By- Suzie-Q @ 7:00 PM MST
Jeremy Scahill: Blackwater is Still in Charge, Deadly, Above the Law and Out of Control
By Antonia Juhasz, AlterNet Posted June 19, 2008
Think Blackwater’s days are numbered? Think again. Jeremy Scahill explains why its slaughter of Iraqis has not stopped the notorious mercenary firm.
On June 3, Jeremy Scahill’s bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army was released in fully revised and updated paperback form. The new edition includes reporting on the now-famous Nisour Square massacre on Sept. 16 of last year, in which Blackwater mercenaries opened fire in a Baghdad neighborhood, brutally murdering 17 Iraqi civilians. The killing spree, which the U.S. Army would label a “criminal event,” would reveal the extent of the lawlessnewss enjoyed by private contractors abroad and the lengths the Bush administration will go to protect its private army of choice.
Antonia Juhasz caught up with Scahill on the phone the day the new edition was released. A fellow at Oil Change International and author of The Bush Agenda, Juhasz is also the author of the forthcoming book The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry, and What We Must Do to Stop It. Juhasz and Scahill discussed, among other topics, the story behind Blackwater, congressional inaction, radical privatization, Barack Obama, corporate vs. independent media, GI resistance in the age of private mercenaries, getting real about challenging corporations and the power of dissent.
I hope they will soon be a thing of the past… 😉
It is hard to imagine the chaos they can create at will to prolong the war to keep the profits rolling in. Disgusting loss of life for both sides.
Blackwater and private contractors are not bad in and of themselves. The problems that we are having is that we DO NOT have a doctrine that advises what they can and can’t do, we haven’t intergrated them into the command and control structure.
As with most tools in the world, it is HOW it is used that determines whether it is good or evil.
Push congress and others to start defining a doctrine for these folks. BTW it wasn’t Blackwater that scared me during Katrina, it was the Police and National Guard.