Jeremy Scahill Videos

President Obama is expected to announce that he will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan next week. In the wake of that decision, discussion of the consequences of United States intervention around the world becomes even more important. It's not only wars that produce blowback for the US; training and funding for right-leaning groups in Latin America has been a long-standing source of resentment and anger around the world.Today on GRITtv, we look back at the effects of US intervention in Latin America and connect the patterns to the current situations in Afghanistan and Iraq with Christian Parenti, Nation contributor and author of The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror , Rev. Luis Barrios, chair of the Department of Latin American & Latina/o Studies at John Jay College in New York,

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus. So begins independent journalist Jeremy Scahill's latest bombshell story on the private security contractor formerly known as Blackwater. Published Monday at TheNation.com, the story details Blackwater's covert activities, which are unaccountable to Congress in way that even CIA activities are not. Scahill, the author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army , has reported on Blackwater for years. He joined Laura in the GRITtv studio to talk about this latest development in the story of the company that seems to pop back up in conflict zones over and over again.

Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill says of the attack on ACORN, "It's part of the broader attack on the poor of this country, the broader attack on the working people of this country, and ultimately the broader attack on democracy in this country." With this new video from Brave New Films, we look at the Republican witch hunt against ACORN's work with the poor and people of color, and the motivations behind it.

Jeremy Scahill explains why a small group of Democratic lawmakers are pushing back against efforts to cut off funding to ACORN. If ACORN is targeted for fraud and abuse of federal funds, military contractors, drug companies, and a long list of corporations that continue to receive massive federal contracts despite well documented wrong doing should be next. A new act introduced by Minnesota Democrat Betty McCollum in response to the Defund ACORN Act is titled the "Against Corporations Organizing to Rip-off the Nation Act of 2009." You can find out more in Scahill's article in this week's issue of the Nation.

The first time I heard of Blackwater was around the Katrina disaster in New Orleans. We started hearing reports that there was a private army that was running around, guarding hotels and preventing people from taking refuge and seeking shelter as they fled from the horrors of the 9th Ward. At first we thought they were security guards, but later learned they were navy seals, and ex military men who had come in from Iraq and were given full authority to shoot and kill, detain folks and basically run the show. The word was these guys were scary and out of control. Those early reports were later confirmed by journalist Jeremy Scahill who went down to New Orleans and pretty much let us know that just like Saddam Hussein had his special Revolutionary Guard, George Bush and friends had their own army of sorts in the form of Blackwater.. Headed up by former elite Navy Seal and fundamentalist Christian, Erik Prince, Blackwater epitomized the growing trend to outsource all aspects o...