Meet Blackwater USA, the private army that the US government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. Its contacts run from military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House; it has a military base, a fleet of aircraft and 20,000 troops, but since September 2007 the firm has been hit by a series of scandals that, far from damaging the company, have led to an unprecedented period of expansion.This revised and updated edition includes Scahill's continued investigative work into one of the outrages of our time: the privatisation of war.
Reviews
“A crackling exposé of the secretive military contractor Blackwater.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[Scahill] is a one-man truth squad.”—Bill Moyers
“[An] utterly gripping and explosive story.”—Naomi Klein, The Guardian
“The biggest book of the year…an amazingly researched and well-told story.”—Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive
“Scahill’s page-turning collection of intrigue and insight into the underworld of privatized warfare is well researched, thoroughly documented, and as a result extremely frightening.”—The Globe and Mail
“Scahill provided me information…which I have not been able to get from the U.S. military…I have read more from Mr. Scahill, than I’ve got from our own government.”—Representative Marcy Kaptur, Defense Appropriations Committee
“[T]his is no uninformed partisan screed…Meticulously documented and encyclopedic in scope…it’s a comprehensive and authoritative guide…this book serves as a provocative primer for advancing the debate.”—Bill Sizemore, Pulitzer-prize nominated journalist, Virginian-Pilot
“Andy McNab couldn’t have invented this prescient tale of the private army of mercenaries run by a Christian conservative millionaire who, in turn, bankrolls the president. A chilling exposé of the ultimate military outsource.”—Christopher Fowler, The New Review’s “Best Books of 2007”
Author Biography
Jeremy Scahill is an unembedded, international journalist. He has covered the war in Iraq; the downfall of Milosevic's government in Serbia; the suppression of oil protests in the Niger Delta; and the use of mercenaries in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. He was among the only western reporters to gain access to the Abu Ghraib prison when Saddam Hussein was in power. Scahill has won numerous journalism awards, included a prestigious Lannan Foundation fellowship for Blackwater, which is his first book.
