Blackwater on BLACKWATER

In its weekly newsletter, Blackwater USA today published a scathing review of BLACKWATER by Jeremy Scahill.  It's already being pounced on in the blogosphere, but, just as I'll defend their right to defend themselves in combat by whatever means necessary, they have an ever greater right to defend themselves in the blogosphere.  And given what aggressive tactics BW is known for, up to this point at least, they're fighting like gentlemen.

Unfortunately, the review is very one-sided, which surprises me since it's not directly coming from BW, but from former journalist and author Lewis Perdue.   He's also the guy who unsuccessfully sued Dan Brown for plagiarism.  (I'll add the disclaimer that Lew and I are buddies from having once suffered together on a committee-from-hell that I chaired for a national writers' organization.)  The obvious bias in the review, unfortunately, gives it the same flaw as Scahill's book.  Both deserve a wide audience and have strengths, but they're both about as fair and balanced as Fox News--as in trying to balance things by being unfair and unbalanced when it comes to the other side.

Lew missed the strength of the book--its meticulous research using FOIA-ed documents and its piecing together of a little known story.  It is well documented and the lack of attributions he cites are trivial.  And, as I've written here over the past few weeks, for this reason alone BLACKWATER deserves to be read.

However, Lew is absolutely on the mark when it comes to the portrayal of the men and women who work for Blackwater and the company's leadership.  The polemics are thick, but, as someone who cut their teeth reading commie documents in the original German and Russian, I have a high immunity to propaganda and gloss over it, because there is real value underlying it that you won't get unless you stomach the jargon.

Since Blackwater USA has not yet posted the newsletter on its website, here it is:

 

A cheap shot at hired guns
Blackwater
By Jeremy Scahill
Reviewed by Lewis Perdue
This book aspires to be the definitive investigation into the growth of one of the largest private military firms in the world and an exhaustive catalog of its sins, especially as a tool for Bush Administration policy. It isn't.

Rather it's a cobbled-together amalgam of the author's previously published articles, plus rehashed pieces by other "progressive" journalists, all embedded in a slurry of unattributed sources and one-sided quotations of politicos with an axe to grind. As such the book, subtitled, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, fails miserably as anything other than a moveon.org playbook for the 2008 presidential campaigns.

Instead of solid investigative reporting and a steady march of organized facts from multiple credible sources, this book offers layers of innuendo cast in obviously biased language. There are no smoking guns here or even warm barrels, just 452 pages of poorly documented, mind-numbing minutiae wandering about in search of significance and lacking in overall coherence.

Blackwater was formed in 1997 to help train military and law enforcement personnel. Author Scahill early on attempts to indict the company for incompetence, or worse, by reconstructing the final days of the four Blackwater employees who were ambushed, burned and hung from a bridge in Fallujah, Iraq. The indictment fails. And Scahill's cartoonish descriptions of the men makes them into bumbling buffoons rather than offering the reader a moving sense of tragedy and men betrayed.

Trite, political-hot-button phraseology pervades the book. To Scahill, Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince is, "a radical right-wing Christian mega-millionaire who has served as a major bankroller not only of President Bush's campaigns but of the broader Christian-right agenda." Some facts would have been helpful: religious affiliation, personal net worth, dollar amount of contributions. Perhaps Mr. Prince is all of these, perhaps not. But only the facts would tell us.

Scahill's lack of attribution destroys the book's credibility. He first writes that, Blackwater has more than $500 million in government contracts, noting that "as one U.S. Congress member observed, in strictly military terms, Blackwater could overthrow many of the world's governments." But which member of Congress? Observed to whom? When? All those pesky little details that a beginning journalism course requires for a C, along with any attempt at a balanced rational analysis, are notably absent in this book. I give it an F.

Sorry, Lew.  I was university faculty, too, but of political science.  For an undergrad course in poli sci, Scahill would get an A+ and be sent to grad school where they would work him over on him over the polemics.  As for your essay, well, let's just say it's a good thing professional courtesy dictates that authors and faculty don't grade one another's work because there's nothing more an academic loves is to point how how the critical piece has the same biased flaws of what it's criticizing.  But just like Schahill, you do bring up several good points.

And FYI, Blackwater does have the capacity to overthrow many of the world's governments--whether or not Scahill attributes his quotation.  The question is, under what circumstances would they?  Having a company like Blackwater around is like having a wolf as a house pet. They'll break a lot, shit on a lot and probably eat your cat, but they can be very loyal, particularly when there's a break-in.  And on 9/11, we had a hell of a break-in.  But then I love my cat...and that's the dilemma we all have to figure out because BW isn't going away and neither are the dangers of the post-9/11 world.

Comments

[Dusty]

Thanks for the link.

[Michael Brito]

Your right "Black Water" is like having a wolf for a house pet. Only thing is, were not wolves also, so that just makes us potential prey, when the wolf gets hungry.
So how long have you been a corporate Neocon?

[R J Hillhouse]

>So how long have you been a >corporate Neocon?

LMAO.

[Laughing My Ass Off.]

[AndyC]

Dusty, you could always be a sheepdog - have a look at Dave Grossman's "On Sheep, Wolves and Sheepdogs" :

http://hobbes.ncsa.uiuc.edu/onsheepwolvesandsheepdogs.html

;)