AMY GOODMAN: I want to talk about the future of Blackwater and also the bases here in the United States. But first, let me play for you a little exchange I had with Barack Obama, asking him about Blackwater. He had come to Cooper Union a few months ago to talk about the economy, and afterwards in the rope line, I asked him.

AMY GOODMAN: Would you call for a ban on the private military contractors like Blackwater?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: I’ve actually—I’m the one who sponsored the bill that called for the investigation of Blackwater in [inaudible], so—

AMY GOODMAN: But would you support the Sanders one now?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Here’s the problem: we have 140,000 private contractors right there, so unless we want to replace all of or a big chunk of those with US troops, we can’t draw down the contractors faster than we can draw down our troops. So what I want to do is draw—I want them out in the same way that we make sure that we draw out our own combat troops. Alright? I mean, I—

AMY GOODMAN: Not a ban?

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: Well, I don’t want to replace those contractors with more US troops, because we don’t have them, alright? But this was a speech about the economy.

AMY GOODMAN: The war is costing $3 trillion, according to Stiglitz.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA: That’s what—I know, which I made a speech about last week. Thank you.


AMY GOODMAN: That was Barack Obama.

JEREMY SCAHILL: This is interesting. I mean, this is one of the more interesting exchanges I’ve seen with a presidential candidate on this issue. I mean, it almost never gets raised at all.

Barack Obama—this is the reality about this. Barack Obama understands this issue extremely well. His staff has been on top of this for quite some time. He—what he said to you is true. He did introduce the legislation in the Senate that has become the Democrats’ official legislation on these private security companies, and he did it eight months before Nisour Square. So, clearly, Barack Obama is someone who has been following this very closely. He understands it very intimately.

What’s interesting—and you raised this with him—is that he won’t take the step toward actually trying to ban these companies. Representative Jan Schakowsky and Senator Bernie Sanders have put forward legislation called the Stop Outsourcing Security Act in the Congress, and Barack Obama has said he’s not going to come onboard and support that legislation.

Interestingly, when I reported in The Nation that Obama would not support that legislation, which seeks to ban the use of these companies in US war zones, Hillary Clinton, five days before the Texas and Ohio primaries, the day my piece comes out, she responds by putting a statement on her website saying that she’s going to endorse Bernie Sanders’ legislation, and she becomes the single most important US political figure to come out for a ban. Now, I’m glad that Hillary Clinton did that, and I look forward to her making this one of her top legislative priorities after the primary season is over.

But on Barack Obama, he’s in a very complicated situation, because his Iraq plan actually is not a plan to end the occupation of Iraq. It’s to continue it with a different label attached to it. And so, you hear him there talking about how “I don’t want to replace contractors with US troops.” The reality is, and Barack Obama knows this very well, his Iraq plan could not be implemented if he was against the use of Blackwater or other private security forces. And the reality is, he’s probably going to have to use these companies for two to three years at a minimum, unless he makes it an aggressive point of trying to shut them down. He might even have to use Blackwater for the first year of his administration.

www.democracynow.org/2008/6/...ahill_on