by Bill Moyers
Few journalists seem to want to press Prince deeply on his political connections. What can you tell us about those connections?
There are two things at play here. There’s the funding of congressional candidates. Erik Prince has given a quarter of a million dollars to Republican candidates. He also gave money to the Green Party to defeat Democratic candidates in the 2006 election cycle. So he’s a pretty committed supporter of the Republican Party. But what I think is more interesting is Erik Prince’s connection to the radical religious right. His father built up a very successful manufacturing empire called Prince Manufacturing. The invention that they were best known for is the now ubiquitous lighted sun visor. You pull down the visor in your car and it lights up; you have a bit of Blackwater history riding around in your vehicle. Prince grows up in this household where he watches his father using that business as a cash-generating engine to fuel and fund the rise of the Republican revolution of 1994, and also of several of the core groups that make up the radical religious right. His dad gave the seed money to Gary Bauer to start the Family Research Council. They were very close to James Dobson and his Focus on the Family “prayer warrior” network. Erik Prince was in the first team of interns that Gary Bauer took on in Washington at the Family Research Council, and Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married Dick DeVos, heir to the Amway corporate fortune, big supporter of conservative causes and owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team. Together, these two families merged in the kind of marriage that was commonplace in the monarchies of old Europe. And together they formed this formidable behind-the-scenes power player in radical right-wing politics in this country. As a young man Erik Prince interns in George H.W. Bush’s White House but complains it’s not conservative enough for him. So he backs Pat Buchanan in his insurgency campaign in 1992. These are the people that peppered the landscape of young Erik Prince’s life. He also interned for Dana Rohrabacher, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, now a congressman from California. It’s interesting that Rohrabacher issued a defense of Erik Prince after his congressional testimony and said that Prince is going to go down in history as a hero, just like Oliver North.
You write, “What is particularly scary about Blackwater’s role in a war that President Bush labeled a ‘crusade’ is that the company’s leading executives are dedicated to a Christian-supremacist agenda.”
I believe that Erik Prince is an ideological foot soldier. And I do believe that he’s a Christian supremacist. I think it’s very easy to explain that. Look, this is the guy who gave half a million dollars to Chuck Colson, the first person to go to jail for Watergate, who has now become a very prominent evangelical figure and an advisor to President Bush. And one of the leading executives of Blackwater, Joseph Schmitz, is an active member of the Military Order of Malta, a Christian militia dating back to the Crusades. I believe that these men do have an agenda that very closely reflects a Crusader mentality.
You write about the revolving door. Cofer Black, head of counterintelligence at the CIA, leaves the government, goes to work as the number two man at Blackwater. Guys leave the Pentagon and go to work for him.
It’s not a revolving door. It’s a bridge. They go back and forth. Blackwater has emerged almost as an armed wing of the administration in Iraq. It doesn’t work for the Pentagon; it works for the State Department. If I were Ambassador Ryan Crocker, I wouldn’t want to come within ten countries of the Blackwater bodyguards. When your bodyguards become more of a target than you, maybe it’s time to get a different security detail.
And maybe you’re one of the families at that Nisour Square shooting where seventeen people were killed and over twenty-five others were wounded. Blackwater walks around bragging about how they haven’t lost a single principal; all of their “nouns” have been kept alive, as they call it. But at what price to the U.S. soldiers in Iraq? I’ve heard from so many soldiers, veterans, who tell me, “We’re in a village somewhere. And things are going fine with the Iraqis. And we’ve reached the point where they’re not attacking us anymore. And we feel like there’s some goodwill that’s been generated.” This is an exact story that a translator attached to the Special Forces unit told me in an email recently. “Then the PSD guys, the personal security detail guys, come whizzing through with their VIP and they shoot up the town. And the Iraqis in town don’t understand that there’s a difference between the private forces and the military. And then they conduct revenge attacks against us.” So the misconduct of these forces is having a blowback effect on the active-duty military.
Is it also true that some of our soldiers in Iraq are “going Blackwater”?
That’s the slang. Even if you’re going to work for Triple Canopy or DynCorp, the slang of the day is “going Blackwater,” which means that you’re jumping from active-duty military to the private sector. You are going to be in the same war zone, but you’re going to make a lot more money. The troops I talked to also say that these guys are sort of the rock stars of the war zone. They’ve got better equipment than us, they have better body armor. You talk to these kids and some of them say, I was in Ramadi at the worst time in 2004, and I never stepped foot in an armored vehicle. We’re bolting steel plates and putting down sandbags on the ground to protect against IEDs. And then the Blackwater guys whiz by with their six-figure salaries and their wraparound sunglasses. The message is, my country is sending me over here for $40,000 a year, my mom’s back home trying to raise money to buy me some real body armor, and then I see these guys whiz by with their six-figure salary wearing the corporate logo instead of the American flag? Or the other reaction is, I want to be like that. I don’t want to be over here working for the Third Infantry Division. I want to go and work for Blackwater or Triple Canopy.
Is there a domestic threat implicit in this?
Bill, I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I think I saw a real window into the possible future. I was standing on a street corner in the French Quarter on Bourbon Street and I was talking to two New York City police officers who had come down to help. This is just a couple of days after the hurricane hit. And this car speeds up next to us, a compact, no license plates on it. Three massive guys get out of it. They have M4 assault rifles, bulletproof vests, khakis, wraparound sunglasses, baseball caps. And they say to the cops, “Where are the rest of the Blackwater guys?” I didn’t even hear the answer. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. They get back in their vehicle and they speed off. I said to this cop, “Blackwater? You mean the guys in Iraq and Afghanistan?” They said, “Oh, yeah. They’re all over the place down here.” And I said, “I’d like to talk to them. Where are they?” And they said, “You can go either way on the street.” So I walked a little bit deeper into the French Quarter. Sure enough, I encountered some Blackwater guys. And when I talked to them, they said that they were down there to confront criminals and stop looters.
Who called them in?
This is an interesting story. Erik Prince sent them in there with no contract initially. About 180 Blackwater guys were sent to the Gulf. They got there before FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, before there was any kind of a serious operation in the city at all.
Within a week, Blackwater was given a contract from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service to engage in security operations inside of New Orleans. They were pulling in $240,000 a day. Some of these guys had just been in Iraq two weeks earlier guarding the U.S. ambassador. Now they’re in New Orleans. They told me they were getting paid $350 a day, plus a per diem.
When I got a copy of Blackwater’s contract with the Department of Homeland Security, it turns out that Blackwater billed U.S. taxpayers $950 per man per day in the hurricane zone. Now, the math on this stuff is always complicated, and Erik Prince and his men are very good at drawing up charts and just saying there’s this detail and that detail. The Department of Homeland Security then did an internal review and determined that it was the best value to the taxpayer at a time when t
he poor residents of New Orleans were being chastised for how they used their $2,000 debit cards that often didn’t work. But even scarier than seeing the Blackwater operatives on the streets of New Orleans were the two Israeli commandos who had been brought in by a wealthy businessman in New Orleans, and set up an armed checkpoint outside of his gated community. They were from a company called Instinctive Shooting International, ISI. I talked to them. They tapped on their automatic weapons and said, “Over in our country, when the Palestinians see this, they’re not so afraid because they’re used to it. But you people, you see it, and you’re very afraid.” They were almost proud of the fact that I was rather in awe seeing Israeli commandos patrolling a U.S. street, operating an armed checkpoint.
Once upon a time, companies and others hired Pinkerton guards. But never on this scale, right?
It was like Baghdad on the Bayou down there in New Orleans. The poor drowned, they were left without food, called looters when they took perishable goods out of a store when they were in dire need. The rich bring in mercenaries to guard their properties or their businesses or their hotel chains. I think it’s a window into what happens in a national emergency. In this country, the poor are left to suffer, and the rich bring in their mercenaries.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Erik Prince is laying plans for an expansion that would put his gunmen in hot spots around the world doing far more than guard duty.
They certainly have intimated that they would be willing to go into Darfur, for one. Blackwater executives said, you send us in, and it’ll be “Janjaweedbe-gone!” Janjaweed are Islamic forces in the Sudan. They’ve been pushing this for a while. This is a gateway into a very lucrative feeding trough, known as the peacekeeping budget.
But suppose they could go in there as mercenaries and bring an end to that conflict. Get food in for those refugees in a way that the United States government can’t do.
What does that say, though, about the structure of the world? What does it say about nation-states and international institutions? The last thing needed in Darfur is more private guns. Who’s to say that’s what would happen if Blackwater gets sent into Darfur in the first place? Who’s going to be monitoring them and overseeing them?
But Erik Prince has been saying, “We want more accountability. We welcome it.”
This is something that I find fascinating. When Blackwater was sued for wrongful death after the four guys were killed in Fallujah in March of ’04 and then the Afghanistan plane crash,3 the legal argument that Blackwater put forward was an interesting one: “We can’t be sued.” They said they should enjoy the same immunity from civilian litigation that’s enjoyed by the U.S. military.
At the same time, their lobbyists and spokespeople are waxing poetic in the media about how it would be inappropriate to apply the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court-martial system, to Blackwater because they’re civilians. So when it’s convenient, we’re part of the U.S. total force, part of the war machine, and should be treated like the military. And when it’s not convenient, oh, we can’t be subjected to military law, because we’re actually civilians.
One of the really disturbing stories out of Iraq in the last year involving Blackwater was that last Christmas Eve inside of the heavily fortified Green Zone, a drunken, off-duty Blackwater contractor allegedly shot and killed a bodyguard for the Iraqi vice president, Adel Abdul-Mahdi. This individual was whisked out of Iraq within thirty-six hours. He actually returned to the region working in Kuwait for another contractor with the Pentagon. The killing happened on December 24, 2006. February of 2007, he’s back in the Middle East working for another U.S. military contractor. He hasn’t been charged with any crime whatsoever. We understand now that the Justice Department is investigating. The Iraqis clearly labeled it a murder, and it created a major rift between Baghdad and Washington. Imagine if an Iraqi bodyguard shot and killed a bodyguard for Dick Cheney and then the Iraqis just whisked him out of the United States. I mean, what would happen? What message does this send?4 What does it say that in four years of occupation, involving hundreds of thousands of contractors, not a single one of them has been prosecuted? Either we have tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq who are actually Boy Scouts, or something is fundamentally rotten with that system.5
What about these suits that were filed by some of the survivors of the four contractors who were killed in Fallujah?
I’ve gotten to know those four families very well over these years of working on this story. They’re military families, very patriotic. Some of them are pretty conservative Republicans. And these men were all veterans of the U.S. military. Scott Helvenston was one of the youngest people ever to complete the Navy BUDS training program, the Basic Underwater Demolition/ SEAL program. He was one of the guys killed there. These guys were killed on March 31, 2004. The families didn’t presume any malice on the part of Blackwater; they thought it was a patriotic American company and that their loved ones were continuing their military service through the private sector in Iraq. When they were killed, the families wanted answers as to what happened, and they began calling Blackwater. Some of the families asked to see a copy of the company’s investigation of that incident. Donna Zovko, the mother of Jerry Zovko—they’re Croatian immigrants—sat down with Blackwater executives at their compound in North Carolina.
When she asked to get that document and look at it, she claims that a Blackwater representative stood up at the table and told her it’s a classified document and you’ll have to sue us if you want to see it. Donna Zovko starts to become friends with Katy Helvenston, whose son was also killed in Fallujah. The two of them begin comparing notes. And they’re scouring media reports. Then they start to look at the photos. And they realize their sons weren’t really in armored vehicles there. They start to put together the pieces. And what emerged was a lawsuit.
In January 2005, the families of those four men—Wesley Batalona, Michael Teague, Jerry Zovko, and Scott Helvenston—filed a groundbreaking wrongful-death lawsuit against Blackwater, charging that the company had sent those men into what was arguably the most dangerous city in the world at the time in unarmored vehicles, without heavy weaponry, and without the opportunity to do a twenty-four-hour risk assessment, all of which they said were in the contract governing their mission that day. Blackwater fought back ferociously, and the case is caught up in legal limbo right now. But it’s being watched very closely by all of the other war companies, because it’s like the tobacco litigation of the ’90s. If that one domino goes down, it starts a chain reaction.
Doesn’t Erik Prince, as a businessman, have to worry about finding new markets? The State Department has said that when his contract outside the Green Zone in Iraq expires next May, Blackwater’s not likely to be a contestant for a new contract. There seems to be a tacit understanding between Blackwater and the government that, given the shootings in September and all the controversy, they’d quietly slip away.
You know what, though? In the midst of all of this chaos and crisis of image for Blackwater, the company continues to win very lucrative government contracts. I don’t even think the business in Iraq represents the most lucrative aspects of the company’s business. It’s just the highest-profile. There’s an affiliate company called Greystone that has been registered offshore in Barbados. It’s being portrayed as sort of a traditional mercenary outfit, and is pushing services to Fortune 500 companies. Look at the guest list for the kickoff ceremony for Greystone: the governments of Croatia and Uzbekistan, the International Monetary Fund, corporations. Government business for Blackwater is tremendously important. They do an enormous volume of business in the training of law enforcement and of the military. They have been involved with training foreign forces as well. Jordanian attack helicopter crews, for example. They’ve been deployed in Azerbaijan. But the corporate business is going to be a major part of Blackwater’s future.
What does this foreshadow for the future?
It’s really scary. I see this as
a real subversion of democratic processes in this country and a subversion of the sovereignty of nations around the world.
Isn’t it also a way to keep protest at home against the war in Iraq and other wars from rising to the level of—
Oh, absolutely. It masks the human toll of the war in terms of American lives. Because the contractor deaths are not counted in the official tolls, nor are their injuries, and it also masks the true extent of the occupation when over half of your occupation force comes from the private sector. President Bush almost never talks about it. He doesn’t have to own it in front of the American people. He’s having enough trouble owning the 170,000 troops that are over there right now. This is a real revolution in terms of U.S. politics. They’re taking billions of dollars in public money, and they’re privatizing it.
As you know, the Pentagon can’t make campaign contributions. The State Department can’t give campaign contributions. Blackwater’s executives can give contributions. These companies are taking billions of dollars from the government, and the money is making its way back into the campaign coffers of the very politicians that make the meteoric ascent of these companies possible. This is tearing away at the fabric of American democracy.
Jeremy Scahill returned to the Journal almost five months after Barack Obama was sworn in as president. Leaks inside Washington suggested the new administration would increase the number of private contractors in both Iraq, where Obama had pledged to draw down combat troops, and Afghanistan, where he intended to escalate the war.
Either way, mercenaries working for American companies abroad had become essential personnel on two fronts, confirming once again that the only winners in war are the people made rich by it. Xe, the company formerly kno wn as Blackwater, continues. Erik Prince has moved to Abu Dhabi.