Originally it was part of the reconstruction budget and
it continues to be part of the ongoing budget for the occupation of Iraq.

GROSS: My guest is Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book "Blackwater." We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Jeremy Scahill. He's a
journalist who's written a new book about the private military company
Blackwater, and the book is called "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most
Powerful Mercenary Army."

As you pointed out, one of the turning points of the war in Iraq was in
Fallujah, when four men working in Iraq for Blackwater were killed by
insurgents and then the charred remains of two of them were hung from a bridge
in Fallujah, hung on display. Now, the families of the four men who were
killed are--have filed wrongful death suits against Blackwater. On what
ground?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, the families of these four men who were killed in
Fallujah all believe that their loved ones were going to be providing security
for ambassador Paul Bremer in Iraq, and that they were going to be doing, you
know, very important work, as special force operators. They didn't think of
their loved ones as being contractors. They thought of them as being
soldiers, what they'd always been their entire careers. And these guys were
successful, decorated special forces operators. And so they went over to
Iraq, they're working for Blackwater USA and they're sent into Fallujah.

And the problems began with the fact that their contracts, the contracts that
they were working under, provided that they would be sent out with three men
to a vehicle. They were sent out with only two men to a vehicle. That third
man in the vehicle would have been a rear gunner, armed with a heavy machine
gun. They were also supposed to be, according to the contracts, provided with
armored vehicles. They were sent in Pajero jeeps, which are widely known in
Iraq as bullet magnets. They were sent out that day, according to the lawsuit
of the families, without a map and without the opportunity to do premission
intelligence gathering.

And so these families, when their loved ones were killed, began asking
Blackwater questions. How did this happen? What were they doing in Fallujah?
What was their mission that day? And they say that they were stonewalled by
Blackwater for months, and then in October of 2004, Blackwater flew the
families to its compound in North Carolina for a memorial service for their
loved ones, and one of the mothers of one of the Blackwater contractors
killed, Donna Zovko, asked a Blackwater representative for the report on the
ambush and asked her for her son's belongings, and the Blackwater
representative, she says, said that the report is classified, and if you want
that information, you'll have to sue.

And so the families started to get to know each other and talked about it
further, and then in January of 2005, they filed a wrongful death lawsuit
against Blackwater in the state of North Carolina, alleging that they had--the
company had defrauded their loved ones, not provided them with their
contractually obligated safeguards, and this is a case that is being monitored
very closely by the whole war contractor industry because, I think there's a
concern, that like the tobacco litigation, once the first domino falls, the
whole pyramid starts to crumble.

GROSS: How is Blackwater defending itself?

Mr. SCAHILL: Very, very aggressively. Blackwater has enlisted some of the
most powerful Republican lawyers in the country to defend it. The original
lawyer on the case was actually Fred Fielding, who now is Bush's White House
counsel. He replaced Harriet Miers. The current counsel of record for
Blackwater is none other than Kenneth Starr, the man who led the impeachment
charge against President Clinton. At one point they retained Greenberg
Traurig, the powerhouse law firm.

And so Blackwater has never disputed the particulars of the lawsuit, but what
they've done is they've tried to argue that they should be immune from
civilian litigation in the United States because Donald Rumsfeld classified
Blackwater and other contractors as part of the US total force, as an official
part of the US war machine, and so Blackwater has filed a series of briefs
saying that, `Look, if you allow us to be sued, it's like allowing the
military to be sued, and it basically invades the rights of President Bush to
wage war as he sees fit and the courts don't belong in that process,'
Blackwater has argued in its legal briefings, and its legal papers filed with
various courts.

And the fact is that twice, the US Supreme Court, which we should point out is
dominated by Republican appointees, rejected Blackwater's appeals, and so it
seems now that this case is going to go ahead in state court in North
Carolina, where there would be no cap on damages a jury could award.

GROSS: Well, Blackwater is arguing that it shouldn't be subjected to civil
trials, but at the same time it's not--it doesn't come under the jurisdiction
of the military. It's not held accountable to the military code of justice.

Mr. SCAHILL: Right. I mean, Blackwater has essentially declared its forces
above any effective law while resisting its attempts to have its private
forces subjected to the Pentagon's court martial system, the uniform code of
military justice. Blackwater also claims this immunity from civilian
litigation. In fact, the only law that Blackwater wants applied to its forces
is one that has no teeth and has not been enforced in Iraq or elsewhere, and
that's the military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000, which is a law
that says that contractors operating in the war zone should be subjected to
the US court system, the criminal court system, in the United States. The
fact is, Terry, that there are 100,0000 in contractors in Iraq, and only one
has been indicted on any kind of charges.

GROSS: So in this Fallujah lawsuit, Blackwater filed a countersuit against
the families who are suing. What does the countersuit say?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, Blackwater would say that they're not suing the families.
They're suing the estates of the four men killed at Fallujah, saying that they
violated the terms of the men's contract, which said that they wouldn't sue in
the event of their death in Iraq or in the war zone. And so, this is a $10
million claim that was filed in an attempt to force the lawsuit out of the
court system and into arbitration proceedings. It's part of Blackwater's
multipronged approach to fighting this lawsuit. They're trying desperately to
get this case out of state court in North Carolina, and this is one of the
great moves in that game.

GROSS: So do all employees of Blackwater have to sign a pledge that they will
never sue?

Mr. SCAHILL: Oh, you should read the contract that these guys sign when they
go into Iraq. It basically lists every possible way a human being could be
killed, including debris falling from the sky, and it says that you won't hold
Blackwater accountable for your death. But what the families of the four men
killed would allege is, that's all well and good except you also were
operating under a contract, Blackwater, that said these men would be provided
with armored vehicles, heavy weapons, three men to a vehicle, and the families
say you defrauded our men and that nullifies the contract.

GROSS: Now there's another suit against Blackwater that might be precedent
setting. Would you describe that suit?

Mr. SCAHILL: Yeah. The other lawsuit stems from an incident that happened
actually in Afghanistan in November of 2004. Blackwater was on contract with
the government to be operating airplanes inside the country as sort of a ferry
service for the US military. They would take personnel and equipment and
other supplies from point A to point B inside of Afghanistan, and in November
of 2004 they were operating a flight that had on board not just Blackwater
contractors, but also active duty US soldiers, and the plane crashed into the
side of a mountain, killing all of those on board. One of the soldiers
actually survived for a brief period of time before ultimately dying.

And the difference between this and the Fallujah lawsuit is that in this case
you had active-duty US soldiers killed, and as a result, the National
Transportation Safety Board did an investigation, the US military did an
investigation. And what emerged from that is the military essentially finding
Blackwater at fault for the flight. They released the transcripts of the
cockpit data recorder, and it showed that the pilots were essentially messing
around. `You're an X-wing fighter, "Star Wars" man,' and there were a number
of other questions about whether or not all the safety precautions were taken
that day.

And so the families of the active duty soldiers have filed a lawsuit against
Blackwater's aviation division, alleging that the company is responsible for
their deaths as well and the judge that's been hearing this case in federal
court has been very aggressive in rejecting Blackwater's arguments that it
should be immune from this litigation. And so whichever one of these comes to
fruition first, Fallujah or Afghanistan, could very well be a precedent
setting case.

GROSS: Jeremy Scahill will be back in the second half of the show. His new
book is called "Blackwater." He's a frequent contributor to The Nation and is
a correspondent for the radio and TV show "Democracy Now." I'm Terry Gross,
and this is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Jeremy Scahill, the
author of the book "Blackwater: The World's Largest Mercenary Army." The book
is an investigation into the private military company Blackwater, which has a
contract with the State Department to provide security to guard senior
American officials in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Scahill raises a lot
of questions about oversight and accountability when military functions are
outsourced to private companies like Blackwater.

There have been several attempts in Congress to bring more scrutiny to the
private military contractors. What's the latest?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, the latest is there's a real war going on on Capitol Hill
right now. There are a number of pieces of legislation making the rounds, and
the real debate boils down to whether or not private military contractors
should be subjected to the military's court martial system, or whether they
should be subjected to the jurisdiction of US prosecutors. Lindsey Graham, a
conservative South Carolina Republican, who has been a military lawyer for the
Air Force, slipped in language late last year to the Defense Authorization
Bill that President Bush signed into law that essentially said contractors are
now subject to the uniform code of military justice, the court martial system.
Well, the mercenary industry went bonkers when Lindsey Graham did that and
they said, `It's unconstitutional. We're civilians. You can't put us under
the court-martial system.' And it might be one area where civil libertarians
and the mercenaries actually agree.

So, on the other side of that you have Barack Obama, Jan Schakowsky and David
Price, a Democrat from North Carolina. They're pushing forward with an
attempt to place contractors under the US court system. And so those are the
two approaches that are really being taken right now.

But in addition to the legislation, Representative Henry Waxman of California
has been on a warpath against Blackwater, and I understand that he intends to
continue holding hearings on the company and finds it outrageous that its
operations are so cloaked in secrecy. So Blackwater really is going to find
itself increasingly in the crosshairs. Some people are calling it the new
Halliburton.

GROSS: Now, on the subject of accountability, Paul Bremer, just as he was
leaving his position as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq,
issued a decree called Order 17. What did this decree do?

Mr. SCAHILL: It effectively immunized private contractors from any kind of
prosecution in Iraq, and, you know, essentially said that Iraqis can't seek
justice for any crimes committed by private contractors in Iraq and that it's
the responsibility of the home government to prosecute these guys.

And what's interesting about Paul Bremer is use of Blackwater security in
Iraq. As one colonel says in my book, if the US military were guarding Bremer
and he got killed, there would be an internal investigation, maybe there would
be a court martial if they found soldiers at fault for his death. If
Blackwater lost Paul Bremer, it would crush their business. Their whole point
of operating in Iraq at that time was to keep Bremer alive, and so it was the
most dedicated, determined adherence to the free market doctrine that someone
like Paul Bremer could have displayed. He put his life literally in the hands
of the private sector at a time when he was the most hated man in Iraq.

GROSS: So you're suggesting that they would go to any means necessary to
protect him, even if that meant killing people who might be innocent and then
there'd be no way of prosecuting them for it?

Mr. SCAHILL: I mean, there are so many reports of Blackwater contractors
just preemptively shooting at Iraqi vehicles as its convoys make their way
through the country, and some of these reports come from senior military
officials who were tasked with looking a security in Iraq. They said that
they would ride around with their Iraqi counterparts and Blackwater guys would
run them off the road. And so these guys were known for being very, very
aggressive and the whole point of their operation is to keep their noun alive,
and their noun was Paul Bremer. It's now Zalmay Khalilzhad, and so they're
going to do everything it takes to not lose the noun.

GROSS: Now, as you've pointed out, Blackwater is also trying to get more and
more work within the United States. It, for instance, was hired as a private
contractor after Hurricane Katrina. What kind of services did it perform?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, it's interesting because Blackwater beat most agencies of
the federal government to the hurricane zone, and when it initially deployed
about 180 men, it didn't have any government contracts, according to company
officials. They say that they just went down to help out in the relief
effort.

I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I was actually
talking to two New York City police officers on Bourbon Street when, all of a
sudden, a compact car with no license plates pulls up and these big burly guys
with flak jackets and M4 machine guns and wraparound sunglasses and shaved
heads get out of the car and say to the New York police officers, `Do you know
where the rest of the Blackwater guys are?' And the police officers said,
`Yeah, there's a bunch of them down the road.' And I turned to the police
officer and I said, `Blackwater? You mean like the guys in Iraq?' And he
said, `Yeah, they're all over the place.'

So I walked around and I found some Blackwater guys, and I talked to them
about what they were doing there, and they told me very clearly that they were
on contract with the Department of Homeland Security, that they were staying
in a Homeland Security camp outside of New Orleans. One of them showed me a
gold law enforcement badge and said he'd been deputized by the governor of
Louisiana. When I asked them what their mission was in New Orleans, they said
that they were there to confront criminals and stop looters. And the fact of
the matter is that these Blackwater guys were riding around in unmarked
vehicles, heavily armed--several of them had just been in Iraq or Afghanistan
a couple of weeks earlier, so it was very disturbing to see the presence of
these private forces on the streets. I mean, you know, what are they going to
do if they see a woman coming out of a department store carrying diapers that
she didn't buy, that she took out of the department store? I mean, what are
these private soldiers supposed to do?

And after I reported that they said that they were on contract with the
Department of Homeland Security, the federal government was forced to admit
it, and it turns out that they were paying these guys $350 a day and
Blackwater was billing the government $950 a day for their services. At one
point Blackwater had 600 men deployed from Texas to Mississippi, and they were
raking in more than $240,000 a day.

GROSS: Is Blackwater trying to get more work in the United States in the
aftermath of natural disasters?

Mr. SCAHILL: Oh, absolutely. Blackwater representatives recently met with
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to talk with him about doing
disaster response in the event of a California earthquake. The company has
applied for operating licenses in all of the coastal states of the United
States and, as I said, they're opening military and law enforcement training
facilities in Illinois and California. They're sort of building a triangle
around the country, and its home base in North Carolina is an impressive
facility. It's 7,000 acres. It has a state of the art, 60,000-square-foot
corporate headquarters that welcomes visitors with doorhandles made from
muzzles of automatic weapons and, you know, Blackwater was founded with the
idea of anticipating increased government outsourcing of military training,
and so Blackwater is really positioning itself to cash in for many, many years
to come.

GROSS: Is it fair to say that the role of private military contractors
started really expanding under the leadership of Dick Cheney and Donald
Rumsfeld?

Mr. SCAHILL: Oh, this is the life's work of those two. I mean, Dick Cheney,
when he was defense secretary under George H.W. Bush, one of the last things
he did was to commission a study from a division of Halliburton, the company
that he would go on to head, looking at how to greater privatize the military
bureaucracy. Well, that was laying the groundwork for this war contractor
bonanza that we've seen unfold since 2001. Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and other
officials came to power in this country with a radical privatization agenda.

But the fact of the matter was that 9/11 provided Cheney and Rumsfeld and the
neoconservative clique that sort of operated in the White House in those days
with this blank slate on which to paint their privatization picture, and Iraq
was considered a slate to be wiped clean and built up from the ground.

GROSS: We were talking about new roles for private military contractors.
Blackwater wants to be able to use its people as part of peacekeeping forces
in Darfur. What exactly are they trying to do?

Mr. SCAHILL: Yeah. This was an initiative that really became public in
March of 2006. Cofer Black was at a military conference in the nation of
Jordan and announced that Blackwater would be willing to go into Darfur as a
sort of, you know, privatized peacekeeping force. And Blackwater's really
been in this intensive lobbying campaign to get permission from someone,
whether it's the UN or the US government or NATO, to deploy in Darfur.

And, you know, one of the great concerns about this scenario is that so much
of the violence in Sudan is attributable to militia violence, and so if you
add yet another private armed force to this situation, it's a cause for, I
think, real serious concern. You know, Blackwater always says it would only
act in the interests of the US, but Congress is finding it almost impossible
to shed light on its operations.

So it all sounds good on paper. Let's send in this effective fighting force
that talks about Janjaweed and an anti-genocide force, but what happens if
things go wrong? Well, when things go wrong in Iraq and Afghanistan, Congress
finds it almost impossible to get information from Blackwater. They've
refused to, repeatedly, to turn over documents. So what happens when you send
these guys into Darfur? You add yet another private military operation to the
mix, and you create a situation where nation states and international bodies
are privatizing out these operations to private military companies, private
mercenary companies and in the process you sort of subvert international order
because, yes, maybe Blackwater could go in and wipe out the Janjaweed militia,
but what happens the day after that? Where's the political process in this?
More violence is not what's needed in Darfur right now, and the fact is that
Erik Prince and others from Blackwater have been part of Christian
organizations that have targeted Sudan for years.

A very disturbing thing happened last October. President Bush lifted partial
sanctions on the south of Sudan, the Christian region of the country, and the
south Sudanese representative in Washington said he expected Blackwater to
start training forces in the south of Sudan sometime soon, and he said this in
January, so it's really a disturbing development and, I think, a disturbing
proposal by Blackwater.

GROSS: My guest is Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book "Blackwater." We'll
talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Announcements)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Jeremy Scahill, and
he's written a new book about the private military contractor Blackwater,
which is taking a large role in the war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan and
other places, and the new book is called "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's
Most Powerful Mercenary Army."

Now, the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is very politically connected.
Let's talk about him, starting with the fact that he's from a very wealthy
family. How did his family make their fortune?

Mr. SCAHILL: Erik Prince grew up in the Midwestern state of Michigan in a
town called Holland, and his dad, Edgar Prince, was very much the king of
Holland. He was a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of guy who built
up an empire, a company called the Prince Manufacturing Corps, and Prince
Manufacturing was best known for creating the now ubiquitous lighted sunvisor
in a car, so when you pull down your visor and you see it light up, that's
from the Prince family.

And what Erik Prince's father taught him was to mix a sort of strict adherence
to Calvinist religious doctrine with a strong embrace of the free market
gospel, and so Erik Prince, as a young man, watched as his father used the
family business as a cash-generating engine to fuel the rise of the religious
right, as well as the Republican revolution of 1994 that brought Newt Gingrich
to power. And so his father was a major contributor to many Republican
campaigns, but also to Gary Bauer, for instance, the founder of the Family
Research Council. He gave Gary Bauer the seed money to start the
organization. Young Erik Prince was among the first interns there.

The Prince family also contributed heavily to James Dobson and Focus on the
Family. Erik Prince, interestingly, is very close to Chuck Colson, the former
Watergate conspirator and one of Bush's advisers, spiritual advisers, and this
was a guy who was Nixon's hatchet man and he's now running faith-based
prisons. So Erik Prince grew up in this atmosphere where his family was very
close to the religious right, very close to conservative politics. Prince
himself interned in George H.W. Bush's White House. But he complained that
it wasn't conservative enough on gay issues, the budget and the environment.
He also worked on Pat Buchanan's insurgent campaign for president in 1992,
when he ran on a very xenophobic, anti-immigrant line.

Erik Prince himself has contributed upwards--and his immediate family--of a
quarter of a million dollars in traceable money to federal Republican
campaigns, and interestingly, he's never given a penny to a Democrat, which is
certainly his right, but he has given money to Green Party candidates to
defeat Democrats, and this is a very unusual pattern for the head of a
powerful corporation, to put all of his eggs in one basket, but this guy is a
committed ideologue.

GROSS: Now Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, is a former Navy Seal.

Mr. SCAHILL: In fact, he's believed to be the wealthiest person ever to
serve in the US Navy Seals. And he was deployed in Haiti, he was deployed in
Bosnia, in the Mediterranean and--I don't think he actually wanted to leave
the Navy Seals, but in 1995 his father died of a heart attack and his wife had
been diagnosed with cancer, and I think that being in the Seals was no longer
a reality for him, and I think that's why he turned his sights on setting up a
military company that would effectively operate itself like a privatized
special forces unit.

GROSS: Now, Joseph Schmitz is the vice chairman of Blackwater and he had been
the Pentagon's inspector general, so he's kind of connected to the private and
the government world. Is he very politically connected?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, I mean, Joseph Schmitz was the Pentagon inspector general
at a time when the war contractor bonanza was just exploding, and his job
effectively was to police the largest war contractor bonanza in history, and
he was basically forced to resign under fire from Democrats and Republicans
alike, accusing him of not doing his job, and then he turns around and takes a
job with one of the most successful of those war contractors, Blackwater USA.

Joseph Schmitz is a committed Christian activist. He himself is the one who
brags of his membership in the Military Order of Malta, the Christian militia
dating back to the first crusade, and if you read through his speeches from
when he was inspector general, he absolutely adored Donald Rumsfeld. He gave
a speech one time in which he went on and on about Rumsfeld's career as a
wrestler. And so this is a guy who was very close, he was a devoted
Republican disciple. He was very close to the Bush administration, and now
he's in a leadership position at Blackwater USA.

GROSS: Now, another highly placed person within Blackwater is Cofer Black.
What's his position in Blackwater and where was he before that?

Mr. SCAHILL: Cofer Black is a vice chairman of Blackwater and he's perhaps
one of the most famous spies in US history. Cofer Black was a 30-year veteran
of the Central Intelligence Agency when he came to Blackwater in February of
2005. This was a man who Osama bin Laden had marked for death in Sudan in the
1990s when Black was a CIA operative there. Cofer Black's also the man who
caught Carlos the Jackal, at the time the most famed international terrorist.
He caught him in Sudan. Black went on to serve for decades in the CIA and
when 9/11 happened, he was the coordinator of the CIA's counterterrorism
center and the man tasked with beginning the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

And on September 13th, 2001, he's in the White House situation room throwing
papers on the ground, explaining to President Bush how he's going to drop in
special forces operators throughout Afghanistan, and he would talk in these
terms: `We're going to put their heads on spikes, we're going to have flies
crawling across their eyeballs.' He talked about chopping bin Laden's head off
with a machete so that you had DNA, didn't know it was him. And he actually
promised President Bush that he would bring Osama bin Laden's head back from
Afghanistan in a box on dry ice. Well, of course that didn't happen. And so
Cofer Black was one of the key players in the early stages of the war on
terror, one of the key players on the real escalated use of the extraordinary
rendition program. And now he's one of the key players at Blackwater USA and
recently announced that he had formed his own private intelligence company.

These guys are really on the cutting edge of private military, private
security, private intelligence. And so Blackwater really has stacked its deck
with veteran spies, veteran government officials and very influential
political figures.

GROSS: Would you just like summarize for us what you think the major concerns
are about the expanding role of private military companies?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, I think that the Bush administration has stretched our
domestic armed forces to the limit. A draft is off the table for political
reasons, and so the US government is left to sort of struggle to find allies
willing to staff its unpopular wars, and private military companies have come
in and filled that vacuum for the Bush administration. So no longer do we
have a real democratic process when it comes to the decision to go to war, and
no longer do we have that sort of push and pull that would come from `how many
people do you have in your military, how many people are willing to serve in
the military?' Mercenaries have provided the Bush administration with the
opportunities to wage sort of endless war. It's only how much your willing to
pay these private forces. If you can't recruit the government of Chile to
support your operations in Iraq, you can still hire their soldiers. And so
what this really does is it subverts democratic processes and it subverts the
natural resistance that people have to aggressive or offensive wars.

The other layer of this is that the operations of these companies are
absolutely shrouded in secrecy. Not even senior officials within Congress,
senior members of Congress, can get detailed information on their contracts,
and so what we're doing is we're taking ourselves further and further away
from oversight and transparency and accountability. We already have enough
problems in this country trying to oversee official US forces. Now you add
100,000 contractors to the mix. It just is a very frightening and disturbing
development in the history of warfare.

GROSS: Have you spoken to a lot of military leaders about what they consider
to be the pros and cons of the Bush administration's reliance on private
military contractors?

Mr. SCAHILL: Well, what senior military officials have been saying publicly
lately is that they think we have to watch the use of these armed contractors
very, very closely. Most recently General John Abizaid said it on Ted
Koppel's documentary, that we really have to be careful about the use of these
heavily armed contractors.

I think, also, there's a real concern in the military community that the
numbers are dropping in the special operations forces. In fact, in Iraq right
now there's a slang term for a soldier who goes to work for any private
military company. They call it "going Blackwater." And so if you think about
it, if you're a grunt in Iraq and you're out there risking your life, and you
maybe don't even have adequate body armor, and you see these Blackwater guys
making 600, $800 a day for doing the same kinds of things that you're doing,
there's a lot of resentment. And so it's impacting morale within the military
as well when you have these highly paid mercenaries running around in Iraq,
and the soldiers are looking at them and saying, you know, `Well, how come
they're getting a six-figure salary and I'm getting $35,000 a year and I've
got a pregnant wife at home?' And so it really, I think, has impacted morale
within the military, as well.

GROSS: Well, Jeremy Scahill, thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. SCAHILL: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Jeremy Scahill is the author of the new book "Blackwater." We phoned
and e-mailed Blackwater asking for an interview, but they never got back to
us. We also contacted the State Department, which has a contract with
Blackwater, but we were told no one will be available to speak to us.

Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews a new CD by Jeff Murphy, formerly of the '70s
power pop trio Shoes. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Jeff Murphy, ex-
member of the pop power trio Shoes
TERRY GROSS, host:

In the late '70s, the power pop trio called Shoes operated out of their
hometown in the Chicago suburb of Zion, Illinois. They started their own
label, Black Vinyl Records, and brothers Jeff and John Murphy, and their
friend Gary Klebe, wrote, produced and performed tight little pop songs that
our rock critic Ken Tucker has long admired. Now, after a silence of almost
10 years, one brother, Jeff Murphy has released a solo album called
"Cantilever." Ken has a review.

(Soundbite of "Never Let You Go")

Mr. JEFF MURPHY: (Singing)
I-I-I'm never going to go, girl,
'Cause I-I-I'll never let you go
In your eyes, baby,
I can see life's shine
Ooh, 'cause you're mine
And everything will be all right

(End of soundbite)

Mr. KEN TUCKER: That's Jeff Murphy singing all the multitrack vocals,
playing all the instruments, and producing himself on the new album
"Cantilever." One dictionary definition of cantilever is, quote, "any rigid
construction extending horizontally well beyond its vertical support." And
while his music is never rigid, Jeff Murphy may be using the word to suggest
that he's extending his range beyond the support of his band Shoes. What he's
really doing is extending the themes that Shoes has always pursued: mournful
love, sympathy for an adored one that's not always reciprocated.

(Soundbite of "Havin' A Bad Day")

Mr. MURPHY: (Singing)
Every day's a challenge
When you can't define your goals
Even though you've been to school
There's much that you don't know
Maybe there's no answer
When you look inside your soul
I don't know
Living through the TV screen
Is all you'll ever know
Kings and queens live out your dreams
In themes from long ago
Maybe that's the answer
Maybe life's a dream
You're having a bad day
It's just another one
Having a bad day
There's plenty more to come
If you sit inside and sigh
You can't expect your world to change
You're having a bad day
Oh, no
Play the game...
(End of soundbite)

TUCKER: Whatever Jeff Murphy loses in not harmonizing in the uniquely
breathy, intense way he did with his brother John, he gains in a certain
independence. Shoes never had much truck with keyboards; they were guitar and
drum boys. But as a middle age multitalent, Jeff Murphy adapts the Shoes
sound to different sonic landscapes. He also gets away with using one of the
most overused words in rock lyrics--that would be icon--in a fresh original
way.

(Soundbite of "You're an Icon")

Mr. MURPHY: (Singing)
As far as these things go
You really got it down
The class is all your own
There's no one else around
Everywhere that you go
Everything that you do
Everyone that you know
Wishes they could be you
You're an icon
When you look like that
It's agreed on
It's a matter of fact
"Elle est tres beau"
Is what your friends all say
You're an icon
In a particular way...

(End of soundbite)

TUCKER: There's one song here that can not only stand with the best of what
Shoes ever did, but also with the best of any current music out there. Jeff
Murphy knows it, too. I'm sure that's why he used it to lead off
"Cantilever." It's called "I'm a Tool for You," and it's pretty glorious.

(Soundbite of "I'm a Tool for You")

Mr. MURPHY: (Singing)
Let me be your digital wave
Let me be your plasma display
I can be those clothes that you wear
Or the dye that you use when you color your hair
I'm a tool for you
I'm your diamond ring
I'm the food that you eat
I'm that song that you sing
You can think of me
In whatever you do
I'm whatever you need
I'm a tool for you

(End of soundbite)

TUCKER: As that song proves, Jack Murphy is really nobody's tool. In the
press note accompanying this album, he says proudly that there are no drum
machines or fancy technology, but he does use a hammer and a crowbar for
percussion on "I'm a Tool for You," and his wife's candy dish for percussion
on another song.

As a band, Shoes was always an admirable, do-it-yourself operation. As a solo
artist sitting out there in Zion, Illinois, Jeff Murphy is an inspiration who
keeps on doing exactly what he wants: aiming for the mass audience in his
head, willing us to listen.

GROSS: Ken Tucker is editor at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Cantilever" by Jeff Murphy.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Soundbite of "You Never Listen to Me")

Mr. MURPHY: (Singing)
Don't want to stand in your way
You really need to be free
It's just a matter of time
Until you say it to me

(End of soundbite)
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