Blackwater USA is probably the world's biggest private army. These mercenaries contractors play a key role in the Iraq occupation. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill talks to Democracy Now! about his new book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater was founded -- it was actually incorporated in late 1996 and really started to build up its operations in 1997. Originally, it was a 5,000-acre plot near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, and the personal private fortune of its founder, Erik Prince. He's believed to be, if not the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest people ever to serve in the elite US Navy Seals.
Maybe we should talk for a moment about who he is and his background, because it has everything to do with the success of the company. Erik Prince comes from a very wealthy rightwing Christian dynasty in the town of Holland, Michigan. His father was a man named Edgar Prince, who was a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps capitalist. He built up an empire called the Prince Manufacturing Corp., and they manufactured auto parts, serviced the auto industry. And, in fact, what the company is perhaps best known for was for creating the now-ubiquitous lighted sun visor. So when you pull down the visor in your car and it lights up, that's the Prince family's invention. And it was a very profitable business.
And so, young Erik Prince grew up in this very heady atmosphere that mixed the sort of free-market gospel with the literal Christian gospel. His family, they were strict Calvinists. And Erik Prince was political at a very early age and watched as his father used his company as a cash-generating engine to fuel the rise of what we now know as the religious right in this country, as well as the Republican Revolution of 1994. His father gave the seed money to Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Young Erik Prince was in the first crop of interns to serve at the Family Research Council. They gave significant funding to James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family, which is now sort of the premier evangelical organizing network in this country, the “prayer warriors.”
And what’s interesting is that Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married into another powerhouse Michigan family, perhaps the single greatest bankroller of the Republican Revolution: Dick DeVos’s Amway Corporation. Erik Prince's sister married Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway fortune. And Amway was a company that sold home services products and sort of was accused of running the operation like a cult and using their marketers to not only sell their products, but to sell their political agenda, the rise of the sort of Christian right and Republican Revolution. And so, this marriage of these two families was sort of typical of the merging of the monarchist families in old Europe.
And so, Erik Prince grew up in this atmosphere, where his family was a real power player in what would become the Republican Revolution of 1994. Erik Prince interned in George H.W. Bush's White House, but he complained that it wasn't conservative enough for him on gay issues, on the balanced budget, on the environment. He also was an intern for the conservative California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a man who, after leaving Reagan’s staff as an advisor and speechwriter, went over to join the Mujahideen in Afghanistan before beginning his congressional term. And so, Erik Prince --
AMY GOODMAN: To fight the Soviets.
JEREMY SCAHILL: To fight the Soviets, and he -- you know, he bragged of having gone over there to stand alongside the freedom fighters, those very freedom fighters now being the ones who have declared war on the Bush administration and, you know, that the Bush administration claims to be at the center of the so-called war on terror. So those were the early days of young Erik Prince.
And then he went on to join the US Navy Seals. And I don't think he wanted to leave the Navy Seals, but his father died in 1995, and his wife had cancer, and it became no longer an option to be a Navy Seal. Prince had been in Bosnia. He had been in Haiti. He had served in the Mediterranean. And so, he sort of came home in the mid-’90s to help the family sort through its affairs and to also take care of his ailing wife.
And the family ended up, after much deliberation, selling Prince Manufacturing for a little less than $1.5 billion in cash, and Erik Prince took his political experience, his religious commitment and the experience he gained from watching his father become a major operator in politics and business, and opened Blackwater. And he teamed up with several other former Special Forces guys, and Blackwater was founded on the principle of anticipating accelerated government outsourcing of training and firearms-related training, and so that's how Blackwater began. It was supposed to be like a sportsman's paradise/training center in the wilderness of North Carolina.
Scahill went on to talk about the CIA vets coming to the Blackwater group.
AMY GOODMAN: Cofer Black is now part of a new Blackwater effort, a new company called Total Intelligence Solutions.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. This is really the next sort of generation of privatization, is the privatization of intelligence. And they’re marketing their services to Fortune 500 companies. And so, it's not just Cofer Black. It's another CIA guy who went on to work at Blackwater, Robert Richer, who was a Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA. So those two are really the sort of leaders behind this new initiative.
But, really, the man behind all of it is Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater. He's rapidly buying up, for instance, a think tank, the Terrorism Research Center, and other intelligence entities and sort of cobbling them together. Blackwater's big push now is not just for government contracts, but it’s also for corporate contracts. And so, it's part of this radical privatization agenda. And to have a man heading this who told Congress openly, “There was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off” -- this is a guy who ran essentially the extraordinary rendition program, now is working as the vice chairman of Blackwater and starting his own private intelligence company.
Blackwater has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, many of them sort of fit the patterns of planes used in extraordinary rendition. Now, we don't have any direct evidence to suggest that Blackwater’s planes have been used in extraordinary renditions, but the types of planes that they have and the flight patterns that they engage in are very similar to some that have been documented to be engaged in extraordinary rendition. So this raises a lot of serious questions about the extent of Blackwater's involvement.