Blackwater Turret gunner
Blackwater — who sometimes call themselves Xe– are a mercenary group who’ve been in plenty of legal trouble in the past. They are now operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and allegedly assassinating people at will. These charges come from reporter Jeremy Scahill.
It’s certainly not the policy of the United States to assassinate people — quite the opposite. Assassination is technically illegal. However, according to Jeremy Scahill and his last interview on Democracy Now it’s possible people in our government, even President Obama, don’t know what Blackwater is up and may not be giving the orders to assassinate.
If their operations are ordered by the Pentagon or the U.S. military, taxpayers are footing the bill for these extra-legal shadow military activities. Is this what taxpayers want to fund? Absolutely not. Blackwater should be fired from the employ of the U.S. government and tried for war crimes if these ongoing assassination stories are true. There should also be investigations into who in the government is really ordering this.
Below are many more articles you can read about what Blackwater/Xe has been up to lately, and it’s nothing to be proud of. If these stories are true, and there’s no reason to think they are not, especially given Blackwater’s past, the conclusion can only be that Blackwater is an American-funded terrorist organization.*
Blackwater Mercenaries in Secret War in Pakistan
Jeremy Scahill story in the Nation: Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan
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 direct 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.
Interview on Democracy Now November 24 2009:
Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan
Jeremy Scahill Reveals Private Military Firm Operating in Pakistan Under Covert Assassination and Kidnapping Program
In an explosive new article in The Nation magazine, investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill reveals the private military firm Blackwater is part of a covert program in Pakistan that includes planning the assassination and kidnapping of Taliban and Al-Qaeda suspects. Blackwater is also said to be involved in a previously undisclosed U.S. military drone campaign that has killed scores of people inside Pakistan. The article says the program has become so secretive that top Obama administration and military officials have likely been unaware of its existence. The President of the United States was unaware of these assassination programs??? Apparently so.
The Associated Press: 6 family members killed in Iraq – BAGHDAD — Assailants broke into a house and killed six family members before dawn Wednesday in an area north of Baghdad that was once a stronghold of al-Qaida in Iraq, Iraqi officials said. The dead included a couple and two daughters, and two brothers of the husband, according to a police officer in Tarmiyah, 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of the capital. The throats of two women were slit, while the other four people were shot execution-style; two of the couple’s other children were not harmed. A motive for the attack was not immediately clear. The Tarmiyah officer and a police investigator said the Sunni Arab victims were not affiliated with Sunni militiamen, many of them former insurgents, who joined U.S. forces and turned against al-Qaida in Iraq. The police officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The officer said the three male victims were working as shepherds on a farm near their house. Was this Blackwater? It is typical of how they are now operating.
The following recent stories on Blackwater are from www.legitgov.org
Pakistan Taliban: Explosions linked to Blackwater activities in the country 16 Nov 2009 Attacks that have continued across Pakistani towns and cities are being blamed on Tehreek e-Taliban, Pakistan’s Taliban. However, the group has issued its first video statement denying involvement in targeting civilians and has blamed external forces for at least two recent blasts. Azam Tariq, a spokesman of the Tehreek e-Taliban, posted the video statement on YouTube on Monday… Tariq said Taliban attacks never aimed to target civilians , but that the explosions were linked to Blackwater activities in the country. Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Islamabad, said: “Even when those bomb blasts did happen, the Taliban denied they had anything to do it… There is a growing anger among Pakistanis. If one looks at the type of attacks that have been taking place – indiscriminate attacks – the first thing that came out, even reported by local media, was the blaming of Blackwater and other American agencies.
‘Blackwater behind Peshawar blast’ –Mehsud: US security firm Blackwater, in collaboration with local agencies, was involved in attack 30 Oct 2009 Pakistan’s pro-Taliban militants blame private US security firm Blackwater for a Wednesday bomb blast in Peshawar which killed over 100 people. Hakimullah Mehsud, head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban, said Blackwater and some Pakistani agencies were involved in the bomb explosion at a crowded market in Peshawar. According to the latest reports, the death toll has mounted to 106 with over 150 injured while rescue workers say that more people could still be buried under the debris. Most of the dead were women and children. Mehsud has rejected the claim, saying the US security firm Blackwater, in collaboration with some local agencies, were involved in the attack. On Sunday, about 200 supporters of the Tehrik-e-Taliban party held an anti-US demonstration in Dera Ismail Khan, denouncing Blackwater and chanting anti-US slogans.
U.S. Quietly Speeds Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Military Aid to Pakistan –The number of American Special Forces soldiers and support personnel who are training and ‘advising’ Pakistani Army and paramilitary troops has doubled in the past eight months to 150 29 Oct 2009 The United States has quietly rushed hundreds of millions of dollars in arms, equipment and sophisticated sensors to Pakistani forces in recent months, said senior American and Pakistani officials. During preparations this spring for the Pakistani campaigns in Swat and South Waziristan, President Obama personally intervened at the request of Pakistan’s top army general to speed the delivery of 10 Mi-17 troop transport helicopters… American military surveillance drones are feeding video images and target information to Pakistani ground commanders, and the Pentagon has quietly provided the Pakistani Air Force with high-resolution, infrared sensors for F-16 warplanes, which Pakistan is using to guide bomb attacks on militants’ strongholds in South Waziristan.
US to Give $125 Million to Upgrade Pakistan’s Power Sector 29 Oct 2009 — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seeking to bolster Islamabad’s fight against Islamic extremists US corporaterrorists’ profits, initiated a crash U.S. assistance program for Pakistan’s power sector aimed at rolling back electricity shortages that threaten to cripple the South Asian nation’s economy. Mrs. Clinton, on the first of a three-day diplomatic mission to Pakistan, said that Washington will disburse $125 million to Islamabad for the upgrading of key power stations and transmission lines . U.S. so-called experts are also beginning to work with Pakistani utility companies to reduce power outages and lost revenue caused by outmoded technologies and systemic non-payment by customers, which costs Pakistan hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
*This makes us wonder: who is really running American foreign policy? Is it the military, the Pentagon, the Generals? If so, this needs to be exposed and changed, so we owe a huge thank you to Jeremy Scahill and other investigative reports for exposing these stories. The mainstream media doesn’t bother anymore.
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Who thinks it’s against the law to do away with anyone, whether or not they are a leader of a nation? Allende, Trujillos and others might differ if they knew who/what hit them. How about that other one in late ‘63? Did you ever read ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man’ by John Perkins?
Xe/Blackwater should be fired even if the stories there are not true. There are so many allegations and it seems that if the government cared about stopping it, they would have done something by now. ST knows about it, but the higher-ups don’t know? Come on, get real. That little incident in 2005 should have disqualified them from any further involvement in contracting or having anything to do with what they are now involved in. Why not let the soldiers who are making peanuts do the work or better still: why not withdraw from a place that isn’t their country? There are still plenty of people and spokesliars who can be tried for war crimes even without the entirely worthless Xe.
Even if someone didn’t know this or that was happening, a lot of us would like to know how it is that a bunch of mentally unbalanced Republikkkan$$ can get all these contracts to push their agenda of Rich DeVossing the whole world they don’t blow out of existence so we can all go to their Aryan Valhalla after we spend all our money buying their Fuller Brush products. Mercenaries like those with Xe and those who oppose that word over inadequate semantics are uneconomical and bad for everyone except their own opportunism, even if they weren’t/aren’t committing mischief abroad.