"Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army" (Jeremy Scahill)
Watched this interview last night on our Tivo-esque device. Here's the transcript, and video if you didn't get to see the piece. Quite a good, far-ranging interview, Jeremy Scahill did most of the talking.
You could not miss Erik Prince this week. The founder and top gun of Blackwater usually keeps a low media profile. But there he was all over the place, in a carefully orchestrated campaign to put the best face on a bad situation.
Erik Prince is the man who assembled a private army in Iraq with tax dollars, provided by the U.S. Government — you. Earlier this month, after some of his soldiers of fortune gunned down 17 innocent Iraqis and wounded 27 others in what the Army first called an unprovoked attack, Prince was called before Congress to give an accounting.
[From Bill Moyers Journal . Watch & Listen | PBS]
Part Two here
Well, I mean, I believe that Erik Prince is an ideological foot soldier. And I do believe that he's a Christian supremacist. And I think it's very easy to explain that. I mean, look, this is the guy who gave a half a million dollars to Chuck Colson, the first person to go to jail for Watergate who's now becoming a very prominent evangelical minister and an advisor to President Bush, one of the people behind the safe face initiatives.
And Chuck Colson has said things like when Mohammed wrote the Koran, he had had too many tamales the night before. Also one of the leading executives of Blackwater, Joseph Schmidt is an active member of the Military Order of Malta, a Christian militia dating back to the Crusades. And I believe that these men do have an agenda that very closely reflects adherence to a sort of Crusader doctrine.
