|
Bush wants "to establish a
volunteer civilian reserve corp. - such a corp. would function much like
our military reserve. This would ease the burden on our armed forces by
allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions
abroad, when America needs them."
Amy: Is the president looking to
further outsource war? My next guest is a reminder of just how privatized
the Iraq War has become. Blackwater - what is it?
Jeremy Scahill: Blackwater is
what began in 1996 as a private military training facility it was built
near the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina... and with visionary
executives most all of them former navy seals or other elite special
forces people who 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 20 aircraft, including helicopter gunships. It's become nothing short
of the Praetorian Guard for the Bush administration's so-called
War-on-Terror: and it's headed by a very right-wing Christian activist,
ex-navy-seal named Eric Prince-whose family was one of the major
bankrollers of the Republican Revolution of the 1990's. He himself is a
significant funder of President Bush and his allies. And what they've done
is they've 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 Bremmer and John Negroponte to the current US
Ambassador. They are training troops in Afghanistan; they've been active
in the Caspian Sea, where they set up a Special Forces base, just miles
from the Iranian border. They really are the frontline in what the Bush
administration views as a necessary revolution in military affairs. In
fact they represent the life's work of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
Amy: What do you mean - 'the
life's work'?
JC: Well Dick Cheney, when he was
Defense Secretary under George HW Bush during the Gulf War - one of the
things he did before leaving office was to create an unprecedented
lucrative market for thee firm he would go on to head-Halliburton. He
commissioned Halliburton 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 911. I
mean Clinton was totally on board with all of this, but it has exploded
since 911. So Cheney after he left office, when the first Bush was the
president, went on to work at the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute; which really led the push for the privatization of
government-not just the military: and when these guys took office, in
Rumsfeld's first real major address, delivered on September 10, 2001-he
literally declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy and said that he had
come to liberate the Pentagon. And what he meant by that-he wrote this in
an article in Foreign Affairs-was that government unlike companies can't
die! He literally said that, so you have to figure out new incentives for
competition. Rumsfeld said that it should be run more like a corporation
than a bureaucracy. So that the company that most embodies that vision-and
they call it a revolution in military affairs-it's a total part of the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Neo-Conservative
movement. The company that most embodies that is NOT Halliburton-it's
Blackwater!
Amy: Explain what understand
happened on Tuesday, the president giving his address and the Blackwater
helicopter crashing.
JC: Well a lot of people - even
though I think there's been a lot of reporting on it - and it's been out
in the public sphere: I think a lot of people would still be surprised to
know that the US Ambassador in Iraq and US diplomats throughout Iraq-and
you have diplomatic facilities and regional occupation offices that are
actually guarded by mercenaries. And Blackwater actually has a
three-hundred million dollar contract that provides diplomatic security
and they guard the American Ambassador and other US diplomats in Iraq.
While we understood-and of course as you know reports are always very
shaky in the early stages-is that "a US diplomatic convoy came under
fire" in a Sunni neighborhood of Baghdad... a Blackwater helicopter
apparently landed to try to respond to that attack. Because Blackwater and
its 'Little-Bird' helicopters provide the security for diplomatic convoys
- and they get engaged in some kind of fire-fight on the ground and four
men from one helicopter were killed and then another helicopter responded
and was brought down either by fire or it got entangled in some wires.
Four of the five men who worked for Blackwater who were killed were shot
in the back of the head according to reports. And what's interesting about
that is the American Ambassador said that he had traveled with the men and
then he'd gone to the morgue; to view their bodies. He said that the
circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of what he called 'the
Fog of War.' But I think it's very possible that they were guarding a very
senior diplomat, if not the ambassador himself. We don't have evidence to
suggest that-but the fact that the Ambassador really came forward and said
that these were fine men and he was with them and he was in the morgue -
it indicates that this could've been a very serious attack on a senior
official.
Amy: What do you think is the
actual body count in Iraq of US soldiers? I mean we count them very
carefully but you know when it surpassed 3,000-and this was extremely
significant. What really is the number of US military dead?
JC: Military deaths - I think
it's interesting because the lines have been totally erased. I would say
that we should be counting the deaths of Blackwater soldiers, in the total
troop count. I mean I filed over the last year a lot of Freedom of
Information Act requests and one of the ways that we have found to
discover the deaths of the number of contractors that have been killed is
actually through the department of labor because the government has a
federal insurance scheme that's been set-which is actually very
controversial. It grew out of something that's called the Defense Base
Act. It's insurance provided to contractors who serviced the US military
abroad. As of late last year more than 600 families of contractors in Iraq
had filed for those benefits. So I think we're talking somewhere in the
realm of-and these are just US contactors that have rights to federal
benefits inside the US. Remember it's not necessarily Americans that make
up the majority of these 100,000-100,000 contractors that are operating in
Iraq right now, forty-eight thousand of whom are mercenaries, according to
the GAO. I don't think it's possible to put a fine point on the number of
troops killed because the Bush administration has found a back-door way to
engage in an undeclared expansion of the occupation by deploying these
private armies. And in the state of the Union address the other night Bush
announced this civilian reserve corp., which is gaining momentum among
democrats and others - Westly Clark has talked about it, the former
presidential candidate and former Supreme Allied NATO Commander. But what
that is, is another Frankenstein scheme that Cheney and these guys have
cooked up in their outsourcing laboratory, to engage in an undeclared
expansion.
On the one hand we have Bush
talking about an official US troop surge - the army a few months ago when
Colin Powell said that "the active duty arm is basically
broken." The army was calling for 30,000 troops over ten years. Bush
announces in his state of the Union, 92,000 active duty troops over five
years, and at the same time they're increasing the presence of the other
contractors, while talking about some privatized or civilian reserve corp.
This is all an undeclared expansion of the undeclared expansion of the US
occupation, totally against the will of the American people and the world!
Amy: Civilian reserve Corp.?
JC: Right - that's what they're
calling it and you know, a lot of what's been tossed around since 2002,
has been envisioning a sort of disaster response, international aid, you
know it's all benign sounding: but the context of it when bush announced
the other night, he said that "we need 92,000 troops and we should
develop a civilian reserve corp. to supplement the work of the
military."
Now, it's interesting Amy that
two years ago-that Eric Prince, the head of Blackwater USA was speaking at
a military conference - he only comes out of his headquarters to speak in
front of military audiences, he does NOT speak in front of civilians. He's
on panels with top brass and others-he's very secretive. He gave a major
address in which he called for "The Contractors Brigade." I can
read you what he said - this was two years ago - before Bush called for
his civilian reserve corp. Eric Prince, Blackwater USA: "There's
consternation in the Pentagon about increasing the permanent size of the
army. We want to add thirty-thousand people and they talked about costs of
anywhere from 3.6 billion to 4 billion to do that. Well by my math that
comes out to about 135 thousand per soldier." And then Prince added:
"We could do it-certainly cheaper!"
So now you have Blackwater, the
Praetorian Guard for the War-on-Terror itching to get into Sudan and you
know something happened last year that got no attention whatsoever. In
October, President Bush lifted sanctions on Christian Southern Sudan; and
there have been reports now that Blackwater has been negotiating directly
with the southern Sudanese regional government to come in and to start
training the Christian Forces of the South of Sudan. Blackwater has been
itching to get into Sudan and Eric Prince is on the Board of Christian
Freedom International, which is an evangelical missionary organization
that has been targeting Sudan for many years-and-there is a political
agenda that Blackwater fits perfectly into whether it's Iraq and
Afghanistan or Sudan.
Amy: And the other connections
between Blackwater's lawyer, the Bush administration and the Republican
Party?
JC: Most recent is that President
Bush hired Blackwater's lawyer-Blackwater's former lawyer, to be his
lawyer. He replaced Harriet Meyers. His name is Fred Fielding, of course a
man who goes back many decades to the Reagan administration, the Nixon
administration - he's now going to be Bush's top lawyer - and he was
Blackwater's lawyer. Joseph Schmitts, who was the former Pentagon
Inspector General, whose job it was to police the war-contractor bonanza -
who then goes to work for, one of the most profitable of them, is the vice
chairman of the Prince Group, Blackwater's parent company and the general
counsel for Blackwater. Ken Starr is now-the former Whitewater prosecutor,
the man who led the Impeachment charge against President Clinton-Kenneth
Starr is now Blackwater's counsel of record, and has filed briefs for them
at the Supreme Court in fighting against unlawful death suits - filed
against Blackwater- for the deaths of its people and US soldiers in war
zones. And then perhaps the most frightening employee of Blackwater is
Coffer Black. This is the man who was the head of the CIA's
Counter-Intelligence at the time of 911: The man who promised President
Bush that he was going to bring bin Laden's head back in a box on dry-ice
and talked about having his men chop bin Laden's head off with a machete.
He told the Russians that he was going to bring the heads of the Mujahadin
back on sticks: "there are going to be flies crawling across their
eyeballs." Coffer Black is a thirty year veteran of the CIA: the man
who many credit with really spear-heading the extraordinary rendition
program: the man told congress that there was a before 911 and an after
911-and that after 911, 'the gloves come off.' He is now a senior
executive at Blackwater, and perhaps their most powerful behind-the-scenes
operative!
Amy: And Electoral Politics?
JC: Well Eric Prince, head of
Blackwater - and other Blackwater executives are major bankrollers of the
president, of Tom De lay, of Santorum... When these guys were running
congress, Blackwater had just a revolving door there, they were really
welcomed in as heroes. Senator John Warner, the former head of the Armed
Services Committee he called them "our silent partner in the war on
global terror." Eric Prince's sister Betsy DeVos is married to Dick
DeVos who recently lost the gubernatorial race in Michigan. But also this
is a family, the Prince family that really was one of the primary funders,
it was Amway and Dick DeVos in the 1990's and it was Edgar Prince and his
network: Eric Prince's father that really created James Dobson's Focus on
the Family-they gave them the seed money to start it. Gary Bower who was
one of the original signers of the to the Project for the New American
Century (PNAC), a major anti-choice leader in this country, a former
presidential candidate - founder of the Family Research Council,: he
credits Edgar Prince - Eric's father - with giving him the money to start
the Family Research Council. We're talking about people who were at the
forefront of the rightwing Christian Revolution in this country. That
really is gaining steam; despite recent electoral defeats-and what's
really frightening is you have a man in Eric Prince who is a neo-Crusader,
a Christian Supremacist who has been given over half-a-billion dollars in
federal contracts and that's not-to-mention his black contracts, his
secret contracts or his contracts with foreign-friendly governments like
Jordan. This is a man who espouses Christian Supremacy and he has been
given essentially - allowed to - create a private army to defend
Christendom around the world against seculars and Muslims and others, and
who has really been brought into the fold. He refers to Blackwater as the
Fed-Ex of the Pentagon. He says - 'When you really want a package to get
somewhere - do you go with the Postal Service or do you go with Fed-Ex?'
This is how these people view themselves. Ah, and it embodies everything
that President Eisenhower prophesied against-what would happen with the
rise of an unchecked military-industrial-complex. You have it all in
Blackwater!
www.democracynow.org/
Jim Kirwan
|
studios