http://www.haruth.com/JewsNetherlands.html [October 2000]
http://www.nik.nl [October 2000]

The more than 223 Jewish cemeteries now are owned by a private organization that wishes to remain anonymous. All burial information on the cemeteries is available in the Joods Cultureel Centrum in Amsterdam and in Hilversum. According to a member of Beth Chaim, over the years, the municipalities in the Netherlands did nothing to maintain the cemeteries. Many of them are in a terrible condition. A small group of volunteers named themselves "Beth Chaim" [House of the Living]: The Workgroup Meppel" in Meppel gave guidance to more than 300 pupils and individuals in the summer of 1998 when they started the restoration of the Jewish cemetery in Meppel.

In February 1999, the Beth Chaim Workgroup Meppel became Beth Chaim Foundation, working closely with a cemetery consultant responsible for all the Jewish cemeteries in the Netherlands. The Foundation cannot do anything without permission of the anonymous organization that owns the cemeteries. In March 2000, the Beth Chaim Foundation has restored two cemeteries and is working on more projects for the future. The Beth Chaim Foundation is an organization of Jewish people and people with a Jewish background with seven in the organization's management. Their goal is the restoration of Jewish cemeteries throughout The Netherlands by all kinds of people: students, Christians, and Jews. BCF emphasizes education of the youth of the Netherlands. BCF management includes:

     Mr. Peter-Paul van Broekhuizen-Chairman of BCF (Jewish grandmother)
     Mrs. Elsbeth van der Horst-vice-Chairman of BCF (Jewish grandmother and father)
     Mrs. Roos Tijssen-Treasurer of BCF (Jewish, a child in several concentration camps)
     Mr. Ron van Diejen-Secretary of BCF (Jewish grandmother and father)
     Mr. Max Turksma-Member of the board (Jewish-survived WWII)
     Mr. Jan Kranendonk jr.-Member of the board (Jewish mother)
     Mr. Jan Haasjes-Member of the board (not Jewish)
 

Richard Devos

CHRIS HEDGES: Well, DeVos, a guy who founded Amway; Target; Sam's Club. You know, they bring in -- a lot of these corporations like Wal-Mart and Sam's Club and others bring in these sort of dominionist or evangelical ministers into the plants as a way to mollify workers. Subscribing to this belief system is essentially about disempowerment.

Old-line families plot the future in New Orleans

Tulane

 I have long grappled with the apparent contradiction of why Tulane treats its Jewish professors so poorly while it caters to Jewish students with attractive programs and campus activities. My conclusion is that a bigoted administration does not allow ideology to interfere with its business decisions. Thus, Tulane appreciates that its Jewish students contribute a high proportion of full tuitions and good SAT scores, while the generous philanthropy of its Jewish alumni is always welcome.

Overkill: Feared Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans

By Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo

NEW ORLEANS -- Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been "deputized" by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details of the former head of the US occupation, L. Paul Bremer and the former US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte.

"This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental United States)," a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. "We're much better equipped to deal with the situation in Iraq."

Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.

Louisiana authorized

What is most disturbing is the claim of several Blackwater mercenaries we spoke with that they are here under contract from the federal and Louisiana state governments.

Blackwater is one of the leading private "security" firms servicing the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has several US government contracts and has provided security for many senior US diplomats, foreign dignitaries and corporations. The company rose to international prominence after 4 of its men were killed in Fallujah and two of their charred bodies were hung from a bridge in March 2004. Those killings sparked the massive US retaliation against the civilian population of Fallujah that resulted in scores of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees.

As the threat of forced evictions now looms in New Orleans and the city confiscates even legally registered weapons from civilians, the private mercenaries of Blackwater patrol the streets openly wielding M-16s and other assault weapons. This despite Police Commissioner Eddie Compass' claim that "Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons."

Officially, Blackwater says it forces are in New Orleans to "join the Hurricane Relief Effort." A statement on the company's website, dated September 1, advertises airlift services, security services and crowd control. The company, according to news reports, has since begun taking private contracts to guard hotels, businesses and other properties. But what has not been publicly acknowledged is the claim, made to us by 2 Blackwater mercenaries, that they are actually engaged in general law enforcement activities including "securing neighborhoods" and "confronting criminals."

That raises a key question: under what authority are Blackwater's men operating? A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, Russ Knocke, told the Washington Post he knows of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security. "We believe we've got the right mix of personnel in law enforcement for the federal government to meet the demands of public safety." he said.

But in an hour-long conversation with several Blackwater mercenaries, we heard a different story. The men we spoke with said they are indeed on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and the Louisiana governor's office and that some of them are sleeping in camps organized by Homeland Security in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. One of them wore a gold Louisiana state law enforcement badge and said he had been "deputized" by the governor. They told us they not only had authority to make arrests but also to use lethal force. We encountered the Blackwater forces as we walked through the streets of the largely deserted French Quarter. We were talking with 2 New York Police officers when an unmarked car without license plates sped up next to us and stopped. Inside were 3 men, dressed in khaki uniforms, flak jackets and wielding automatic weapons. "Y'all know where the Blackwater guys are?" they asked. One of the police officers responded, "There are a bunch of them around here," and pointed down the road.

"Blackwater?" we asked. "The guys who are in Iraq?"

"Yeah," said the officer. "They're all over the place."

A short while later, as we continued down Bourbon Street, we ran into the men from the car. They wore Blackwater ID badges on their arms.

"When they told me New Orleans, I said, 'What country is that in?,'" said one of the Blackwater men. He was wearing his company ID around his neck in a carrying case with the phrase "Operation Iraqi Freedom" printed on it. After bragging about how he drives around Iraq in a "State Department issued level 5, explosion proof BMW," he said he was "just trying to get back to Kirkuk (in the north of Iraq) where the real action is." Later we overheard him on his cell phone complaining that Blackwater was only paying $350 a day plus per diem. That is much less than the men make serving in more dangerous conditions in Iraq. Two men we spoke with said they plan on returning to Iraq in October. But, as one mercenary said, they've been told they could be in New Orleans for up to 6 months. "This is a trend," he told us. "You're going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations."

If Blackwater's reputation and record in Iraq are any indication of the kind of "services" the company offers, the people of New Orleans have much to fear.

Jeremy Scahill, a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, and Daniela Crespo are in New Orleans. Visit www.democracynow.org for in-depth, independent, investigative reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Email: jeremy@democracynow.org

Chapter 4: A business gets a start Erik Prince thought he saw an opportunity as the U.S. military began to shrink. He was right. By JOSEPH NEFF AND JAY PRICE, Staff Writers Wesley Batalona and Jerry Zovko had again gone looking for military contracting work, and this time they found it with a relatively new company: Blackwater USA, based in Moyock, N.C. Set on more than 6,000 acres in the state's northeast corner, Blackwater was known as one of the best of the private military contractors. Its close ties to the elite Navy SEALs grew from its owner, Erik Prince. Prince, 35, had been a White House intern and was a billionaire's son, yet he volunteered as a firefighter and for the Navy. Prince, a widower and father of four, was a former member of the SEAL commandos. He maintained the unit's characteristic secrecy while positioning himself at the intersection of free enterprise, activist Christianity, conservative politics and military contracting. He made his first political contribution at 19 -- $15,000 to the Republican Party.   CHARACTERS Erik Prince Was very rich to have served in the military Andy Messing Retired Special Forces officer is a critic of private military contractors but admires Prince Prince "is one of the richest guys that ever served in the military," said Andy Messing Jr., a retired Special Forces major and director of the National Defense Council Foundation. Every year, tens of thousands of men and women join the military to get a leg up on life: a job, an education, a career. Erik Prince didn't have to join to get ahead. His father, Edgar Prince, started his own company in 1965. He hit it big by making sun visors with lighted mirrors. Business grew, and his factories churned out parts seen in most cars today: overhead consoles, map lamps, headliners for roofs. When Edgar Prince died in 1995, Prince Automotive employed 4,500 workers in eight factories, including six in Holland, Mich., where Erik Prince grew up. Edgar Prince was Holland's biggest employer. A tidy city just inland from Lake Michigan, Holland is home to one of the nation's biggest pockets of Dutch-Americans. Nearby Calvin College has one of the few departments of Dutch in the United States. The area hews to the Dutch traditions of frugality and industry. Edgar Prince ran his business in line with the Calvinist values of the Christian Reformed Church, which dominates western Michigan. Prince factories didn't run on Sundays; corporate jets flew the sales staff home on weeknights for family time. Edgar Prince and his wife, Elsa, adopted downtown Holland, investing millions of dollars when suburban shopping malls threatened the downtown shopping district. His "business was an engine that generated cash that he could use to do good things," Erik Prince told The Wall Street Journal in 2000. The Princes spread their wealth around the country as well, pumping tens of millions of dollars into the Christian conservative movement, with big gifts and small grants. Erik Prince's sister, Betsy, is the chairwoman of Michigan's Republican Party, and married into a family even more generous to the party and the Christian Right than the Princes: the DeVos family, owners of the Amway home marketing company. 'A smart guy' Erik Prince molded himself after his father: a devout Christian, astute businessman and family man who shunned the limelight. After Holland Christian School, Prince attended Hillsdale College, a small liberal arts school that champions free markets and individual freedom. Erik Prince fit in at what Gary Wolfram, a professor of political economy who taught him, called a "Mecca of market economy." "He was a smart guy, and pleasant to be around, and he's well-spoken," Wolfram said. "What's good about him, he understands the interrelationship between markets and the political system." As Prince studied free market economics, the world was changing. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 heralded the end of the Cold War. The U.S. military began getting smaller. During the 1990s, the Pentagon would shed about 700,000 active-duty troops and 300,000 civilian employees. As the military shrunk, its tasks grew: the first Persian Gulf War, then Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. In each conflict, the U.S. military used more contract employees to do jobs once given to soldiers. It wasn't just age-old tasks such as cooking meals and cleaning latrines, but fulfilling the technological needs of the modern military. Private contractors fix helicopters, run computers and maintain high-tech systems such as Patriot missiles and radar networks. A business that barely existed at the end of the Cold War was on its way to becoming a $100-billion-a-year industry. Education in politics Prince didn't focus just on economics while in college. A series of internships showed him how politics worked in the nation's capital. He was one of the first interns at the Family Research Council in Washington. He worked as a defense analyst on the staff of U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a conservative Republican from Orange County, Calif. And he interned in the White House of President George H.W. Bush, father of current President George W. Bush. In 1992, he campaigned for Patrick Buchanan. "I interned with the Bush administration for six months," Prince told The Grand Rapids Press in early 1992. "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with -- homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns." Back at school, Prince volunteered on a more humble scale: He was the first college student to join the Hillsdale Volunteer Fire Department. He'd be sitting in class when his radio crackled. As amused classmates looked on, he'd dash out. "When you've been on a fire an hour and a half and the crowd's gone, some of the guys want to sit on bumpers and have a soft drink," said Kevin Pauken, one of the squad's full-timers. "Other guys will be rolling hoses and picking up equipment so you can get out of there. That was Erik." In 1992, Prince enlisted in the Navy, was commissioned as an officer, and the next year joined the SEALs, who get their acronym from the attack routes of sea, air and land. He spent four years with Seal Team 8 in Norfolk, Va. "Prince was a first-class SEAL, he was the real deal," said Messing, the retired Special Forces officer. Prince left the SEALs in 1996. His father had died the previous year, and Erik took over the family business. About this time, his wife, Joan, was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 2003 at 36). Also in 1996, the Prince family sold its automotive business to S.C. Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion in cash. Prince headed the Prince Group, which held several nonautomotive factories and the company that developed downtown Holland.  Prince Judeo Prince took up a variety of causes. He sits on several boards, including Christian Solidarity International, a human rights organization, and the Institute of World Politics, a fledgling foreign relations school in Washington that teaches would-be diplomats from a Judeo-Christian perspective. And he has continued to open his checkbook to the Republican Party and conservative candidates, contributing at least $151,250 since 1989.   He shuns reporters and declined, through a spokesman, to be interviewed for this story. Photos of him are hard to find. Opportunity knocks Prince has been equally secretive about his biggest venture since the SEALs: At 27, he founded Blackwater USA, buying an expanse of farmland in Camden and Currituck counties. He saw an opportunity as the shrinking military closed some of its own training centers, and he wanted to build the SEALs a good one just a short drive from the unit's East Coast base at Little Creek, Va. Former Navy SEALs form the backbone of Blackwater, which advertises its Moyock compound -- now more than 6,000 acres -- as "the most comprehensive private tactical training facility in the United States." It puts many military ranges to shame. One range is two-thirds of a mile long and perfect for sniper training. There are computerized target systems and an entire mock town for urban tactical training, and a track for tactical driving techniques. Soldiers can shoot from boats or hovering helicopters into junk cars, trucks and buses. Blackwater boasts that it can custom-design any sort of training a soldier wants. Business was steady but unremarkable for the first few years. SWAT teams and police trained there, as well as soldiers from Fort Bragg and SEALs. The 2001 attacks on New York and Washington changed the tempo. "Before the events of Sept. 11, I was getting pretty cynical about how people felt about training," Prince told The Virginian-Pilot newspaper two weeks after the Twin Towers fell. "Now the phone is ringing off the hook." Blackwater got its own air wing, with helicopters and small cargo planes. It began training a SEAL-type unit for the navy of Azerbaijan and proposed setting up a giant training center outside Baghdad, modeled on its Moyock facility. Some private security companies would take any job, unsavory client or not. Not Blackwater. Most of its work was for the U.S. government. It worked only for foreign governments approved by the U.S. State Department. This month, Blackwater had 450 people in Iraq, company officials said. It guarded L. Paul Bremer, the highest-profile American target in Iraq before the Iraqis took control of their own government again June 28. And Blackwater won the job of guarding the new top American, Ambassador John Negroponte. In 2003, it was paid at least $18.9 million by the government. Blackwater's growth since 9/11 meant the company needed workers. This past winter, in Oceanside, Calif., a former SEAL and sometime Hollywood consultant and stuntman heard about those high-paying jobs via the informal SEAL alumni e-mail network. Scott Helvenston was recently divorced and just two years earlier had declared bankruptcy, citing income of just $14,000 a year. That wasn't much for a father with two children. What's more, Helvenston liked the idea of returning to military work. After a dozen years as a commando, he missed the life, the missions, the camaraderie. He would go to work for Erik Prince. (News researcher Brooke Cain contributed to this report.)

Betsy DeVos

In addition to its support for Focus on the Family and the Foundation for Traditional Values, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation also supports the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, where Betsy DeVos serves on the board. The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation has supported the institute in the past. The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty attempts to link economics with religion and traditional virtues and sponsors workshops for business executives, religious leaders, professors and others involved in religion, business and economic research. The institute also publishes a number of documents in order to disseminate its view to the general public, policymakers and other leaders.

The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation also contributes to the aforementioned Council for National Policy, where Richard DeVos has served on the executive committee and board of governors and which has been described as "very dangerous and dangerously secretive"¹²⁹ in the eyes of liberals. Because of its secretive nature, it is difficult to fully ascertain the activities of the council. However, it is clearly a conservative organization that works to effect public policy changes at the national level. It was founded in part by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, leader of the Moral Majority, and it strives to combat what it sees as liberal control over the country and focuses on issues in domains ranging from social to economic. ABC News reported that "it provided a forum for religiously engaged conservative Christians to influence the geography of American political power."¹³⁰ The council supports a strong national defense, Christian values, conservative morals and limited government

Devos is a jew that owns 'Orlando Magic'

Blackwater-Washington Post

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 8, 2005; Page A14

 BLACKWATER USA
ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

By: Al Cronkrite



Did you know that the United States government is spending billions of dollars hiring paramilitary troops being used in clandestine operations as well as in the War in Iraq and even on our own soil?

It appears that the French Foreign Legion has had children as there are now several organizations in the United States and overseas that provide both trained soldiers and soldierly training. These private military companies (PMCs) offer support for governments and armed forces and facilitate the conduct of a broad range of activities that are often not public knowledge. The activities of PMCs can be conducted with or without the cooperation of our armed forces and when secrecy and lack of accountability are desired they are a convenient vehicle. There are no questions about the legitimacy of the operation, no one is concerned about casualties, the Geneva Convention can be forgotten, international problems are alleviated, and the source of the operation itself can be concealed.

According to an article by Laura Peterson “Since 1994, the U.S. Defense Department has entered into 3,061 contracts with 12 of the 24 U.S.-based PMCs…. Pentagon records valued those contracts at more than $300 billion. More than 2,700 of those contracts were held by just two companies: Kellogg Brown & Root and Booz Allen Hamilton. Because of the limited information the Pentagon provides and the breadth of services offered by some of the larger companies, it was impossible to determine what percentage of these contracts was for training, security or logistical services.”

U. S. supported mercenaries have been involved in Africa, Bosnia, and South America. They are being used in Iraq where 48,000 mercenaries working for 181 different firms are currently deployed. They were surreptitiously used along with Mexican troops to confiscate firearms in New Orleans after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Mercenaries have no inhibitions about depriving citizens of their Constitutional rights and, armed with AK 47s, they can be used by tyrannical governments for any selected oppression.

Most people in the United States have never heard of these organizations and are not aware that our government is conducting paramilitary activities that are not subject to the rules of conduct for normal overt operations.

Of the dozens of organizations that provide military type training and support, this article will concentrate on one that is of particular interest.

“Blackwater USA” is a multifaceted PMC with extensive training facilities in Northeastern North Carolina. They advertise their services as “the most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world.” Their Website is here. It was founded in 1996 by Erik Prince who is the wealthy son of Michigan auto parts manufacturer Edgar Prince and a former Navy Seal with extensive personal contacts in Washington. Edgar Prince helped Gary Bauer form the Family Research Council and his daughter, Betsey, (Eric’s sister) is married to Dick DeVos the son of Amway founder Richard DeVos. She is Chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party. The family is reported to have extensive personal relationships with James Dobson, D. James Kennedy, Edwin Meese III, Pat Roberson, Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich and others.

According to an article in The Nation, since June 2004 Blackwater USA has received $320 million from the Bush Administration to provide security services around the world. Blackwater flew mercenaries into New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina before contracts had been formalized. Ultimately, the Bush Administration paid them $30 million.

Christian theology provides the platform for much of the tragedy that is involved when followers of The Prince Of Peace involve themselves in aiding an imperialistic government in illegal conquests.

Former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief, Chris Hedges, has published a new book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” . He spent two years traveling around the country seeking the tenor of Christendom. He quickly dredges up the demon of the theocratic state and expresses concern that the evils involved with the hiring of mercenaries could result in the imposition of Christianity on the nation. He goes on to describe Christian vigilantes that occupy high level positions in the Bush II Administration, Army Generals who claim their Faith is their first priority and who cherish the opportunity to evangelize men and women involved with our defense policy. “I think it’s a huge impact.... You have many men and women who are seeking God’s counsel and wisdom as they advise the chairman [of the Joint Chiefs] and the secretary of defense.”




Of the many Evangelical churches he attended Hedges writes, “They painted the war in Iraq not as an occupation but as an apocalyptic battle by Christians against Islam, a religion they regularly branded as ‘satanic.’ All this befits a movement whose final aesthetic is violence. It also befits a movement that, in the end, would need the military and police forces to seize power in American society“.

Chris Hedges is a far left, anti-Christian, Liberal working for a newspaper that holds the same sentiments. His motivations are horrid but some of his descriptions are both accurate and deplorable.

Implicit in the zeal to evangelize is the erroneous assumption that conversion involves “making a decision for Christ“. This Arminian heresy has distorted the Christian ethic and created the impression that Christians are something akin to eccentric used car salesmen and must be avoided at all costs. All through the Biblical narrative God selected His servants. God chooses whom He chooses; we do not choose God, that is humanism! Jesus Himself said that no man would become a Christian unless the Father drew him. Evangelism should never involve planting but only gently harvesting the fruit that God has planted and nurtured.

When the present nation of Israel was created by the Balfour Agreement and sustained by the United Nations, the land occupied by Palestinian Arabs for centuries was overrun by illegal aliens and expropriated by a secular government that has established a nation taken from their ancestors by God as a result of an apostasy that has never been forsaken. This huge injustice supported by theologically challenged Christians is in direct opposition to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Who ordered the Diaspora which removed the mantle from those that had broken His covenant and placed it on those who accepted His Son as their Savior. Now, many of these Christians have broken this precious Covenant by supporting what God has rejected.

Consider the strife and turmoil the creation of this illegitimate nation has created. Prior to 1948, Jews and Arabs had been living peacefully in Palestine for centuries. When Jewish immigrants began to arrive in the area in overwhelming numbers Arab resistance was justly strident and has remained so. Terrorism was unheard of before this affront to God and the clandestine partisanship that has divided Jewish loyalty to their present domiciles was non existent. This was a crime against the established government of the Middle East and against the Jewish people as well. Injustice can be forceably maintained by coercion but it never brings lasting peace.

We now have Christians who worship a peaceful God engaged in overt military action against over 200 million Arabs who instead of annihilation should be awarded the Justice our Christian God represents. It is an anarchic, confusing, unjust situation that only Satan could create

What a tragedy that highly placed military personnel are spreading this pernicious heresy throughout the upper echelons of our government and that wealthy Christians have fallen victim to this same “kill’em all” doctrine and are busy aiding it and making money from it.

Much of this aberration can be traced to the blasphemy Dispensationalism has created. It is not only a paralyzing doctrine but has succeeded in neutering Christianity by channeling Christian zeal into supporting what God hates while failing to support what He loves.

If United States Evangelical leaders would begin to understand the injustice Israel represents and join with The Creator in bringing both Jew and Gentile under the jurisdiction of God’s Laws hope could be returned to the world.

Chistian Zionists

BGovernment support of settlement building accelerated dramatically in 1977 when Menachem Begin became Prime Minister. Begin's ultranationalist notions had made him a figure on the fringe for the first three decades of Israel's existence, but his Likud Party had finally come to power.

Ironically, Begin won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, along with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, for signing the Camp David Accords. Thanks to skillfully managed negotiations on the part of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Begin agreed to return the Sinai desert to Egypt, but refused to discuss the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. And this is where our story begins - the same year that the Camp David Accords were signed.

That year, 1978, Begin invited The Reverend Jerry Falwell for his first official visit to Israel, and the following year, 1979, his government gave Falwell a gift -- a Lear Jet.

Begin's timing was perfect. He began working seriously with Christian Zionists at the precise moment that Christian fundamentalists in America were discovering their political voice.

The same year that Falwell received his Lear Jet, 1979, he formed the Moral Majority, an organization that changed the political landscape in the United States. What was Falwell's interest in Israel? He was a Dispensationalist. Dispensationalism is a system of theology that believes the Jews must return to Israel as part of God's plan for Christ to return. To read more about the history of Dispensationalism, click here.




Van Adel

Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill joins us to talk about his new book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Scahill writes, "Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the 'global war on terror,' with its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and 20,000 private contractors at the ready. Run by a multimillionaire Christian conservative who bankrolls President Bush and his allies, its forces are capable of overthrowing governments." From Iraq to New Orleans, Blackwater has continued to pull in multi-million-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near-secrecy. [includes rush transcript]
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Four years ago today, the US invasion of Iraq was in its opening hours. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries later, another date marked later this month has taken on nearly as much significance. March 31st, 2004. Four employees of the private U.S. security firm Blackwater USA are ambushed as they drive through the center of Fallujah. In images broadcast around the world, their burnt corpses are dragged through the streets. Two of them are strung up from a bridge. This is an excerpt of the PBS documentary, "Private Warriors", going back to that day.

"Private Warriors" - excerpt of PBS documentary.

The U.S. military followed with the first of two major attacks that ended up virtually destroying Fallujah -- and setting off a new wave of Iraqi resistance that continues to this day. Meanwhile, instead of curbing the reliance on contractors in Iraq, the Bush administration has expanded the privatization of war. Blackwater has been one of the biggest recipients. From Iraq to New Orleans, it has continued to pull in multi-million-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near-secrecy.
Today, an in-depth look at Blackwater with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. He"s just come out with his first book: "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army." Jeremy is a Democracy Now! correspondent and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He joins us in the firehouse studio.


Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of the new book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
More information at Blackwaterbook.com

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AMY GOODMAN: Four years ago today, the US invasion of Iraq was in its opening hours. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries later, another date marked later this month has taken on nearly as much significance. It was March 31, 2004. Four employees of the private US security firm Blackwater USA were ambushed as they drive through the center of Fallujah. In images broadcast around the world, their burnt corpses were dragged through the streets. Two of them were strung up from a bridge. This is an excerpt of the PBS documentary, Private Warriors, going back to that day.

NARRATOR: Contractually, Blackwater was to supply two SUVs with three guards per vehicle. Instead, the men set out at 8:30 in the morning with just two men per car, each short a rear gunner. They were escorting three empty trucks on their way to pick up some kitchen equipment at a base west of Fallujah. They were vulnerable and obvious. The commander responsible for Fallujah was Marine Colonel John Toolan.

COL. JOHN TOOLAN: Contractors were easily identified on the roads, because they were all in brand new SUVs, 2004 SUV, tinted windows, so they were easy to pick out. And the insurgents knew that it was a fairly easy mark.

NARRATOR: Around 9:30 a.m., they approached the center of town. Insurgents would ambush them from behind. All four guards were shot and killed. The insurgents made their own video of the aftermath.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The first thing that came up was the camera bouncing toward this SUV, and it went right into the car. It was -- I knew it was him from his looks, everything, clear as day. You know, at least I know he wasn't burned alive. He was dead.

NARRATOR: By the time the press arrived, a mob had set the cars on fire.

COL. JOHN TOOLAN: Unfortunately, it was going out on CNN, and we knew that this was a key component of the insurgents’ strategy: get the pictures out, make it look like they're winning. It was clear.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt of the Frontline documentary, Private Warriors. The US military followed with the first of two major attacks that ended up virtually destroying Fallujah and setting off a new wave of Iraqi resistance that continues to this day.

Meanwhile, instead of curbing the reliance on contractors in Iraq, the Bush administration has expanded the privatization of war. Blackwater has been one of the biggest recipients. From Iraq to New Orleans, it's continued to pull in multimillion-dollar government contracts, mostly without accountability and in near secrecy. Today, an in-depth look at Blackwater with investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill. He has just come out with his first book, its title, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Jeremy will join us after this break.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent and Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. His first book is now out. It is called Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jeremy.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Welcome back.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Thanks.

AMY GOODMAN: We just saw this excerpt of what happened in Fallujah, the end of March 2004. Describe what happened and why you took this on and expanded it into a book.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I first went to Iraq as a reporter for Democracy Now! in late 1998, when the Clinton administration was gearing up to bomb Iraq, and, in fact, Clinton did hammer Iraq for four days in December of 1998. And it was the first of what would be many trips that I would take to Iraq from 1998 until 2003, when the US occupation began. And I spent a fair bit of time going in and out of Fallujah, among the cities that I visited in Iraq.

In fact, in the summer of 2002, I camped out in the desert right near Fallujah and walked through the center of the city. And my recollection of conversations with people in Fallujah was always of a massacre. But this was before the Iraq war had officially begun in 2003. During the 1991 Gulf War, Allied war planes bombed a crowded marketplace and hit a residential complex and killed some seventy-eight people in Fallujah. And so, I always thought of that as the Fallujah massacre.

And you have to understand that when the US troops first rolled into Baghdad, Fallujans sort of organized themselves and sort of were taking stock of these earth-moving events that had happened in the country when the occupation began. And so, when US troops came to the outskirts of Fallujah in April of 2003, Fallujans essentially told the US military, “We're fine. We don't need you here.” And there was some back-and-forthing going on with local officials, and Fallujans were really trying to organize their lives and have their kids going to school. And this was happening around Iraq. Despite the fact that there was an occupation underway, people were still trying to live somewhat normal lives.

And eventually the US came in and took Fallujah by force. They, in fact, took over a primary school called the Leader’s School in April of 2003, and Iraqis began protesting, and that resulted in what Fallujans remember as a massacre. About a dozen people were killed, seventy people were injured one night as Fallujans protested. And that really sparked a series of conflicts between the people of Fallujah and the US military, in which scores of US soldiers were killed and many Fallujans were killed.

And then another event happened before the Fallujah ambush of the Blackwater contractors. On March 22, the Israeli military killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, who was a cleric bound in a wheelchair, as he was coming out of morning prayers, killed him and about a half a dozen people in his entourage. And in Fallujah, there was a massive protest against that. And already people believed that the Israelis and the US were working hand-in-hand during the occupation of Iraq. So that was the context leading up to the Fallujah ambush, and it's almost never talked about.

So the people of Fallujah -- I think, rightly -- were very outraged at their treatment at the hands of the US and its allies and saw this sort of relationship between the US and Israel as one of conquest in the Middle East and certainly in Iraq. In fact, many people in Iraq believed that private military contractors, like Blackwater, were either CIA or Mossad. So it’s very likely that when those guys rolled into Fallujah that morning, that people thought they were attacking a CIA convoy or a Mossad convoy.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, four -- I was about to say soldiers, but they weren't -- four people, military contractors, were killed, brutally dragged through the streets of Fallujah and then hung up. Tell us who they were.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, these guys were all Special Forces veterans. Scott Helvenston was one of the youngest people ever to serve in the US Navy Seals. He became a US Navy Seal trainer and served in the Navy Seals for twelve years and was a world-class athlete. He won, I think, a gold medal and several other medals at international competitions. Jerry Zovko also had served in the US Special Forces. Mike Teague was a veteran of several US wars, including Afghanistan, and was a highly decorated soldier. And Wes Batalona was a US Army Ranger who had served in Somalia. So these guys were all Special Forces veterans. They all considered themselves to be patriotic Americans.

And, you know, I’ve gotten to know their families very well over these years. All of them believed that their loved ones were doing what they had always done, serving their country. And the fact that they were working for Blackwater was no different than serving in the Navy Seals. They all that thought their loved ones were going over there to protect Paul Bremer, because that's what Blackwater was doing in Iraq at the time. I don't think any of their families knew that their loved ones would end up dying for empty flatbed trucks going to pick up kitchen equipment.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, they've sued.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And so, after those guys were killed, I don't think any of the families immediately assumed any malice on the part of Blackwater, and they, I think, did what anyone would do. They started calling the company and saying, “What happened? What were they doing in Fallujah? Why were they escorting these trucks? Why were there only two men in each vehicle that day? Why weren’t the vehicles armored?” And instead of getting answers, the families say that they got the runaround from Blackwater.

And so, Blackwater flies these families out in October of 2004, several months after the ambush happened, and while they're at the Blackwater compound in Moyock, North Carolina, the families say they felt like they were being monitored, that Blackwater officials were attempting to not have them speak about the incident. And, really, they got the impression that Blackwater didn't want them to really be talking to each other. And the event was billed sort of as a memorial for their loved ones, and there were some other people whose loved ones had died in Iraq, but also a moment for the families to ask questions of what happened.

And so, Donna Zovko, Jerry Zovko's mother, and her son and her husband were in a meeting with Blackwater executives, and she says that she asked to see the incident report on the ambush and to have her son's belongings returned to her. And she said that a Blackwater representative stood up from the table and said that “that’s a classified document, and you'll have to sue us to get it.” And so, the families got to know each other in the ensuing months, and Katy Helvenston, Scott Helvenston's mother, and Donna Zovko really sort of spearheaded it. And in January of 2005, those four families filed a groundbreaking wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater, saying that the company had defrauded their loved ones by not providing them with their contractually obligated safeguards for their mission that day. And, yes, the men signed contracts saying that they would not hold Blackwater accountable if they died or were injured. But the families say that the contracts became null and void the moment that Blackwater sent them on that mission unprepared.

AMY GOODMAN: That's one of the suits against this company, Blackwater. Talk about this company, who founded it, how large it is.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater was founded -- it was actually incorporated in late 1996 and really started to build up its operations in 1997. Originally, it was a 5,000-acre plot near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, and the personal private fortune of its founder, Erik Prince. He's believed to be, if not the wealthiest, one of the wealthiest people ever to serve in the elite US Navy Seals.

Maybe we should talk for a moment about who he is and his background, because it has everything to do with the success of the company. Erik Prince comes from a very wealthy rightwing Christian dynasty in the town of Holland, Michigan. His father was a man named Edgar Prince, who was a sort of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps capitalist. He built up an empire called the Prince Manufacturing Corp., and they manufactured auto parts, serviced the auto industry. And, in fact, what the company is perhaps best known for was for creating the now-ubiquitous lighted sun visor. So when you pull down the visor in your car and it lights up, that's the Prince family's invention. And it was a very profitable business.

And so, young Erik Prince grew up in this very heady atmosphere that mixed the sort of free-market gospel with the literal Christian gospel. His family, they were strict Calvinists. And Erik Prince was political at a very early age and watched as his father used his company as a cash-generating engine to fuel the rise of what we now know as the religious right in this country, as well as the Republican Revolution of 1994. His father gave the seed money to Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Young Erik Prince was in the first crop of interns to serve at the Family Research Council. They gave significant funding to James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family, which is now sort of the premier evangelical organizing network in this country, the “prayer warriors.”

And what’s interesting is that Erik Prince’s sister Betsy married into another powerhouse Michigan family, perhaps the single greatest bankroller of the Republican Revolution: Dick DeVos’s Amway Corporation. Erik Prince's sister married Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway fortune. And Amway was a company that sold home services products and sort of was accused of running the operation like a cult and using their marketers to not only sell their products, but to sell their political agenda, the rise of the sort of Christian right and Republican Revolution. And so, this marriage of these two families was sort of typical of the merging of the monarchist families in old Europe.

And so, Erik Prince grew up in this atmosphere, where his family was a real power player in what would become the Republican Revolution of 1994. Erik Prince interned in George H.W. Bush's White House, but he complained that it wasn't conservative enough for him on gay issues, on the balanced budget, on the environment. He also was an intern for the conservative California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a man who, after leaving Reagan’s staff as an advisor and speechwriter, went over to join the Mujahideen in Afghanistan before beginning his congressional term. And so, Erik Prince --

AMY GOODMAN: To fight the Soviets.

JEREMY SCAHILL: To fight the Soviets, and he -- you know, he bragged of having gone over there to stand alongside the freedom fighters, those very freedom fighters now being the ones who have declared war on the Bush administration and, you know, that the Bush administration claims to be at the center of the so-called war on terror. So those were the early days of young Erik Prince.

And then he went on to join the US Navy Seals. And I don't think he wanted to leave the Navy Seals, but his father died in 1995, and his wife had cancer, and it became no longer an option to be a Navy Seal. Prince had been in Bosnia. He had been in Haiti. He had served in the Mediterranean. And so, he sort of came home in the mid-’90s to help the family sort through its affairs and to also take care of his ailing wife.

And the family ended up, after much deliberation, selling Prince Manufacturing for a little less than $1.5 billion in cash, and Erik Prince took his political experience, his religious commitment and the experience he gained from watching his father become a major operator in politics and business, and opened Blackwater. And he teamed up with several other former Special Forces guys, and Blackwater was founded on the principle of anticipating accelerated government outsourcing of training and firearms-related training, and so that's how Blackwater began. It was supposed to be like a sportsman's paradise/training center in the wilderness of North Carolina.

AMY GOODMAN: You begin your book about talking about a speech of Donald Rumsfeld’s the day before the September 11 attacks.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary, and gathered before him was the gaggle of corporate executives that had been tapped by the Bush administration to make up the senior civilian leadership at the Pentagon. There was a sort of mixture of people at the Pentagon. On the one hand, you had people from corporate America, from all the defense and weapons manufacturers that were brought in, and then you also had the neoconservative ideologues, people like Paul Wolfowitz. And so, Rumsfeld gives a speech in which he literally declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy. And he said, “I’ve come not to destroy the Pentagon, but to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”

And then literally the next day the Pentagon would be attacked. But the vision that Rumsfeld sort of laid out that day would become known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine, where you use high technology, small footprint forces and an increased and accelerated use of private contractors in fighting the wars. It also, at the center of the Rumsfeld Doctrine, became regime change in central strategic nations. Rumsfeld and Cheney both had been signers of the Project for a New American Century, that envisioned a new Pearl Harbor as accelerating the agenda, the neoconservative agenda. And, indeed, the day after Rumsfeld laid out that plan, the Pentagon was attacked, and all of a sudden the world became a blank canvas on which Rumsfeld and Cheney and Bush could sort of paint their vision.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, you devote a whole chapter to another official within Blackwater, Cofer Black.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. I mean, Blackwater is really stacked to the deck. The deck is really stacked in Blackwater's favor. In the times that we live in right now, they have several former senior officials from the Bush administration, not from like the Reagan administration, but from the current Bush administration.

Among the most prominent, perhaps the biggest power player in Blackwater's arsenal, is J. Cofer Black, who is a thirty-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, began his career in the 1970s in Africa, as the US -- well, some would say supported the apartheid regime, others would say did nothing to stop it. So Cofer Black was one of the key CIA people in Africa throughout the ’70s and ’80s. And he arrived in Sudan in the early 1990s, and he came under diplomatic cover. As a sort of diplomat, he was there, but he actually was CIA.

And as Black was there, a young Saudi billionaire named Osama bin Laden was building up his international network. And by the time Black would leave Sudan a few years later, the CIA would refer to it as the Ford Foundation of Islamic terrorism. And so, Cofer Black and Osama bin Laden are both operating simultaneously in Khartoum in Sudan in the 1990s. And at one point, there was a plot to kill Cofer Black once bin Laden's group had learned that he was actually CIA. And so, they were sort of monitoring each other. And one of Black's operatives in Sudan actually cooked up a plot to kill bin Laden and toss his body over the fence at the Iranian embassy to make it seem like the Iranians had killed bin Laden. But at the time, bin Laden wasn’t considered a big fish. The big fish in Sudan was Carlos the Jackal, the famed international terrorist. And so, Cofer Black's claim to fame in the 1990s had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, but had to do with the fact that he was seen as the man who caught Carlos the Jackal.

And Black would go on then to serve in Latin America, and just before 9/11 he was tapped to head up the CIA's counterterrorism center. And so when the 9/11 attacks happened, Cofer Black was called to the Situation Room in the White House on September 13, 2001, to lay out for President Bush the CIA plan to go after bin Laden. And he was said to be throwing papers on the ground as he described how they were going to insert Special Forces into Afghanistan. And he told President Bush that he would bring back Osama bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice. And, in fact, those were the orders he gave to his CIA operatives that went in with the Jawbreaker team into Afghanistan after 9/11. And one of them said to Cofer Black, you know, “I don't know what we're going to do about dry ice in the field, but we certainly can get a cardboard box.”

Cofer Black became known in the administration as the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy, because he would talk in these sort of messianic terms about the mission that they were about to undertake and said, “When we're through with them, they'll have flies crawling across their eyeballs.” He told Russian diplomats, “We’re going to stick their heads on pikes in the field.” So this is now the guy who went on after 9/11 to really accelerate the use of extraordinary renditions, the capturing of people, putting hoods on them, putting diapers on them, sending them on these long flights to third countries where they're asked a series of questions provided by US interrogators and where they're tortured and humiliated and broken down -- people like Maher Arar, who you've covered extensively on this show.

AMY GOODMAN: Cofer Black is now part of a new Blackwater effort, a new company called Total Intelligence Solutions.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. This is really the next sort of generation of privatization, is the privatization of intelligence. And they’re marketing their services to Fortune 500 companies. And so, it's not just Cofer Black. It's another CIA guy who went on to work at Blackwater, Robert Richer, who was a Deputy Director of Operations at the CIA. So those two are really the sort of leaders behind this new initiative.

But, really, the man behind all of it is Erik Prince, the head of Blackwater. He's rapidly buying up, for instance, a think tank, the Terrorism Research Center, and other intelligence entities and sort of cobbling them together. Blackwater's big push now is not just for government contracts, but it’s also for corporate contracts. And so, it's part of this radical privatization agenda. And to have a man heading this who told Congress openly, “There was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11, and after 9/11 the gloves come off” -- this is a guy who ran essentially the extraordinary rendition program, now is working as the vice chairman of Blackwater and starting his own private intelligence company.

Blackwater has a fleet of more than twenty aircraft, many of them sort of fit the patterns of planes used in extraordinary rendition. Now, we don't have any direct evidence to suggest that Blackwater’s planes have been used in extraordinary renditions, but the types of planes that they have and the flight patterns that they engage in are very similar to some that have been documented to be engaged in extraordinary rendition. So this raises a lot of serious questions about the extent of Blackwater's involvement.

AMY GOODMAN: When we come back from break, I want to ask you under whose laws do they operate, these, what you call, mercenaries, Blackwater. We're talking to Jeremy Scahill. He is author of the new book, Blackwater. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Jeremy Scahill. He is a Democracy Now! correspondent. He’s the Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute. And he has written his first book. It's called Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Jeremy, as we speak, it's number two on the Amazon list for nonfiction bestsellers. This seems to be a problem, well, perhaps for Blackwater, who -- well, you have a website called blackwaterbook.com?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: What's happened with your website?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I actually got a letter from Blackwater's -- one of Blackwater's many lawyers. They have an army of lawyers. Their counsel of record is Ken Starr, the man who led the impeachment charge against President Clinton. And their previous lawyer was Fred Fielding, who now is President Bush's White House counsel, defending him against the attorney purge scandal. So they have powerhouse law firms, many law firms working for them. We got a letter from their law firm saying that they respect my First Amendment rights to criticize Blackwater, but take down your website. And they said that I’m violating the Lanham Act, which has to do with like corporate competition and trademark. And, I mean, this is intimidation tactics. And we're not going to back down. The website is going to remain up.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let's talk about the lawsuits against Blackwater. One is the lawsuit around the men who died in Fallujah, their families have brought it. Another one is for Afghanistan; what happened?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. This stems from a plane crash that happened in Afghanistan in November of 2004. I mean, this really sort of tells the story of the reach of Blackwater. Blackwater -- I was talking about its aviation division before. Blackwater has a contract in Afghanistan to provide a sort of ferry service for the US military, where Blackwater aircraft take personnel, in some cases active-duty US troops, from point A to point B inside of Afghanistan. They also transport supplies and equipment and other things.

And so, in November of 2004, Blackwater was operating an aircraft taking a number of US troops from one point to another. They were riding through a mountain range, and we were able to get the cockpit data recording transcripts, and the pilots sort of appeared to be messing around, saying, you know, “You're an x-wing fighter man, Star Wars,” and they were kind of joking with each other. And the plane ends up crashing into the side of the mountain. And what’s different from Fallujah is that in this case active-duty US soldiers were killed, one of them being a fairly senior military official. And so, the families, not of the Blackwater contractors, but of the soldiers, are suing Blackwater. And this could also be a precedent-setting case.

Now, Blackwater has argued in its legal briefings that it can't be sued in civilian courts and that it's entitled to the same immunity enjoyed by the military from civilian litigation inside of the United States. And the reason that Blackwater says this, or among the top reasons, is that Donald Rumsfeld in February of 2006 classified contractors as an official part of the US total force, making up an effective part of the US war machine. So Blackwater has turned around and taken Rumsfeld's designation of their company as an official part of the US total force and said, “This means we're part of the US military, and you can't sue us.” At the same time, Blackwater, since 2004, has been lobbying against having its forces placed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, commonly known as the court-martial system. So Blackwater is essentially saying, “We're above the law. We can't be prosecuted in military courts. We can't be sued in civilian courts.”

AMY GOODMAN: And what are the laws that congress members and senators are trying to pass now?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, it's interesting, because one of the reasons, I think, that the Bush administration uses companies like Blackwater is it provides an extraordinary amount of political cover. We know that at least 780 contractors have been killed in Iraq. I think the number is actually probably much higher, but those are people whose families have applied for death benefits under the federal insurance program provided to contractors.

AMY GOODMAN: Which would mean, by the way, that we're talking about more than 4,000 Americans who have died in Iraq.

JEREMY SCAHILL: There are 4,000, yes, people who are -- well, not all of those 780 are actually Americans, but they're working for American companies or on behalf of the occupation. But, again, these are only people who are eligible for federal death benefits in the United States. Over 7,600 of them have been injured in Iraq. There are 100,000 private contractors in Iraq. We know from the Government Accountability Office that there are 48,000 employees of private military firms, mercenary companies operating in Iraq. 180 separate firms are registered operating in Iraq, Blackwater sort of being the industry leader. And they operate in a climate of total impunity. There is no effective law that governs these mercenary forces in Iraq.

Technically, the law of the land is something called the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act -- it's a mouthful -- that was passed in 2000, that said that anyone, any contractor working for or accompanying the armed forces could be subjected to prosecution under US law for crimes committed on the battlefield. Now, one of the major flaws of that -- I mean, there's a much bigger flaw, which I’ll explain in a second -- one of the major flaws of that is that Blackwater, for instance, isn't working for the military. It has a State Department contract in Iraq. So it's not technically working under the Department of Defense. So it could argue it's not really subjected to that law. Blackwater has been paid since June of 2004 $750 million by the State Department alone. That's just one of Blackwater's contracts.

And so, what's happening right now is that Representative David Price, who happens to be from Blackwater's home state of North Carolina -- he's a Democrat -- is putting forth legislation to expand that act, that I referred to before, to include all contractors, so it technically would cover Blackwater.

But the bigger problem is not how good it looks on paper. The bigger problem is -- you have 100,000 private forces operating in Iraq right now -- who is going to go do the investigations? Because according to this law, it would be US prosecutors. So a US prosecutor would go from Virginia over to Baquba? And who's going to protect them? And who's going to interview the Iraqi victims? And how would any of this work? And when I put that question to Representative David Price, he said, “Well, that's a good question. I didn't say it was a simple matter.” But the fact is that the mercenary industry is endorsing this legislation because it is not enforceable. And so, it looks great on paper. The mercenaries can go in front of Congress and say, “Well, there's this law. We can be prosecuted.” But the fact is only one person has been indicted, one contractor has been indicted, in these years of occupation in Iraq, and he wasn't even an armed military contractor.

AMY GOODMAN: And other laws that that congress members and senators are trying to put forward?

JEREMY SCAHILL: A very interesting thing happened late last year. The conservative South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, himself a former JAG officer in the Air Force and currently a reservist lawyer for the Air Force, slipped in language to the 2007 defense authorization that President Bush signed into law that said that contractors will be placed under the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the court-martial system. They went bonkers with this. And it’s actually one instance where --

AMY GOODMAN: This was passed.

JEREMY SCAHILL: It was passed. Bush signed it into law. So now, Barack Obama, for instance, put forth this sweeping legislation that also seeks to expand that domestic prosecution of contractors on the battlefield, but also calls for the Pentagon to clarify how it's going to implement Lindsey Graham's change, because the law of the land right now actually is that contractors could be put in the court-martial system. And I think that we're going to see serious constitutional challenges. This is going to play out for years and years. I mean, contractors are here to stay. I mean, they are not going anywhere. And they're only going to be on the rise with the surge and the British pulling out, you know, some of its troops.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, who is Blackwater's man in Latin America?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater’s man in Latin -- well, he's no longer their man in Latin America, but the man who has been working for Blackwater in Latin America is a guy named Jose Miguel Pizarro, and he’s a dual citizen of the US and Chile. And I actually got him to go on record with me and interviewed him for several hours. And Mr. Pizarro grew up in Pinochet’s Chile with dreams of serving in the Chilean military. And he's a major defender of Augusto Pinochet and a defender of Pinochet’s record and says he lived in the military government for seventeen years and didn't see any dictatorship and, you know, goes on and on. And I explain it in detail in the book how much of a fan he is of Pinochet.

So he did fulfill his dreams. He served in the Chilean military and got to know -- because he was bilingual and also was a citizen of the US -- got to know people from the US military and really admired them and looked up to them. And so, he left the Chilean military, joined the US military and worked as a translator for US Southern Command. And he traveled all around Latin America and met all of these military officials.

And then he, in 1999, offered his services to General Dynamics, essentially marketing General Dynamics military products to Latin American governments. And he became so successful at it that in 2001 he left General Dynamics and started his own consulting firm and went around and introduced himself to all of the military attaches of Latin American nations and began selling them what he called “business intelligence.” He says, “I wasn’t an arms dealer.” And so, what Pizarro would do is he would go to the military attaches of almost every Latin American nation and say, “I can put you in touch with people that can service your military with new equipment and weapons, etc.” So he was going around and sort of was the middle man between US weapons manufacturers and Latin American governments. And he built up a very successful operation.

When the Iraq war began in 2003, Pizarro was hired on by CNN en Espanol to be a commentator on the war, and he struck up a friendship with Wesley Clark, and he said that he would go down into the cafeteria -- both he and Clark were based in Atlanta -- and if he didn't know what to say about a particular question, he would ask Wesley Clark, “What should I say about this?” And General Clark would say, “Well, Jose, let me tell you,” and then he would just say exactly in Spanish what Clark had told him in English. And so, Pizarro was working, still doing his military consultancy.

He met a Blackwater representative, who he described as an attractive woman, at a trade show in 2003. And he approached them. He had never really heard of Blackwater. And his initial idea was that he wanted to help Blackwater market their target systems in Latin America, as he had been doing for all of these other companies. And so, he ended up going to the Blackwater compound, and he said it was like walking onto a movie set, a private military base. He was absolutely blown away by the 7,000-acre property in Moyock, North Carolina. And, you know, he talked about it in these terms like a kid seeing his first movie on the big screen.

And so he immediately got this vision that “I’m not going to market their target systems. I want to get them some Chile troops.” And so, he began lobbying Blackwater officials, and saying, you know, Chileans are really well trained, and, you know, there was the US system, and we have great special forces. And, of course, he's talking about the military built up with US support in Pinochet’s Chile, you know, this murderous regime, this brutal regime in Chile. And so, Blackwater's president, Gary Jackson, Pizarro says, was not at all on board with it. And it took weeks and months of sort of building toward a real proposal.

Pizarro gets a meeting with Erik Prince and goes in and says, “You know, Mr. Prince, I’d like five minutes of your time.” Prince, he says, told him, “You've got three minutes.” It turns out, according to Pizarro, that Erik Prince had served with the Navy Seals in Chile and had this great respect for the Chilean forces. So he essentially says to Pizarro, “If you can get me just one Navy Seal from Chile, it's worth it for me. So go ahead, and you go down there, and you put your guys together. And give me a call when you're ready.”

Pizarro goes down to Chile, begins talking to people, former military people, etc. He puts an ad in the paper, is inundated with applications from former special forces Chilean forces. And they set up a camp, where they begin evaluating. He says, “We weren't training. We were evaluating soldiers.” And they used dummy rifles, etc., in rural Chile.

And to make a long story short, Blackwater sends evaluators down. Three evaluators come down in November of 2003 to Chile, and they look over Pizarro’s forces. And eventually in February of 2004, Pizarro is up in Moyock, North Carolina, with his first batch of Chileans. And he says that he provided some 750 Chilean forces to Blackwater and other private military firms operating in Iraq. Those were the first international forces Blackwater admits to using. Gary Jackson, the guy who originally opposed it, was quoted then, after his Chileans arrived in Iraq, as saying, “We scoured the ends of the earth for professionals, and the Chileans fit well within the Blackwater system.”

AMY GOODMAN: Other internationals who are now employed by Blackwater?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, there was a big scandal several months ago. Blackwater had hired up Colombian forces, but they were only paying them $34 a day. And so, the Colombians that Blackwater had hired and brought over to Iraq staged a strike of sorts at the Blackwater compound and demanded to be paid what everyone else was being paid.

AMY GOODMAN: And you're also writing about Blackwater actually being in charge of US troops. We only have a minute to go, but talk about Najaf.

JEREMY SCAHILL: One of the most disturbing incidents that happened in Iraq with mercenaries was on April 4, 2004. 4/4/04. Muqtada al-Sadr's forces from the Mahdi Army were in an uprising, because Paul Bremer had ordered the arrest of one of his top deputies, and there was a massive protest that hit the city of Najaf. Blackwater was guarding the occupation office there. They also had some Salvadoran troops, part of the Coalition of the Willing, as well as some active-duty US Marines.

And one of those Marines, Corporal Lonnie Young -- I got the official Marine account of that day. As the protest was happening, Lonnie Young, this active-duty Marine, has his weapon aimed into the crowd at a guy he says was carrying an AK-47. And he's thinking to himself, you know, “I need to ask for orders to open fire,” but there were no commanding officers on scene. So he asked permission from Blackwater to open fire. And he said, “Sir, I’ve acquired a target with your permission.” And he says Blackwater gave the order.

So Blackwater took active command of an active-duty US Marine in a battle that Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces recall as a massacre on April 4, 2004. Blackwater guys refer to it as their Alamo. It's unclear how many people were killed that day, but they were firing off so many rounds, the Blackwater guys and this Marine, that they had to stop every fifteen minutes to let their weapons cool. Lonnie Young, that Marine, says hundreds of people were killed that day. The US government would say that there were about twenty to thirty.

AMY GOODMAN: Back home, New Orleans.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Blackwater showed up in New Orleans without a contract right after Hurricane Katrina hit, beat most federal agencies to the hurricane zone, within days was hired up by the Department of Homeland Security. Blackwater paid its men, they told me, $350 a day. They billed the federal government $950 a day per Blackwater man. At one point, they had 600 men stretched from Texas all the way to Mississippi through the Gulf. Blackwater was raking in sometimes $240,000 a day.

In an act of extraordinary cynicism, Blackwater in November of 2005 held a fundraiser, a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser. Paul Bremer was the keynote speaker, and they pulled in $138,000 and gave it to the Red Cross. I didn't see the Red Cross at all when I was in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But the point is they gave $138,000, but they were pulling in $240,000 a day.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, we have to leave it there, but I want to ask if you can come back tomorrow and also join Naomi Klein, who will be joining us. Tomorrow night, you and Naomi Klein will be having a discussion -- I’ll be moderating it -- at the Ethical Culture Society here in New York, about Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, the name of your first book. And congratulations on this investigative masterpiece. We will talk tomorrow about New Orleans, about Blackwater expanding on the home front, and we'll go abroad to the Caspian Sea. What are their plans for the Caspian Basin?

To purchase an audio or video copy of this entire program, click here for our new online ordering or call 1 (888) 999-3877.


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Published on Thursday, October 10, 2002 by the Inter Press Service
Conservative Christians Biggest Backers of Iraq War
by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - Of the major religious groups in the United States, evangelical Christians are the biggest backers of Israel and Washington's planned war against Iraq, says a new survey released here Wednesday by a politically potent group of fundamentalist Christians and Jews.

Some 69 percent of conservative Christians favor military action against Baghdad; 10 percentage points more than the U.S. adult population as a whole.

And almost two-thirds of evangelical Christians say they support Israeli actions towards ''Palestinian terrorism'', compared with 54 percent of the general population, according to the survey, which was released by Stand For Israel, a six-month-old spin-off of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ).

''The single strongest group for Israel in the United States, apart from Jews, is conservative Christians,'' declared Ralph Reed, co-chairman of Stand for Israel and former executive director of the Christian Coalition. He also noted that 80 percent of self-identified Republicans also favor military action against Baghdad.

Reed, who was widely regarded as the wunderkind of the Christian Right during the 1990s, said the poll results might have important political implications in upcoming U.S. elections, particularly for the Jewish vote, which has traditionally gone overwhelmingly to Democrats. In 2000, for example, only 18 percent of Jewish voters cast ballots for President George W. Bush.

''There is a new openness among Jewish voters to support this president and other Republicans who strongly support Israel,'' Reed said, adding that he believes Bush in 2004 may reap close to the 38 percent of the Jewish vote harvested by Ronald Reagan in 1984, the highest percentage ever received by a Republican presidential candidate.

Some 81 percent of Jewish respondents said they see Bush as a strong supporter of Israel, and 46 percent said they were more likely to vote for him based on his handling of the ''war on terrorism''. The poll also found that two-thirds of Republicans said they supported Israel in the current conflict, compared to 46 percent of Democrats.

''The bottom line is that Bush appears to be making some significant inroads with this heavily Democratic group, something that could have an impact on the next two election cycles,'' said Ed Goeas, head of the Tarrance Group, which carried out the poll.

The survey, which included 1,200 respondents contacted last week, tends to confirm the findings of similar polls over the last several years that have shown strong support for Israel on the part of evangelical Christians, who together make up about one third of the U.S. adult population.

Historically apolitical, the group first came to the attention of the political elite in 1976 when large numbers of them helped elect Jimmy Carter, a ''born-again'' Christian. Disillusioned by Carter's liberal politics and social attitudes, they became a major recruiting ground for the ''New Right'' that in turn paved the way for the election in 1980 of former president Ronald Reagan.

At the same time, Christian fundamentalists were also avidly courted by the right-wing Likud government in Israel, which saw in them a promising new constituency that, for theological reasons, could be persuaded to oppose the return of Jerusalem and the West Bank to Arab rule.

In 1979, the government of Israel reportedly gave Jerry Falwell, head of the ''Moral Majority'' and the leading Christian Right figure of the time, his first private jet.

The Israeli government has also arranged special tours for evangelical Christian groups that have contributed tens of millions of dollars to Jewish and Israeli agencies involved in resettling Jews to Israel and in building Israeli settlements on the occupied territories.

With offices in Chicago and Jerusalem, the IFCJ has acted as a key forum for promoting the relationship between conservative U.S. Jews and evangelical Christians since 1983. As violence between Israelis and Palestinians intensified last spring, the group created ''Stand for Israel'', which it called ''an effort to strategically mobilize leadership and grassroots support in the Christian community for the State of Israel''.

''Jews are only now beginning to understand the depth of support they have among conservative Christians,'' said IFCJ's founder-director and Stand for Israel co-chairman, Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, at the time.

''Once the potential of this immense reservoir of good will is fully comprehended by the Jewish people and strategically tapped by the Stand for Israel campaign, you will see support for Israel in the United States swell dramatically.''

The new survey's results appear to bear out that prediction, at least in part. Two thirds of conservative Christians queried in the poll said that they believed they shared the same or similar perspective as Jews when it comes to the issue of ''Israel and its current struggle against Palestine''.

Reed and Eckstein also claimed that the survey effectively debunked the notion that evangelical Christian support for Israel was based on New Testament prophecy that the reconstruction of the ancient Jewish kingdom of David would usher in the ''end times'' and the second coming of Christ.

Asked which was the most important of four possible reasons why they supported Israel, 56 percent of fundamentalist Christian respondents chose political reasons, particularly Israel's democratic values, its alliance with the United States in the war against terrorism, and its role as a safe haven for persecuted Jews elsewhere. Thirty-five percent opted for the ''end-times'' option.

But when given a choice of four religious alternatives, only 28 percent cited the end-times alternative. Almost two thirds said that God had given the Jews the land of Israel as the main theological reason for backing the Jewish state.

''This survey bears out my view that Christians are trustworthy and vital allies,'' said Eckstein. ''I've seen more positive changes (in Jewish and conservative Christian relations) in the past six months than I have for the past 25 years,'' he added.

Along with announcing the survey results, Eckstein, who co-chairs Stand for Israel with Reed, unveiled a one-minute video which will be run in ''tens of thousands'' of churches with combined memberships of 3.2 million people on Sunday, Oct. 20, exhorting Christians to pray for Israel whose enemies, it says, ''are on the attack again''.

''God has promised that those who bless Israel will themselves be blessed,'' says the video, which is filled with recent images of violence in Israel and the West Bank.

Reed conceded that not all conservative Christians were as supportive of Israel as those involved in the ''Stand for Israel'' campaign.

Indeed, some 50 evangelical ministers recently issued a statement opposing unilateral military action against Iraq, and at least one national evangelical group has urged a more-balanced policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. But Reed insisted that his views represented those of a ''very, very large majority'' of evangelical Christians.

Copyright 2002 IPS


 

Go to Complete Coverage »

Audio
Back Story With The Times’s John M. Broder (mp3)

Timeline
The report describes Blackwater’s role in Iraqi casualties and property damage:


Mr. Prince disputed a Congressional staff report that detailed several instances of Blackwater employees killing Iraqis, fleeing the scene and then the company trying to cover up the violent episodes by whisking the Blackwater employees out of the country and quietly paying off the families of the victims.

He accused Congress and the news media of a “rush to judgment” about Blackwater episodes that left civilians dead, including a chaotic confrontation in a Baghdad square on Sept. 16 that killed at least 17 Iraqis. He said it was too soon to pass judgment on that episode, which is under investigation by the State Department, the F.B.I. and the Iraqi government.

“We have 1,000 guys out in the field,” he said. “People make mistakes; they do stupid things sometimes.” But he added that the company dismissed or disciplined those who broke its rules and that many of the episodes that led to Iraqi deaths came to light only because Blackwater personnel reported them to the State Department.

Mr. Prince’s appearance before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform was his first extended turn in public. The company he founded 10 years ago has come under fire from critics in Congress and the military who portray its employees, many of them former military special forces operators, as unaccountable soldiers of fortune who are undermining the American mission in Iraq by alienating the Iraqi public.

The hearing also included testimony from two senior State Department officials who offered extensive praise for Blackwater’s professionalism in Iraq and insisted that the department had acted properly in investigating cases in which the company’s employees were accused of illegal acts.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is the committee’s chairman, citing evidence of State Department efforts to protect Blackwater employees from investigations by Iraqi officials and to help the company compensate victims of shootings, said it appeared that the department was acting as Blackwater’s “enabler.”

Mr. Prince, 38, a former Navy Seal, appeared before the committee and its openly skeptical chairman in a trim dark blue suit with his blond hair in a fresh cut. He was accompanied by a handful of Blackwater executives and lawyers.

In the audience were family members of the four Blackwater guards who were killed and whose bodies were burned in an ambush in Falluja in 2004 that marked a turning point in the war.

Mr. Prince said he welcomed additional oversight and new regulations from Congress to clarify the company’s roles and legal responsibilities overseas. He said the company was providing a needed service at a reasonable cost. Many Democrats on the committee disputed that, citing the $1,222 that the company charged the government for each day of work by one of its security guards.

Near the end of his more than three hours at the witness table, Mr. Prince said, “If the government doesn’t want us to do this, we’ll go do something else.”

Mr. Prince answered most questions directly, although he demurred on specific questions on Blackwater’s government contracts and on the number of Iraqi civilians it had compensated for killing family members or destroying private property.

By agreement with Mr. Waxman and Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, the ranking Republican on the committee, Mr. Prince was not asked questions about the Sept. 16 shootings in Baghdad to avoid prejudicing the current criminal inquiry.

But in prepared testimony, Mr. Prince defended his employees’ actions in Baghdad that day. “I stress to the committee and to the American public,” he said, “that based on everything we currently know, the Blackwater team acted appropriately while operating in a very complex war zone on Sept. 16.”

Mr. Prince, who comes from a wealthy and prominent Republican family in Michigan, said his company’s phenomenal rise came from competence, not connections. He said he had not personally lobbied the White House or Congress to get federal contracts.

Asked if his sister-in-law, Betsy DeVos, a major Bush fund-raiser, former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman and wife of the party’s 2006 nominee for governor, had interceded on Blackwater’s behalf, he smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said.

In_2006_$600million

The company had less than $1 million of federal government contracts in 2001. Last year, the company took in nearly $600 million in federal money, most of it under contract with the State Department to provide bodyguards for diplomats and visiting dignitaries, including the dozens of members of Congress who travel to Iraq each year.

Mr. Prince said he was proud of his employees, who have conducted thousands of escort missions in the most dangerous parts of central Iraq without death or serious injury to any of the people they are assigned to protect. Thirty Blackwater workers have been killed in Iraq, he said.

He said Blackwater guards strictly followed rules of engagement set by the State Department, which call for gradual escalation of force before any shots are fired.

The House committee staff found that Blackwater employees had fired their weapons 195 times since early 2005 and in a vast majority of incidents used their weapons before taking any hostile fire. The report also said that in most cases Blackwater guards fired from fast-moving vehicles and immediately fled the scene of any confrontation.

“Our job is to get them off the X — the preplanned ambush site where the bad guys have planned to kill you,” Mr. Prince said. “We can’t stay and secure the terrorist crime scene investigation.”

He forcefully rejected the characterization of Blackwater from some members of the committee as a mercenary army. He said that contractors had served with the United States military since Revolutionary times and that mercenaries were soldiers who fought with foreign armies for money.

“They call us mercenaries,” he said. “But we’re Americans working for America protecting Americans.”

State Department officials who testified after Mr. Prince did largely defended the government’s use of security employees from Blackwater and other firms that handle diplomatic security in Iraq, saying the armed guards performed a critical service.

“Without private security details, we would not be able to interface with Iraqi government officials, institutions and other Iraqi civilians critical to our mission there,” said David M. Satterfield, the State Department’s coordinator for Iraq and a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

James Risen contributed reporting
1992

© July 24, 2006

Emilie Wierda marries a Craig Weida, Othewer sister marries Devos

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater USA, is famously media-shy. But the former Navy SEAL agreed to an e-mail interview with The Virginian-Pilot. Here’s the complete text:

Q. Can you tell me a little about your personal history? I know you were a SEAL. When was that? Is that what brought you to the Hampton Roads area? How long did you live in Virginia Beach?

A. I was raised in Holland, Mich. My dad was a very successful entrepreneur. From scratch he started a company that first produced high pressure die-cast machines and grew into a world-class automotive parts supplier in west Michigan. They developed and patented the first lighted car sun visor, developed the car digital compass/thermometer and the programmable garage door opener.


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Not all their ideas were winners. Things like a sock-drawer light, an automated ham de-boning machine and a propeller driven snowmobile didn’t work out so well for the company. My dad used them as examples of the need for perseverance and determination.

I earned my pilot’s license at 17 and entered the Naval Academy after high school intending to be a Navy pilot. I didn’t like the academy but loved the Navy. This is where I was first exposed to the SEAL teams. I resigned after three semesters at the academy and attended Hillsdale College in Michigan, where I graduated in 1992. I re-entered the Navy through Officer Candidate School and was commissioned a naval officer. I then joined the SEALs, where I served as an officer at SEAL Team 8. I deployed to Haiti, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, including Bosnia.

As I trained all over the world, I realized how difficult it was for units to get the cutting-edge training they needed to ensure success. In a letter home while I was deployed, I outlined the vision that is today Blackwater.

I lived in Virginia Beach for about five years.

Q. Can you tell me a little about the genesis of Blackwater? What was your motivation in starting the company? Did you have any inkling that it would come so far so fast?

A. Just prior to a deployment, my dad unexpectedly died. My family’s business had grown to great success and I left the Navy earlier than I had intended to assist with family matters. I wanted to stay connected to the military so I built a facility to provide a world-class venue for U. S. and friendly foreign military, law enforcement, commercial, and government organizations to prepare to go into harm’s way. Many special operations guys I know had the same thoughts about the need for private advanced training facilities. A few of them joined me when I formed Blackwater. I was in the unusual position after the sale of the family business to self-fund this endeavor.

Q. How do you account for the phenomenal growth of Blackwater and the private security industry? Do you expect this growth to continue?

A. Blackwater's growth is due to a few simple, but important facts: We have always delivered our services complete, correct, and on time, and we continue to attract committed professionals who value service over self and who want to have an immediate positive impact for our customers.

Growth in this industry is not restricted to Iraq alone. Because of the demand, the companies who have continually invested for the long-term will be the companies who are looked at to provide services whenever they are needed. As I said before, when Blackwater got started there was little focus on training and readiness in individual skills.

We have a very long-term view to our work. We see ourselves assisting in the transformation of the DoD into a faster more nimble organization. The private sector has always led innovation in our country. If the government sees some of the things we are doing, and chooses to utilize us or to adopt and adapt some of our innovations in the defense of the nation, then all the better.

Q. Can you discuss the role played by Blackwater and other contractors in the Pentagon’s “total force,” as referenced in the latest Quadrennial Defense Review? What is its significance for Blackwater?

A. The "total force" refers to all resources available to be used in the nation's defense. Blackwater considers itself a partner to the DoD and all government agencies, and we stand ready to provide surge capacity, training, security and operational services in various areas at their request. We are honored to contribute in some small way.

American history details the contributions of private contractors in the development of our Nation. Examples include the Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay colonies; all started as private investment endeavors whose security was provided by PMCs. Across the street from the White House is Lafayette Park; on its four corners stand statues of Lafayette, Von Steuben, Rochambeau, and Kosciusko. All were foreign professional military officers that came here to help build and develop the capacity of the Continental Army. The base of one of the statues bears the inscription: “He gave military training and discipline to the citizen soldiers who achieved the independence of the United States.” Lewis and Clark’s expedition to explore the American West consisted of some active duty soldiers but their “Corps of Discovery” crew also consisted of what would now be considered contractors.

Q. What are the economics of this industry? How is it cost-effective for the government to outsource these functions?

A. Blackwater and the private sector are able rapidly to tailor a custom solution to solve the customer’s problem. Our ability to quickly react with a right-sized solution whose entire cost is only associated with the duration of the contract is cost-effective because there are no subsequent carrying costs like salary, medical care, retirement, etc.

My family’s business was automotive supply, one of the most efficient and globally competitive in the world. You wake up in the morning having to drive efficiency throughout the organization or you will be driven under. We strive for that level efficiency in what we do today. In very competitive industries, the purchasing/contract officers understand your business as well as you do. The government can ensure good value for the taxpayer by pushing that level of competence and accountability to its purchasing agents and contracting officers too.

Q. There have been calls for more regulation of this industry. Do you agree that any further regulation is needed? If so, what could you support?

A. Given the sensational tone of the media coverage our industry receives, it is understandable that there are calls for more regulation. We certainly agree that our industry should be accountable and transparent, but we should carefully analyze the domestic and international regulations that already exist so that further conversations can be had from a common foundation of accurate information. There are already many tools at the disposal of purchasing agents, government contracting officers and law enforcement officials to ensure proper behavior of PMC’s. For example, early privateers (the forbearers of the U.S. Navy) would post a significant performance bond to receive their Letter of Marque. We fully support high standards with high enforcement that drive unethical, immoral players from our industry.

Q. Some contractors have been involved in financial or abuse scandals. How can that kind of thing be avoided?

A. Those companies or individuals who disregard the moral, ethical, and legal high ground are not long for this industry. Closely working together with contracting agencies, contracting officers, and policy makers can only reduce the opportunities for financial and other abuses. The key to success is leadership and balance; strong corporate governance, and operational and "field” leadership at all levels carries the day always. We want to reduce opportunities for abuse without constraining the flexibility that makes our industry so valuable.


 

Betsy DeVos

In addition to its support for Focus on the Family and the Foundation for Traditional Values, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation also supports the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, where Betsy DeVos serves on the board. The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation has supported the institute in the past. The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty attempts to link economics with religion and traditional virtues and sponsors workshops for business executives, religious leaders, professors and others involved in religion, business and economic research. The institute also publishes a number of documents in order to disseminate its view to the general public, policymakers and other leaders.

The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation also contributes to the aforementioned Council for National Policy, where Richard DeVos has served on the executive committee and board of governors and which has been described as "very dangerous and dangerously secretive"¹²⁹ in the eyes of liberals. Because of its secretive nature, it is difficult to fully ascertain the activities of the council. However, it is clearly a conservative organization that works to effect public policy changes at the national level. It was founded in part by the Rev. Tim LaHaye, leader of the Moral Majority, and it strives to combat what it sees as liberal control over the country and focuses on issues in domains ranging from social to economic. ABC News reported that "it provided a forum for religiously engaged conservative Christians to influence the geography of American political power."¹³⁰ The council supports a strong national defense, Christian values, conservative morals and limited government

Blackwater-Washington Post

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 8, 2005; Page A14

The_christain_right

[edit] History
Jerome Himmelstein writes that:

"The term New Religious Right refers to a set of organizations that emerged in the late 1970s, the Moral Majority (later renamed the Liberty Federation), the Religious Roundtable, and the Christian Voice; their leaders, including Robert Grant, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Ed McAteer; and the movement that these leaders and organizations fostered. Though this movement made a broad, religiously based conservative appeal, its deepest roots and most lasting impact were among white evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians" (p. 97).
The contemporary "Christian Right" as a nascent political movement began when evangelicals began organizing against a series of Supreme Court decisions, notably Roe v. Wade and also engaged in local battles over pornography, obscenity, taxation of private Christian schools, school prayer, textbook contents (concerning evolution), homosexuality and abortion.

One early effort to institutionalize the Christian Right as a politically-active social movement began in 1974 when Dr. Robert Grant, an early movement leader, founded American Christian Cause to advocate Christian moral teachings in Southern California. Concerned that Christians overwhelmingly voted in favor of President Jimmy Carter in 1976, Grant founded Christian Voice to mobilize Christian voters in favor of candidates who share their values. The birth of the New Christian Right, however, is usually traced to a 1979 meeting where televangelist Jerry Falwell was urged to create a "Moral Majority" organization.[9][10]

In the US in 1980 Christian leaders and members of the religious right rallied in Washington DC on April 29th and 30th, for an event called Washington for Jesus. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Dr. William Bright, Benson Idahosa from Africa, and many other high-profile Christians marched on Washington DC, in an effort to get Ronald Reagan, the opposing republican candidate to oust then-Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter out of office. Many of the beliefs of the religious right were outlined and solidified in speeches and statements made by leaders during the event. Other Washington for Jesus rallies were held in Washington in 1998, 1996, and 2004. Washington for Jesus was founded by [John Giminez], the pastor of Rock Church in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

 

People
Howard Ahmanson, Jr, philanthropist[12]
Mother Angelica, Roman Catholic nun, EWTN founder
Gary Bauer, activist[9][10][12]
Anita Bryant, singer, chairwoman of the Save Our Children campaign
Archbishop Raymond Leo Burke
George W. Bush, Current President of the United States
Jack Chick comic strip artist
Charles Colson, former White House advisor under President Nixon, ex-con founder of Prison Fellowship International[9]
Gary DeMar, President of American Vision
James Dobson, Psychologist, radio show host, and founder of Focus on the Family[9]
William A. Donohue, chairman of the Catholic League
Tony Evans, Urban activist minister, radio preacher, Promise Keeper[9]
Jerry Falwell, deceased, Baptist pastor and conservative activist[9][10]
Maggie Gallagher, Journalist and pundit
Hutton Gibson, Sedevacantist author and Holocaust denier; father of actor Mel Gibson
Franklin Graham, Humanitarian and missionary; son of Billy Graham
Robert Grant, Chairman of Christian Voice and the American Freedom Coalition[9]
John Hagee, pastor and author
D. James Kennedy, deceased, Founder of Coral Ridge Ministries[9]
Russell Kirk, author, The Conservative Mind
Tim LaHaye, Writer and author of the "Left Behind" novel series[9]
Beverly LaHaye, Conservative activist and founder of Concerned Women for America[9]
Alan Keyes, Conservative black talk show host
Stephen Mansfield, author
R. Albert Mohler, Jr., President of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Roy Moore, jurist
Marilyn Musgrave, Colorado State Senator
Father Richard John Neuhaus, founder and editor of First Things
Gary North, Christian Reconstructionist[9]
Michael Novak, Roman Catholic philosopher and Diplomat
Tony Perkins, political activist
Ralph E. Reed, Jr., Georgia politician [9]
Pat Robertson, Conservative political activist, businessman, and televangelist[9][12]
Rousas John Rushdoony, (1916–2001) Reconstructionist[9][12]
Rick Santorum, former Republican U.S. Senator
Francis Schaeffer, deceased; theologian[9]
Phyllis Schlafly, founder of Eagle Forum[9]
Bishop Michael J. Sheridan
Randall Terry, anti-abortion activist[9]
Jack Thompson, attorney protesting violence in the media
Jerry Vines, Preacher, former president of Southern Baptist Convention
Donald Wildmon, leads American Family Association [9]