Blackwater - The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007) Jeremy Scahill

Audiobook!
PDF e-book also included.
Seperate e-book links beneath.

by Jeremy Scahill
read by Tom Weiner
14.2 hrs (est.), Published - 10/10/07

A New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller

A largely untold facet of the war on terror is the widespread outsourcing of military tasks to private mercenary companies. Accountable neither to the citizenry nor to standard military legal codes, these largely unregulated corporate armies are being entrusted with ever-greater responsibilities on behalf of the nation.

Meet Blackwater USA, the world’s most secretive, powerful, and fastest growing private army on the planet. Founded by fundamentalist Christian megamillionaire Erik Prince, the scion of a conservative dynasty that bankrolls extreme-right-wing causes, this company of soldiers is now being sent “to the front lines of a global battle, waged largely on Muslim lands, that an evangelical President whom Prince helped put in the White House has boldly defined as a ‘crusade’.”

Ranging from the blood-soaked streets of Fallujah to Washington, D.C., where they are hailed as heroes, this is the dark story of Blackwater’s rise to power.

REVIEWS

“A crackling exposé.”—New York Times Book Review

“The dark, largely unknown story of Blackwater…is chillingly told in Jeremy Scahill's exposé….Tom Weiner has precise diction and a rumbling, authoritative delivery.”—AudioFile

“Jeremy Scahill’s Blackwater would be a masterpiece of the genre of futuristic sci fi were it not so regrettably real....[A] horrifying but necessary read.”—Daily Kos

“This engrossing investigative piece exposing, in shocking detail, a U.S.-government-outsourced Frankenstein replete with helicopter gunships may leave you incredulous. But you better believe it, for it poses a grave and gathering danger to the future of our Republic.”—Ray McGovern, CIA veteran and former intelligence briefer to George H. W. Bush

“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

“Should our nation enter a period of instability following another terrorist attack on American soil, an economic collapse, or a series of environmental disasters, the tyranny that groups such as Blackwater impose on others could become the tyranny they impose on us. The rise of this unchecked mercenary force, as Jeremy Scahill understands, could presage the final stage in the collapse of American democracy.”—Chris Hedges, former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief

JEREMY SCAHILL is a frequent contributor to The Nation and a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now! He is currently a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute. A two-time winner of the prestigious George Polk Award, Scahill has reported extensively from Iraq, and his exposure of the presence of Blackwater forces in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina sparked a Congressional inquiry and an internal Department of Homeland Security investigation. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army [Revised and Updated]
Nation Books | 2008 | ISBN: 156858394X | Pages: 550 | PDF | 1.20 MB

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.

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Meet Blackwater USA, the powerful private army that the U.S. government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. With its own military base, a fleet of twenty aircraft, and twenty-thousand troops at the ready, Blackwater is the elite Praetorian Guard for the "global war on terror"-- yet most people have never heard of it. It was the moment the war turned: On March 31, 2004, four Americans were ambushed and burned near their jeeps by an angry mob in the Sunni stronghold of Falluja. Their charred corpses were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. The ensuing slaughter by U.S. troops would fuel the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts occupation forces to this day. But these men were neither American military nor civilians. They were highly trained private soldiers sent to Iraq by a secretive mercenary company based in the wilderness of North Carolina. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army is the unauthorized story of the epic rise of one of the most powerful and secretive forces to emerge from the U.S. military-industrial complex, hailed by the Bush administration as a revolution in military affairs, but considered by others as a dire threat to American democracy.

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* Winner of the George Polk Book Award
* Alternet Best Book of the Year
* Barnes & Noble one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2007
* Amazon one of the Best Nonfiction Books of 2007

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