Blackwater Watchdog Jeremy Scahill

Chapter 5 - Advice From a Caterpillar

We’ve been exploring the idea that little is as it seems in the discussion of private security companies (PSC’s) or, if you will, mercenaries. In this public policy debate, the world is downside up and outside in, and many are sworn certain that their view is the only one just and correct—if only because they heard someone else express it so vehemently that it has to be right.

So far, we have been digging into the facts behind the soundbites on Blackwater in Katrina. Chapter 1 laid the ground rules for this exploration. In chapter 2, we did some photographic examination of the truth of Blackwater “paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans.” Chapter 3 revealed that a familiar photo of “Blackwater Mercenaries in Katrina” actually shows New Orleans police officers, then went on to explore profiteering claims and to examine Blackwater’s role in Katrina as Federal Protective Service site security guards. And last week, chapter 4 explored (martial) law enforcement in Katrina scenarios by looking at the Posse Comitatus Act.

These posts covered most aspects of the Blackwater in Katrina story. Admittedly, though, chapter 4 largely proved more boring than watching the bumper rust on a ‘72 Matador Coupe in the front yard of your average central Pennsylvania doublewide. (Which is, incidentally, the most bone-searingly ugly car known to humankind—all you can do is stare blankly, stupefied and incredulous, at the horror. It takes months to fully comprehend its awful majesty and menacing force.)

One last factor deserves consideration in our Katrina discussion. There is a single source for almost all of the sensational reporting on Blackwater and Katrina: one Mr. Jeremy Scahill. As the self-appointed watchdog/caviler of Blackwater, he has made many strong assertions about Katrina. Consideration of his other investigative reporting might prove helpful in understanding his Katrina reporting. Indeed, one might ask “Who are you?”

Before we even go there, however, we should be crystal clear on one point: every citizen has the right to express their opinion. Whatever the political, religious, sexual, ethical or any other persuasion, no one’s view should be censored from the marketplace of ideas, so long as they do not slander or endanger others. Not that he needs any permission from the staff here at the Rabbit, but Mr. Scahill is encouraged to contribute as much constructive input to the public debate as he can. In the interim, let’s see how he came to have such interesting things to say about Blackwater in Katrina.

Jeremy Scahill was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin by his “social activist” parents, learning early on about radical figures like Malcolm X and other pacifist/socialist/anarchist advocates. He graduated Wauwatosa East High School in 1992, then drifted through a couple University of Wisconsin regional campuses and an area technical college before determining that his “time would be better spent by entering the struggle for justice in this country.”

After dropping out of college, Mr. Scahill spent the next two years in various East Coast homeless shelters, at one point turning up at a Baltimore commune guided by radical peace activist and anarchist Philip Berrigan. Unfortunately, the fire-eating Vietnam-era Berrigan had apparently gone a ways downhill—in their one reported protest attempt, they were unsuccessful in even getting arrested for breaking into the NSA to protest its role as “the brains of the military death machine.” (Baltimore Morning Sun, July 5, 1996). With practice, though, the obligatory and all-important arrests were achieved in connection with sundry other protests.

It was during Mr. Scahill’s stint at the Berrigan compound that he launched his writing career, regularly appearing in a monthly newspaper on social justice issues. For example, after Cuban fighter jets shot down two private planes owned by a Miami-based Cuban refugee support group, the U.S. again tightened the embargo originally imposed under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Scahill joined the chorus of objections from figures such as socialist/anarchist Noam Chomsky and Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakan.

Scahill vigorously attacked the U.S. embargo as an attempt to “supercede international law” and as being the cause of severe shortages of food and medical care in the communist/socialist Cuban economy (Catholic Worker newspaper, June 1997).

The reader should evaluate that argument on its merits, but it is an interesting one, given how things were humming along so nicely at the time in other countries built on that model … like the USSR, GDR, or DPRK. Or, if you prefer nation-states that are both less defunct and less-acronymic, substitute similar economic and civil rights powerhouses of the time like Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria.

(Kudos to these planned-economy titans of technology, however, for they were the purveyors of perhaps the second-most ugly vehicle of all time, the Sachsenring Trabant. The Trabant, built into the 1990’s, was a marvel of East German engineering that erupted in clouds of brown smoke every time you started the two-cylinder engine. Fortunately, not all of these masterpieces of the socialist economic miracle were abandoned alongside Eastern Bloc dirt roads—we have photographic proof that some are still in service to this day. Oh what a feeling!)

By 1997, Jeremy Scahill had moved on to New York City, where he became involved with the fledgling Democracy Now!, a New York-based talk radio program. For those unfamiliar with the program, it aggressively purports to be “fiercely independent,” although observers contend that in practice it is “far left” in the sense that it advocates worldwide socialism and opposes most existing governments.

In mid-1998, Mr. Scahill was headed to Nigeria, claiming that a U.S. oil company was to blame for two deaths during an incident involving Nigerian military onboard an offshore oil platform. (For those not familiar, one side asserts that the military forces were “corporate death squads” sent to kill peaceful protestors while the other points out that sovereign state forces were boarding the platform to rescue hostages taken several days earlier in the seizure of the platform.)

He also spent part of 1998 in Iraq. Mr. Scahill is a perennial favorite at the annual conference held by the International Socialist Organization, a movement advocating an extreme Marxist viewpoint, spiced with elements of Lenin and Trotsky. Here is what he had to say during the Socialism 2007 conference regarding his early Iraq visits: “I started going to Iraq in 1998, when Bill Clinton was in power. And I don’t know how many Americans are aware of this, but it was Bill Clinton who initiated the longest sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam—under the guise of protecting the so-called no-fly zones.” Mr. Scahill's concerns regarding U.S. conduct were not limited to the no-fly zones, however. His position on economic sanctions: "The Clinton Administration refined the disgusting act of killing Iraqis. They refined it. They imposed the most brutal regime of economic sanctions in history on that country. They strangled mercilessly the children of Iraq for a decade straight." Here’s his Socialism 2006 attack on Democrats and President Clinton, which proved to be a preview of a recent articles. As an aside, it is interesting that during the 2006 event, he mocks the “bipartisan clamoring to intervene, as they say, in Sudan.”

Meanwhile, what had been Yugoslavia had been imploding. Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic was several years into an aggressive program of “ethnic cleansing” of, among others, Bosnian Muslims—or as it is known in plain English, concentration camps, village-wide rape sprees, and mass shootings—eventually resulting in the systematic execution of more than 200,000 civilians. In Srebrenica, the world’s first United Nations “Safe Area,” U.N. peacekeepers stood by over a period of five days as Serbian forces selected and then slaughtered over 7,000 men and boys between the ages of twelve and sixty.

By 1999, the focus of Milosevic’s “cleansing” had turned to ethnic Albanians, and NATO sought to end it via a bombing campaign. It was during this time that Mr. Scahill traveled extensively in the Balkans, meeting his future wife, a Serbian translator, and welcoming the birth of their first child. It was also where he reported frequently on the ongoing war crimes—the U.S. war crimes, that is. Yes, these would be the war crimes Mr. Scahill alleges against President Clinton, General Wesley Clark, and the U.S. military forces involved in the campaign. For those who want to dig down on this, examples of his reporting and comments regarding the individuals who were the ones being labeled as the “neo-fascists” at that point in time are here, here, and here. Lastly, here is a more recent event where he accosted General Wes Clark regarding U.S. military war crimes during the Kosovo campaign.

Sorry, I simply don’t have a snarky comment to follow that. Even the flippant windbaggery we enjoy here at the Rabbit is not up to it.

Scahill continued to report on socialist, pacifist and Serb-related issues, living and working in Belgrade into 2001. On 9/11, he was on strike against his regular independent radio network, but participated in coverage of the week’s events with an independent, independent network of journalists (are we correct in saying that two independents don’t make them Right?) that interviewed, among others, a former airplane hijacker and the family of a Palestinian “activist” imprisoned for three years under the Clinton administration.

Scahill then reported for a period on anti-Taliban battles in Afghanistan, describing “bungled U.S. operations” and “mass executions of civilians” but soon moved on to Ba’athist Iraq to establish a Bagdad-based affiliate of Democracy Now! under the name IraqJournal. During his Iraq reporting, from late 2002 to early 2003, he met with everyone from leading Imams, to everyday people in the street, to at least Tariq Aziz. Shortly before the 2003 invasion, Mr. Scahill returned to New York, where he resumed reporting on U.S. atrocities—both internal and external.

For example, here is his description of Blackwater’s domestic activities: “After last week, no one should call [this organization] a police force. It's a paramilitary group. Thousands of soldiers, dressed in khaki uniforms with full black body armor and gas masks, marching in unison through the streets, banging batons against their shields, chanting, ‘back back back.’ There were armored personnel carriers and helicopters.” Scary, huh? Oh, wait, that’s right, it wasn’t Blackwater—he was describing the Miami police department.

On the foreign news front, he covered the conduct of U.S. military in what he normally refers to as “the so-called war on terror.” For example, in a piece about “the [U.S.] military’s repeated killing of journalists in Iraq,” Mr. Scahill argued that “The US military has yet to discipline a single soldier for the killing of a journalist in Iraq,” describing “credible accounts of [Al Jazeera] journalists being tortured by the US military in Iraq.” No accountability, no punishment, torture ... could “Thugs-gone-Wild” be a recurring theme in Mr. Scahill’s writing?

Finally, we arrive at August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina arrives at the Gulf Coast.

If you are reading the Rabbit, you have no doubt already read much of Mr. Scahill's colorful reporting on Blackwater (and other PSC's) in Katrina, including this, this, this, and these. He also has a string of boilerplate statements which are rolled out for book promo events and pro forma NPR appearances. If you have not heard these canned talking points, here is Mr. Scahill trying to share them with Jon Stewart:

What follows is some additional Katrina reporting by Mr. Scahill that you may have missed. It may be instructive in your reasoned analysis of assertions made regarding Blackwater in Katrina.

While describing visits to both New Orleans and Baton Rouge just days after the storm landed, Mr. Scahill describes seeing scores of vehicles filled with “very large men, flak jackets, automatic weapons.” Who were these 'heavies'? Blackwater mercenaries? No, “Immigration and Naturalization Service, Border Patrol, National Guard, Active Army, Police.” It was not just their equipment that was of concern, though. Mr. Scahill describes Border Patrol agents “acting like thugs” which made people who did not have “papers that make them quote unquote legal citizens of the United States” nervous about seeking help.

Of course, the mercenaries were the gravest threat. As Mr. Scahill put it, they were “the most feared forces here right now actually because they are the ones really going after people in a brutal and violent way.” No, wait, that wasn’t Blackwater, that was his description of the New Orleans police.

Mr. Scahill’s allegations of thuggery do not end there, however. He accuses the Chicago Fire Department of looting a bar as part of a program of “official looting.” Meanwhile, he denies that there was any meaningful looting by civilians, saying “stories of looting and violence are just not true.” In his words, “no one was taking TV’s, stereos, or Nike shoes” they were only taking “food, diapers, and medicine.”

On another occasion he asserted, “We know there were thirteen New Orleans police officers who were engaged in systematic looting, and that’s just what’s become public. But I haven’t seen any real, compelling footage that shows there was frantic criminality going on in New Orleans.”

Heaven knows our fellow humans were in dire straits after Katrina. But even if Mr. Scahill is defining taking food, water or medicine because you were unprepared for the storm as not being looting, which can be argued, this statement nonetheless reflects an interesting view of events. Just by way of example, there are some who would consider the “liberation” of clothing, more clothing, Nikes, beer, liquor—or eventually the entire contents of the Tchoupitoulas Street Wal-mart—to be looting. (Note: We can understand the logic behind stealing a gun or a bike in the midst of societal breakdown and utter chaos, but what in the world compelled the white guy in this pic to make a purse his first order of business? To compound the failure of judgment, the bag doesn’t begin to match his shoes.)

That’s about all we’ve got for this week. We leave it to you to decide how much of the Blackwater in Katrina reporting is truth … and how much is truthiness.

We do have to admit, though, that we’re not fully clear on exactly what would constitute “compelling footage.”

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Next week: We leave Katrina and move to a more timely topic, which should be more exciting than Scrabble night at the annual Moose Lodge grammar jamboree.