Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, Jeremy Scahill, 2007

It was the Mogadishu moment of the Iraq war. March 31, 2004: Four American mercenaries are ambushed in the Sunni hotbed of Fallujah, their jeeps set ablaze with the men inside. An angry mob drags their charred corpses through the streets, hanging them from a bridge over the Euphrates River. “Fallujah is the graveyard of the Americans!,” the mob declares in front of the cameras. Within hours, the images spread across the world. The ensuing US slaughter in Fallujah would fuel the fierce Iraqi resistance that haunts US occupation forces to this day. Who were the mercenaries killed in Fallujah and who sent them there to die?

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. Founded by billionaire Erik Prince, the company has 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.

Democracy Now!, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, 20 March 2007.

Winner of the 2007 George Polk Book Award.

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, Harriet A. Washington, 2007

From the era of slavery to the present day, the first full history of black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment.

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of blacks, and the view that they were biologically inferior, oversexed, and unfit for adult responsibilities. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions.
The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read Medical Apartheid, a masterful book that will stir up both controversy and long-needed debate.

The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War’s Buried History, Mark Danner, 2006

The Secret Way to War, with a preface by by Frank Rich, includes Mark Danner’s strongly argued analysis of the Downing Street Memo as well as the complete text of the memo and seven other leaked British documents. Collectively, the documents show the members of Tony Blair’s government and their counterparts in Washington struggling to find legal and political rationales and strategies for regime change in Iraq.

The United States went to war in Iraq to eliminate the threat from Saddam Hussein’ s weapons of mass destruction– which turned out not to exist. As the war drags on, the strange case of the weapons that were not there remains a matter of bitter debate, for it underscores the fact that the goals and the motivations of the Bush administration officials who argued for war are still largely obscure. Yet in fact there exists crucial and little-publicized evidence that lets us understand the secretive, even deceptive, way that the the US launched a war of choice in the Middle East in March 2003.

At the beginning of May 2005, just before the British elections, the London Times published the “Downing Street Memo,” the leaked secret minutes of a July 2002 meeting of senior British intelligence, foreign policy, and security officials. The memo made clear that eight months before the invasion of Iraq, President Bush had already decided on war. The British officials who attended the meeting were told that the “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” that the US wanted to avoid consulting the UN, and that few plans were being made for the aftermath of war.

Largely ignored in the US press for weeks afterward, The New York Review of Books published the memo in its entirety with an extensive commentary by award-winning journalist Mark Danner. Danner explains how the memo clarifies the broader– and largely concealed– history of the events leading up to the Iraq war. He shows that the Bush and Blair administrations advocated the resumption of UN weapons inspections as a means not to avoid war but to ensure it. Most importantly, Danner argues that in the face of the memo’s clear evidence of deception, the press, public, and Congress still have not held the administration responsible.

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk, 2005

A sweeping and dramatic history of the last half century of conflict in the Middle East from an award-winning journalist who has covered the region for over thirty years, The Great War for Civilisation unflinchingly chronicles the tragedy of the region from the Algerian Civil War to the Iranian Revolution; from the American hostage crisis in Beirut to the Iran-Iraq War; from the 1991 Gulf War to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. A book of searing drama as well as lucid, incisive analysis, The Great War for Civilisation is a work of major importance for today’s world.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves, Adam Hochschild, 2005

In 1787, a printer, a lawyer, a cleric, several merchants, and a musician first gathered in a London printing shop to pursue a seemingly impossible goal: ending slavery in the largest empire on earth. In BURY THE CHAINS: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Houghton Mifflin; publication date: January 7, 2004), Adam Hochschild, author of the acclaimed and award-winning King Leopold’s Ghost, crafts a taut, thrilling account of their fight. Their crusade soon became one of the most brilliantly organized citizens’ movements of all time and resulted in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world.

At this point in the eighteenth century, anyone who advocated ending slavery in the British Empire was regarded as either crazy or hopelessly idealistic. Slave labor in the British West Indies, for instance, had turned sugar from a rare luxury for the wealthy into something found on millions of European dinner tables. British ships dominated the slave trade, carrying roughly half the African captives who crossed the Atlantic. Previous attempts to counter this huge and powerful industry by starting an antislavery movement in the world’s largest slave-trading country had gone nowhere. As Hochschild writes, “A latent feeling was in the air, but an intellectual undercurrent disapproving of slavery was something very different from the belief that anything could ever be done about it. An analogy today might be how some people think about automobiles.”

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, Steve Coll, 2004

Ghost Wars, which has taken [Steve Coll] twelve years to write, spells out the CIA’s covert work in Afghanistan ever since the Soviet Union invaded that blighted country in 1979. Coll recounts in detail the CIA’s encouragement and support of the Islamic jihad against the Soviets, and the consequences of this support for the rise of radical Islamists like bin Laden. Not surprisingly, the book gives particular emphasis to the critical period during the late 1990s after bin Laden established himself in Afghanistan and then, with the help of the Taliban regime, began his global jihad against the US and the West.
Coll was able to secure secret documents about the CIA’s operations. He talked not just with its officials, but with spymasters and spies in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other countries. No one else I know of has been able to bring such a broad perspective to bear on the rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events….

Coll’s book is deeply satisfying because it is much more than a treatise on the CIA’s performance. It covers the entire region from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan; shows where al-Qaeda and bin Laden were getting support, discussing in detail bin Laden’s complicated relationship with the Saudis, who had expelled him in 1991 but remained ambivalent about bringing him to justice; and it clarifies the battles over policy among the CIA, the White House, and the US’s principal allies. It’s an inside account written by an outsider….