Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

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Description

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 miltiary 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

Meticulously researched and fascinating ... Scahill does a fine job * Sunday Times *
Scahill deserves commendation. * New Statesman *
Blackwater is the utterly gripping and explosive story of how the Bush Administration has spent hundreds of millions of public dollars building a parallel corporate army, an army so loyal to far right causes it constitutes nothing less than a Republican Guard. The most important and chilling book about the death throes of U.S. democracy you will read in years and a triumph of investigative reporting. -- Naomi Klein, author No Logo
An explosive piece of investigative journalism -- Ben Myers * Shortlist *
Of all the insane Bush privatization efforts, none is more frightening than the corporatizing of military combat forces. Jeremy Scahill admirably exposes a devastating example of this sinister scheme. -- Michael Moore, Academy Award Winning Director
A powerful argument against the privatisation of war... exemplary... If the job of writing about "the rise of the world's most powerful mercenary army" seems mightily ambitious, it has been undertaken by just the right person... he's the sort of writer who sets out the evidence and lets us make up our own minds * Big Issue *
Revelatory -- Aimee Shalan * Guardian *
An exhaustively well-researched expose -- Alastair Mabbott * Herald *
[A] revealing study -- Tom Widger * Sunday Tribune *

Author Bio

Jeremy Scahill is an unembedded, international journalist. He has covered the war in Iraq; the downfall of Milosevic s government in Serbia; the role of the Chevron oil corporation in the massacre of protesting villagers in the Niger Delta; and the involvement of mercenaries in New Orleans following 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. Blackwater is his first book.