Blackwater CIA Updates

Head Mercenary, Erik Prince of Blackwater

With friends like Blackwater, who needs enemies? The infamous mercenary group, Blackwater,  is not just a band of armed killers anymore.  They have been revealed to be soldier/assassins working with the CIA, and working with them in Pakistan and Afghanistan.   Congress didn’t give them authority to be assassins anywhere, much less in Pakistan; after all, they portrayed themselves as “protectors of diplomats”.   This is the continued privitization of the U.S. military, a mlitarized Orwellian group of thugs still thinking it can operate outside the law.

Blackwater still temps in Iraq, but has no legal contract to do so.  President Obama should sever all ties to Blackwater.  Do we still pay them?   I don’t know, but I have been following Blackwater for a long time, and this needs to all  be kept on the record.

From the New York Times — The State Department replaced Blackwater with a rival in May, but the company still does some work for the department in Iraq on a temporary basis.  Five Blackwater guards involved in the shooting are facing federal manslaughter charges, and their trial is scheduled to start in February (2010) in Washington. A sixth guard pleaded guilty in December. The company has never faced criminal charges in the case, although the Iraqi victims brought a civil lawsuit in federal court against Blackwater and Mr. Prince. (source)

Blackwater operating at CIA Pakistan base, ex-official says –Contractor said to be helping to load missiles 11 Dec 2009 — The US contractor terrorist group Blackwater is operating in Pakistan at a secret CIA airfield used for launching drone attacks, according to a former US official, despite repeated government denials that the company is in the country. The official, who had direct knowledge of the operation, said that employees with Blackwater, now renamed Xe Services, patrol the area round the Shamsi airbase in Baluchistan province. He also confirmed that Blackwater employees help to load laser-guided Hellfire missiles on to CIA-operated drone that target ‘al-Qaida’ members suspected of hiding in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border regions, confirming information that surfaced in the US media in the summer.

Mercenaries? CIA Says Expanded Role for Contractors Legitimate –Blackwater, Other Firms Said to Be “Hired Guns” in Iraq, Afghanistan — Combat Role Would Be Against U.S. Law 11 Dec 2009 — The CIA and the military special forces have quietly expanded the role of private contractors, including Blackwater, to include their involvement in raids and secret paramilitary operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, four current and former U.S. military and intelligence officers tell ABC News. American law specifically prohibits the use of private soldiers or mercenaries in combat, according to Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University. “The United States Congress has never approved the use of private contractors for combat operations,” Turley told ABC News in an interview.

Iraq offers one of its choicest oilfields 12 Dec 2009 — Iraq on Saturday offers up one of its choicest oilfields on day two of a contract auction, as the country emerges from the shadow of war and seeks to leap into the top ranks of oil producing nations. The West Qurna Phase Two oilfield, with a massive 12.9 billion barrels of reserves, is expected to produce fierce competition among the 30-odd international oil companies that braved the threat of violence and attacks to come to Baghdad. What happened to the insurgency? There was no “insurgency”. That’s just a label that means, “countrymen who wanted the U.S. out of their country.” In other words, Citizens with Guns Who Aren’t Afraid to Use Them, the very people most American Patriotic Right-wingers aspire to be. Obviously, Blackwater is now protecting the oil companies.

From the Nation: Erik Prince is gray-mailing the U.S. government.

An in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels. . . . In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world’s most famous mercenary’s insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. “The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges,” says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. “He absolutely would not do these things otherwise.”. . . .

There are reportedly two separate Grand Juries investigating Blackwater on a range of serious charges, ranging from gun smuggling to extralegal killings; multiple civil lawsuits alleging war crimes and extrajudicial killings; and Congress is investigating the assassination program in which Prince and his company were central players.

A question not answered by Friday’s New York Times revelation that Blackwater guards were actually taking part in Central Intelligence Agency raids during the Bush Administration is the question of whether private contractors are still doing functions in Afghanistan and Iraq that Americans normally expect U.S. military members to perform.  And it sounds like even members of the Obama Administration who one might expect to have clarity on this, don’t.