Jeremy Scahill won me over when we was reporting for Democracy Now! on the 2004 presidential election. Wesley Clark was in New Hampshire campaigning just days before the primary. The usual campaign coverage is a about as informative as a dog turd. Everyone is in softie mode– journalists, politicians, public citizens. And in the midst of it, a young reporter walks up to Clark who is making his way down the street kissing babies, etc. And Scahill opens: “In Yugoslavia, you used cluster bombs and depleted uranium…”. (See the rest of the confrontation here).
So when his book Blackwater was announced, about the mercenary firm of the same name made famous by images of burnt remains of employees hanging over the Euphrates, I knew I had to read it. All in all, the book was great. It is clear and sober, yet a pleasure to read (Not nearly as academic–and therefore boring–as Peter W. Singer’s Corporate Warriors, although I recommend that book highly for a thorough and detailed portrait of how the system of mercenary armies arose and now operates, politically, financially, and historically). Scahill has a written voice that is far less confrontational than his spoken one, and yet the cutting analysis is still there. He is someone who thinks, and sadly we can’t say this about many of the journalists out there. Scahill represents hope for the future of investigative journalism. And unlike some of his colleagues, he checks his emotional baggage at the door, giving us a book far more substantial and potentially influential.
In fact, one of the few criticisms I have of the book are not about Scahill’s writing, but the publisher’s marketing. It’s published by Nation Books, and is blurbed by (among others) Joseph Wilson, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Arundhati Roy. In other words, the usual gang. None of them have much expertise in the field, and all convey a sense of “yeah, another howler from the Left.” Anyone who makes it past the cover is already a believer. But in between the covers, the book is far more accessible than to just Mother Jones readers. It should have been put out by a university press and blurbed by actual experts (like Peter W. Singer). It deserves to be taken seriously.
One of the more enjoyable aspects of the book are the occasional sprinklings of observations from Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who has a way of calling a spade a shovel—with all the euphemisms and opaque language surrounding the thriving mercenary industry, Ratner has a way of getting the language right. In speaking of the unprecedented deployment of private mercenaries domestically immediately following the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, Scahill quotes Ratner (page 332):
These kind of paramilitary groups bring to mind Nazi Party brownshirts, functioning as an extrajudicial enforcement mechanism that can and does operate outside the law. The use of these paramilitary groups is an extremely dangerous threat to our rights.
Yeah, what he said.
