Eric Prince, head of the company formerly known as Blackwater, must be one murderous thug good Christian Businessman. Or a really good bud of Satan Dick Cheney. Apparently, according to The New York Times, the CIA hired his firm to do their wet work (that’s super secret spy lingo for foreign assassinations) because why dirty your own hands when an allegedly homicidal fanatic for hire Good Christian Businessman will do the work for you. For a small profit, of course. After all, we are not communists:
WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials. […]
The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said. […]
Officials said the C.I.A. did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune. Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program. […]
A Xe spokeswoman did not return calls seeking comment.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee, also declined to give details of the program. But she praised Mr. Panetta for notifying Congress. “It is too easy to contract out work that you don’t want to accept responsibility for,” she said.
I guess even the spooks got a little spooked by Mr. Prince. Nice to know some of them worry about the legal niceties of hiring mercenaries. I wonder how much money Mr. Prince made off this “off the books” deal? Or maybe he was just doing it for his pleasure. And with all the shoes dropping over this program you have to wonder also if the reason Prince’s contract was dropped by the CIA was because they noticed the his company wasn’t exactly all that discreet when it came to murder for hire. Indeed, they were downright sloppy about it, and rather indiscriminate to boot. Allegedly.
A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.”
I wonder if Blackwater’s notorious record of slaughtering innocent civilians in Iraq mad the CIA back away from this “deal” especially after the well publicized massacre of Iraqi civilians in It also makes me wonder if Mr. Prince has any connection to any of the astroturf groups that created the “grass roots” protesters known as “tea baggers.” I mean, now that he has all this time on his hands. The idea of bring guns to public appearances by President Obama certainly strikes me as the sort of “tactic of intimidation” Prince could have suggested. But hey, that’s just me speculating.
Then again, who ever imagined Prince would be hired by the CIA in the first place. Allegedly. Or murder his own employees to keep their mouths shut. Allegedly. Or consider that he was on a mission from God to mount a crusade against Muslims. Allegedly.
… Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.
Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”
Now just imagine what would happen if the Republican party, in its current iteration, ever regained power. The Republican politicians now so vociferously complaining about Obama’s “death panels” would likely be hiring Prince and Blackwater Xe to do more than just have a rousing good time going on killing sprees in Iraq. And the assassination squads wouldn’t be limited to Muslim “jihadists.” In my opinion.
And there are gun-toting wingnuts showing up at Obama’s town hall meetings saying he’s a Muslim. Any questions?
The same Town Hall mobs who screech about socialism, weep over gramma’s death panel, & who pull their guns to be heard are the same ones who chose to live in ignorance while the Bush administration compromised the very core of their American souls.
I doubt if the CIA is leery of Erik Prince. Given his history, Prince is undoubtedly CIA. His history in the Navy Seals and his work in right-wing Repub politics and his internship with GHW Bush (remember what he did before he was VP?) all indicate a spook background.
He also has that scent of European background that suggests some family members may have been beneficiaries of Operation Paperclip, his mother being of Dutch origin whose family apparently arrived here in the years after WWII. (I know, this is a reach, but you see it over and over. Von Spakovsky’s family, for ex.)
The CIA has for decades played the game of off-the-books entrepreneurs who do the dirty work in exchange for government protection. Government contracts are steered to “friends” and often are invisible because of the CIA’s secrecy. You see CIA contractors showing up running private airlines that are flying in drugs, flying out Saudi royals, flying out renditionals, moving weapons around the world. CIA contractors and connected businessmen turned up in the S&L collapse in the eighties, the Vatican banking scandal before and BCCI after. Wherever there’s money to be stolen you’ll find someone with a connection to the CIA.
The advantage to this arrangement is that this breed of criminal gets to do his work with protection. If he goes too far or just is unlucky enough to get busted the CIA has a deniability. Murder? Assassination? Child prostitutes? Drugs? Hey, all in a day’s work.
Now take a step back and view the terrain. There is no moral difference between George H. W. Bush and a gangster. There are advantages to the elder Bush’s criminality: He operates a much bigger enterprise which causes greater damage to the public, because his criminal scams are disguised as government policy he wears the veneer of respectability, and the CIA always has a get-out-of-jail-free card. Maybe once in awhile a Prince gets exposed, but the enterprise as a whole continues.
Once we signed the contracts with Prince we set ourselves in play to allow Prince & Blackwater to become the face of the US in the Arab world. There’s no running from that.
This stuff is scaring the bejeebers out of me. Planned assassinations of people within and without the US; dirty contract performed by gangster types, drug running and gun running around the world; 21st century crusaders killing people of Muslim faith in the name of the Christian God and being paid by an agency of the US Government. Gosh, where does it all end? And, can we, by any stretch of the imagination, clean the filth out of the Potomac stables (called the nation’s capital)? I hate to do down without a fight but I don’t know where to start.
Sounds like you need a history lesson:
The US has been involved in this sort of nonsense since the beginning.
Is this the part that shocked Leon Panetta re: Cheney’s assassination squad? That it was outsourced to a high-profile egomaniac? I mean, the CIA has been doing this kind of thing for-evah but their sub-contractors tended to be unknown… and unknowable.
Does Xe have any clients BESIDES the US government? They seem like really thuggish mercs, not ones you’d want at all unless they are expendable.
Of course the Agency didn’t have a contract with Blackwater, isn’t that what those huge “REWARDS” were for, to pay off operators for offing the most wanted? Offer a few million for the head of some wanted person, and let private enterprise do the dirty work of our govt. Nice and neat, and the CIA never got their hands dirty.