by Bill Moyers
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.
The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!
Translating great poetry, you know, is a way of stealing sugar.
The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder’s plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!
This is from Beowulf.
Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.
I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot.
One of my boys said to me, “Dad, you’re not a loafer.”
I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the face, and died twenty years later in joy.
I don’t mind you saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.
“You’re a thief!” the judge said. “Let’s see
Your hands!” I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.
Are you happy at eighty?
I’m happy at eighty. But I can’t stand as much happiness as I used to.
That’s because you’re Lutheran.
Maybe one day out of the week I’ll become depressed—but the rest of the time, especially if I’m writing poetry, I’m never depressed.
What depresses you?
Who knows? Depression comes up from underneath. And it just grabs you. It’s an entity on its own. We are built for depression in a way. Because the nafs is so strong in us it doesn’t want us to be happy and give away things. It wants us to pull back inside and say, “My mother wasn’t good enough to me. My father wasn’t good enough to me.” You know that whole thing.
Who knows when or if we’ll see each other again? Let’s bring the circle around. Because when I first met you thirty years ago you told me this was a poem that had marked you. Remember it?
Oh, yes.
I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
Well, that’s very ’60s, isn’t it? This is Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German.
I am circling around God ...
The word made him nervous. So he said,
... around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
Genius poem, isn’t it? Genius.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years,
You know, Bill, there’s a part of you that has been circling for a thousand years.
And you.
Yeah.
And all of us.
Oh, yes. And that wonderful energy that you can see in a human face even when walking down the street. Something’s still there—circling around God, around the ancient tower. “And I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon”—which means someone who goes in and grabs things and steals them—“or a storm, or a great song.”
Oh, yes.
JEREMY SCAHILL
More than 630 companies were hired by the United States to help implement the occupation of Iraq. By 2007, their 180,000 employees outnumbered America’s 160,000 troops. Of those men and women for hire, 48,000 worked for private security firms. Their presence, The New York Times reported, marked “a critical change in the way America wages war: the early days of the Iraq War, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.”
The most publicized of these companies was Blackwater—a name that became so notorious it ultimately was changed by its owners to Xe Services. Very few Americans had even heard of the company until the spring of 2004, when four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah were killed in an ambush, their bodies mutilated, burned, dragged through the streets, then hanged from a bridge. Photographs of the grisly scenes flashed instantly around the world. American military forces quickly launched a bloody house-by-house assault on Fallujah aimed at driving insurgents from the city, and congressional investigators and journalists were soon digging into Blackwater’s history and operations.
None was more meticulous than Jeremy Scahill, the independent investigative reporter who has twice received the George Polk Award for journalistic achievements. His book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, was published in March 2007, almost three years to the day since the killing of the four contractors. The New York Times called it “a crackling exposé.”
News from Iraq further propelled the book up the bestseller list. On September 16, 2007, while escorting a convoy of State Department officials to a military base, Blackwater guards opened fire on Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing seventeen civilians. According to military reports, the shooters used excessive force without provocation, and the FBI concluded that they had violated rules in effect for security contractors.
Iraq revoked Blackwater’s authority to operate there, and the company was suddenly an international pariah. Its founder and chief executive officer, Erik Prince, who had rarely been seen in public, went before an ineptly run congressional hearing and tried to portray his company as the latest incarnation in a long and accepted tradition of contract soldiering—mercenaries. Skeptics weren’t buying it, and the secretive Prince uncharacteristically agreed to a series of televised interviews. Jeremy Scahill, who had burrowed deep below Blackwater’s spin, was fascinated by the Prince media blitz.
—Bill Moyers
You have been watching the interviews of Erik Prince on television. What’s the message?
Let’s remember, this is a guy who prior to the September 16 shooting in Baghdad had only done one television interview ever. And that one was right after 9/11 on Fox News with Bill O’Reilly. He told O’Reilly that after 9/11, the phone’s been ringing off the hook at Blackwater. Other than that, this is a guy who hasn’t really appeared in public. So it was unusual to see him appear before the Congress and do this blitzkrieg of interviews. The message was very clear. He was trying to say, we’re a patriotic American company, we’re Americans protecting Americans. But there is also something that reminded me of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men where he boasts about eating his cereal meters away from Cubans who want to kill him. When Erik Prince uses terms like “the bad guys” and “our blood runs red, white, and blue,” he’s saying, look, you don’t understand, American people, what we’re doing for you. While you’re enjoying comfort here in the United States, we’re over there protecting our men and women in uniform, our diplomats. I think he wants to increase the mystique about the company and the operations of Blackwater.
Do you think he was motivated, and his PR firm was motivated, in part because he didn’t do that well at the recent hearings before Congress into this shooting?
I think that for years Blackwater has made a very serious strategic error in how they’ve handled their publicity. And now we’re seeing the company go on the offensive. I think Erik Prince held his own in front of the Congress. I attribute that largely to the fact that the Democrats didn’t really do their homework on him. Here you have the man who owns the company providing the largest private army on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq. A billion dollars in contracts. Twenty-seven of his men are killed in Iraq. We don’t know how many people he killed. No private actor in the occupation of Iraq has had more of a devastating impact on
events in Iraq than Blackwater. But at the hearings you see Democrats flipping through the pages while Prince was testifying.
If you go to the CBS News website reporting on Lara Logan’s interview with him, the headline reads: “Blackwater Chief Welcomes Extra Oversight.” Could that have been the message? Look, this was a terrible thing that happened over there. But we really want you—the State Department, the government, the military—to hold us more accountable.
There’s a very Orwellian vibe to all of this. Blackwater says they’re not a mercenary company. Erik Prince calls that a slanderous term. We’re not even in the private military company business, he says. We’re in the business of peace because peace matters. In fact, Blackwater recently left the mercenary trade association. They had been a leading member and funder of it. It’s called the International Peace Operations Association. And the logo is a cartoon sleeping lion. It’s so incredibly Orwellian. They have been pushing this “hold us accountable” line for years because it looks great on paper. There are going to be laws that govern the use of private military companies, but in reality they are totally unenforceable.
Why?
The idea is that U.S. civilian law is going to apply to contractors on the battlefield. Democrats say let’s send an FBI field office over to Baghdad to monitor 180,000 contractors. But there are more contractors in Iraq right now than there are U.S. soldiers. The idea is that the FBI will go around Iraq, investigate crimes committed by contractors, interview witnesses, presumably in very dangerous places, and then arrest the individuals in question, bring them back to the United States, and prosecute them in a U.S. civilian court. I mean, I’ve never heard a more insane plan. So, what that bill will give Erik Prince and other mercenary companies is the opportunity to sit down and say, there are laws that govern us, we’re accountable under U.S. law, when they know that it only exists on paper. There will be a few token prosecutions, but it’s impossible to monitor the activities of 180,000 personnel.
How did you get interested in this story?
I started going to Iraq in 1998. I went in the weeks leading up to the Clinton administration’s attack on Baghdad in December of ’98. I had actually spent a fair bit of time in the city of Fallujah. It was a place that I knew well. And, as you know, on March 31, 2004, four Blackwater operatives were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, their bodies dragged through the streets, burned, strung up from a bridge.
The American public recoiled from those images.
Right. Initial reports were that civilian contractors had been killed, that these were water specialists or engineers being dragged through the streets. Then it emerged that in fact they were mercenaries working for a private company called Blackwater USA. We watched as the Bush administration then began to escalate the rhetoric, and it became clear that they were going to lay siege to the city of Fallujah. What happened in the aftermath is well known. The U.S. military was ordered to destroy the city. Hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed, a number of U.S. troops. I began from a very simple question: How on earth were the lives of four corporate personnel—not U.S. soldiers, not humanitarian workers—used to justify the destruction of an entire Iraqi city? That siege had an incredibly devastating impact on events on the ground in Iraq. It gave rise to the Iraqi resistance. Fueled it. Attacks escalated against U.S. forces.
How would our diplomats be protected if it weren’t for the private security contractors? The army is stretched thin. Isn’t there a role for these people?
The fact is that the U.S. military has not historically done the job that Blackwater is doing. That was done through diplomatic security. But in Iraq, you’re talking about the occupation of a country. And without these private sector forces, without companies like Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and DynCorp, the occupation wouldn’t be tenable. The 180,000 contractors operating in Iraq alongside 170,000 U.S. troops represents a doubling of the occupation force. What this does is it subverts the citizenry of the United States. You no longer have to have a draft. You don’t have to depend on your own citizens to fight your wars.
What do these private contractors make compared to American soldiers on the ground?
It varies widely depending on the company, depending on their role, depending on their nationality. If you’re a former Navy SEAL or a Delta Force guy working for Blackwater, you can make about $600 a day for your work in Iraq. We’re talking six-figure salaries. Some of these guys working for private military companies make as much as General Petraeus, if not more. He makes about $180,000 a year. Average troops on the ground are being paid $40,000 a year to be in the exact same war zone as the men from Blackwater. And they’re wearing the American flag on their shoulder, not the Blackwater logo.
Didn’t I read somewhere that one of our generals said we couldn’t be in Iraq without Blackwater and these other companies?
General Petraeus himself has been guarded by private contractors in Iraq. What message did it send for the general who’s overseeing the surge in Iraq to be guarded at times not by the U.S. military but by private forces? Erik Prince likes to describe Blackwater as a sort of Federal Express of the national security apparatus. He says if you want a package to get somewhere, do you send it through the post office or do you send it through FedEx? Fact is, in the coalition that’s occupying Iraq, the U.S. military is the junior partner to these private companies. There are over 170 mercenary companies like Blackwater operating in Iraq right now. That’s almost as many nations as are registered at the UN. This isn’t just about Iraq. It’s also about looting the U.S. treasury.
What does it say that these mercenaries, this “peace and stability industry,” have become so essential?
I think we’re in the midst of the most radical privatization agenda in our nation’s history. We see it in schools, in the health care system, in prisons. And now we’re seeing it full-blown in the war machine. The very existence of the nation-state is at stake here, because you have companies now that have been funded with billions of dollars in public money using that money to then build up the infrastructure of private armies, some of which could take out a small national military. The old model used to be that if a company wants to go into Nigeria, for instance, and exploit oil, they have to work with the junta’s forces to do that. Now you can just bring in your own private military force, which is a publicly traded mercenary outfit. They’ve been in Colombia for years. The Colombian government receives $630 million a year to fight the so-called war on drugs. Of that $630 million, half of it goes to U.S. war contractors. They’ve been in the Balkans. They’re all over the place. They’re in Bolivia, they’re in Ecuador. Blackwater recently won a $15 billion contract that it will share with four other companies to fight terrorists with drug ties.
I was struck that no one confronted Prince about the specifics of his private army. How do you explain that?
I’m not sure why they didn’t do it. This is a man who is building up nothing short of a parallel national security apparatus. He not only has his Blackwater Security, which is deployed in Iraq, he has a maritime division and an aviation division. He recently started his own privatized intelligence company called Total Intelligence Solutions that’s headed by a thirty-year veteran of the CIA, Cofer Black, the man who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden and who oversaw the extraordinary rendition program. This is the man who promised President Bush that he would have his operative in Afghanistan chop off Osama bin Laden’s head, place it in a box with dry ice, and then have it hand-delivered to President Bush. He’s now the number two man at Blackwater USA. And he’s heading up this private intelligence company called Total Intelligence Solutions. Blackwater won a $92 million contract from the Pentagon to operate flights throughout central Asia. This is a company that is manufacturing surveillance blimps and marketing them to the Department of Homeland Security. They have their own armored vehicle called the Grizzly. Blackwater’s going to be around for a very long time.
And yet Prince said they’re just a very “robust temp agency.
” Sort of like Kelly girls.
I really don’t know what to say to that. These are the guys who have worked inside of Afghanistan. They’ve been responsible for so much death and destruction in Iraq. Erik Prince likes to portray Blackwater as this sort of apple-pie, all-American operation. Yet his company has recruited soldiers from all around the world and deployed them in Iraq. Some are Chilean commandos who trained and served under Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile. Blackwater worked with a Chilean recruiter who had been in Pinochet’s military, and they hired scores of Chileans, brought them to North Carolina for evaluation, and then sent them over to Iraq. Chile was opposed to the occupation of Iraq. It said, no, we won’t join the coalition of the willing. And so Blackwater goes in and hires up soldiers from a country whose home government is opposed to the war, and deploys them in Iraq. Blackwater has hired Colombian soldiers and paid them $34 a day to be in Iraq as well. They’ve hired Bulgarians, Fijians, Poles.
But he objects to that term, mercenary?
He says it’s slanderous.
I was intrigued to learn that the CEO of the public relations agency that is handling Prince—Burson-Marsteller—was also Hillary Clinton’s top campaign strategist, Mark Penn.
PR companies are also mercenaries and oftentimes work for the highest bidder.
They’re not shooting people, though.
No, no, no. But they’re mercenaries in the sense that they’ll rent their services out to anyone. And once you’re defending Erik Prince, then you become part of his operation. I also think that it was a strategic choice to go with the company with Mark Penn because of his connection with the Democrats and Hillary Clinton. For so many years we had a Republican-dominated Congress. Blackwater was certainly the beneficiary of the Republican monopoly in government. But this system is now bipartisan. When Hillary Clinton’s husband was in the White House, he was an aggressive supporter of the privatization of the war machine. Bill Clinton used mercenary forces in the Balkans.