Former Catholic Worker Goes After Blackwater Mercenaries

international | anti-war / imperialism | other press

Friday September 28, 2007 10:46

by VP

Jeremy Scahill, former member of the New York Catholic Worker and Jonah House, U.S. mercenary corpotaion Blackwater most recently responsible for killing 11 Iraqi civilians last week.

At Blackwater USA, Jeremy Scahill's is the face they love to hate. And
for the past 10 days, that face has been hard to miss.

CNN, ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, BBC, C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera - those are just some
of the media outlets that have featured on-air interviews with Scahill
after a shooting involving Blackwater contractors Sept. 16 in Baghdad
that left at least 11 Iraqis dead.

The shootings have raised Blackwater's international profile to its
highest visibility yet - and, by extension, that of Scahill, perhaps
the private military company's most dogged critic.

The author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful
Mercenary Army," a best-selling book published earlier this year,
Scahill brought his anti-Blackwater campaign to Norfolk on Wednesday,
the closest he has come to the company's Moyock, N.C., headquarters.

"More than any other private actor in the occupation of Iraq,
Blackwater has been at the epicenter of escalation of blood and
conflict in that country," he told an audience of about 200 at the
Naro Expanded Cinema.

"The U.S. military is now the junior partner in the so-called
coalition that is occupying Iraq," Scahill said, noting that there are
now more civilian contractors in the war zone than U.S. troops.

"The Bush administration has used these companies to subvert
democratic processes around the world," he said, avoiding the need to
reinstate the military draft or build coalitions with other countries.

So how did Scahill, 32, become Blackwater's nemesis?

He grew up in Milwaukee, the son of activist parents. His father was
part of the Catholic Worker movement, an organization dedicated to
nonviolence, voluntary poverty and hospitality for the homeless and
hungry.

The Norfolk Catholic Worker was a co-sponsor of Scahill's Wednesday
appearance, along with the Naro.

After dropping out of college in 1995, Scahill hitchhiked east and
spent a year painting houses alongside the radical anti-war ex-priest
Philip Berrigan in Baltimore.

Listening to the radio while painting, he discovered the fledgling
liberal media outlet Democracy Now.

"I had never heard anything like it in my life," Scahill said in an
interview Wednesday.

Determined to become a radio journalist, he went to work for Democracy
Now, first as a volunteer and later as a $40-a-day staffer.

After covering stories in Nigeria and the Balkans, he made several
trips to Iraq in the years leading up to the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Like most Americans, he first became aware of Blackwater in 2004 when
four of the company's contractors were killed and two of the bodies
strung from a bridge in Fallujah, prompting a retaliatory assault by
U.S. forces that virtually leveled the city.

Scahill said he asked himself: "How on Earth were the lives of four
operatives working for a war corporation worth the destruction of an
entire city?"

A year later, Scahill went to New Orleans in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina and encountered armed Blackwater contractors
patrolling the devastated streets.

"I started to realize this is an incredible story," he said.

By then he was working for The Nation, a liberal magazine. He plunged
into researching Blackwater and the private military industry,
producing a series of blistering articles focusing on Blackwater as
the poster boy for the privatization of warfare.

"One day," he said, "my editor at The Nation said, 'Jeremy, this is
all very interesting, but you either need to find a new topic or write
a book.'"

So he wrote a book.

His timing couldn't have been better. "Blackwater" hit No. 9 on the
New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, and that was before the
Sept. 16 shootings sparked a diplomatic crisis and prompted a
three-day shutdown of Blackwater's security work in Iraq.

Scahill said he has received only one official response from
Blackwater: a letter demanding that he remove the name "Blackwater"
from the Web site promoting his book. He didn't.

Otherwise, he has been deluged by reactions, pro and con. He declined
to say whether they have included threats.

"I get all sorts of e-mail saying all sorts of things," he said. "If I
started to worry about the hostile e-mails I receive, I would never be
able to work."