Meet Blackwater USA, the private army that the US government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. Its contacts run from military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House; it has a military base, a fleet of aircraft and 20,000 troops, but since September 2007 the firm has been hit by a series of scandals that, far from damaging the company, have led to an unprecedented period of expansion.

This revised and updated edition includes Scahill's continued investigative work into one of the outrages of our time: the privatisation of war.

Jeremy Scahill is an unembedded, international journalist. He has covered the war in Iraq; the downfall of Milosevic's government in Serbia; the suppression of oil protests in the Niger Delta; and the use of mercenaries in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina. He was among the only western reporters to gain access to the Abu Ghraib prison when Saddam Hussein was in power. Scahill has won numerous journalism awards, included a prestigious Lannan Foundation fellowship for Blackwater, which is his first book.