Has Blackwater USA become the New and Improved SS???

tybird wrote:

I don't believe that the SS model can be improved on.....they were the pinnacle of all that is bad in the human soul and magnified to a degree that most of us can't understand.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill is the author of that book, the New York Times bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. He attended yesterday’s hearing, joins us from Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you set the scene for us?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, Erik Prince is a man who has never held a press conference. He’s only known to have given one television interview, and that was on Fox News shortly after 9/11. He’s a guy whose company has gone after people, reporters, journalists, who have taken his photo. This is a man who’s incredibly secretive and has tried to avoid having his face in the public spotlight. In fact, the last time he was invited to testify in front of the Congress, it was in February, and instead of showing up himself, he dispatched his lawyer Andrew Howell. So this was a major day, where you see the mercenary king of the United States appearing not just before Congress, but before the cameras of the world. He certainly was uneasy having to do that, but he probably faced a choice himself, and that was to either show up on his own volition or to face a subpoena, where he would have been required to show up.

When Erik Prince stepped into the room, he was mobbed by photographers, and he came in, not with an army of armed mercenaries, but with an army of lawyers and advisers. And one of the people with him was Barbara Comstock, who’s a well-known Republican operative and a crisis management consultant. Blackwater had the first and second rows basically empty behind Mr. Prince, with the exception of his team of advisers and his consiglieri, and an unidentified man on several occasions during the course of the hearing himself interrupted the hearings and asked Henry Waxman to be able to consult with Prince. And then, what would result from that is that Erik Prince would turn around, and his advisers and lawyers would pile around him like a sports team plotting out their next play. It was very dramatic.

And I think that the issue here is that the Democrats really, I feel, dropped the ball on many of the most important issues surrounding Blackwater. Yes, there were some important questions raised. But for the most part, they steered away from some of the most devastating and violent incidents involving the company. The ambush at Fallujah in March of 2004, for instance, wasn’t addressed at all, except in passing. And there were a number of family members of the four Blackwater operatives who were killed in that incident. That’s a crucial one for the Congress to investigate, not only because of the allegations that Blackwater sent those four men into Fallujah in unarmored vehicles, short two men, and without heavy weapons, but because of the enormous price that Iraqi civilians paid for the deaths of those four corporate employees, the Bush administration ordering the leveling of Fallujah and, of course, the inflammation of the Iraqi resistance. There are a number of other incidents that never came up in the hearing.

I think that what needs to happen is that Erik Prince needs to become a more frequent visitor to Capitol Hill than his industry lobbyists have been over the past several years, and his visits should always begin with his right hand raised and cameras in front of him.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, the Fallujah attack that killed the four Blackwater employees, we have rarely heard in the corporate media that, in fact, Blackwater is being sued by the families of those Blackwater employees.

JEREMY SCAHILL: That’s right. And Henry Waxman's committee last week released a devastating study that essentially said that Blackwater was responsible for what happened that day, by sending the men out ill-prepared into what was arguably the most dangerous city in the world.