Jeremy Scahill | May 25, 2010
The United States military is in the process of taking bids from private war contractors to secure and ship massive amounts of US military equipment through sensitive areas of Pakistan into Afghanistan where it will then be distributed to various US Forward Operating Bases and other facilities. According to the contract solicitation [1] [PDF], "There will be an average of 5000" import shipments "transiting the Afghanistan and Pakistan ground lines of communication (GLOC) per month, along with 500 export shipments." The solicitation states that, "This number may increase or decrease due to US military transportation requirements," adding, "The contractor must maintain a constant capability to surge to any location within Afghanistan or Pakistan" within a 30-day period. Among the duties the contractor will perform is "intelligence, to include threat assessments throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan."
And while it seems the US is trying to put a Pakistani or Afghan face on the work, the terms of the contract mandate that US personnel will be involved with inherently risky and potentially lethal operations. Among the firms listed [2] by the Department of Defense as "interested vendors" are an Afghan firm tied to a veteran CIA officer and run by the son of Afghan defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, and a Pakistani firm with links to Blackwater.
Perhaps most striking about this US military contract solicitation is the admission by the military that contractors are being used for shipping and guarding military hardware as a run-around to the current official policy of the US and Pakistan governments that the US military does not conduct operations in Pakistan. "Due to current limitations on having US military presence in Pakistan and threat levels precluding US Military active involvement with the contractor 'outside the wire' in Afghanistan, the contractor must be proactive at identifying appropriate methods for obtaining the necessary in-transit visibility information," according to the contract solicitation.
Many of the companies that have currently expressed interest in the contract are registered as Pakistani or Afghan businesses. It is well established that the US military depends on Pakistani and Afghan intermediaries to pay off [3] the Taliban and other resistance groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan to allow safe passage of US military hardware and other supplies, meaning the US is effectively funding both sides of the war. As my colleague Aram Roston reported [3] last year for The Nation, "US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents." Other US military sources have told me the number might be as high as 20 percent.
The current contracting arrangement for which the DoD is soliciting bids is essentially a more formalized way of doing the same thing. But while the contractor may place a Pakistani or Afghan stamp on the paper trail and allow the US and Pakistan to deny that US personnel are involved, the security language of the solicitation actually mandates that US personnel work the operations.
According to the solicitation, the contractor must provide personnel "capable of facilitating, coordinating, obtaining, and reporting critical movement control data and information from the appropriate US government personnel at multiple locations." The personnel must "have the ability to obtain necessary identification... to gain access to base camps within Afghanistan without escort." Most importantly, "Personnel must have a valid US Secret Security Clearance." That level of clearance--"Secret"-- cannot be issued to a foreign citizen, meaning that the contract actually necessitates US citizens working on the contract, presumably in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
This arrangement is not new. In fact, this is precisely the arrangement I reported on last year for The Nation (See: "The Secret US War in Pakistan" [4]). According to Blackwater and US military sources, US military shipments were being protected on a contract with Kestral Logistics, a powerful Pakistani firm, which specializes in military logistical support, private security and intelligence consulting. It is staffed with former high-ranking Pakistani army and government officials. A former senior Blackwater executive with experience in Pakistan told me that Kestral subcontracted to Blackwater and that "Blackwater has provided convoy security for Defense Department shipments destined for Afghanistan that would arrive in the port at Karachi. Blackwater, according to the former executive, would guard the supplies as they were transported overland from Karachi to Peshawar and then west through the Torkham border crossing, the most important supply route for the US military in Afghanistan." Blackwater, he said, was paid by the Pakistani government through Kestral for consulting services. "That gives the Pakistani government the cover to say, 'Hey, no, we don't have any Westerners doing this. It's all local and our people are doing it.' But it gets them the expertise that Westerners provide for [counterterrorism]-related work," according to the former Blackwater executive.
All of this is consistent with the US military's current contract solicitation. What's more, Kestral is listed as an "interested vendor" on the current DoD contract. According to federal lobbying records, Kestral has hired former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs Roger Noriega, who served in that post from 2003 to 2005, to lobby the US government, including the State Department, USAID and Congress, on foreign affairs issues "regarding [Kestral's] capabilities to carry out activities of interest to the United States." Noriega was hired through his firm, Vision Americas, which he runs with Christina Rocca, a former CIA operations official who served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 2001 to 2006 and was deeply involved in shaping US policy toward Pakistan. Since late 2009, Kestral has paid Vision Americas and a Vision Americas-affiliated firm, Firecreek Ltd., at least $60,000 to lobby on defense and foreign policy issues.
Another company that is listed as an "interested vendor" is NCL Holdings. "What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles," according to Roston's reporting [3] for The Nation in November, "is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan's current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets." Roston reported that NCL's advisory board included Milton Bearden, "a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as 'a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.' It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser." Bearden is no longer listed on NCL's website [5] as a member of the advisory board. Roston reported that in Afghanistan, "NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister's son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company [Watan Risk Management] owned by President Karzai's cousins, for protection." In a letter [6] to a US Congressional committee after Roston's story was published, NCL denied the allegations.
The bulk of the work in protecting US military shipments through Pakistan and Afghanistan is done for the military's Surface Deployment and Distribution Command [7], which, according to the SDDC website [8], "support[s] the transportation management of freight such as tanks, fuel, ammunition, combat vehicles, food and other commodities to locations within CONUS [Continental United States] and throughout the world." According to the Afghanistan/Pakistan solicitation, the contractor will transport and secure "SDDC and other US military-sponsored shipments entering Pakistan via Karachi or Port Qasim (all terminals) and entering Afghanistan via the Chaman, Torkham, Hairaton, Sher Khan, and / or Towraghandi border crossings (import) and exiting Afghanistan and Pakistan via the aforementioned nodes (export). Additional entry and exit nodes may be added at the discretion of the US Government."
Once the contractor takes control of the military shipments, at "predestinated locations" throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, the contractor is required to deliver reports back to the US military's contracting command. These include "ports, border crossings, official and unofficial checkpoints and rest stops, and final destinations / base camps within the OEF (Operation Enduring Freedom) theater of operations."
Many of these shipments will come into Pakistan through the Ports of Karachi and Qasim and the military lists the following as potential additional areas through which shipments would pass:
In Pakistan: Quetta, Peshawar, Torkham, and Chaman.
In Afghanistan: Torkham, Chaman, Hairaton, Kabul (Supreme / Camp Phoenix / Afghan National Army-Afghan National Police Depots, Jalalabad, Bagram, Shank, Sharona, Salerno, Kandahar, and Bastion / Leatherneck.
The solicitation essentially leaves oversight of the shipments to a combination of technology and self-policing. RFID (radio frequency identification) tags are placed on the cargo and the contractor is required to document the movement of the shipments using Hand Held Interrogator devices throughout the trip. Though they sound ominous, the HHIs are mobile devices commonly used in austere locations to transmit data. "Due to restrictions on the military presence at key logistical locations in Afghanistan and Pakistan," the solicitation states, "quality assurance on... shipments is problematic. Therefore, the contractor must document and report any deficiencies found." According to the solicitation, "Common violations" include: failure to properly secure cargo, failure to take proper measures to prevent damage, and improper use of US Government equipment."
Read the contract solicitation here [1] [PDF]
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/pentagon-seeks-private-contractor-move-weapons-through-pakis tanafghanistan
Links:
[1] http:// http://s3.amazonaws.com/thenation/pdf/pakistan-logistics-watermark.pdf
[2] https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=3eb262d38cd1717ff5853b5778510755&tab=ivl&tabmode=list&subtab=list&subtabmode=list&=
[3] http://www.thenation.com/print/article/how-us-funds-taliban
[4] http://www.thenation.com/article/secret-us-war-pakistan
[5] http://www.nclholdings.com/about/board-of-advisors
[6] http://www.nclholdings.com/news-events/4/59-statement-of-hamed-l-wardak&Itemid=40
[7] http://www.sddc.army.mil/Public/Home
[8] http://www.sddc.army.mil/public/Global Cargo Distribution/
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Blackwater's CEO: We Are Fighting "Barbarians" in the Middle East
by Jake Horowitz
Ever wonder what's inside the mind of the world's most powerful private military contractor? Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, seldom makes public appearances. The few times he's made speeches in public, he has attempted to ban journalists from attending and prevented audience members from recording or videotaping his remarks.
Fortunately, The Nation's investigative sleuth Jeremy Scahill has managed to obtain a rare audio recording of a recent private speech delivered by Prince at the University of Michigan this past January.
The result is an absolutely stunning window into the worldview of the man who somehow continues to secure billions of dollars of the American taxpayers' money by winning government contracts to fight the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan.
In front of an audience of ROTC commanders and cadets, military veterans, and entrepreneurs, Prince delivered a speech entitled, "Overcoming Adversity: Leadership at the Tip of the Spear," in which the Blackwater CEO touched on a range of issues associated with the fight against terrorism and America's military involvement in the Middle East. Fortunately, Scahill was able to place a contact inside the meeting, who managed to capture Prince's remarks by clandestinely recording the speech underneath his seat.
I'd strongly encourage you to listen to the recording, as there are simply too many troubling statements to take up here. But here are some of the highlights lowlights:
- When asked whether he was concerned whether Blackwater's secretive mercenary operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan stood outside the bounds of protection under the Geneva Conventions, Prince dismissively replied, "absolutely not because the people we are fighting are barbarians and they crawled out of a sewer." (Note: In acknowledging that Blackwater is indeed operating in Pakistan, Prince seems to have backtracked on his prior statements, as well as those of the Obama administration and the Pakistani government). Speaking in gross and offensive generalizations, Prince tarnished all of the people of the Middle East with the same brush, remarking that "They are [all] there to kill us," and "they have a 1200 AD mentality. They don't even know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there."
- Prince suggested that Iran is "at the absolute dead center ... of badness" and charged that the Iranian government was trying to acquire nuclear weapons as part of a "master plan to stir up and organize a Shi'a revolt through the whole region." In order to reverse this spread of Iranian influence, Prince proposed that the U.S. government hire Blackwater to be deployed as a private army in Yemen, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia. He suggested that using private contractors to roll-back Iran's "sinister hand" would be cost-effective, politically expedient, and would allow for a "very, very small, very light footprint."
- Prince also proposed sending in Blackwater troops to fight "terrorists" in the oil-rich nation of Nigeria, to counter the growing influence of "criminal syndicates" that are "stealing" oil and using the revenue to "fund terrorist organizations." He failed to mention that the presence of multinational U.S-based oil corporations on Nigerian soil — and the human rights abuses and pollution associated with these companies' business operations — have sparked much of the opposition throughout the country.
- Prince cited instances in which Blackwater forces operating in Afghanistan resupplied a U.S. military unit, and even called in U.S. military airstrikes near the Pakistan border, because there is too much "lawyering" involved with the U.S. military chain of command.
Prince's culturally-imperialistic statements reflecting his Christian-crusader mentality — in which Blackwater represents a force of unparalleled "good" fighting a barbaric, anti-modern, and homogenous people of "evil" — are profoundly unsettling, raising serious questions about why the Obama administration continues to employ his company in Iraq and the Af-Pak region. But, Prince's contentions that Blackwater has in various instances superseded the military chain of command by calling in airstrikes and resupplying U.S. military convoys sound an even louder alarm — confirming that private military contractors are able to operate unilaterally, with little oversight, and above the rules of warfare.
Given Blackwater's egregious track record on compliance with international law — take the Iraqi Nisour Square massacre as just one example — the possibility of a Blackwater "A-Team" patrolling the streets of San'a, Riyadh, Lagos, or Mogadishu is altogether unacceptable and should make you quiver.
Fortunately, we can prevent this from happening. Join the effort to tell Congress to stop outsourcing our security to Blackwater and other private military contractors operating outside the bounds of international law. Don't allow this company to continue to secure lucrative government contracts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Ever wonder what's inside the mind of the world's most powerful private military contractor? Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, seldom makes public appearances. The few times he's made speeches in public, he has attempted to ban journalists from attending and prevented audience members from recording or videotaping his remarks.
Fortunately, The Nation's investigative sleuth Jeremy Scahill has managed to obtain a rare audio recording of a recent private speech delivered by Prince at the University of Michigan this past January.
The result is an absolutely stunning window into the worldview of the man who somehow continues to secure billions of dollars of the American taxpayers' money by winning government contracts to fight the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan.
In front of an audience of ROTC commanders and cadets, military veterans, and entrepreneurs, Prince delivered a speech entitled, "Overcoming Adversity: Leadership at the Tip of the Spear," in which the Blackwater CEO touched on a range of issues associated with the fight against terrorism and America's military involvement in the Middle East. Fortunately, Scahill was able to place a contact inside the meeting, who managed to capture Prince's remarks by clandestinely recording the speech underneath his seat.
I'd strongly encourage you to listen to the recording, as there are simply too many troubling statements to take up here. But here are some of the highlights lowlights:
- When asked whether he was concerned whether Blackwater's secretive mercenary operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan stood outside the bounds of protection under the Geneva Conventions, Prince dismissively replied, "absolutely not because the people we are fighting are barbarians and they crawled out of a sewer." (Note: In acknowledging that Blackwater is indeed operating in Pakistan, Prince seems to have backtracked on his prior statements, as well as those of the Obama administration and the Pakistani government). Speaking in gross and offensive generalizations, Prince tarnished all of the people of the Middle East with the same brush, remarking that "They are [all] there to kill us," and "they have a 1200 AD mentality. They don't even know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there."
- Prince suggested that Iran is "at the absolute dead center ... of badness" and charged that the Iranian government was trying to acquire nuclear weapons as part of a "master plan to stir up and organize a Shi'a revolt through the whole region." In order to reverse this spread of Iranian influence, Prince proposed that the U.S. government hire Blackwater to be deployed as a private army in Yemen, Somalia, and Saudi Arabia. He suggested that using private contractors to roll-back Iran's "sinister hand" would be cost-effective, politically expedient, and would allow for a "very, very small, very light footprint."
- Prince also proposed sending in Blackwater troops to fight "terrorists" in the oil-rich nation of Nigeria, to counter the growing influence of "criminal syndicates" that are "stealing" oil and using the revenue to "fund terrorist organizations." He failed to mention that the presence of multinational U.S-based oil corporations on Nigerian soil — and the human rights abuses and pollution associated with these companies' business operations — have sparked much of the opposition throughout the country.
- Prince cited instances in which Blackwater forces operating in Afghanistan resupplied a U.S. military unit, and even called in U.S. military airstrikes near the Pakistan border, because there is too much "lawyering" involved with the U.S. military chain of command.
Prince's culturally-imperialistic statements reflecting his Christian-crusader mentality — in which Blackwater represents a force of unparalleled "good" fighting a barbaric, anti-modern, and homogenous people of "evil" — are profoundly unsettling, raising serious questions about why the Obama administration continues to employ his company in Iraq and the Af-Pak region. But, Prince's contentions that Blackwater has in various instances superseded the military chain of command by calling in airstrikes and resupplying U.S. military convoys sound an even louder alarm — confirming that private military contractors are able to operate unilaterally, with little oversight, and above the rules of warfare.
Given Blackwater's egregious track record on compliance with international law — take the Iraqi Nisour Square massacre as just one example — the possibility of a Blackwater "A-Team" patrolling the streets of San'a, Riyadh, Lagos, or Mogadishu is altogether unacceptable and should make you quiver.
Fortunately, we can prevent this from happening. Join the effort to tell Congress to stop outsourcing our security to Blackwater and other private military contractors operating outside the bounds of international law. Don't allow this company to continue to secure lucrative government contracts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Monday, May 17, 2010
Blackwater's makeover
By Jia Lynn Yang, writer
May 17, 2010: 6:11 AM ET
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/17/news/companies/blackwater_makeover.fortune/index.htm#comme nts
(Fortune) -- Blackwater wants you to forget everything you've ever heard about it: The 2007 shootings at Nisour Square in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, the allegations of bribery and weapons violations, the relations with Iraqis that deteriorated so badly the company was kicked out of the country altogether. A year ago the military contractor adopted a new name, Xe (pronounced zee, and short for the inert gas xenon), and a new CEO, Joseph Yorio.
But has Blackwater really changed? Controversial founder Erik Prince, chairman and sole owner of the company, insists he has turned over all the company's operations to Yorio, a former Green Beret and shipping executive. Yet the company's problems -- including its reputation for arrogance and cutting corners in the field -- won't go away overnight.
Since leaving Iraq, the company has returned to its roots, training military and law enforcement officers. That's how Blackwater began in 1997, when Prince opened a huge training facility in Moyock, N.C. ("Blackwater" is a reference to the dark swampy water that runs throughout the compound.) Now the company is in the running to win a $1 billion contract to train Afghanistan's national police force, a job so important that it could determine how long the U.S. military remains in that country.
The contract in Afghanistan, which the Pentagon will award early next year, could go a long way in improving Xe's financial outlook. Yorio tells Fortune the company lost half its revenue when it left Iraq. (The private company won't disclose figures, but sources say at its peak Blackwater had annual sales north of $1 billion.)
But its reputation continues to take hits. In May, five former employees were charged with weapons violations, and Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, held hearings earlier this year pinpointing reckless behavior by the company under its subcontract to train the Afghan National Army. Levin has also sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it should consider Blackwater's past problems in Afghanistan as it decides whether to award the company a new contract to train the country's police.
Yorio acknowledges the challenges he faces in running a tarnished business, but he says the changes at Xe aren't just cosmetic: a new compliance officer who used to work at the State Department now vets all Xe projects to make sure employees follow government rules and protocols.
The upshot: Xe wants to reinvent itself into what founder Prince calls "a normal, regular business." (Competitors in the training business include DynCorp and Triple Canopy.) But if the company succeeds in winning the $1 billion contract in Afghanistan, Prince should expect more intense scrutiny. He should know better than anyone: there's nothing normal or regular about working in a war zone.
May 17, 2010: 6:11 AM ET
http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/17/news/companies/blackwater_makeover.fortune/index.htm#comme nts
(Fortune) -- Blackwater wants you to forget everything you've ever heard about it: The 2007 shootings at Nisour Square in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead, the allegations of bribery and weapons violations, the relations with Iraqis that deteriorated so badly the company was kicked out of the country altogether. A year ago the military contractor adopted a new name, Xe (pronounced zee, and short for the inert gas xenon), and a new CEO, Joseph Yorio.
But has Blackwater really changed? Controversial founder Erik Prince, chairman and sole owner of the company, insists he has turned over all the company's operations to Yorio, a former Green Beret and shipping executive. Yet the company's problems -- including its reputation for arrogance and cutting corners in the field -- won't go away overnight.
Since leaving Iraq, the company has returned to its roots, training military and law enforcement officers. That's how Blackwater began in 1997, when Prince opened a huge training facility in Moyock, N.C. ("Blackwater" is a reference to the dark swampy water that runs throughout the compound.) Now the company is in the running to win a $1 billion contract to train Afghanistan's national police force, a job so important that it could determine how long the U.S. military remains in that country.
The contract in Afghanistan, which the Pentagon will award early next year, could go a long way in improving Xe's financial outlook. Yorio tells Fortune the company lost half its revenue when it left Iraq. (The private company won't disclose figures, but sources say at its peak Blackwater had annual sales north of $1 billion.)
But its reputation continues to take hits. In May, five former employees were charged with weapons violations, and Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, held hearings earlier this year pinpointing reckless behavior by the company under its subcontract to train the Afghan National Army. Levin has also sent a letter to the Pentagon saying it should consider Blackwater's past problems in Afghanistan as it decides whether to award the company a new contract to train the country's police.
Yorio acknowledges the challenges he faces in running a tarnished business, but he says the changes at Xe aren't just cosmetic: a new compliance officer who used to work at the State Department now vets all Xe projects to make sure employees follow government rules and protocols.
The upshot: Xe wants to reinvent itself into what founder Prince calls "a normal, regular business." (Competitors in the training business include DynCorp and Triple Canopy.) But if the company succeeds in winning the $1 billion contract in Afghanistan, Prince should expect more intense scrutiny. He should know better than anyone: there's nothing normal or regular about working in a war zone.
U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts
By MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON — Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.
Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.
But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.
The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.
Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.
Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.
But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before. The contractors were still being paid under a $22 million contract, the review shows, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon office in charge of special operations policy.
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that the program “remains under investigation by multiple offices within the Defense Department,” so it would be inappropriate to answer specific questions about who approved the operation or why it continues.
“I assure you we are committed to determining if any laws were broken or policies violated,” he said. Spokesmen for General Petraeus and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, declined to comment. Mr. Furlong remains at his job, working as a senior civilian Air Force official.
A senior defense official said that the Pentagon decided just recently not to renew the contract, which expires at the end of May. While the Pentagon declined to discuss the program, it appears that commanders in the field are in no rush to shut it down because some of the information has been highly valuable, particularly in protecting troops against enemy attacks.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expanded role of contractors on the battlefield — from interrogating prisoners to hunting terrorism suspects — has raised questions about whether the United States has outsourced some of its most secretive and important operations to a private army many fear is largely unaccountable. The C.I.A. has relied extensively on contractors in recent years to carry out missions in war zones.
The exposure of the spying network also reveals tensions between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which itself is running a covert war across the border in Pakistan. In December, a cable from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Pentagon argued that the military’s hiring of its own spies could have disastrous consequences, with various networks possibly colliding with one another.
The memo also said that Mr. Furlong had a history of delving into outlandish intelligence schemes, including an episode in 2008, when American officials expelled him from Prague for trying to clandestinely set up computer servers for propaganda operations. Some officials say they believe that the C.I.A. is trying to scuttle the operation to protect its own turf, and that the spy agency has been embarrassed because the contractors are outperforming C.I.A. operatives.
The private contractor network was born in part out of frustration with the C.I.A. and the military intelligence apparatus. There was a belief by some officers that the C.I.A. was too risk averse, too reliant on Pakistan’s spy service and seldom able to provide the military with timely information to protect American troops. In addition, the military has complained that it is not technically allowed to operate in Pakistan, whose government is willing to look the other way and allow C.I.A. spying but not the presence of foreign troops.
Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, dismissed reports of a turf war.
“There’s no daylight at all on this between C.I.A. and DoD,” he said. “It’s an issue for Defense to look into — it involves their people, after all — and that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used broad interpretations of its authorities to expand military intelligence operations, including sending Special Operations troops on clandestine missions far from declared war zones. These missions have raised concerns in Washington that the Pentagon is running de facto covert actions without proper White House authority and with little oversight from the elaborate system of Congressional committees and internal controls intended to prevent abuses in intelligence gathering.
The officials say the contractors’ reports are delivered via an encrypted e-mail service to a “fusion cell,” located at the military base at Kabul International Airport. There, they are fed into classified military computer networks, then used for future military operations or intelligence reports.
To skirt military restrictions on intelligence gathering, information the contractors gather in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas is specifically labeled “atmospheric collection”: information about the workings of militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan or about Afghan tribal structures. The boundaries separating “atmospherics” from what spies gather is murky. It is generally considered illegal for the military to run organized operations aimed at penetrating enemy organizations with covert agents.
But defense officials with knowledge of the program said that contractors themselves regarded the contract as permission to spy. Several weeks ago, one of the contractors reported on Taliban militants massing near American military bases east of Kandahar. Not long afterward, Apache gunships arrived at the scene to disperse and kill the militants.
The web of private businesses working under the Lockheed contract include Strategic Influence Alternatives, American International Security Corporation and International Media Ventures, a communications company based in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Czech ownership.
One of the companies employs a network of Americans, Afghans and Pakistanis run by Duane Clarridge, a C.I.A. veteran who became famous for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed.
The Times is withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A spokesman for Lockheed said that no Pentagon officials had raised any concerns about the work.
“We believe our subcontractors are effectively performing the work required of them under the terms of this task order,” said Tom Casey, the spokesman. “We’ve not received any information indicating otherwise.” Lockheed is not involved in the information gathering, but rather administers the contract.
The specifics of the investigation into Mr. Furlong are unclear. Pentagon officials have said that the Defense Department’s inspector general is examining possible contract fraud and financial mismanagement dating from last year.
In his only media interview since details of the operation were revealed, with The San Antonio Express-News, Mr. Furlong said that all of his work had been blessed by senior commanders. In that interview, he declined to provide further details.
Officials said that the tussle over the intelligence operations dated from at least 2008, when some generals in Afghanistan grew angry at what they saw as a paucity of intelligence about the militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were regularly attacking American troops.
In October of that year, Mr. Furlong traveled to C.I.A. headquarters with top Pentagon officials, including Brig. Gen. Robert H. Holmes, then the deputy operations officer at United States Central Command. General Holmes has since retired and is now an executive at one of the subcontractors, International Media Ventures. The meeting at the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center was set up to inform the spy agency about the military’s plans to collect “atmospheric information” about Afghanistan and Pakistan, including information about the structure of militant networks in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Mr. Furlong was testing the sometimes muddy laws governing traditional military activities. A former Army officer who sometimes referred to himself as “the king of the gray areas,” Mr. Furlong played a role in many of America’s recent adventures abroad. He ran psychological operations missions in the Balkans, worked at a television network in Iraq, now defunct, that was sponsored by the American government and made frequent trips to Kabul, Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years to help run a number of clandestine military propaganda operations.
At the C.I.A. meeting in 2008, the atmosphere quickly deteriorated, according to some in attendance, because C.I.A. officials were immediately suspicious that the plans amounted to a back-door spying operation.
In general, according to one American official, intelligence operatives are nervous about the notion of “private citizens running around a war zone, trying to collect intelligence that wasn’t properly vetted for operations that weren’t properly coordinated.”
Shortly afterward, in a legal opinion stamped “Secret,” lawyers at the military’s Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Fla., signed off on a version of Mr. Furlong’s proposed operations, adding specific language that the program should not carry out “inherent intelligence activities.” In January 2009, General Petraeus wrote a letter endorsing the proposed operations, which had been requested by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan at the time.
What happened after that money began flowing to Afghanistan remains a matter of dispute. General McKiernan said in an interview with The Times that he never endorsed hiring private contractors specifically for intelligence gathering.
Instead, he said, he was interested in gaining “atmospherics” from the contractors to help him and his commanders understand the complex cultural and political makeup of the region.
“It could give us a better understanding of the rural areas, of what people there saying, what they were expressing as their needs, and their concerns,” he said.
“It was not intelligence for manhunts,” he said. “That was clearly not it, and we agreed that’s not what this was about.”
To his mind, he said, intelligence is specific information that could be used for attacks on militants in Afghanistan.
General McKiernan said he had endorsed a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan pitched to him a year earlier by Robert Young Pelton, a writer and chronicler of the world’s danger spots, and Eason Jordan, a former CNN executive. The project, called AfPax Insider, would have been used a subscription-based Web site, but also a secure information database that only the military could access.
In an interview, Mr. Pelton said that he did not gather intelligence and never worked at the direction of Mr. Furlong and that he did not have a government contract for the work.
But Mr. Pelton said that AfPax did receive reimbursement from International Media Ventures, one of the companies hired for Mr. Furlong’s operation. He said that he was never told that I.M.V. was doing clandestine work for the government.
It was several months later, during the summer of 2009, when officials said that the private contractor network using Mr. Clarridge and other former C.I.A. and Special Operations troops was established. Mr. Furlong, according to several former colleagues, believed that Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan had failed to deliver on their promises, and that the new team could finally carry out the program first envisioned by General McKiernan. The contractor network assumed a cloak-and-dagger air, with the information reports stripped of anything that might reveal sources’ identities, and the collectors were assigned code names and numbers.
Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting. Barclay Walsh contributed research.
WASHINGTON — Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.
Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.
But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.
The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying.
Military officials said that when Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top commander in the region, signed off on the operation in January 2009, there were prohibitions against intelligence gathering, including hiring agents to provide information about enemy positions in Pakistan. The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region, and information that could be used for “force protection,” they said.
Some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to morph into traditional spying activities. And they pointed out that the supervisor who set up the contractor network, Michael D. Furlong, was now under investigation.
But a review of the program by The New York Times found that Mr. Furlong’s operatives were still providing information using the same intelligence gathering methods as before. The contractors were still being paid under a $22 million contract, the review shows, managed by Lockheed Martin and supervised by the Pentagon office in charge of special operations policy.
Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, said that the program “remains under investigation by multiple offices within the Defense Department,” so it would be inappropriate to answer specific questions about who approved the operation or why it continues.
“I assure you we are committed to determining if any laws were broken or policies violated,” he said. Spokesmen for General Petraeus and Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, declined to comment. Mr. Furlong remains at his job, working as a senior civilian Air Force official.
A senior defense official said that the Pentagon decided just recently not to renew the contract, which expires at the end of May. While the Pentagon declined to discuss the program, it appears that commanders in the field are in no rush to shut it down because some of the information has been highly valuable, particularly in protecting troops against enemy attacks.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expanded role of contractors on the battlefield — from interrogating prisoners to hunting terrorism suspects — has raised questions about whether the United States has outsourced some of its most secretive and important operations to a private army many fear is largely unaccountable. The C.I.A. has relied extensively on contractors in recent years to carry out missions in war zones.
The exposure of the spying network also reveals tensions between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which itself is running a covert war across the border in Pakistan. In December, a cable from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Pentagon argued that the military’s hiring of its own spies could have disastrous consequences, with various networks possibly colliding with one another.
The memo also said that Mr. Furlong had a history of delving into outlandish intelligence schemes, including an episode in 2008, when American officials expelled him from Prague for trying to clandestinely set up computer servers for propaganda operations. Some officials say they believe that the C.I.A. is trying to scuttle the operation to protect its own turf, and that the spy agency has been embarrassed because the contractors are outperforming C.I.A. operatives.
The private contractor network was born in part out of frustration with the C.I.A. and the military intelligence apparatus. There was a belief by some officers that the C.I.A. was too risk averse, too reliant on Pakistan’s spy service and seldom able to provide the military with timely information to protect American troops. In addition, the military has complained that it is not technically allowed to operate in Pakistan, whose government is willing to look the other way and allow C.I.A. spying but not the presence of foreign troops.
Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, dismissed reports of a turf war.
“There’s no daylight at all on this between C.I.A. and DoD,” he said. “It’s an issue for Defense to look into — it involves their people, after all — and that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Pentagon has used broad interpretations of its authorities to expand military intelligence operations, including sending Special Operations troops on clandestine missions far from declared war zones. These missions have raised concerns in Washington that the Pentagon is running de facto covert actions without proper White House authority and with little oversight from the elaborate system of Congressional committees and internal controls intended to prevent abuses in intelligence gathering.
The officials say the contractors’ reports are delivered via an encrypted e-mail service to a “fusion cell,” located at the military base at Kabul International Airport. There, they are fed into classified military computer networks, then used for future military operations or intelligence reports.
To skirt military restrictions on intelligence gathering, information the contractors gather in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas is specifically labeled “atmospheric collection”: information about the workings of militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan or about Afghan tribal structures. The boundaries separating “atmospherics” from what spies gather is murky. It is generally considered illegal for the military to run organized operations aimed at penetrating enemy organizations with covert agents.
But defense officials with knowledge of the program said that contractors themselves regarded the contract as permission to spy. Several weeks ago, one of the contractors reported on Taliban militants massing near American military bases east of Kandahar. Not long afterward, Apache gunships arrived at the scene to disperse and kill the militants.
The web of private businesses working under the Lockheed contract include Strategic Influence Alternatives, American International Security Corporation and International Media Ventures, a communications company based in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Czech ownership.
One of the companies employs a network of Americans, Afghans and Pakistanis run by Duane Clarridge, a C.I.A. veteran who became famous for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed.
The Times is withholding some information about the contractor network, including some of the names of agents working in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
A spokesman for Lockheed said that no Pentagon officials had raised any concerns about the work.
“We believe our subcontractors are effectively performing the work required of them under the terms of this task order,” said Tom Casey, the spokesman. “We’ve not received any information indicating otherwise.” Lockheed is not involved in the information gathering, but rather administers the contract.
The specifics of the investigation into Mr. Furlong are unclear. Pentagon officials have said that the Defense Department’s inspector general is examining possible contract fraud and financial mismanagement dating from last year.
In his only media interview since details of the operation were revealed, with The San Antonio Express-News, Mr. Furlong said that all of his work had been blessed by senior commanders. In that interview, he declined to provide further details.
Officials said that the tussle over the intelligence operations dated from at least 2008, when some generals in Afghanistan grew angry at what they saw as a paucity of intelligence about the militant groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan who were regularly attacking American troops.
In October of that year, Mr. Furlong traveled to C.I.A. headquarters with top Pentagon officials, including Brig. Gen. Robert H. Holmes, then the deputy operations officer at United States Central Command. General Holmes has since retired and is now an executive at one of the subcontractors, International Media Ventures. The meeting at the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center was set up to inform the spy agency about the military’s plans to collect “atmospheric information” about Afghanistan and Pakistan, including information about the structure of militant networks in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Mr. Furlong was testing the sometimes muddy laws governing traditional military activities. A former Army officer who sometimes referred to himself as “the king of the gray areas,” Mr. Furlong played a role in many of America’s recent adventures abroad. He ran psychological operations missions in the Balkans, worked at a television network in Iraq, now defunct, that was sponsored by the American government and made frequent trips to Kabul, Eastern Europe and the Middle East in recent years to help run a number of clandestine military propaganda operations.
At the C.I.A. meeting in 2008, the atmosphere quickly deteriorated, according to some in attendance, because C.I.A. officials were immediately suspicious that the plans amounted to a back-door spying operation.
In general, according to one American official, intelligence operatives are nervous about the notion of “private citizens running around a war zone, trying to collect intelligence that wasn’t properly vetted for operations that weren’t properly coordinated.”
Shortly afterward, in a legal opinion stamped “Secret,” lawyers at the military’s Centcom headquarters in Tampa, Fla., signed off on a version of Mr. Furlong’s proposed operations, adding specific language that the program should not carry out “inherent intelligence activities.” In January 2009, General Petraeus wrote a letter endorsing the proposed operations, which had been requested by Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top commander in Afghanistan at the time.
What happened after that money began flowing to Afghanistan remains a matter of dispute. General McKiernan said in an interview with The Times that he never endorsed hiring private contractors specifically for intelligence gathering.
Instead, he said, he was interested in gaining “atmospherics” from the contractors to help him and his commanders understand the complex cultural and political makeup of the region.
“It could give us a better understanding of the rural areas, of what people there saying, what they were expressing as their needs, and their concerns,” he said.
“It was not intelligence for manhunts,” he said. “That was clearly not it, and we agreed that’s not what this was about.”
To his mind, he said, intelligence is specific information that could be used for attacks on militants in Afghanistan.
General McKiernan said he had endorsed a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan pitched to him a year earlier by Robert Young Pelton, a writer and chronicler of the world’s danger spots, and Eason Jordan, a former CNN executive. The project, called AfPax Insider, would have been used a subscription-based Web site, but also a secure information database that only the military could access.
In an interview, Mr. Pelton said that he did not gather intelligence and never worked at the direction of Mr. Furlong and that he did not have a government contract for the work.
But Mr. Pelton said that AfPax did receive reimbursement from International Media Ventures, one of the companies hired for Mr. Furlong’s operation. He said that he was never told that I.M.V. was doing clandestine work for the government.
It was several months later, during the summer of 2009, when officials said that the private contractor network using Mr. Clarridge and other former C.I.A. and Special Operations troops was established. Mr. Furlong, according to several former colleagues, believed that Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan had failed to deliver on their promises, and that the new team could finally carry out the program first envisioned by General McKiernan. The contractor network assumed a cloak-and-dagger air, with the information reports stripped of anything that might reveal sources’ identities, and the collectors were assigned code names and numbers.
Ginger Thompson and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting. Barclay Walsh contributed research.
Secret Erik Prince Tape Exposed
Jeremy Scahill
Erik Prince, the reclusive owner of the Blackwater empire, rarely gives public speeches and when he does he attempts to ban journalists from attending and forbids recording or videotaping of his remarks. On May 5, that is exactly what Prince is trying to do when he speaks at DeVos Fieldhouse as the keynote speaker for the "Tulip Time Festival" in his hometown of Holland, Michigan. He told the event's organizers no news reporting could be done on his speech and they consented to the ban. Journalists and media associations in Michigan are protesting this attempt to bar reporting on his remarks.
Despite Prince's attempts to shield his speeches from public scrutiny, The Nation magazine has obtained an audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Prince to a friendly audience. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption, provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater. The people of the United States have a right to media coverage of events featuring the owner of a company that generates 90% of its revenue from the United States government.
In the speech, Prince proposed that the US government deploy armed private contractors to fight "terrorists" in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence. He expressed disdain for the Geneva Convention and described Blackwater's secretive operations at four Forward Operating Bases he controls in Afghanistan. He called those fighting the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan "barbarians" who "crawled out of the sewer." Prince also revealed details of a July 2009 operation he claims Blackwater forces coordinated in Afghanistan to take down a narcotrafficking facility, saying that Blackwater "call[ed] in multiple air strikes," blowing up the facility. Prince boasted that his forces had carried out the "largest hashish bust in counter-narcotics history." He characterized the work of some NATO countries' forces in Afghanistan as ineffectual, suggesting that some coalition nations "should just pack it in and go home." Prince spoke of Blackwater working in Pakistan, which appears to contradict the official, public Blackwater and US government line that Blackwater is not in Pakistan.
Prince also claimed that a Blackwater operative took down the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W Bush in Baghdad and criticized the Secret Service for being "flat-footed." He bragged that Blackwater forces "beat the Louisiana National Guard to the scene" during Katrina and claimed that lawsuits, "tens of millions of dollars in lawyer bills" and political attacks prevented him from deploying a humanitarian ship that could have responded to the earthquake in Haiti or the tsunami that hit Indonesia.
Several times during the speech, Prince appeared to demean Afghans his company is training in Afghanistan, saying Blackwater had to teach them "Intro to Toilet Use" and to do jumping jacks. At the same time, he bragged that US generals told him the Afghans Blackwater trains "are the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan." Prince also revealed that he is writing a book, scheduled to be released this fall.
The speech was delivered January 14 at the University of Michigan in front of an audience of entrepreneurs, ROTC commanders and cadets, businesspeople and military veterans. The speech was titled "Overcoming Adversity: Leadership at the Tip of the Spear" and was sponsored by the Young Presidents' Association (YPO), a business networking association primarily made up of corporate executives. "Ripped from the headlines and described by Vanity Fair magazine, as a Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier and Spy, Erik Prince brings all that and more to our exclusive YPO speaking engagement," read the event's program, also obtained by The Nation. It proclaimed that Prince's speech was an "amazing don't miss opportunity from a man who has 'been there and done that' with a group of Cadets and Midshipmen who are months away from serving on the 'tip of the spear.'" Here are some of the highlights from Erik Prince's speech:
Send the Mercs into Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria
Prince painted a global picture in which Iran is "at the absolute dead center... of badness." The Iranians, he said, "want that nuke so that it is again a Persian Gulf and they very much have an attitude of when Darius ran most of the Middle East back in 1000 BC. That's very much what the Iranians are after." [NOTE: Darius of Persia actually ruled from 522 BC-486 BC]. Iran, Prince charged, has a "master plan to stir up and organize a Shia revolt through the whole region." Prince proposed that armed private soldiers from companies like Blackwater be deployed in countries throughout the region to target Iranian influence, specifically in Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia. "The Iranians have a very sinister hand in these places," Prince said. "You're not going to solve it by putting a lot of uniformed soldiers in all these countries. It's way too politically sensitive. The private sector can operate there with a very, very small, very light footprint." In addition to concerns of political expediency, Prince suggested that using private contractors to conduct such operations would be cost-effective. "The overall defense budget is going to have to be cut and they're going to look for ways, they're going to have to have ways to become more efficient," he said. "And there's a lot of ways that the private sector can operate with a much smaller, much lighter footprint."
Prince also proposed using private armed contractors in the oil-rich African nation of Nigeria. Prince said that guerilla groups in the country are dramatically slowing oil production and extraction and stealing oil. "There's more than a half million barrels a day stolen there, which is stolen and organized by very large criminal syndicates. There's even some evidence it's going to fund terrorist organizations," Prince alleged. "These guerilla groups attack the pipeline, attack the pump house to knock it offline, which makes the pressure of the pipeline go soft. they cut that pipeline and they weld in their own patch with their own valves and they back a barge up into it. Ten thousand barrels at a time, take that oil, drive that 10,000 barrels out to sea and at $80 a barrel, that's $800,000. That's not a bad take for organized crime." Prince made no mention of the nonviolent indigenous opposition to oil extraction and pollution, nor did he mention the notorious human rights abuses connected to multinational oil corporations in Nigeria that have sparked much of the resistance.
Blackwater and the Geneva Convention
Prince scornfully dismissed the debate on whether armed individuals working for Blackwater could be classified as "unlawful combatants" who are ineligible for protection under the Geneva Convention. "You know, people ask me that all the time, 'Aren't you concerned that you folks aren't covered under the Geneva Convention in [operating] in the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan? And I say, 'Absolutely not,' because these people, they crawled out of the sewer and they have a 1200 AD mentality. They're barbarians. They don't know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there."
It is significant that Prince mentioned his company operating in Pakistan given that Blackwater, the US government and the Pakistan government have all denied Blackwater works in Pakistan.
Taking Down the Iraqi Shoe Thrower for the 'Flat-Footed' Secret Service
Prince noted several high-profile attacks on world leaders in the past year, specifically a woman pushing the Pope at Christmas mass and the attack on Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, saying there has been a pattern of "some pretty questionable security lately." He then proceeded to describe the feats of his Blackwater forces in protecting dignitaries and diplomats, claiming that one of his men took down the Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at President Bush in Baghdad in December 2008. Prince referred to al-Zaidi as the "shoe bomber:"
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Jeremy Scahill
Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater...
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Afghanistan Erik Prince George W Bush Iraq Louisiana Louisiana National Guard Michigan Natural Disaster North Atlantic Treaty Organization Pakistan Person Career Prince Private Saudi Arabia Toilet Use United States War Yemen forward lawyer
"A little known fact, you know when the shoe bomber in Iraq was throwing his shoes at President Bush, in December 08, we provided diplomatic security, but we had no responsibility for the president's security--that's always the Secret Service that does that. We happened to have a guy in the back of the room and he saw that first shoe go and he drew his weapon, got a sight picture, saw that it was only a shoe, he re-holstered, went forward and took that guy down while the Secret Service was still standing there flat-footed. I have a picture of that--I'm publishing a book, so watch for that later this fall--in which you'll see all the reporters looking, there's my guy taking the shoe thrower down. He didn't shoot him, he just tackled him, even though the guy was committing assault and battery on the president of the United States. I asked a friend of mine who used to run the Secret Service if they had a written report of that and he said the debrief was so bad they did not put it in writing."
While the Secret Service was widely criticized at the time for its apparent inaction during the incident, video of the event clearly showed another Iraqi journalist, not security guards, initially pulling al-Zaidi to the floor. Almost instantly thereafter, al-Zaidi was swarmed by a gang of various, unidentified security agents.
Blackwater's Forward Operating Bases
Prince went into detail about his company's operations in Afghanistan. Blackwater has been in the country since at least April 2002, when the company was hired by the CIA on a covert contract to provide the Agency with security. Since then, Blackwater has won hundreds of millions of dollars in security, counter-narcotics and training contracts for the State Department, Defense Department and the CIA. The company protects US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and other senior US officials, guards CIA personnel and trains the Afghan border police. "We built four bases and we staffed them and we run them," Prince said, referring to them as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). He described them as being in the north, south, east and west of Afghanistan. "Spin Boldak in the south, which is the major drug trans-shipment area, in the east at a place called FOB Lonestar, which is right at the foothills of Tora Bora mountain. In fact if you ski off Tora Bora mountain, you can ski down to our firebase," Prince said, adding that Blackwater also has a base near Herat and another location. FOB Lonestar is approximately 15 miles from the Pakistan border. "Who else has built a [Forward Operating Base] along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?" Prince said earlier this year.
Blackwater's War on Drugs
Prince described a Narcotics Interdiction Unit Blackwater started in Afghanistan five years ago that remains active. "It is about a 200 person strike force to go after the big narcotics traffickers, the big cache sites," Prince said. "That unit's had great success. They've taken more than $3.5 billion worth of heroin out of circulation. We're not going after the farmers, but we're going after the traffickers." He described an operation in July 2009 where Blackwater forces actually called in NATO air strikes on a target during a mission:
"A year ago, July, they did the largest hashish bust in counter-narcotics history, down in the south-east. They went down, they hit five targets that our intel guys put together and they wound up with about 12,000 pounds of heroin. While they were down there, they said, 'You know, these other three sites look good, we should go check them out.' Sure enough they did and they found a cache--262,000 kilograms of hash, which equates to more than a billion dollars street value. And it was an industrialized hash operation, it was much of the hash crop in Helmand province. It was palletized, they'd dug ditches out in the desert, covered it with tarps and the bags of powder were big bags with a brand name on it for the hash brand, palletized, ready to go into containers down to Karachi [Pakistan] and then out to Europe or elsewhere in the world. That raid alone took about $60 million out of the Taliban's coffers. So, those were good days. When the guys found it, they didn't have enough ammo, enough explosives, to blow it, they couldn't burn it all, so they had to call in multiple air strikes. Of course, you know, each of the NATO countries that came and did the air strikes took credit for finding and destroying the cache."
December 30, 2009 CIA Bombing in Khost
Prince also addressed the deadly suicide bombing on December 30 at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. Eight CIA personnel, including two Blackwater operatives, were killed in the bombing, which was carried out by a Jordanian double-agent. Prince was asked by an audience member about the "failure" to prevent that attack. The questioner did not mention that Blackwater was responsible for the security of the CIA officials that day, nor did Prince discuss Blackwater's role that day. Here is what Prince said:
"You know what? It is a tragedy that those guys were killed but if you put it in perspective, the CIA has lost extremely few people since 9/11. We've lost two or three in Afghanistan, before that two or three in Iraq and, I believe, one guy in Somalia--a landmine. So when you compare what Bill Donovan and the OSS did to the Germans and the Japanese, the Italians during World War II--and they lost hundreds and hundreds of people doing very difficult, very dangerous work--it is a tragedy when you lose people, but it is a cost of doing that work. It is essential, you've got to take risks. In that case, they had what appeared to be a very hot asset who had very relevant, very actionable intelligence and he turned out to be a bad guy... That's what the intelligence business is, you can't be assured success all the time. You've got to be willing to take risks. Those are calculated risks but sometimes it goes badly. I hope the Agency doesn't draw back and say, 'Oh, we have to retrench and not do that anymore,' all the rest. No. We need you to double down, go after them harder. That is a cost of doing business. They are there to kill us."
Prince to Some NATO Countries in Afghanistan: 'Go Home'
Prince spoke disparagingly of some unnamed NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan, saying they do not have the will for the fight. "Some of them do and a lot of them don't," he said. "It is such a patchwork of different international commitments as to what some can do and what some can't. A lot of them should just pack it in and go home." Canada, however, received praise from Prince. "The Canadians have lost per capita more than America has in Afghanistan. They are fighting and they are doing it and so if you see a Canadian thank them for that. The politicians at home take heavies for doing that," Prince said. He did not mention the fact that his company was hired by the Canadian government to train its forces.
Prince also described how his private air force (which he recently sold) bailed out a US military unit in trouble in Afghanistan. According to Prince, the unit was fighting the Taliban and was running out of ammo and needed an emergency re-supply. "Because of, probably some procedure written by a lawyer back in Washington, the Air Force was not permitted to drop in an uncertified drop zone... even to the unit that was running out of ammo," Prince said. "So they called and asked if our guys would do it and, of course, they said, 'Yes.' And the cool part of the story is the Army guys put their DZ mark in the drop zone, a big orange panel, on the hood of their hummer and our guys put the first bundle on the hood of that hummer. We don't always get that close, but that time a little too close."
Blackwater: Teaching Afghans to Use Toilets
Prince said his forces train 1300 Afghans every six weeks and described his pride in attending "graduations" of Blackwater-trained Afghans, saying that in six weeks they radically transform the trainees. "You take these officers, these Afghans and it's the first time in their life they've ever been part of something that's first class, that works. The instructors know what they're talking about, they're fed, the water works, there's ammunition for their guns. Everything works," Prince said. "The first few days of training, we have to do 'Intro to Toilet Use' because a lot of these guys have never even seen a flushed toilet before." Prince boasted: "We manage to take folks with a tribal mentality and, just like the Marine Corps does more effectively than anyone else, they take kids from disparate lifestyles across the United States and you throw them into Parris Island and you make them Marines. We try that same mentality there by pushing these guys very hard and, it's funny, I wish I had video to show you of the hilarious jumping jacks. If you take someone that's 25 years old and they've never done a jumping jack in their life--some of the convoluted motions they do it's comical. But the transformation from day one to the end of that program, they're very proud and they're very capable." Prince said that when he was in Afghanistan late last year, "I met with a bunch of generals and they said the Afghans that we train are the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan."
Prince also discussed the Afghan women he says work with Blackwater. "Some of the women we've had, it's amazing," Prince said. "They come in in the morning and they have the burqa on and they transition to their cammies (camouflage uniforms) and I think they enjoy the baton work," he said, adding, "They've been hand-cuffing a little too much on the men."
Hurricane Katrina and Humanitarian Mercenaries
Erik Prince spoke at length about Blackwater's deployment in 2005 in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, bragging that his forces "rescued 128 people, sent thousands of meals in there and it worked." Prince boasted of his company's rapid response, saying, "We surged 145 guys in 36 hours from our facility five states away and we beat the Louisiana National Guard to the scene." What Prince failed to mention was that at the time of the disaster, at least 35% of the Louisiana National Guard was deployed in Iraq. One National Guard soldier in New Orleans at the time spoke to Reuters, saying, "They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here... We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq." Much of the National Guard's equipment was in Iraq at the time, including high water vehicles, Humvees, refuelers and generators.
Prince also said that he had a plan to create a massive humanitarian vessel that, with the generous support of major corporations, could have responded to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis across the globe. "I thought, man, the military has perfected how to move men and equipment into combat, why can't we do that for the humanitarian side?" Prince said. The ship Prince wanted to use for these missions was an 800 foot container vessel capable of shipping "1700 containers, which would have lined up six and a half miles of humanitarian assistance with another 250 vehicles" onboard. "We could have gotten almost all those boxes donated. It would have been boxes that would have had generator sets from Caterpillar, grain from ADM [Archer Daniels Midland], anti-biotics from pharmaceutical companies, all the stuff you need to do massive humanitarian assistance," Prince said, adding that it "would have had turnkey fuel support, food, surgical, portable surgical hospitals, beds cots, blankets, all the above." Prince says he was going to do the work for free, "on spec," but "instead we got attacked politically and ended up paying tens of millions of dollars in lawyer bills the last few years. It's an unfortunate misuse of resources because a boat like that sure would have been handy for the Haitian people right now."
Outing Erik Prince
Prince also addressed what he described as his outing as a CIA asset working on sensitive US government programs. He has previously blamed Congressional Democrats and the news media for naming him as working on the US assassination program. The US intelligence apparatus "depends heavily on Americans that are not employed by the government to facilitate greater success and access for the intelligence community," Prince said. "It's unprecedented to have people outed by name, especially ones that were running highly classified programs. And as much as the left got animated about Valerie Plame, outing people by name for other very very sensitive programs was unprecedented and definitely threw me under the bus."
Erik Prince, the reclusive owner of the Blackwater empire, rarely gives public speeches and when he does he attempts to ban journalists from attending and forbids recording or videotaping of his remarks. On May 5, that is exactly what Prince is trying to do when he speaks at DeVos Fieldhouse as the keynote speaker for the "Tulip Time Festival" in his hometown of Holland, Michigan. He told the event's organizers no news reporting could be done on his speech and they consented to the ban. Journalists and media associations in Michigan are protesting this attempt to bar reporting on his remarks.
Despite Prince's attempts to shield his speeches from public scrutiny, The Nation magazine has obtained an audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Prince to a friendly audience. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption, provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater. The people of the United States have a right to media coverage of events featuring the owner of a company that generates 90% of its revenue from the United States government.
In the speech, Prince proposed that the US government deploy armed private contractors to fight "terrorists" in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence. He expressed disdain for the Geneva Convention and described Blackwater's secretive operations at four Forward Operating Bases he controls in Afghanistan. He called those fighting the US in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan "barbarians" who "crawled out of the sewer." Prince also revealed details of a July 2009 operation he claims Blackwater forces coordinated in Afghanistan to take down a narcotrafficking facility, saying that Blackwater "call[ed] in multiple air strikes," blowing up the facility. Prince boasted that his forces had carried out the "largest hashish bust in counter-narcotics history." He characterized the work of some NATO countries' forces in Afghanistan as ineffectual, suggesting that some coalition nations "should just pack it in and go home." Prince spoke of Blackwater working in Pakistan, which appears to contradict the official, public Blackwater and US government line that Blackwater is not in Pakistan.
Prince also claimed that a Blackwater operative took down the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President George W Bush in Baghdad and criticized the Secret Service for being "flat-footed." He bragged that Blackwater forces "beat the Louisiana National Guard to the scene" during Katrina and claimed that lawsuits, "tens of millions of dollars in lawyer bills" and political attacks prevented him from deploying a humanitarian ship that could have responded to the earthquake in Haiti or the tsunami that hit Indonesia.
Several times during the speech, Prince appeared to demean Afghans his company is training in Afghanistan, saying Blackwater had to teach them "Intro to Toilet Use" and to do jumping jacks. At the same time, he bragged that US generals told him the Afghans Blackwater trains "are the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan." Prince also revealed that he is writing a book, scheduled to be released this fall.
The speech was delivered January 14 at the University of Michigan in front of an audience of entrepreneurs, ROTC commanders and cadets, businesspeople and military veterans. The speech was titled "Overcoming Adversity: Leadership at the Tip of the Spear" and was sponsored by the Young Presidents' Association (YPO), a business networking association primarily made up of corporate executives. "Ripped from the headlines and described by Vanity Fair magazine, as a Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier and Spy, Erik Prince brings all that and more to our exclusive YPO speaking engagement," read the event's program, also obtained by The Nation. It proclaimed that Prince's speech was an "amazing don't miss opportunity from a man who has 'been there and done that' with a group of Cadets and Midshipmen who are months away from serving on the 'tip of the spear.'" Here are some of the highlights from Erik Prince's speech:
Send the Mercs into Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria
Prince painted a global picture in which Iran is "at the absolute dead center... of badness." The Iranians, he said, "want that nuke so that it is again a Persian Gulf and they very much have an attitude of when Darius ran most of the Middle East back in 1000 BC. That's very much what the Iranians are after." [NOTE: Darius of Persia actually ruled from 522 BC-486 BC]. Iran, Prince charged, has a "master plan to stir up and organize a Shia revolt through the whole region." Prince proposed that armed private soldiers from companies like Blackwater be deployed in countries throughout the region to target Iranian influence, specifically in Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia. "The Iranians have a very sinister hand in these places," Prince said. "You're not going to solve it by putting a lot of uniformed soldiers in all these countries. It's way too politically sensitive. The private sector can operate there with a very, very small, very light footprint." In addition to concerns of political expediency, Prince suggested that using private contractors to conduct such operations would be cost-effective. "The overall defense budget is going to have to be cut and they're going to look for ways, they're going to have to have ways to become more efficient," he said. "And there's a lot of ways that the private sector can operate with a much smaller, much lighter footprint."
Prince also proposed using private armed contractors in the oil-rich African nation of Nigeria. Prince said that guerilla groups in the country are dramatically slowing oil production and extraction and stealing oil. "There's more than a half million barrels a day stolen there, which is stolen and organized by very large criminal syndicates. There's even some evidence it's going to fund terrorist organizations," Prince alleged. "These guerilla groups attack the pipeline, attack the pump house to knock it offline, which makes the pressure of the pipeline go soft. they cut that pipeline and they weld in their own patch with their own valves and they back a barge up into it. Ten thousand barrels at a time, take that oil, drive that 10,000 barrels out to sea and at $80 a barrel, that's $800,000. That's not a bad take for organized crime." Prince made no mention of the nonviolent indigenous opposition to oil extraction and pollution, nor did he mention the notorious human rights abuses connected to multinational oil corporations in Nigeria that have sparked much of the resistance.
Blackwater and the Geneva Convention
Prince scornfully dismissed the debate on whether armed individuals working for Blackwater could be classified as "unlawful combatants" who are ineligible for protection under the Geneva Convention. "You know, people ask me that all the time, 'Aren't you concerned that you folks aren't covered under the Geneva Convention in [operating] in the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan? And I say, 'Absolutely not,' because these people, they crawled out of the sewer and they have a 1200 AD mentality. They're barbarians. They don't know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there."
It is significant that Prince mentioned his company operating in Pakistan given that Blackwater, the US government and the Pakistan government have all denied Blackwater works in Pakistan.
Taking Down the Iraqi Shoe Thrower for the 'Flat-Footed' Secret Service
Prince noted several high-profile attacks on world leaders in the past year, specifically a woman pushing the Pope at Christmas mass and the attack on Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, saying there has been a pattern of "some pretty questionable security lately." He then proceeded to describe the feats of his Blackwater forces in protecting dignitaries and diplomats, claiming that one of his men took down the Iraqi journalist, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at President Bush in Baghdad in December 2008. Prince referred to al-Zaidi as the "shoe bomber:"
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Afghanistan Erik Prince George W Bush Iraq Louisiana Louisiana National Guard Michigan Natural Disaster North Atlantic Treaty Organization Pakistan Person Career Prince Private Saudi Arabia Toilet Use United States War Yemen forward lawyer
"A little known fact, you know when the shoe bomber in Iraq was throwing his shoes at President Bush, in December 08, we provided diplomatic security, but we had no responsibility for the president's security--that's always the Secret Service that does that. We happened to have a guy in the back of the room and he saw that first shoe go and he drew his weapon, got a sight picture, saw that it was only a shoe, he re-holstered, went forward and took that guy down while the Secret Service was still standing there flat-footed. I have a picture of that--I'm publishing a book, so watch for that later this fall--in which you'll see all the reporters looking, there's my guy taking the shoe thrower down. He didn't shoot him, he just tackled him, even though the guy was committing assault and battery on the president of the United States. I asked a friend of mine who used to run the Secret Service if they had a written report of that and he said the debrief was so bad they did not put it in writing."
While the Secret Service was widely criticized at the time for its apparent inaction during the incident, video of the event clearly showed another Iraqi journalist, not security guards, initially pulling al-Zaidi to the floor. Almost instantly thereafter, al-Zaidi was swarmed by a gang of various, unidentified security agents.
Blackwater's Forward Operating Bases
Prince went into detail about his company's operations in Afghanistan. Blackwater has been in the country since at least April 2002, when the company was hired by the CIA on a covert contract to provide the Agency with security. Since then, Blackwater has won hundreds of millions of dollars in security, counter-narcotics and training contracts for the State Department, Defense Department and the CIA. The company protects US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and other senior US officials, guards CIA personnel and trains the Afghan border police. "We built four bases and we staffed them and we run them," Prince said, referring to them as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). He described them as being in the north, south, east and west of Afghanistan. "Spin Boldak in the south, which is the major drug trans-shipment area, in the east at a place called FOB Lonestar, which is right at the foothills of Tora Bora mountain. In fact if you ski off Tora Bora mountain, you can ski down to our firebase," Prince said, adding that Blackwater also has a base near Herat and another location. FOB Lonestar is approximately 15 miles from the Pakistan border. "Who else has built a [Forward Operating Base] along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?" Prince said earlier this year.
Blackwater's War on Drugs
Prince described a Narcotics Interdiction Unit Blackwater started in Afghanistan five years ago that remains active. "It is about a 200 person strike force to go after the big narcotics traffickers, the big cache sites," Prince said. "That unit's had great success. They've taken more than $3.5 billion worth of heroin out of circulation. We're not going after the farmers, but we're going after the traffickers." He described an operation in July 2009 where Blackwater forces actually called in NATO air strikes on a target during a mission:
"A year ago, July, they did the largest hashish bust in counter-narcotics history, down in the south-east. They went down, they hit five targets that our intel guys put together and they wound up with about 12,000 pounds of heroin. While they were down there, they said, 'You know, these other three sites look good, we should go check them out.' Sure enough they did and they found a cache--262,000 kilograms of hash, which equates to more than a billion dollars street value. And it was an industrialized hash operation, it was much of the hash crop in Helmand province. It was palletized, they'd dug ditches out in the desert, covered it with tarps and the bags of powder were big bags with a brand name on it for the hash brand, palletized, ready to go into containers down to Karachi [Pakistan] and then out to Europe or elsewhere in the world. That raid alone took about $60 million out of the Taliban's coffers. So, those were good days. When the guys found it, they didn't have enough ammo, enough explosives, to blow it, they couldn't burn it all, so they had to call in multiple air strikes. Of course, you know, each of the NATO countries that came and did the air strikes took credit for finding and destroying the cache."
December 30, 2009 CIA Bombing in Khost
Prince also addressed the deadly suicide bombing on December 30 at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. Eight CIA personnel, including two Blackwater operatives, were killed in the bombing, which was carried out by a Jordanian double-agent. Prince was asked by an audience member about the "failure" to prevent that attack. The questioner did not mention that Blackwater was responsible for the security of the CIA officials that day, nor did Prince discuss Blackwater's role that day. Here is what Prince said:
"You know what? It is a tragedy that those guys were killed but if you put it in perspective, the CIA has lost extremely few people since 9/11. We've lost two or three in Afghanistan, before that two or three in Iraq and, I believe, one guy in Somalia--a landmine. So when you compare what Bill Donovan and the OSS did to the Germans and the Japanese, the Italians during World War II--and they lost hundreds and hundreds of people doing very difficult, very dangerous work--it is a tragedy when you lose people, but it is a cost of doing that work. It is essential, you've got to take risks. In that case, they had what appeared to be a very hot asset who had very relevant, very actionable intelligence and he turned out to be a bad guy... That's what the intelligence business is, you can't be assured success all the time. You've got to be willing to take risks. Those are calculated risks but sometimes it goes badly. I hope the Agency doesn't draw back and say, 'Oh, we have to retrench and not do that anymore,' all the rest. No. We need you to double down, go after them harder. That is a cost of doing business. They are there to kill us."
Prince to Some NATO Countries in Afghanistan: 'Go Home'
Prince spoke disparagingly of some unnamed NATO countries with troops in Afghanistan, saying they do not have the will for the fight. "Some of them do and a lot of them don't," he said. "It is such a patchwork of different international commitments as to what some can do and what some can't. A lot of them should just pack it in and go home." Canada, however, received praise from Prince. "The Canadians have lost per capita more than America has in Afghanistan. They are fighting and they are doing it and so if you see a Canadian thank them for that. The politicians at home take heavies for doing that," Prince said. He did not mention the fact that his company was hired by the Canadian government to train its forces.
Prince also described how his private air force (which he recently sold) bailed out a US military unit in trouble in Afghanistan. According to Prince, the unit was fighting the Taliban and was running out of ammo and needed an emergency re-supply. "Because of, probably some procedure written by a lawyer back in Washington, the Air Force was not permitted to drop in an uncertified drop zone... even to the unit that was running out of ammo," Prince said. "So they called and asked if our guys would do it and, of course, they said, 'Yes.' And the cool part of the story is the Army guys put their DZ mark in the drop zone, a big orange panel, on the hood of their hummer and our guys put the first bundle on the hood of that hummer. We don't always get that close, but that time a little too close."
Blackwater: Teaching Afghans to Use Toilets
Prince said his forces train 1300 Afghans every six weeks and described his pride in attending "graduations" of Blackwater-trained Afghans, saying that in six weeks they radically transform the trainees. "You take these officers, these Afghans and it's the first time in their life they've ever been part of something that's first class, that works. The instructors know what they're talking about, they're fed, the water works, there's ammunition for their guns. Everything works," Prince said. "The first few days of training, we have to do 'Intro to Toilet Use' because a lot of these guys have never even seen a flushed toilet before." Prince boasted: "We manage to take folks with a tribal mentality and, just like the Marine Corps does more effectively than anyone else, they take kids from disparate lifestyles across the United States and you throw them into Parris Island and you make them Marines. We try that same mentality there by pushing these guys very hard and, it's funny, I wish I had video to show you of the hilarious jumping jacks. If you take someone that's 25 years old and they've never done a jumping jack in their life--some of the convoluted motions they do it's comical. But the transformation from day one to the end of that program, they're very proud and they're very capable." Prince said that when he was in Afghanistan late last year, "I met with a bunch of generals and they said the Afghans that we train are the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan."
Prince also discussed the Afghan women he says work with Blackwater. "Some of the women we've had, it's amazing," Prince said. "They come in in the morning and they have the burqa on and they transition to their cammies (camouflage uniforms) and I think they enjoy the baton work," he said, adding, "They've been hand-cuffing a little too much on the men."
Hurricane Katrina and Humanitarian Mercenaries
Erik Prince spoke at length about Blackwater's deployment in 2005 in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, bragging that his forces "rescued 128 people, sent thousands of meals in there and it worked." Prince boasted of his company's rapid response, saying, "We surged 145 guys in 36 hours from our facility five states away and we beat the Louisiana National Guard to the scene." What Prince failed to mention was that at the time of the disaster, at least 35% of the Louisiana National Guard was deployed in Iraq. One National Guard soldier in New Orleans at the time spoke to Reuters, saying, "They (the Bush administration) care more about Iraq and Afghanistan than here... We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, but almost all of our guys are in Iraq." Much of the National Guard's equipment was in Iraq at the time, including high water vehicles, Humvees, refuelers and generators.
Prince also said that he had a plan to create a massive humanitarian vessel that, with the generous support of major corporations, could have responded to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis across the globe. "I thought, man, the military has perfected how to move men and equipment into combat, why can't we do that for the humanitarian side?" Prince said. The ship Prince wanted to use for these missions was an 800 foot container vessel capable of shipping "1700 containers, which would have lined up six and a half miles of humanitarian assistance with another 250 vehicles" onboard. "We could have gotten almost all those boxes donated. It would have been boxes that would have had generator sets from Caterpillar, grain from ADM [Archer Daniels Midland], anti-biotics from pharmaceutical companies, all the stuff you need to do massive humanitarian assistance," Prince said, adding that it "would have had turnkey fuel support, food, surgical, portable surgical hospitals, beds cots, blankets, all the above." Prince says he was going to do the work for free, "on spec," but "instead we got attacked politically and ended up paying tens of millions of dollars in lawyer bills the last few years. It's an unfortunate misuse of resources because a boat like that sure would have been handy for the Haitian people right now."
Outing Erik Prince
Prince also addressed what he described as his outing as a CIA asset working on sensitive US government programs. He has previously blamed Congressional Democrats and the news media for naming him as working on the US assassination program. The US intelligence apparatus "depends heavily on Americans that are not employed by the government to facilitate greater success and access for the intelligence community," Prince said. "It's unprecedented to have people outed by name, especially ones that were running highly classified programs. And as much as the left got animated about Valerie Plame, outing people by name for other very very sensitive programs was unprecedented and definitely threw me under the bus."
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Al Capone Solution for the Blackwater Problem
By David Isenberg
Author, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq
Despite years of arguing, the state of legal frameworks for private military companies remains unclear. This is for a variety of reasons; using inapplicable laws, such as those for old style mercenaries, questions of jurisdiction, lack of resources, and questions of political will.
To try and clarify the existing, confusing, legal status quo a number of news laws and amendments to existing laws, both nationally and internationally, have been proposed in recent years. Some are undoubtedly beneficial, while others are yet to be tested by inevitable appeals.
But just when one thinks that everything that can be proposed has been along comes a new idea. As the saying goes, out of the mouths of babes. In this case the babe is André M. Penálver, a student at Cornell University Law School.
He writes in the current issues of the Cornell University Law Review:
In the aftermath of the Nisour Square tragedy, in which seventeen Iraqi civilians died as a result of actions by Blackwater USA, a security contractor, the United States was confronted with a loophole in its criminal law. While the responsible Blackwater guards would face stiff penalties under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for any accounting fraud committed abroad, there was no obvious criminal statute that would cover the senseless act of violence in Nisour Square. With the growth of military contractors specifically and the spread of globalization generally, violent acts by corporations proliferate.
This note aims to show that a criminal statute with extraterritorial jurisdiction is the proper solution to the Blackwater problem and the plague of corporate human rights abuses abroad. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) already holds corporations criminally liable for accounting and bribery crimes committed overseas. Congress need only amend the FCPA to address a larger scope of crimes, including human rights abuses, to hold corporations such as Blackwater responsible for their actions. That our statutes make a crime of a corporation's over- seas accounting fraud but not overseas murder is an absurdity that demands change.
His note "Corporate Disconnect: The Blackwater Problem and The FCPA Solution" is doubtful about the ability of international law to address the issue of legal accountability for PMC. He writes a solution rooted in international law is also problematic. "First, there is the ongoing debate over whether international law really is law at all. International law lacks the backing of a legislature, an executive body, and a judiciary with compulsory jurisdiction. These qualities have led some to conclude that international law is more 'positive morality' than law."
And, even if international law is law, there is another concern in finding a forum to apply it. Even if international law did provide all the necessary tools to address something like the Blackwater problem, it does not address whether the United States would ever subject itself or its citizens to such an international criminal trial. To date, the United States has resolved not to let the International Criminal Court try its citizens.
Congress cites the lack of constitutional protections available in the ICC. This same concern would apply to any international tribunal; thus, one could conclude that the United States would not fully cooperate with any international criminal court.
The situation is little better in U.S. courts. In practice, American judges give short shrift to international law in their courtrooms. Using the many rules available under the doctrine of "judicial provincialism," judges may find ways to prevent a hearing on international law cases, to prevent international law from providing the rule of decision in a case, or to hinder the proper handling of international law.
Even if U.S. judges decide to use international law in their decisions, supplanting domestic law with international law raises yet another constitutional concern.
Penálver also explains why recent efforts, such as the amended Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act is inadequate. He writes:
Although MEJA offers a "significant expansion of American criminal law over crimes committed on foreign soil," and although the United States has attempted to indict the Blackwater guards under MEJA, it is not a clear solution to the problem at hand for three reasons.
First, and most importantly, MEJA would only apply to the individual guards: Blackwater USA itself cannot be prosecuted under MEJA. Second, it remains to be seen whether a conviction of the guards is even possible: the government's initial indictment under MEJA has been dismissed.
To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a contractor under MEJA, and this involved child pornography.
Moreover, MEJA has never applied to contractors working for the State Department, as with the Blackwater guards at Nisour Square. Third, a prosecution under MEJA will not likely clarify the law in the least. If there is a prosecution under MEJA, it will be by twisting the statute into a "an unprecedented use of the law," likely producing protracted, technical arguments aimed at scuttling the case well before a jury has the opportunity to evaluate the guards' actions." Criminal law deserves more clarity than this extension of MEJA can provide. Finally, setting aside this dubious application of MEJA, it would certainly not address any of the other human rights abuses that corporations commit overseas.
Using the FPCA offers certain advantages. It is unique in its extraterritorial jurisdiction. The FCPA applies to issuers, domestic concerns, and -- since 1998 -- "any person." As applied to U.S. issuers and persons, there is no requirement of a territorial nexus between the corrupt act and the United States.
The FCPA may reach foreign agents and employees who have little contact with the United States. Likewise, the FCPA could create liability for a domestic concern through the actions of one of its foreign agents, even if that agent has no contact with the United States.
And unlike the case with MEJA the Justice Department and the SEC have enforced the FCPA with frequency and severity. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of investigations by the SEC, and both the SEC and DOJ have sought larger penalties.
In 2004, for the first time, the SEC required a company to disgorge profits of unlawful FCPA activities; that practice is now routine.
More proactively, corporate self-monitoring to ensure FCPA compliance has increased, as has voluntary disclosure arising from corporations' internal investigations.
While the FCPA landscape continues to evolve, all signs point to heightened scrutiny and graver consequences for violators.
In other words, there is nothing like the threat of taking away a corporation's profits to get its attention. This is somewhat akin to convicting Al Capone for tax evasion instead of murder.
According to Penálver, "The power of private corporations that governments have wrestled with for centuries takes on new importance in the context of globalization. While powerful governments such as the United States have learned to manage the world's largest corporations, globalization puts giant interstate corporations into contact with relatively weaker states that have little experience in dealing with the accompanying problems."
To put this in proper context Penálver notes that the modern state is just one of several types of corporations. He writes:
"There have been times that states have been so weak, or business corporations have been so strong, that such corporations have supplanted the state altogether. Not long after Hobbes articulated the source of a state's power, private corporations posed their first challenge to state authority. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European trading monopolies operating in India, North America, and Africa formed the foundations of private empires.
Those monopolies include such historic brand names as the East India Company, Hudson Bay Company, and the British South Africa Company.
However, for the FPCA to be used in regard to PMC it will need to be amended so that corporate law is as much concerned with murder as accounting fraud.
For all the FCPA's success in combating bribery, it is also the source of a conundrum. Although Congress enacted the FCPA to prevent "ethically repugnant" behavior by corporations, the Act ignores human rights abuses while throwing the book at corporate fraud. Had Blackwater officials knowingly changed the figures in its accounting books, the corporation would face a fine of up to $25,000,000 and its employees could spend up to twenty years in jail. But as it happens, because Blackwater guards wrongfully killed seventeen civilians and undermined U.S. interests in Iraq, they and their corporation find them-selves in a legal loophole with no certain criminal liability.
It is not hard to see the disconnect in U.S. extraterritorial law. While U.S. law severely punishes the relatively harmless act of accounting fraud, it offers no remedy for a corporation's acts of brutal violence.
Penálver believes that all that is presently necessary to address human rights abuses by corporations such as Blackwater is political will. Congress could remedy the problem by expanding the scope of the FCPA.
He concludes;
Much of the necessary language may come from existing domestic and international legal concepts. Substantively, Congress could seek to create criminal liability for corporations that aid and abet or perpetrate a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity. Congress could define such terms by looking to the language of international law, particularly the Nuremberg Principles. First, crimes against peace are the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment" of any of the same. Second, war crimes are "violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity." Third, crimes against humanity are "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts occur in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.
Author, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq
Despite years of arguing, the state of legal frameworks for private military companies remains unclear. This is for a variety of reasons; using inapplicable laws, such as those for old style mercenaries, questions of jurisdiction, lack of resources, and questions of political will.
To try and clarify the existing, confusing, legal status quo a number of news laws and amendments to existing laws, both nationally and internationally, have been proposed in recent years. Some are undoubtedly beneficial, while others are yet to be tested by inevitable appeals.
But just when one thinks that everything that can be proposed has been along comes a new idea. As the saying goes, out of the mouths of babes. In this case the babe is André M. Penálver, a student at Cornell University Law School.
He writes in the current issues of the Cornell University Law Review:
In the aftermath of the Nisour Square tragedy, in which seventeen Iraqi civilians died as a result of actions by Blackwater USA, a security contractor, the United States was confronted with a loophole in its criminal law. While the responsible Blackwater guards would face stiff penalties under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for any accounting fraud committed abroad, there was no obvious criminal statute that would cover the senseless act of violence in Nisour Square. With the growth of military contractors specifically and the spread of globalization generally, violent acts by corporations proliferate.
This note aims to show that a criminal statute with extraterritorial jurisdiction is the proper solution to the Blackwater problem and the plague of corporate human rights abuses abroad. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) already holds corporations criminally liable for accounting and bribery crimes committed overseas. Congress need only amend the FCPA to address a larger scope of crimes, including human rights abuses, to hold corporations such as Blackwater responsible for their actions. That our statutes make a crime of a corporation's over- seas accounting fraud but not overseas murder is an absurdity that demands change.
His note "Corporate Disconnect: The Blackwater Problem and The FCPA Solution" is doubtful about the ability of international law to address the issue of legal accountability for PMC. He writes a solution rooted in international law is also problematic. "First, there is the ongoing debate over whether international law really is law at all. International law lacks the backing of a legislature, an executive body, and a judiciary with compulsory jurisdiction. These qualities have led some to conclude that international law is more 'positive morality' than law."
And, even if international law is law, there is another concern in finding a forum to apply it. Even if international law did provide all the necessary tools to address something like the Blackwater problem, it does not address whether the United States would ever subject itself or its citizens to such an international criminal trial. To date, the United States has resolved not to let the International Criminal Court try its citizens.
Congress cites the lack of constitutional protections available in the ICC. This same concern would apply to any international tribunal; thus, one could conclude that the United States would not fully cooperate with any international criminal court.
The situation is little better in U.S. courts. In practice, American judges give short shrift to international law in their courtrooms. Using the many rules available under the doctrine of "judicial provincialism," judges may find ways to prevent a hearing on international law cases, to prevent international law from providing the rule of decision in a case, or to hinder the proper handling of international law.
Even if U.S. judges decide to use international law in their decisions, supplanting domestic law with international law raises yet another constitutional concern.
Penálver also explains why recent efforts, such as the amended Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act is inadequate. He writes:
Although MEJA offers a "significant expansion of American criminal law over crimes committed on foreign soil," and although the United States has attempted to indict the Blackwater guards under MEJA, it is not a clear solution to the problem at hand for three reasons.
First, and most importantly, MEJA would only apply to the individual guards: Blackwater USA itself cannot be prosecuted under MEJA. Second, it remains to be seen whether a conviction of the guards is even possible: the government's initial indictment under MEJA has been dismissed.
To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a contractor under MEJA, and this involved child pornography.
Moreover, MEJA has never applied to contractors working for the State Department, as with the Blackwater guards at Nisour Square. Third, a prosecution under MEJA will not likely clarify the law in the least. If there is a prosecution under MEJA, it will be by twisting the statute into a "an unprecedented use of the law," likely producing protracted, technical arguments aimed at scuttling the case well before a jury has the opportunity to evaluate the guards' actions." Criminal law deserves more clarity than this extension of MEJA can provide. Finally, setting aside this dubious application of MEJA, it would certainly not address any of the other human rights abuses that corporations commit overseas.
Using the FPCA offers certain advantages. It is unique in its extraterritorial jurisdiction. The FCPA applies to issuers, domestic concerns, and -- since 1998 -- "any person." As applied to U.S. issuers and persons, there is no requirement of a territorial nexus between the corrupt act and the United States.
The FCPA may reach foreign agents and employees who have little contact with the United States. Likewise, the FCPA could create liability for a domestic concern through the actions of one of its foreign agents, even if that agent has no contact with the United States.
And unlike the case with MEJA the Justice Department and the SEC have enforced the FCPA with frequency and severity. In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of investigations by the SEC, and both the SEC and DOJ have sought larger penalties.
In 2004, for the first time, the SEC required a company to disgorge profits of unlawful FCPA activities; that practice is now routine.
More proactively, corporate self-monitoring to ensure FCPA compliance has increased, as has voluntary disclosure arising from corporations' internal investigations.
While the FCPA landscape continues to evolve, all signs point to heightened scrutiny and graver consequences for violators.
In other words, there is nothing like the threat of taking away a corporation's profits to get its attention. This is somewhat akin to convicting Al Capone for tax evasion instead of murder.
According to Penálver, "The power of private corporations that governments have wrestled with for centuries takes on new importance in the context of globalization. While powerful governments such as the United States have learned to manage the world's largest corporations, globalization puts giant interstate corporations into contact with relatively weaker states that have little experience in dealing with the accompanying problems."
To put this in proper context Penálver notes that the modern state is just one of several types of corporations. He writes:
"There have been times that states have been so weak, or business corporations have been so strong, that such corporations have supplanted the state altogether. Not long after Hobbes articulated the source of a state's power, private corporations posed their first challenge to state authority. Beginning in the seventeenth century, European trading monopolies operating in India, North America, and Africa formed the foundations of private empires.
Those monopolies include such historic brand names as the East India Company, Hudson Bay Company, and the British South Africa Company.
However, for the FPCA to be used in regard to PMC it will need to be amended so that corporate law is as much concerned with murder as accounting fraud.
For all the FCPA's success in combating bribery, it is also the source of a conundrum. Although Congress enacted the FCPA to prevent "ethically repugnant" behavior by corporations, the Act ignores human rights abuses while throwing the book at corporate fraud. Had Blackwater officials knowingly changed the figures in its accounting books, the corporation would face a fine of up to $25,000,000 and its employees could spend up to twenty years in jail. But as it happens, because Blackwater guards wrongfully killed seventeen civilians and undermined U.S. interests in Iraq, they and their corporation find them-selves in a legal loophole with no certain criminal liability.
It is not hard to see the disconnect in U.S. extraterritorial law. While U.S. law severely punishes the relatively harmless act of accounting fraud, it offers no remedy for a corporation's acts of brutal violence.
Penálver believes that all that is presently necessary to address human rights abuses by corporations such as Blackwater is political will. Congress could remedy the problem by expanding the scope of the FCPA.
He concludes;
Much of the necessary language may come from existing domestic and international legal concepts. Substantively, Congress could seek to create criminal liability for corporations that aid and abet or perpetrate a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity. Congress could define such terms by looking to the language of international law, particularly the Nuremberg Principles. First, crimes against peace are the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment" of any of the same. Second, war crimes are "violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity." Third, crimes against humanity are "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts occur in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Former Blackwater president makes first court appearance
By Mike Baker
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/04/former-blackwater-president-makes-first-court-appearance
RALEIGH, N.C.
Federal prosecutors launched a scathing assessment of Blackwater Worldwide's former president Wednesday, declaring in an initial court appearance that he operated the security firm with "sheer arrogance" and a "scofflaw attitude."
Gary Jackson and four past colleagues indicted last week appeared Wednesday morning before a judge who allowed them to go free as they await trial. A magistrate judge denied a government request to place a bond on each defendant but ordered them to turn over passports and refrain from possessing firearms.
The first court hearing offered a brief glimpse into the combative nature of a case that pits the federal government against former officials at a company that for years played a crucial role as a government contractor protecting U.S. officials in war zones.
Prosecutors slammed Jackson, arguing that he flouted federal regulations while building the lucrative security enterprise. As an example, assistant US attorney John Bowler said Jackson participated in an effort to falsify federal documents to hide that the company had provided guns as a gift to the king of Jordan.
"It is just another display of sheer arrogance and scofflaw attitude," Bowler said.
Ken Bell, an attorney for Jackson, said federal officials were frequently aware of Blackwater's activities and were on scene when the company provided weapons to Jordanian officials. He dismissed the charges as nothing more than "regulatory offenses."
"At most, certain forms were not filled out," he said.
The charges against Jackson, 52, include a conspiracy to violate firearms laws, false statements, possession of a machine gun and possession of an unregistered firearm. Also indicted were former Blackwater general counsel Andrew Howell, 44; former executive vice president Bill Mathews, 44; former procurement vice president Ana Bundy, 45; and former weapons manager Ronald Slezak, 65.
Each of the defendants was charged as part of a conspiracy to violate firearms laws. Mathews also was charged with possession of a machine gun and possession of an unregistered weapon. Howell was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice. Slezak was charged with false statements. Bundy was charged with obstruction of justice.
All five, wearing suits, quietly sat together in the first row of a cramped courtroom, talking only when a judge asked them brief questions. Next to them was a group of tattooed defendants who wore T-shirts and handcuffs during their first appearance on drug charges.
Jackson and other top officials at Blackwater left the Moyock-based firm last year during a management shake-up, around the time the company changed its name to Xe Services.
Blackwater has been trying to rehabilitate its image since a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 people, outraged the Iraqi government and led to federal charges against several Blackwater guards. The accusations later were thrown out of court after a judge found prosecutors mishandled evidence.
In the current case, prosecutors cited several cases in which they say Blackwater bypassed federal rules. In one, they accused the company of setting up a straw purchase in which the firm acquired machine guns such as AK-47s by using a North Carolina sheriff's letterhead. In another, they said the company converted long-barrel rifles to short-barrel weapons for its contractors and didn't register the guns as federal rules require.
Bell said the automatic weapons were acquired in conjunction with the Camden County Sheriff's Office. He said Blackwater had all the licenses required to manufacture short-barrel weapons, something he said contractors needed to do their government work.
"They were not able to perform these functions — and keep themselves alive — with long-barrel weapons," he said.
The maximum penalty for each charge ranges from five to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
http://hamptonroads.com/2010/04/former-blackwater-president-makes-first-court-appearance
RALEIGH, N.C.
Federal prosecutors launched a scathing assessment of Blackwater Worldwide's former president Wednesday, declaring in an initial court appearance that he operated the security firm with "sheer arrogance" and a "scofflaw attitude."
Gary Jackson and four past colleagues indicted last week appeared Wednesday morning before a judge who allowed them to go free as they await trial. A magistrate judge denied a government request to place a bond on each defendant but ordered them to turn over passports and refrain from possessing firearms.
The first court hearing offered a brief glimpse into the combative nature of a case that pits the federal government against former officials at a company that for years played a crucial role as a government contractor protecting U.S. officials in war zones.
Prosecutors slammed Jackson, arguing that he flouted federal regulations while building the lucrative security enterprise. As an example, assistant US attorney John Bowler said Jackson participated in an effort to falsify federal documents to hide that the company had provided guns as a gift to the king of Jordan.
"It is just another display of sheer arrogance and scofflaw attitude," Bowler said.
Ken Bell, an attorney for Jackson, said federal officials were frequently aware of Blackwater's activities and were on scene when the company provided weapons to Jordanian officials. He dismissed the charges as nothing more than "regulatory offenses."
"At most, certain forms were not filled out," he said.
The charges against Jackson, 52, include a conspiracy to violate firearms laws, false statements, possession of a machine gun and possession of an unregistered firearm. Also indicted were former Blackwater general counsel Andrew Howell, 44; former executive vice president Bill Mathews, 44; former procurement vice president Ana Bundy, 45; and former weapons manager Ronald Slezak, 65.
Each of the defendants was charged as part of a conspiracy to violate firearms laws. Mathews also was charged with possession of a machine gun and possession of an unregistered weapon. Howell was charged with two counts of obstruction of justice. Slezak was charged with false statements. Bundy was charged with obstruction of justice.
All five, wearing suits, quietly sat together in the first row of a cramped courtroom, talking only when a judge asked them brief questions. Next to them was a group of tattooed defendants who wore T-shirts and handcuffs during their first appearance on drug charges.
Jackson and other top officials at Blackwater left the Moyock-based firm last year during a management shake-up, around the time the company changed its name to Xe Services.
Blackwater has been trying to rehabilitate its image since a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 people, outraged the Iraqi government and led to federal charges against several Blackwater guards. The accusations later were thrown out of court after a judge found prosecutors mishandled evidence.
In the current case, prosecutors cited several cases in which they say Blackwater bypassed federal rules. In one, they accused the company of setting up a straw purchase in which the firm acquired machine guns such as AK-47s by using a North Carolina sheriff's letterhead. In another, they said the company converted long-barrel rifles to short-barrel weapons for its contractors and didn't register the guns as federal rules require.
Bell said the automatic weapons were acquired in conjunction with the Camden County Sheriff's Office. He said Blackwater had all the licenses required to manufacture short-barrel weapons, something he said contractors needed to do their government work.
"They were not able to perform these functions — and keep themselves alive — with long-barrel weapons," he said.
The maximum penalty for each charge ranges from five to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
The Mercenary Owners, They Are a Changin' (Sort of)
By Jeremy Scahill
Blackwater and DynCorp, the two leading mercenary firms servicing the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have both undertaken steps toward significant structural changes over the past month. In the case of DynCorp, the ownership of the whole business seems to be changing hands, while Blackwater is dumping its private air force.
Cerberus Capital Management, one of the largest private equity firms in the US announced [1] April 12 it was buying DynCorp [2], the massive, publicly traded company, which is akin to the Wal-Mart of the private security industry, for $1 billion in cash. Cerberus counts among its big wigs former vice president Dan Quayle [3], who often represents the company internationally. DynCorp has had its share of scandals [4] over the years, including whistleblower allegations that personnel have engaged in organized sex-slave trading with girls as young as 12 and allegations its personnel have assaulted journalists. It has been rebuked by the State Department for its "aggressive behavior" in interactions with European diplomats, NATO forces and journalists in Afghanistan. A 2007 US government audit of DynCorp's work in Iraq found that the State Department "does not know specifically what it received for most of the $1.2 billion in expenditures under its DynCorp [5]contract for the Iraqi Police Training Program." More recently, the company was in the news facing allegations [6] its training of the Afghan National Police was shoddy [7], including allegations its trainees didn't know how to adjust the sights on their AK-47s. If the Cerberus deal goes through, it will mean that the publicly-traded DynCorp will go private, meaning that it will be infinitely more difficult to get information on the company.
Cerberus seems to have had a dream of owning its own mercenary business for at least a few years. In April 2008, the company was reportedly [8] looking to buy Blackwater. The deal apparently fell through because of concerns over Blackwater's reputation.
For over a year, Blackwater has tried to act [9] like it is under new ownership. It isn't. Erik Prince remains its sole owner. The company has tried to change its name, creating alter egos such as Xe Services and US Training Center. It even went so far as to create an apparent shell company, Paravant, in an effort to trick the government into giving it more contracts in Afghanistan, according [10] to Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin. Paravant is also the "company" whose personnel reportedly signed out [11] hundreds of weapons in Iraq under the name of the popular South Park character Eric Cartman. In January, two Paravant operatives were arrested [12] by the FBI on charges they murdered Afghan civilians.
While Prince technically stepped down [13] as CEO and many of his original cronies have fled or been relieved of their duties (five, including former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, are facing federal weapons charges [14]), Blackwater is still Blackwater and Prince is very much running the show. But in a sign that Prince may be shifting away from his dream of building a parallel structure to the US military--complete with an army, navy and air force--Prince sold [15] his aviation division, made up of Presidential Airways and Aviation Worldwide Services, for $200 million to AAR Corp.
Prince's private little air force had roughly 60 planes, many of which were used for US government and military operations in Afghanistan and Central Asia and Africa. For years, the aviation division has found itself in the legal crosshairs. The families of US servicemen killed in Afghanistan in the crash of Blackwater flight 61 sued the company, [16] saying Blackwater's pilots were reckless, the flight had inadequate equipment and that they should not have flown. AAR seems to have gotten an incredible deal, financially speaking, predicting that it will generate about $175 million of revenue for the company annually. This, coupled with the fact that Blackwater does not seem to be bidding on the new round of massive State Department private security contracts, could be the first real sign that Blackwater is phasing out of, at least, the public, US government-funded mercenary business. Prince's private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions, works for many corporations and foreign governments. Sources have also told me that recently Prince transfered some of his Other Government Agency (read:CIA and JSOC) business to companies outside, but trusted by, Prince's Blackwater empire. Prince, who reportedly ran--and participated in--covert actions for the CIA and JSOC around the world, said recently [17] he wanted to be like Indiana Jones and become a school teacher and perhaps coach wrestling.
Representative Jan Schakowsky, the leading Congressional critic of the mercenary industry, said she was concerned that if DynCorp goes totally private it could hinder oversight activities of its operations going forward. The company remains deeply embedded in US operations, particularly in Afghanistan. DynCorp is bidding on a new massive State Department security contract and beat back protests [18] from Blackwater making it eligible to bid on a lucrative training program in Afghanistan. The company also operates in Pakistan [19]. Schakowsky said the company has a "fairly long history of misconduct."
"We have a hard enough time doing any kind of effective oversight over companies like this," Schakowsky told [20] Reuters. "This just makes it harder."
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/mercenary-owners-they-are-changin-sort
Links:
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/DynCorp-International-Inc-to-bw-3625293200.html?x=0&.v=1
[2] http://www.dyn-intl.com/
[3] http://www.vicepresidentdanquayle.com/biography.html
[4] http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1101-25.htm
[5] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21428395#
[6] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/15/92287/us-contractors-failed-to-train.html
[7] http://www.propublica.org/feature/six-billion-dollars-later-the-afghan-national-police-cant-begin-to-do
[8] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4756462&page=1
[9] http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/126863/
[10] http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/Levin_asks_Gates_to_investigate_before_more_DoD_Blackwater_contracts.html
[11] http://washingtonindependent.com/77476/blackwater-the-senate-and-south-park
[12] http://rebelreports.com/post/322008047/two-blackwater-guards-arrested-by-fbi-on-murder-charges
[13] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-scahill/mercenary-king-erik-princ_b_171105.html
[14] http://www.justice.gov/usao/nce/press/2010-apr-16_2.html
[15] http://hamptonroads.com/2010/03/xe-sells-aviation-unit-aar-200-million
[16] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/19/60minutes/main6223615_page4.shtml
[17] http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/01/blackwater-201001?printable=true
[18] http://industry.bnet.com/government/10006063/xe-services-blackwater-loses-protest-to-dyncorp-for-afghan-training/
[19] http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/dyncorp-to-continue-working-in-pakistan-840
[20] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B2IZ20100412
Blackwater and DynCorp, the two leading mercenary firms servicing the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have both undertaken steps toward significant structural changes over the past month. In the case of DynCorp, the ownership of the whole business seems to be changing hands, while Blackwater is dumping its private air force.
Cerberus Capital Management, one of the largest private equity firms in the US announced [1] April 12 it was buying DynCorp [2], the massive, publicly traded company, which is akin to the Wal-Mart of the private security industry, for $1 billion in cash. Cerberus counts among its big wigs former vice president Dan Quayle [3], who often represents the company internationally. DynCorp has had its share of scandals [4] over the years, including whistleblower allegations that personnel have engaged in organized sex-slave trading with girls as young as 12 and allegations its personnel have assaulted journalists. It has been rebuked by the State Department for its "aggressive behavior" in interactions with European diplomats, NATO forces and journalists in Afghanistan. A 2007 US government audit of DynCorp's work in Iraq found that the State Department "does not know specifically what it received for most of the $1.2 billion in expenditures under its DynCorp [5]contract for the Iraqi Police Training Program." More recently, the company was in the news facing allegations [6] its training of the Afghan National Police was shoddy [7], including allegations its trainees didn't know how to adjust the sights on their AK-47s. If the Cerberus deal goes through, it will mean that the publicly-traded DynCorp will go private, meaning that it will be infinitely more difficult to get information on the company.
Cerberus seems to have had a dream of owning its own mercenary business for at least a few years. In April 2008, the company was reportedly [8] looking to buy Blackwater. The deal apparently fell through because of concerns over Blackwater's reputation.
For over a year, Blackwater has tried to act [9] like it is under new ownership. It isn't. Erik Prince remains its sole owner. The company has tried to change its name, creating alter egos such as Xe Services and US Training Center. It even went so far as to create an apparent shell company, Paravant, in an effort to trick the government into giving it more contracts in Afghanistan, according [10] to Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin. Paravant is also the "company" whose personnel reportedly signed out [11] hundreds of weapons in Iraq under the name of the popular South Park character Eric Cartman. In January, two Paravant operatives were arrested [12] by the FBI on charges they murdered Afghan civilians.
While Prince technically stepped down [13] as CEO and many of his original cronies have fled or been relieved of their duties (five, including former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, are facing federal weapons charges [14]), Blackwater is still Blackwater and Prince is very much running the show. But in a sign that Prince may be shifting away from his dream of building a parallel structure to the US military--complete with an army, navy and air force--Prince sold [15] his aviation division, made up of Presidential Airways and Aviation Worldwide Services, for $200 million to AAR Corp.
Prince's private little air force had roughly 60 planes, many of which were used for US government and military operations in Afghanistan and Central Asia and Africa. For years, the aviation division has found itself in the legal crosshairs. The families of US servicemen killed in Afghanistan in the crash of Blackwater flight 61 sued the company, [16] saying Blackwater's pilots were reckless, the flight had inadequate equipment and that they should not have flown. AAR seems to have gotten an incredible deal, financially speaking, predicting that it will generate about $175 million of revenue for the company annually. This, coupled with the fact that Blackwater does not seem to be bidding on the new round of massive State Department private security contracts, could be the first real sign that Blackwater is phasing out of, at least, the public, US government-funded mercenary business. Prince's private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions, works for many corporations and foreign governments. Sources have also told me that recently Prince transfered some of his Other Government Agency (read:CIA and JSOC) business to companies outside, but trusted by, Prince's Blackwater empire. Prince, who reportedly ran--and participated in--covert actions for the CIA and JSOC around the world, said recently [17] he wanted to be like Indiana Jones and become a school teacher and perhaps coach wrestling.
Representative Jan Schakowsky, the leading Congressional critic of the mercenary industry, said she was concerned that if DynCorp goes totally private it could hinder oversight activities of its operations going forward. The company remains deeply embedded in US operations, particularly in Afghanistan. DynCorp is bidding on a new massive State Department security contract and beat back protests [18] from Blackwater making it eligible to bid on a lucrative training program in Afghanistan. The company also operates in Pakistan [19]. Schakowsky said the company has a "fairly long history of misconduct."
"We have a hard enough time doing any kind of effective oversight over companies like this," Schakowsky told [20] Reuters. "This just makes it harder."
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/blog/mercenary-owners-they-are-changin-sort
Links:
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/DynCorp-International-Inc-to-bw-3625293200.html?x=0&.v=1
[2] http://www.dyn-intl.com/
[3] http://www.vicepresidentdanquayle.com/biography.html
[4] http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1101-25.htm
[5] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21428395#
[6] http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/04/15/92287/us-contractors-failed-to-train.html
[7] http://www.propublica.org/feature/six-billion-dollars-later-the-afghan-national-police-cant-begin-to-do
[8] http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4756462&page=1
[9] http://www.alternet.org/blogs/waroniraq/126863/
[10] http://www.politico.com/blogs/laurarozen/0310/Levin_asks_Gates_to_investigate_before_more_DoD_Blackwater_contracts.html
[11] http://washingtonindependent.com/77476/blackwater-the-senate-and-south-park
[12] http://rebelreports.com/post/322008047/two-blackwater-guards-arrested-by-fbi-on-murder-charges
[13] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-scahill/mercenary-king-erik-princ_b_171105.html
[14] http://www.justice.gov/usao/nce/press/2010-apr-16_2.html
[15] http://hamptonroads.com/2010/03/xe-sells-aviation-unit-aar-200-million
[16] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/19/60minutes/main6223615_page4.shtml
[17] http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/01/blackwater-201001?printable=true
[18] http://industry.bnet.com/government/10006063/xe-services-blackwater-loses-protest-to-dyncorp-for-afghan-training/
[19] http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/front-page/dyncorp-to-continue-working-in-pakistan-840
[20] http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63B2IZ20100412
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
EXCLUSIVE…Secret Recording of Erik Prince Reveals Previously Undisclosed Blackwater Ops
Investigative journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill obtains a rare audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, to a friendly audience in January. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption, provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater. In a Democracy Now! exclusive broadcast we play excerpts of the recording and speak with Scahill about the revelations. [Includes rush transcript]
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/4/exclusivesecret_recording_of_erik_prince_reveals
Guest:
Jeremy Scahill, award-winning independent journalist, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and the author of the international bestseller, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” His article, Secret Erik Prince Tape Exposed is published on his new blog for TheNation.com
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Welcome to all of our listeners and viewers. Erik Prince doesn’t like being in the media spotlight. The reclusive owner of the private military firm known as Blackwater is scheduled to give the keynote address tomorrow at the Tulip Time Festival in his hometown of Holland, Michigan. True to form, Prince told the event’s organizers no news reporting could be done on his speech and they consented to the ban. But journalists and media associations in Michigan protested the move and on Monday, the organizers reversed their position and said the media would be allowed to attend with one caveat: no video or audio recording devices are allowed inside. Despite Prince’s attempts to shield his speeches from public scrutiny, investigative journalist and DEMOCRACY NOW! correspondent Jeremy Scahill obtained a rare audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Prince to a friendly audience in January. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater. Jeremy’s article on the recording of Erik Prince’s speech was published on his new blog for TheNation.com.
AMY GOODMAN: The audio the speech has never before been broadcast. Today, we’ll air excerpts in a DEMOCRACY NOW! exclusive. But first, Jeremy Scahill joins us here in our DEMOCRACY NOW! studio. He is an award winning independent journalist, Puffin Foundation writing fellow at The Nation Institute, and the author of the international bestseller “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Jeremy is also scheduled to speak tomorrow in Holland, Michigan, just hours after Erik Prince, at a separate event organized by the Interfaith Congregation of Holland. Jeremy Scahill, welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW!.
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Nice to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about this tape. How’d you get it?
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Well, Erik Prince has been in the media at times because he has had to respond when its forces killed 17 innocent Iraqis in Nisour Square, he made the rounds on CNN and 60 Minutes and other places. And he generally goes into a very controlled environment. He doesn’t often give speeches, he doesn’t lecture on the university circuit, and when he does give talks, he makes it very clear to the event organizers that there are to be no recording devices and journalists are not allowed. And so I had contact with someone who had the opportunity to go to this private event that was hosted by the Young Presidents Organization and Erik Prince was giving a speech in front of all these entrepreneurs. It was a private gathering. And they had ROTC cadets from the University of Michigan- the commanders of ROTC there. And in fact, at one point during his speech, Erik Prince stops after he had been bashing some NATO countries and saying that some of the U.S. allies in Afghanistan should pack up their bags and get out of the country, he singled-out about Canada as a positive example of a force that was doing a good job in Afghanistan, he stopped and he said, “I just want to make it clear everything I’m saying here is off the record in case any journalists slipped into the room. Let’s remember this is a man whose company does ninety percent of its business with the federal government. Taxpayers fund this man’s corporation. We have a right to know what he’s up to. We have a right to know, when you can’t get documents on Blackwater, what the owner of this company is saying. So I revealed the details of this tape in the interest of the first amendment freedom of the press, but also because I believe the American people have a right. So someone contacted me, said they weren’t going to be going to this and I asked that individual, "Do you think you could record it?” And so what happened was that this person went into the event and clandestinely recorded Erik Prince speaking. And what he said was really incredible.
There are a number of key points to focus on. One is that Erik Prince said that the United States should send armed mercenaries, he doesn’t use the term, but that’s what they are, armed mercenaries, into Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. With the exception of Nigeria, he talked about Yemen and Somalia and Saudi Arabia facing Iranian threats and the Iranians were, as he put it, at the dead center of badness in the world. And he said that by sending in private contractors, armed contractors, instead of the military, you solve the political problems of sending a large U.S. force, and said that the private sector can do this in a much smaller footprint way and it also would be politically expedient because there would essentially be plausible deniability on the part of the government. In the case of Nigeria, of course we’ve seen an increase in resistance movements and indigenous movements that are protesting against multinational oil corporations polluting, doing what they perceive to be stealing of Nigeria’s most valuable resources, oil-rich African nation. Erik Prince talked about these Nigerian groups as stealing oil from the multi-national oil corporations and suggested without providing any evidence whatsoever that revenue from this theft, by Nigerian groups, of the oil was being used to fund terrorist operations. I talked to some military sources that I have that have extensive experience with U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, Pakistan, and what they found most disturbing about what Prince said was that Prince told a story of July 2009 where his narcotics interdiction unit, a 200-person strike force in Afghanistan that I had never heard of this force before, they actually were operating near the Pakistan border, they came across with a said was a massive hashish and heroin operation and Blackwater forces actually called-in air strikes that then came in and destroyed this facility. The idea that a private company is individually calling-in air strikes raises serious questions about the chain of command issue in Afghanistan. How is it that a private force is able to simply can get on the phone and within moments call-in air strikes that take out anything?
The other story that disturbs military folks that I’ve talked to is that Erik Prince tells a story of how his Blackwater forces resupply a U.S. military unit with ammunition when they’re running low. And he says that the reason that Blackwater did it is because there was too much lawyering involved with the official military doing it. So Blackwater was contacted he said, by this military unit, and they brought in the resupply, the ammunition. Again, chain of command issues. How is it that Blackwater is able to just unilaterally work with individual units fo the U.S. military? Or, in the case of the so-called drug bust that they’re actually calling-in air strikes. Prince, Amy, also said that Blackwater took down Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes the President Bush and Prince called the Secret Service “flatfooted.” And said that he’s going to be publishing a book in the fall, Erik Prince is. It’s going to be like, you know, “Chicken Soup for the Mercenary Soul.” And he said he’s going to publish a photo of the Blackwater guy taking down the man that Prince called the “Iraqi shoe bomber.” I’ve never heard an allegation there was a bomb there but- when Erik Prince is speaking in front of the media, you get one version of the story. When he’s talking in front of business leaders and the military, you hear a very different side of things and I think it’s very revealing.
The Pentagon should be asking serious questions right now of Erik Prince about what exactly his forces are doing in Afghanistan. He also said he controls four forward operating bases inside of Afghanistan and including one at the base of the mountains of Tora Bora, which is the closest U.S. base and it’s operated, in Erik Prince’s terms, by Blackwater, to the Pakistan border. But he described having these in different strategic locations around Afghanistan. This was not a speech by a man who seems like he’s concerned that he’s going out of business anytime soon. He seems to be doing quite well and very much of the center of things in Afghanistan.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Well, Jeremy we want to go to one of those clips. This has never before been broadcast. It’s difficult to hear. We have the transcript up for our television viewers. But for our radio audience, why don’t you set up this clip. This is about the Geneva Conventions.
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Right, this was recorded by someone who had to do it secretly, so it was recorded from a seat in the audience with the room ambiance, so it’s a bit hard to make out. But what Erik Prince, he says that people have come up to him and said, aren’t you concerned when you operate in the likes of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan–interesting because Blackwater has denied it works in Pakistan, but here’s Erik Prince mentioning his work in Pakistan–aren’t you concerned when you work in these places you don’t have protection under the Geneva Convention? You know, there’s a debate about this, that they could be classified as ‘unlawful combatants’ because they’re essentially mercenaries, it’s arguable under international law definitions. And Prince said, absolutely not because the people that we’re fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are ‘barbarians who crawled out of the sewer.’ He said that they have a 1200 AD mentality. And that they don’t know where Geneva is, let alone there was a convention there. It’s interesting that he misuses the term convention there because it wasn’t a convention in the sense of a meeting, but a convention in the sense of an international agreement that was brokered that governs now, international affairs. So here’s Erik Prince expressing disdain over the debate about the status of his forces in the Geneva Conventions.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: So let’s go to that clip. Listen carefully. This is Eric Prince speaking in January. Never before been broadcast.
ERIK PRINCE: They are there to kill us. They don’t understand- you know, people ask me that all the time, ’Aren’t you concerned that you folks aren’t covered under the Geneva Convention in dealing in the likes of Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan?’ And I say, ‘Absolutely not,’ because these people, they crawled out of the sewer and they have a 1200 AD mentality. They’re barbarians. They don’t even know where Geneva is, let alone that there was a convention there. [LAUGHTER]
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: That was Erik Prince. Again, it was difficult to understand, you can go to our website at democracynow.org for a transcript, it’s up on the screen, of what he’s saying. We’re going to another clip right now, Jeremy. This is him talking about Yemen, about Saudi Arabia, about the Middle East, and specifically about the influence he thinks of Iran.
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Yeah, as he put it, as Erik Prince put it, as I said, you know Iran is of the dead center of badness in the world. And he painted this picture where Iran is fomenting a Shi’ite revolt in the region and he talked about how they’re stirring-up this revolt in Yemen and doing cross-border raids into Saudi Arabia. He talked about the Iranian influence in Somalia and other countries and talked about the Iranians providing support for improvised explosive devices in Iraq and he said, that in the case of Yemen and Saudi Arabia an Somalia, that the Iranians have had a very sinister hand in these places. So, Erik Prince proposed that the U.S. send in forces, small forces of U.S. mercenaries because he said that you’re not going to solve the problem by putting a lot of uniformed soldiers in these countries. It’s way too politically sensitive, he said. The private sector can operate there with a very, very, very small, very light footprint.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Again, let’s go to that tape. This is Erik Prince.
ERIK PRINCE: So, the Iranians are stirring it up in Yemen first, they’re trying to stir it up in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. The Iranians have had a very, very big hand in Iraq certainly and there’s a lot of evidence that they’re supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan as well. We’ve seen more and more sophisticated IEDs, the Improvised Explosive Devices, that are blowing up our troops on the road, even some evidence of surface-to-air missiles being moved in. So the Iranians have a very sinister hand in these places. You’re not going to solve it by putting a lot of uniformed soldiers in all these countries. It’s way too politically sensitive. The private sector can operate there with a very, very, very small, very light footprint.
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Again, that was Erik Prince speaking in January. Difficult to hear. Jeremy, your article really goes through all of what he says throughout this speech. Talk about- well, go ahead.
AMY GOODMAN: And interestingly, he’s speaking at the University of Michigan where President Obama just gave the commencement address yesterday.
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Right, exactly and where he will be speaking on Wednesday is Holland, Michigan is at the DeVos Fieldhouse which is owned by the DeVos family, the owners of the Orlando Magic basketball team. The biggest bank rollers of the rise of the radical religious right. His sister, Betsy, is married to Dick DeVos, the heir to that fortune. And it’s interesting because he almost always speaks of some kind of a venue there that is controlled by either his family or his extended family. The last part of what Prince said in that clip, though, is very significant. He talked about the issue of the very small footprint. That is in his line for a long time. That the U.S. government has very expensive military operations and that if you take a high-end team of special forces operators like those that work for Blackwater, former SEALS, Delta Force, JSOC guys, joint special operations command guys, that you can send in less of them and that they can inflict much more damage. So he’s suggesting this will be something that can be done right now, send them into these countries to take out ‘the bad guys,’ as he called it, he constantly uses that term, ‘the bad guys.’
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And other things that Prince talks about, about training Afghan forces and also about Hurricane Katrina and Blackwater’s presence there in the aftermath.
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Right, he said that Blackwater trains somewhere in the ballpark of 1,500 Afghans every six weeks. Blackwater is currently competing for this massive training contract to train the Afghan police and there are some other companies doing it, too, but Blackwater right now, has a large part of the market cornered, and so they spend a lot of time with these Afghan forces. But he also sort of spoke disparagingly in a way that sort of was cultural imperialism about Afghans. He said that the Afghans that come to us, you know, they’ve never been a part of something professional and something that works and he said that, you know, they don’t know how to use toilets- and the first thing we have to do is teach them intro to toilet use. He also talks about women that are working with Blackwater, and he says, you know, they come to work in their burkas and then they put on their cammies, their camouflage, and he said, you know, they really like the baton work and they get carried away with the handcuffs, wanting to handcuff men all the time. He was sort of speaking disparagingly of them. And the at the same time turns around and says, ‘but in six weeks we turn these individuals into what U.S. generals have told me is the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan. You know, I wonder what General McChrystal thinks about that, given his Army Ranger history, that Afghans who spend six weeks with Eric Prince’s force are somehow the most effective fighting force in Afghanistan. And then finally, Sharif, as you mentioned, he- Erik Prince brags that Blackwater saved 128 people during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I was down there and- we were all down there, Amy, and we saw the Blackwater guys, we talked to some of them. They said that they were there to confront criminals and stop looters. But what Prince says that I think would be offensive to, Louisiana, is he says that Blackwater forces beat the Louisiana National Guard to the scene of the hurricane zone. He says, we jumped from five states over and beat the Louisiana National Guard. He doesn’t mention that thirty-five to forty percent of the Louisiana National Guard was deployed in Iraq along with massive amounts of equipment that could of been used in recovery operations, that could have been used in humanitarian operations there. So to say Blackwater beat the Louisiana National Guard without mentioning that part of the reason there wasn’t an effective Louisiana National Guard response was because so many of them were in Iraq and deployed abroad. And they expressed anger. I remember seeing some of them coming back into Louisiana livid with President Bush, saying, ‘He cares more about Iraq than he does about Louisiana and we should have been here.’ And so, he uses that then to launch off, Amy, and say he participated, Prince is a SEAL, in the invasion, he called it, of Haiti in 1994. And then he said that he had wanted to create a humanitarian barge like this massive vessel that could respond to natural disasters around the world, that could be supported by large pharmaceutical companies and Archer Daniels Midland, but that because of political attacks from the Left, because of his tens of millions of dollars in legal bills, he had to cancel it. And he says, you know, ‘a ship like that sure could come in handy right now in Haiti as it deals with the earthquake.
AMY GOODMAN: He also talked about the CIA bombing in Khost.
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Yeah. he did although he didn’t mention the fact that Blackwater was guarding the CIA individuals that were blown up that day. You remember there was a Jordanian double agent that managed to penetrate Forward Operating Base Chapman. He killed eight CIA personnel including two Blackwater operatives. I have learned from a very well-informed intelligence source within the U.S. government that the Blackwater men were doing security that day. So, in a way, you could say Blackwater operatives failed to protect the CIA individuals that were there that day. But Prince talked about it being a necessary cost of doing business and that’s when he segued into his disdain for the Geneva Convention, was when he started saying that the people we’re fighting are barbarians that crawled out of the sewer, but he doesn’t mention that Blackwater had personnel killed there. He also compares themselves to Valerie Plame and says that he was a victim of ‘outing’ and that the government depends on Americans who are not working officially with the government, but are contractors, for the entire intelligence apparatus. And it was unprecedented for someone like him, running a sensitive program which was essentially a CIA assassination program, to be outed publicly and compared themselves to Valerie Plame.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy, you’re going to Holland, Michigan tomorrow. You’re going to be speaking hours after Erik Prince.
JEREMY SCHAHILL: Right, I mean, an interfaith congregation in Holland, Michigan, when they learned that Erik Prince was going to be speaking, initially it was going to be completely closed-off to any public scrutiny- I mean, what’s the difference between closing of the public and not allowing journalists to record it in audio or video? And they said, you know, we as residents of the city are offended that this man is going to be speaking at what is supposed to be a sort of cultural celebration of the heritage of people there and that they’re going to shut it down, essentially, from any kind of coverage. So we want someone to come in and give the other side of the story, because the organizers of the festival said that Prince was going to be talking about the value-based lessons of his childhood. Well, what about the values that Erik Prince’s forces have shown in Iraq when they’ve shot innocent civilians, and stolen childhoods, like Ali Kinani, the 9-year-old boy who was the youngest victim of Blackwater at Nisour Square? We reported on that at DEMOCRACY NOW!. My intent is to go there and tell the other side of the story, the one that Erik Prince certainly won’t be discussing inside the DeVos Fieldhouse.
AMY GOODMAN: And we will link to that story that you did tell about Ali Kinani at democracynow.org. Jeremy, thanks so much for being with us. Jeremy Scahill, independent journalist, DEMOCRACY NOW! correspondant, author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” He’s starting a new blog at TheNation.com where he writes about his acquiring this tape of the speech of Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. Back in a minute.
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