Funky Papa
FUNK-Y-PPA-4
So some days ago I decided that I needed a break from my usual late night fiction romps. In need of something more serious, I picked Jeremy Scahill's Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, which as its name explains, it chronicles the rise of what it was known as the world's top tier private military contractor.
The book itself pretty opens with the infamous 2004 Fallujah ambush, when a number of Blackwater mercenaries ended with their charred and mutilated corpses being put on display. This incident brought Blackwater into the spotlight; what the media didn't quite tell is that entire armies of military contractors were roaming the streets without any authority to restrain them, nor how that situation came to be.
With no laws to oversee their activity in Iraq (as a matter of fact, the Bush administration did its best to ensure that the new Iraqi government couldn't punish them, nor they were obliged to comply with military regulations for a very long time), Blackwater mercenaries were involved in the murder of civilians, evidence tampering, smuggling operations, the works. At the height of its power, Blackwater even afforded itself the luxury of making death threats to a US State Department investigator. For the most part, Blackwater's crimes remain unpunished.
The book is not just about Blackwater, though, as it also covers the privatization policies enacted by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, which helped to chop a large part of the American armed apparatus' under the notion of improving its efficiency (a well calibrated farce, as Halliburton and others made out like bandits overcharging exorbitant amounts of money for the most basic services), making it so dependant of contractors that America's force projection during an invasion scenario would be effectively crippled.
A great example is provided by the PMCs working on Iraq at behest of the US government, which in order to accomplish their missions had to be supplied with intelligence provided by PMC Aegis Defence at the princely sum of half a billion dollars. The situation was patently ridiculous, if not absurd. Military intelligence was so strategically starved of resources that it had to resort to outsource its activities in order to make sure that high ranking American officials and all kinds of companies working in Iraq were safe from insurgent and Islamist groups. It really says something that America had to resort to veritable pond-scum like Tim Spicer to get shit done as if it were some disfunctional African fiefdom.
Scahill also devotes a great deal of the book to shine some light on Blackwater's founder Erik Prince's origins. Typically depicted as a former SEAL and rugged capitalist, Prince comes from old money and seemingly funded Blackwater upon the idea of one of his former superiors. Already worth close to a billion dollars by the time he formed Blackwater, he's closely tied by blood and politics to both the craziest fringes of the Catholic and Evangelical churches (which would later became the Tea Party), but also to some of the most powerful members of corporate America, which provided him with high level contacts, some significant media clout and massive lobbying power, which were put to use to reinvent what amounted to a training facility for the FBI and local police departments in a Virginia swamp into a veritable army with its own navy and air force.
These days the Blackwater of yore no longer exists. After a number of fallouts and Erik Prince's exit (who now earns his bread "advising" Chinese companies to exploit Africa's natural resources, ever the capitalist patriot) Blackwater was renamed a number of times and finally bought by the rather nebulous Constellis Group, which also owns PMC Triple Canopy, which in turn picked up Blackwater's business in Iraq after Washington found the situation in Iraq untenable and reassigned contracts. How quaint. Now called Academi, Blackwater is steered by moral luminaries such as John Ashcroft, Jack Quinn and Bobby Ray Inman. The company is no longer in the spotlight, but the environment that allowed it thrive remains and America's military is still profoundly (and venomously) dependent of PMCs, which are still making bank at the expenses of America's sovereignty. You just don't know about their names.
While well researched, the book itself can be a bit ponderous and falls prey to the author's penchant to repeat the same points over and over again, which makes for a bit of an unpalatable read. There's also an evident anti-privatization bias on his part, although given the consequences of outsourcing even the most basic functions of the army that is hardly something that can be used against him.
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army is a troubling and important piece of muckraking journalism that should be an obligatory read for anybody interested in the workings of the military industrial complex and how it's quickly eroding the sovereignty of America in new and extremely toxic ways for the profit of a few powerful men. Go read it, GAF.
The book itself pretty opens with the infamous 2004 Fallujah ambush, when a number of Blackwater mercenaries ended with their charred and mutilated corpses being put on display. This incident brought Blackwater into the spotlight; what the media didn't quite tell is that entire armies of military contractors were roaming the streets without any authority to restrain them, nor how that situation came to be.
With no laws to oversee their activity in Iraq (as a matter of fact, the Bush administration did its best to ensure that the new Iraqi government couldn't punish them, nor they were obliged to comply with military regulations for a very long time), Blackwater mercenaries were involved in the murder of civilians, evidence tampering, smuggling operations, the works. At the height of its power, Blackwater even afforded itself the luxury of making death threats to a US State Department investigator. For the most part, Blackwater's crimes remain unpunished.
The book is not just about Blackwater, though, as it also covers the privatization policies enacted by Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, which helped to chop a large part of the American armed apparatus' under the notion of improving its efficiency (a well calibrated farce, as Halliburton and others made out like bandits overcharging exorbitant amounts of money for the most basic services), making it so dependant of contractors that America's force projection during an invasion scenario would be effectively crippled.
A great example is provided by the PMCs working on Iraq at behest of the US government, which in order to accomplish their missions had to be supplied with intelligence provided by PMC Aegis Defence at the princely sum of half a billion dollars. The situation was patently ridiculous, if not absurd. Military intelligence was so strategically starved of resources that it had to resort to outsource its activities in order to make sure that high ranking American officials and all kinds of companies working in Iraq were safe from insurgent and Islamist groups. It really says something that America had to resort to veritable pond-scum like Tim Spicer to get shit done as if it were some disfunctional African fiefdom.
Scahill also devotes a great deal of the book to shine some light on Blackwater's founder Erik Prince's origins. Typically depicted as a former SEAL and rugged capitalist, Prince comes from old money and seemingly funded Blackwater upon the idea of one of his former superiors. Already worth close to a billion dollars by the time he formed Blackwater, he's closely tied by blood and politics to both the craziest fringes of the Catholic and Evangelical churches (which would later became the Tea Party), but also to some of the most powerful members of corporate America, which provided him with high level contacts, some significant media clout and massive lobbying power, which were put to use to reinvent what amounted to a training facility for the FBI and local police departments in a Virginia swamp into a veritable army with its own navy and air force.
These days the Blackwater of yore no longer exists. After a number of fallouts and Erik Prince's exit (who now earns his bread "advising" Chinese companies to exploit Africa's natural resources, ever the capitalist patriot) Blackwater was renamed a number of times and finally bought by the rather nebulous Constellis Group, which also owns PMC Triple Canopy, which in turn picked up Blackwater's business in Iraq after Washington found the situation in Iraq untenable and reassigned contracts. How quaint. Now called Academi, Blackwater is steered by moral luminaries such as John Ashcroft, Jack Quinn and Bobby Ray Inman. The company is no longer in the spotlight, but the environment that allowed it thrive remains and America's military is still profoundly (and venomously) dependent of PMCs, which are still making bank at the expenses of America's sovereignty. You just don't know about their names.
While well researched, the book itself can be a bit ponderous and falls prey to the author's penchant to repeat the same points over and over again, which makes for a bit of an unpalatable read. There's also an evident anti-privatization bias on his part, although given the consequences of outsourcing even the most basic functions of the army that is hardly something that can be used against him.
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army is a troubling and important piece of muckraking journalism that should be an obligatory read for anybody interested in the workings of the military industrial complex and how it's quickly eroding the sovereignty of America in new and extremely toxic ways for the profit of a few powerful men. Go read it, GAF.
