Hooyah!! : London Review of Books on Scahill about the Blackwater mercenary army

[muriel_volestrangler]

Even in this privatisation-hardened age, even in the United States, the notion that military installations are a monopoly of government remains so ingrained that in 2003, when the Chilean-American arms go-between José Miguel Pizarro Ovalle first saw the real-world mercenary processing centre run by the private firm Blackwater in North Carolina, he had to reach for the imagery of Cubby Broccoli. ‘It’s a private army in the 21st century,’ he gushed to Jeremy Scahill.

It was like out of a Dr No movie . . . It’s a gigantic facility with a military urban terrain. It’s a mock city where you can train with real-life ammunition or paintball, with vehicles, with helicopters. Gosh, impressive, very impressive . . . I saw people from all over the world training there – civilians, military personnel . . . Wow, it was like a private military base.

It is a private military base, spread over seven thousand acres, near the town of Moyock and the Great Dismal Swamp, with firing ranges, tactical exercise areas and an armoury (containing more than a thousand weapons, according to the Virginian-Pilot, the local newspaper, though there is no law preventing Blackwater stocking as many as it wants). There are also the 21st-century equivalent of barracks (convention-style hotel rooms), an office block in which the door handles are fashioned from machine-gun barrels, and a memorial rock garden to the 25 Blackwater employees and one Blackwater dog killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The centrepiece of the memorial is a bronze sculpture of a pensive boy hugging a folded American flag to his breast. Since Pizarro visited (he later recruited hundreds of Chilean mercenaries to work in Iraq for Blackwater, some of them amnestied for their deeds under the Pinochet regime), construction has continued apace. Blackwater is building a 6000-foot airstrip and facilities to house its aviation wing of 20 transport planes and helicopters, as well as a large hangar for the construction of airships and a plant to make an armoured vehicle called the Grizzly.

The founder and owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, the 38-year-old heir to a fortune made by his father (a Michigan entrepreneur who invented the illuminated car sun visor), is not, legally, a villain. It doesn’t make him a villain that he is a privately educated, avowedly devout Roman Catholic, a former member of US Navy special forces and the father of six children. It doesn’t make him a villain that he has declared: ‘Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service.’ It doesn’t make him a villain that he is part of the right-wing Republican DeVos-Prince dynasty of Michigan, which has bankrolled radical Christian evangelical movements that campaign against homosexuality, abortion and stem-cell research. The fact that he was an intern in the administration of the elder President Bush, but found him too liberal and backed the extreme right-winger Pat Buchanan to replace him, doesn’t make him a villain; nor does the fact that he has given a quarter of a million dollars in campaign contributions to Republican politicians. It doesn’t make him a villain that he donated half a million dollars to an organisation set up by Charles Colson, a felon convicted for his role in the Watergate scandal, to get prisoners to become born-again Christians in exchange for better jail conditions (in 1996, Colson floated the possibility of a Christian coup against the re-elected President Clinton). Nor does it make Prince a villain that, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when survivors were desperate for food, drinking water, shelter and medical supplies, his company flew ammunition into New Orleans to supply the groups of heavily-armed mercenaries it had rushed to the disaster zone. It is true that he helps fund campaigners against high taxation and welfare spending, while the hundreds of millions of dollars Blackwater has taken in fees since 2001 have come almost exclusively from the US taxpayer. Yet this does not make him a villain.

A man who hires a squad of elite lawyers to fight to protect his company from liability for anyone’s death, foreign or American, anywhere overseas, despite at least one incident of Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq shooting dead an innocent man; despite the death in Fallujah of four Blackwater mercenaries to whom the company hadn’t given proper armoured vehicles, manpower, weapons, training, instructions or maps; despite the death of three US servicemen in Afghanistan at the hands of a reckless Blackwater aircrew, who also died: well, casual observers might think this would render Erik Prince a villain. Yet it would make him a villain only in some liberal, humanistic, ethical sense. In the eyes of American law, Prince has done nothing villainous; on the contrary, he is a patriot and a Christian, which is to say, a good man.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n15/meek01_.html

[dipsydoodle]

1. And where will that private army go

when the USA does finally leave Iraq ? Maybe to keep the natives on the USA mainland in order ?

[0007]

2. 'Tis about time......

....more from the same article

Scahill states as if it were an accepted fact that the US – ‘the mightiest empire in history’ – has imperial ambitions in Iraq, whereas so far its behaviour has indicated that it is something even worse: a mere conqueror. Scahill riffs speculatively on the notion that the US has deliberately fostered and protected Shia death squads in Iraq, in Central American style. There was a stage of the occupation when this seemed a likely scenario, but now this degree of control and influence over Shia factions is something of which the occupiers can only dream, as shown with heartbreaking clarity by the recent PBS documentary Gangs of Iraq.<*> The film, which tracks US attempts to train and harness a new Iraqi army and police, suggests that there are no Iraqi military or paramilitary units Washington can rely on to implement the American agenda of a docile, pan-sectarian Iraq, and few it can rely on not to bite the hand that arms it. In one sequence, PBS records a raid by US and Iraqi troops on houses and a parking lot where, according to a tip-off, there is an arms cache. Sure enough, there is: they find artillery shells, copper plates used to make the deadliest roadside bombs, and a car with a boot full of explosives. The American soldiers are delighted with their success, but they don’t hear what their Iraqi comrades are talking about over to one side. A PBS cameraman captures this exchange between two Iraqi officers, who don’t realise the camera has a microphone:

OFFICER 1 (murmurs): I know where it is. It’s not here. It’s with the Sheikh.

OFFICER 2: Who?

OFFICER 1: It’s with my Mullah.

OFFICER 2: Ah.

OFFICER 1: I’m telling you, there’s nothing here. This is just kid stuff. (looking round, seemingly amazed by the pointlessness of it all) The big stuff is not here.

OFFICER 3: Sir, the video camera has a microphone.

The Iraqis never told their American allies about the real arms cache; PBS found out about it months later, when they translated the soundtrack of the film.

[0007]

3. bttft

[laststeamtrain]

4. K&R n/t

[bonito]

5. K&R

[KoKo]

6. We here in NC must find a way to pressure our Govenor to Close it Down...

I wonder if what is going on there is dangerous to our health with what they might be exploding and using in their war training. Also...what about these people from other countries. What if they are staying here....part of the Bush/Chertoff forces to be used in case of an "event."

[sarcasmo]

7. Blackawater, coming to a city near you. Kick and Nom.