Name: Blackwater
ISBN: 9781568583945

Blackwater

On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad's Nisour Square leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled "Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor U.S. soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for the secretive mercenary company, Blackwater Worldwide. This is the explosive story of a company that rose a decade ago from Moyock, North Carolina, to become one of the most powerful players in the "War on Terror." In his gripping bestseller, awardwinning journalist Jeremy Scahill takes us from the bloodied streets of Iraq to hurricane-ravaged New Orleans to the chambers of power in Washington, to expose Blackwater as the frightening new face of the U.S. war machine.

What Hacker News says

theoriqueJul 2012

The book on Blackwater written by the journalist Jeremy Scahill has a lot of interesting background on Prado. Also, "American Desperado" (great book, also by Evan Wright) talks about some of Prado's interesting involvement in drug importation into Florida in the 1980s.

Sounds like an interesting guy, but probably not someone you want to meet in a dark alley.

Edit:

The Scahill book is http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-...

The Wright book is http://www.amazon.com/American-Desperado-Life---Soldier-Gove...

I've read both and highly recommend them.

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shepardrtcApr 2016

The article said nothing about Erik Prince being a crazy Christian zealot. But you're probably thinking of previous work by one of the authors of this article, Jeremy Scahill, who has written many other articles and a couple of books about Erik Prince and Blackwater.

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NrsolisJun 2013

Just because it doesn't look like the job of the most likely agency of the USG to do doesn't mean that it wasn't some other part of the USG that did it. The oversight and internal motivations of the USG (indeed, any government) aren't uniform. Not by a long shot.

Case in point: JSOC developed their own intelligence capability that was a rival to that of the CIA and used it for their own purposes. That was one of the things that the DoD did that seems to replicate a capability available elsewhere in the USG and almost entirely for the purpose of escaping oversight.

BTW, Jeremy Scahill (author of Blackwater and Dirty Wars) reported that HIS laptop was hacked. When you combine this with the surveillance of AP reporters and it does seem that certain parts of the USG seem to feel that journalists are worthy and legitimate intelligence targets.

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