All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com slash radio.
Our next guest is Bruce Falconer from Mother Jones Magazine.
He's from their Washington Bureau.
Much of his work focused on military contracts and the Iraq War.
He's got a new article in Mother Jones called Blackwater's World of Warcraft, and something tells me this isn't about the video game that the kids on South Park were playing in that one episode, but no, more about killing people for profit, that kind of thing.
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to have you.
A very interesting article, pretty scary article here about, well, the growing danger of these private paramilitary forces working for the national government.
I guess, can you just sort of give us a brief history of Eric Prince and the Blackwater Company, where they come from and what they do now and, you know, maybe, you know, sort of how they got here from there?
Sure.
Yeah.
Eric Prince is the son of Edgar Prince, who was a billionaire auto parts supplier in Holland, Michigan, who was also very active in Republican causes and was one of the co-founders and primary funders of the Family Research Council.
Eric joined the Navy SEALs, actually a very unusual choice for a person of his breeding.
He was quite wealthy and privileged, but did choose to serve in the military and did a number of black operations in Europe and supposedly in South America throughout the 90s.
And when his father passed away from a heart attack in 1995, he inherited a great deal of money, which he used to invest in his own company and a company that he designed around his own experience as a Navy SEAL.
He found that many of the functions performed by special forces were perhaps better performed, more efficiently performed and more cheaply performed by private industry.
And he put his money where his mouth was and launched Blackwater in the late 90s, which remained small and quite a modest company for a long time.
Even in 2001, prior to the September 11th attacks, the company was pulling in well under a million dollars a year.
But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gathered steam, the profits and contracts rolling in really just began to mount.
And by 2006, fiscal year 2006, he was pulling in over 600 million dollars a year, a total of one billion dollars in federal contracts since 2001, which, if I did my math correctly, is something in the order of 80,000 percent growth over that period.
Wow.
Yeah, well, I'm not in a position to check your percentages, but that sounds like a lot to me.
Yeah.
And so, well, now, one of the things that really catches my attention there is the ties to the Republican Party.
This family already was close to the Republican Party.
Should we be worried that that this company is actually too close to the Republican Party?
I don't mean to be too paranoid, but I can sort of see this like the rise of the American essay or something here.
Well, the question of whether they're too close, I don't know.
There certainly is no question that Eric Prince and indeed the entire Prince family is as well connected in Republican circles.
And despite his denials before Congress, it would be shocking if there was not some degree of favoritism granted to the Prince family and to Blackwater in particular, as there were so many companies buying for federal contracts for security contracts in Afghanistan, in Iraq.
And Blackwater has been pretty spectacularly lucky in terms of its growth over those years in beating out other competitors.
Now, we have to admit that in terms of a company that can offer what the State Department was looking for in terms of security contracting, Blackwater was perhaps uniquely situated.
It was well financed from the beginning with the Prince family fortune and perhaps was in a place to more quickly get up to speed and begin providing services on the ground in ways that companies like Triple Canopy were not.
But that being the case, there is no question that Prince was already deeply connected into the power circles that were in a position to grant him the contract that he required.
Now, traditionally, though, that's the job of the Marine Corps, right?
Protecting State Department employees in foreign countries?
Sure.
And it remains the job of the Marine Corps.
Blackwater is responsible for the State Department's worldwide protective services contract, which is just a massive contract that builds on the services that the Marines already provide.
The Marines provide protection for the physical embassies themselves.
But typically, when diplomats are on the move, especially in war-torn countries like Iraq, they're protected by the State Department's diplomatic security service, which is underfunded and undermanned for the mission that it's required to perform these days.
And Blackwater has been able to step in.
And in fact, in the shooting in the traffic circle in September of last year, Blackwater was performing a State Department contract, diplomatic protection contract, at that time.
And as they always are, they were under the direct operational command of a State Department diplomatic security officer, as they are on all of their missions.
But in practice, we've been told that Blackwater really does call the shots and is, for all intents and purposes, though they are contractors, they are the primary keepers of security for diplomats on the move.
And now, what's the extent of the role that they play in Iraq besides, you know, protecting ambassadors driving from here to there?
Well, that's a good question.
The primary responsibility is just that, is providing physical protection for State Department, for diplomats who have to attend meetings in the green zone or go to other meetings that would take them outside of protected areas.
They have been involved in transporting non-humans, like supplies such as weapons or food or cooking supplies, which is what the contractors were transporting through Fallujah in 2004, when Blackwater first kind of hit the national stage, when four of its contractors were killed in a very brutal fashion and hung from a bridge in Fallujah.
At that point, they were not protecting diplomats.
They were simply on a supply run through a very dangerous area.
Since that time, it seems pretty clear that they have focused more intently on those personal security details.
And it's a skill that Blackwater operators seem to have, and they've been able to capitalize on that uniquely and gain an advantage over their competitors.
And raw numbers, do you know how many are in Iraq working for Blackwater?
Blackwater contractors?
Something on the order of a thousand.
It changes, but right around a thousand at this point in time.
So that's still, I guess, a pretty small proportion of the overall number of private contractors in Iraq.
Oh, sure.
Absolutely.
We've been told there's something, the numbers are really uncertain, but there's something like 20,000 to 25,000 security contractors in Iraq.
And even that number is a drop in the bucket.
If you just look at private contractors, you're talking well over 100,000.
Okay, now you quote Eric Prince, the founder of Blackwater, from testimony before the Congress, saying, listen, don't call us mercenaries.
Mercenaries are people from one country fighting for another country.
We're Americans fighting for America.
Yeah, that's right.
And how true was that?
Well, as we found in this piece that I wrote with my editor, Dan Schulman here at Mother Jones, that Blackwater is just one of Eric Prince's companies.
And he does have another private security company that is staffed almost exclusively by what the industry refers to as third country nationals, which is something of an innocuous term for foreign mercenaries.
These are primarily guys from South America, Eastern Europe, and to a growing extent from Africa who have military experience, who've been able to work on subcontract for Blackwater in Iraq and in Afghanistan, carrying weapons and performing many of the same tasks that their American counterparts are doing.
Boy, yeah, that's kind of something.
It's almost like the French Foreign Legion or something in a way.
Yeah, but it would be Eric Prince's Foreign Legion.
He owns this company outright.
It has no stockholders and it's growing and has contractors of language abilities and different kinds of martial skills that are unique.
We don't know of any international paramilitary group really that could rival the capabilities that Greystone Limited, which is the name of this company that Greystone has to offer.
Yeah, and that's the thing too, this Greystone Limited, I'd never heard of before, but it sounds like this is the real Blackwater.
Well, in some respects, I guess it is.
We should point out that in terms of providing personal protection, the State Department contract does require that any contractor, private security contractor, providing security directly for a U.S. diplomat has to be an American citizen.
That is at least in the letter of the contract.
We've heard stories that this in practice is not true, that there have been security details dispatched in Iraq where U.S. diplomats have been protected by non-Americans and even ex-South American soldiers under the employ of Greystone and Blackwater.
But it seems that Greystone, most of their contractors are standing guard duty at static facilities, they're guarding ammunition dumps, guarding facilities within the green zone.
But even if that's the case in practice, what we learned about the company is just its capability.
What it was designed to do is far more expansive than what the mission, if you were on the ground in Iraq today, than what the company is actually doing.
They own a fleet of fixed-wing fighters and troop transport aircraft, as well as what they call little birds, which are basically armed helicopters with machine guns that can transport troops short distances into combat zones.
Even Eric Prince, even though this doesn't particularly belong to Greystone, but Eric Prince also has another company that owns an ocean-going vessel that is large enough to transport large quantities of troops or supplies pretty much anywhere in the world.
So just the combined equipment of Eric Prince's companies, including Greystone's possessions, but also if you combine those with other companies like Presidential Airways, which is an air cargo transport fleet with Blackwater's logistical capabilities, and also with an intelligence company that Eric Prince founded a couple of years ago, provides them with pretty much a full-service paramilitary capability that can do whatever any contract would presumably ask of them.
The only reason that we can assume that Greystone is not providing more of an active military part in Iraq is simply because the contracts haven't been issued.
It's not any hesitation on the part of Greystone or Eric Prince or Blackwater to do that kind of work.
Yeah, now you mentioned the helicopters.
I remember those from the Traffic Circle Massacre there.
They had a couple of pictures.
They're sort of like the little bubble helicopters that the bad guys always fly on the A-Team.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
With guns on the side there.
And now, this is really incredible.
You say they can transport large numbers of troops.
How large?
Well, large numbers maybe.
That is a matter of perspective.
But certainly, Copper Black is quoted in the Jordanian press as saying that it is the ambition of Eric Prince's companies to be able to dispatch a brigade-sized force on a moment's notice anywhere in the world to fulfill a security contract.
Wow.
That really is incredible, the amount of infrastructure that is really going on here.
It's not that they're relying on the Army to bring them here and there.
They have their own fleets of ships, their own planes, their own helicopters.
What about tanks?
They got their own tanks?
They don't have their own tanks, as far as we know.
But there have been cases in Iraq where, far from Blackwater relying on the Army for infrastructure and logistics, it's been the reverse.
I believe it was a Romanian diplomat.
I could be mistaken, but a foreign diplomat was caught in a bombing in Baghdad late last year.
And before the U.S. Army could arrive on the scene, Blackwater had already dispatched its Little Bird helicopters to evacuate the wounded diplomats and bring them to hospitals in the Green Zone.
So the U.S. Army basically calling up Blackwater on the cell phone saying, hey, we need some help.
Either that or perhaps even the diplomats themselves and their staff, having been caught in that situation, knew that they could rely on Blackwater to pull them out of there even faster than the U.S. military.
It's like calling a cab, it's faster than an ambulance.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Boy, this is interesting stuff.
And there's so many different directions we could go.
Tell me more about Total Intelligence Solutions, Kofor Black and the private CIA that's been created under the umbrella of Blackwater.
Sure.
Yeah.
Total Intelligence Solutions is, like you say, pretty much an in-house CIA operated by Kofor Black, who was the director of the Counterterrorism Center at the CIA at the time of the 9-11 attacks and who famously, after the attacks, told promised President Bush that he would deliver Osama bin Laden's head on ice, on dry ice, to him at the White House, which never occurred, of course.
But shortly afterwards, Kofor Black left government for a much, presumably a much higher paying job with Eric Ritz's company.
And at this point, Total Intelligence Solutions is a 24-hour intelligence, private intelligence group that is able to provide information about world events to companies operating in war zones anywhere in the world.
They have a facility in Northern Virginia that resembles much of what you would see on TV shows like 24, with large flat screen monitors, maps and news, 24-hour news on all the time.
We've talked to people who have experience in the intelligence business, and frankly, they question how much of a real service Total Intelligence Solutions would be able to provide to its clients.
They seem to have capitalized instead on the reputation of Kofor Black as a very capable and indeed a very extremely experienced CIA officer, particularly in Africa, and companies paranoid or concerned about their foreign operations in dangerous places are probably just covering their bases by doing everything they can to find out what's going on to assure their investments are safe.
And Total Intelligence Solutions, regardless of its real capabilities, at least provides a cover for them.
Well, you know, one thing that came up in that explanation was working for all different governments, not just the U.S. government.
You mentioned, I guess it was Black that you said was quoted in a Jordanian paper.
How much business does Blackwater do with the government in Jordan?
Well, we know that they have trained Jordanian Special Forces troops, just like they've trained Azerbaijani Marine Commandos.
And a source of mine in Africa told me the other day that there were some Blackwater and Presidential Airways people on the ground in, I believe it was, I believe it was Congo just last month.
Oh, really?
And they're defending the helpless people there or they're helping the death squads?
Yeah, no, in that case, I don't think it's death squads.
Blackwater is trying aggressively to move into the African market because as they see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan winding down, they very astutely have judged that that also means that their contracts will be winding down as well.
And the phenomenal growth and profit that they've seen over the last five or six years will not be assured unless they can transition their business to a new market.
And what they see is the future of the business.
And indeed, this is not just Blackwater, but the rest of the private security industry as a whole, companies like DynCorp and Triple Canopy believe that peacekeeping is the next frontier in terms of deploying men with guns on private contracts to dangerous places.
And, you know, there's something to be said for that.
The UN peacekeepers are notoriously hamstrung and unable to protect refugees.
All you need to do is refer to the situation in Darfur and other places in Africa where there are desperate situations.
And Kofor Black and others at Blackwater have suggested that Blackwater, given the right contract, would be able to secure refugee camps and prevent murders by groups like Janja Weed for probably for a very reasonable price and based on their military capability, extremely efficiently.
Yeah, that makes perfect sense, really.
I guess the real problem is the accountability.
It's not like we're talking about some private investors in America hiring Blackwater and making sure that their money is being spent wisely.
We're talking about government contracts.
It's half private, but half not.
And it seems like no matter what they do, they'll still get the contract next time.
Well, that is right.
Blackwater likes to say that when people bring up the issue of regulation, the issue of oversight, they like to play both sides in the sense that they, until late last year, belonged to a group called the International Peace Operations Association, known by its acronym IPOA, which is a small group based here in Washington, D.C., that is an advocacy-slash-trade group-slash-lobbying organization for the private security business.
And the IPOA has its own set of standards and own set of oversight procedures, which it claims can keep private security companies, basically keep them honest, have a forum in which any perceived transgressions can be punished.
The problem is that there's no enforcement mechanism there.
And when Blackwater was implicated in the shootings of 17 Iraqi civilians in a traffic circle late last year, instead of submitting itself to oversight by a group like the IPOA, it simply pulled out of the organization.
And Greystone followed suit the next month.
They will tell you, if you ask them about oversight, that they're all for it.
They would encourage any kind of government oversight that can ensure that business moves along as normal.
Because these incidents, such as what occurred in Baghdad, they were good for business.
And it's not so much of a moral perspective as it is one of just a pure capitalistic view that if there is accountability, Blackwater is more likely to gain even more contracts, to amass more wealth, and to be in more places around the world.
Well, now, there's another Scott Horton who's entirely separate from me.
And if we're related, it's from centuries ago.
He writes for Harper's Magazine.
And in one of my interviews with him, we talked about the law that ought to govern the actions of people like Blackwater employees in places like Iraq.
And according to him, and he's an international human rights lawyer and so forth, he said that there's at least three or four laws in the American system that ought to apply to these people's behavior.
And yet the Justice Department takes the position that, well, it's not us.
Talk to the State Department.
And the State Department says, oh, well, it isn't us.
Talk to the DOD.
And the DOD says, well, you know, go talk with Mukasey about it again over at Justice.
And everybody pretends that they're not in charge of enforcing the laws that control these people's behavior, at least can hold them accountable for things that they do in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, and that is correct.
There are laws on the books that theoretically on the face of them would seem to apply to contractors, certainly to Blackwater contractors operating in Iraq.
The problem that has arisen and that really came into the news, again, after this incident in the traffic circle in Baghdad, was that the laws on the books, as they stood at that point in time, applied only to contractors working for the Defense Department or Defense Department-related entities.
And the fact was that these Blackwater contractors were working on a State Department contract, which would seem kind of a technicality.
But certainly in terms of prosecuting these guys for the murders in an American court, it's unclear whether an American court would have jurisdiction.
And because they are immune to Iraqi law, unless the case were referred to the International Criminal Court, of which the United States is not a member, they have fallen into a very strange kind of twilight zone, legally, where nobody appears to have jurisdiction over Blackwater contractors.
And this is something that perhaps could change.
The FBI is, we're told, actively investigating the incident in Baghdad, and at the end of that, will issue a report that already the New York Times has said that at least several of the deaths in that traffic circle were unauthorized and appeared to be the result of illegal shootings.
And if that comes out, we can expect Congress perhaps finally will make an effort to fill in this gap in legal codes so that Blackwater contractors, at least in the future, if not in this past case, will no longer be able to fall through the cracks in our legal system.
Have there been any efforts like that in the Congress?
I heard that Bernie Sanders had a bill to just abolish the use of all contractors in Iraq, something like that.
But what about the tightening up of these legal loopholes?
There are, as far as last I heard, there were moves underway in the Congress, but as usually is the case, as the issue has, it's further and further behind us in the past, there's less attention being paid.
I would expect, however, once the decision comes out, once the investigation is completed into the Blackwater shootings that we will see it arise again as a political issue, and hopefully at that point, some of the suggestions that have been made will actually find their way into law.
All right.
Now, there's a couple of characters that you bring up in the article that I want to know more about.
One of them is named Pizarro, and the other is a former employee of Pablo Escobar.
Is that right?
Named Julio Nayer.
Who are these guys?
Well, Jose Miguel Pizarro is a very media friendly, very good looking, very well spoken American, dual American Chilean citizen who worked as a translator for the U.S. military in South America throughout much of the 90s.
And after his retirement, began to operate a series of businesses, which included a small company here in the Washington suburbs called Red Tactica, which offered foreign policy, military advice to private companies.
And after the invasion of Iraq, he was tapped to be an on-air personality for CNN's Spanish language channel, where he came into contact with American generals, in particular Wesley Clark, who was a talking head on the CNN English language channel.
And these two men began to have conversations in the cafeteria at CNN headquarters in Atlanta about the opportunities that were beginning to present themselves in Iraq for people of military experience.
And it was then that Pizarro got the idea that he had access through his military and paramilitary connections in Chile to a vast pool of highly qualified, highly skilled and experienced Chilean commandos.
And Chile's army is, it should be said, one of the better armies in South America, certainly one of the more qualified militaries.
And he brought the idea to Blackwater, which at that time was greatly expanding its operations in Iraq.
And he essentially brought them an offer they couldn't refuse, in that American special forces veterans who were working for Blackwater were pulling in at that point, you know, well over $1,000 a day to do diplomatic security work.
And these Chilean veterans were capable of doing the same types of jobs for much less money, given the exchange rate in Chile.
And after some initial hesitation by Blackwater about hiring foreign mercenaries, essentially, Eric Prince decided to give it the go-ahead.
And it worked out spectacularly well.
It turns out that the Chileans were everything they said they were.
They were qualified, they were dedicated, they were smart.
And they did, by all accounts, an excellent job of guard duty in the green zone.
But from there, that's where Blackwater's idea to essentially maximize profits by hiring foreign mercenaries who would earn less money really took off.
Because if you can hire Chileans for, you know, $700 a month, or $700 a week, you can hire Colombians, Peruvians, Salvadorans for a fraction of the cost.
And I think that is exactly what Blackwater did.
Are these guys veterans of the dirty wars of the 1980s?
Something tells me they were all trained at the School of the Americans in the first place, or their former bosses were.
Yeah, well, I mean, there's some anecdotal evidence of that being true.
Certainly, what we know is that in the case of Colombia, there are suspicions that, yes, members of paramilitaries like the AUC ultimately found their way into the ranks of Blackwater and subsequently worked for Greystone through local companies.
And it's important that we say that as well, that Blackwater and Greystone appear to be smart enough not to hire these guys directly, but instead work through local contracting companies.
So in the case of Colombia, there's a very shadowy company called ID Systems of uncertain ownership.
You know, we've heard it's owned by a Panamanian, we've heard it's owned by a Colombian, but a very wealthy individual who has preferred to stay out of the media eye, who has been able to recruit, you know, from the vast pool of military-aged and military-experienced men in Colombia to provide a steady stream of very low-paid recruits for Blackwater and Greystone contracts in Iraq.
And when we say low-paid, we really mean it.
I mean, these guys are, as of 2005, 2006, were standing post in Baghdad under mortar fire for $34 a day, which if you compare that to what Blackwater guys were pulling in, American Blackwater contractors were pulling in at the same time, which ranged anywhere from $800 to $1,000 a day.
It's a remarkable difference.
In the differential, certainly, the reason for that is that Blackwater is able to pocket more of the profit from the contract.
Right.
It's not like they lower the price of what they're charging the taxpayer.
No, not at all.
And it's much more profitable to hire these guys from the third world.
And as contracts have become more difficult to obtain, the companies have been gravitating much more broadly to the third world to recruit the lowest-paid mercenaries they can find.
It's now moving.
It's moved up through Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras.
And last we heard, it's spreading into Africa quite aggressively.
And now this guy, Nayar, he was a recruiter for mercenaries for Blackwater or Greystone.
Is that right?
Well, we haven't been able to really make that connection directly.
Julio Nayar is a Cuban American who was wanted on drug charges in Miami.
He was an international fugitive who eventually found his way to El Salvador.
He, it is said, was a one-time associate of Pablo Escobar, had essentially managed the books for the Escobar cartel.
And at the time the Iraq war broke out, was the manager of a karaoke bar in San Salvador.
Little is known about Nayar other than that he had connections to Salvadoran military officers, as well as an unnamed American security company that was recruiting for missions and contracts in Iraq.
Nayar went around posting advertisements and inviting recruits to meet him at his karaoke bar, which they did, and lined up outside the door and down the street for the opportunity to interview with Julio Nayar, who then made the cut, made the selections, created a list of Salvadoran recruits that he might funnel to the Americans.
And then as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.
Nobody really knew what happened to him for quite some time, well over a year.
But it was some months later that most of the men who had found themselves on Nayar's short list were contacted by another company about which very little is known, called the Central America Professional Services Company, known by its acronym of Capros.
And Capros, we know beyond any doubt, had an arrangement with Greystone to provide Salvadoran recruits for Greystone contracts.
It's unclear whether the men directly recruited by Nayar ultimately made their way into Greystone's ranks, but there's no question that Salvadorans have indeed become part of Greystone's recruiting pool.
That's funny.
It's just like out of their brochure or their promotional video or whatever that you quote where they say, in today's gray world, where there are no black and whites anymore and the good guys have to be just as bad as the bad guys, it's the perfect time to hire Greystone to do your security work for you.
Well, right, it seems like a company that was conceived almost in perfect alignment with the rhetoric that was coming out of the Bush administration the days after September 11th, where the gloves had to come off and we had to deal with bad people in order to get at the people who were even worse, the people who were attacking us.
And certainly you could see that as being part of the Greystone model.
I wouldn't want to take that too far, simply just because people are recruited from third world countries doesn't necessarily imply any kind of criminal intent or lack of skill.
But what it does say is that certainly the embarrassment that might be associated with hiring former veterans or veterans of wars in Colombia and El Salvador, very dirty wars, wars in which large quantities of civilians were caught up in the fighting and killed, any qualms they had about recruiting these types of individuals for service faded away pretty quickly when the idea of maximizing profits came into their minds.
All right, now I'll probably lose half the listeners, but I have to go ahead and throw out the hysterical term that everybody abuses to the point of meaninglessness.
But I really mean it.
The word is fascism.
This sounds to me like the very worst sort of combination of public and private interest, the profit motive for enforcing with state power, with violent state power and no accountability.
And I've already seen months ago, I guess I could have tried to find the YouTube for the audio here or something, but I've already seen months ago news reports of local sheriff's departments actually just being replaced with groups of Blackwater guys in this country.
I haven't seen that myself, actually.
Oh, OK.
Well, geez, it's too bad I brought that up without my footnote right on me.
I'll see if I can find it to wrap up the show.
But this is the kind of thing that really worries me when they decide that, you know, we spend X amount of dollars on our local sheriff's department every year and Eric Prince says he can do it for less.
Right.
Well, we do know that Blackwater, after Katrina hit New Orleans, was one of the first kind of pseudo police forces on the ground.
And at least my understanding of that is that they did it proactively.
They didn't have a government contract for that work.
They simply thought that there was a need and a perceived need anyway, and went in with weapons and APC's to secure essentially security in the city.
Yeah.
Well, and confiscate people's guns and directly violate their rights.
Right.
You know, you bring up you bring up the idea that this is a fascist business.
You know, I guess I can see your point.
But to me, it looks more more typical of just the kind of globalization that's occurring in any industry.
And the regulation certainly is not caught up to to the use of private security contractors.
But, you know, mercenaries have been around since since the beginning of warfare itself.
And the idea that they've become more respectable in recent years is beyond any doubt.
I mean, most of this type of modern the modern mercenary company was really forged in Africa in the 1990s by groups like Executive Outcomes and a little bit later on Sandline International, where, you know, you would take veterans of South Africa's apartheid era special forces and put them into a company, give them a contract, and they would go to countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, what have you, to work for whoever was paying them the most money.
These companies shut down, you know, and made humiliation when revelations about what they were doing actually came to light.
In an Executive Outcomes case, they had a helicopter pilot, you know, who was flying combat missions with machine guns, you know, ahead of Sierra Leonean national forces.
But Eric Prince has is certainly one would think an admirer of these earlier companies, but is smart enough to know that there has to be a PR component to it as well.
And he's been very careful to build a company as far as far as he can that will be able to survive beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond any legal regulation that may be coming down the pike.
Certainly, the Pentagon has shown no indication that it intends to limit the number of contracts that it's granting.
And in fact, by all indications, contracts, defense contracts are increasing or just their fact of life.
And I don't see I don't see companies like Blackwater or Triple Canopy going anywhere anytime soon.
What I do see is eventually the regulation will catch up to practice and perhaps companies like Blackwater will be able to be deployed on missions that are more suited to to their capabilities and their legal standing, such as peacekeeping in Africa, an area that they they truly do want to get into.
They haven't received any real contracts for that type of work yet.
But it seems to me it's much more suitable for a company like Blackwater to be keeping peace than to be playing an active role in a war zone where they are not covered by the laws of war and, as we've seen, can fall through the cracks of legal regulation.
Yeah, see, I got to wonder about that, too.
There's so many private interests at stake in Africa, too, in terms of oil and gold and that kind of thing.
It seems like you're always going to have, you know, like what Pat Robertson owns gold mines in Liberia or something like that.
How long before Blackwater is just protecting him?
Well, again, I mean, you bring up a good point, and I think it's all it has to be an issue of regulation or who's granting certainly who's granting the contracts.
Greystone is a company that was listed on the U.N.'s contractor database as of late last year.
They were pulled out of the database shortly after we inquired to the U.N. about their presence in it and whether they had received any U.N. contracts.
They were temporarily removed from the database pending a U.N. review.
But certainly a company like Greystone, working under a U.N. contract, assuming that it has the proper oversight and assuming that the legal mechanisms are put in place to govern that kind of work, you know, if a company like Greystone is going to exist, which it does, it seems to me that it should be used in a way that it will do the least harm.
And the best way for that is to be nowhere near a hot war.
All right, everybody, that's Bruce Falconer.
He is a reporter in Mother Jones' Washington Bureau.
The new article is Blackwater's World of Warcraft.
Thanks very much for your time today, Bruce.
Thanks very much for having me.
All right, everybody, real quick, last-minute thing on the show here.
Monday, Howard Zinn will be here.
And also I screwed up.
I can't find my footnote about Blackwater cops being hired as local sheriffs.
But I do have an article here from The Washington Post from March 14th, 2006.
Storm Racked Parish considers hired guns contractors in Louisiana would make arrests, carry weapons.
And this is about St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans hiring DynCorp International mercenaries.
They would be deputized.
I'm not exactly sure whether this was all carried out.
And this isn't the footnote I was thinking of, but this was as close as I could find.
They would be deputized to make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department's khaki and black uniforms.
You wouldn't be able to tell the difference between us and them, said Tufaro, who developed the proposal.
OK, that's the end of that.
That's the end of me for today.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
It's Anti-War Radio, KS92.7 in Austin.
We'll be back Monday at 11 o'clock Texas time.
