Blackwater’s License to Kill Revoked
by Kurt Nimmo

 

“A preliminary Iraqi report on a shooting involving an American diplomatic motorcade said Tuesday that Blackwater security guards were not ambushed, as the company reported, but instead fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman’s call to stop, killing a couple and their infant,” reports the New York Times.

 

“The report, by the Ministry of Interior, was presented to the Iraqi cabinet and, though unverified, seemed to contradict an account offered by Blackwater USA that the guards were responding to gunfire by militants.

 

The report said Blackwater helicopters had also fired. The Ministry of Defense said 20 Iraqis had been killed, a far higher number than had been reported before.”

But of course. After all, Blackwater’s slogan is: “Providing a new generation of capability, skills, and people to solve the spectrum of needs in the world of security,” that is to say killing people in lands invaded and occupied, even lands hit by natural disaster, specifically New Orleans after Katrina.

Blackwater was formed by two former Navy Seals, one a “billionaire right-wing fundamentalist Christian from a powerful Michigan Republican family. A major Republican campaign contributor, he interned in the White House of President George H.W. Bush and campaigned for Pat Buchanan in 1992. He founded the mercenary firm Blackwater USA in 1997 with Gary Jackson, another former Navy SEAL,” according to an NNDB profile.


It is a good idea to link when writing about Blackwater, as they like to sue their critics. Back in 2006, Blackwater threatened to sue journalist Mike Whitney.

“The shooting, which took place on Sunday, has angered Iraqi officials and touched off a harsh debate about private security companies, which operate outside Iraqi law, a privilege extended to them by Americans officials while Iraq’s government was still under American administration,” the New York Times continues. “Blackwater, which guards all top American officials here, had its work suspended, and Iraqi officials agreed to rewrite the rules to make the companies accountable.” In other words, Blackwater’s trigger-happy thugs, politely called “security guards,” are an embarrassment and will now be asked to play by the “rules,” although one might conclude that any such “rules” in an invaded and occupied country where around a million people have died is nothing short of a sick joke.

Blackwater, however, is not going anywhere. In fact, it is the way of the future, as a “number of senior CIA and Pentagon officials have taken top jobs at Blackwater, including firm vice chairman Cofer Black, who was the Bush Administration’s top counterterrorism official at the time of the 9/11 attacks,” Ken Silverstein writes for Harpers. In other words, the bogus GWOT is now privatized, a for-profit enterprise. You may recall Cofer’s infamous remark after the nine eleven inside job that “the gloves came off,” i.e., a lot of people will die, as indeed over a million Iraqis and an undetermined number of Afghans have died.

As it turns out, according to Silverstein’s sources, Eric Prince, Blackwater’s founder, has a “green badge” at the CIA and “regularly, probably once a month or so” meets “with senior people, especially in the D.O.,” that is to say the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, now part of the National Clandestine Service. In addition, Blackwater has recruited Rob Richer, the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director of Operations, who is now Blackwater’s Vice President of Intelligence, and at the time of Silverstein’s writing was “aggressively recruiting Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s current top spy as director of the National Clandestine Service. Rodriguez has a number of former agency friends at Blackwater, most notably Rick Prado, with whom he served in Latin America and who is now Blackwater’s Vice President of Special Programs.” A well-informed grade schooler can tell you what the CIA did in Latin America.

As for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, we are told it will concentrate on “overseas” intelligence gathering. But then, as recently reported, the CIA “violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents,” the National Security Archive announced on June 21. Of course, none of this is revelatory, even news, as Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA illegal domestic operations with a front page story in the New York Times on December 22, 1974, writing that “a check of the CIA’s domestic files ordered last year… produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities… beginning in the nineteen fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail.”

Of course, the CIA’s charter is null and void. “The CIA has assigned dozens of case officers and analysts to work with FBI agents throughout the USA in the most extensive deployment of intelligence officers on domestic soil in the spy agency’s history,” USA Today reported back on November 7, 2004. “Officials at both agencies say the deployment, which pairs CIA officers with FBI agents in the bureau’s offices to assist with terror-related investigations, also represents the CIA’s broadest association with federal law enforcement since the CIA was created after World War II,” despite the fact the agency is “prohibited by law from participating in intelligence-gathering operations against U.S. citizens. It also has no law-enforcement powers.” Even so, “CIA analysts have conducted briefings for local police to help identify potential terrorist threats,” no doubt as previously categorized by the CIA, resulting in the “family jewels” embarrassment (see previous paragraph).

Lest you think Blackwater is something only Iraqis need worry about, consider the fact the for-profit private army is currently training police in Illinois. “Surrounded by pristine farmland, down a series of bumpy rural roads, ‘Blackwater North’ took over an existing 80-acre shooting range” near Mount Carroll. “On the day ABC7 visited, officers from several departments including Chicago and Rockford were in a tactical hostage exercise.” Det. Steve Stoball of the Freeport Police Department said there “are new techniques that the criminals are using so we have to be updated with our techniques. Coming out to Blackwater, these guys have seen it all,” including “firing on innocent civilians,” as Amnesty International notes. Blackwater, of course, has competition, as other “security” corporations, including DynCorp, Zapata, and Custer Battles, also engaged in random mass murder “in efforts to clear roads.” Be afraid, very afraid, that these people are now training local cops, already employing “pain compliance” on students asking one-worlders the wrong questions.

All of this is quite natural, considering. “In many ways, Blackwater represents the life’s work of the neoconservative core that has guided the Bush Administration since it first took power in 2000,” writes Jeremy Scahill. “We’re talking about a company that was founded by a man named Erik Prince, who comes from a family that was one of the top bank rollers of, not only the ‘Republican revolution’ of the 1990s that brought Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America to power, but also the rise of what we now know as the religious right or the Christian conservative movement. Erik Prince’s family helped James Dobson found Focus on the Family. Erik Prince’s family gave the seed money for Gary Bauer to found the Family Research Council. Erik Prince himself is a major bank roller of President Bush, his allies, and the Christian conservative movement in this country…. Someone who is deeply linked to the Christian right, and to the current Administration, has turned around and started what has become the world’s most powerful private mercenary army. These guys are like neo-Crusaders. To have them on the government payroll to the tune of $750 million, operating in a Muslim country, should be frightening to everyone who understands that.”

Frightening, indeed, although wholly predictable, as the “Christian right,” i.e., the Muslim-hating Christian Zionists, are now in control of the horizontal and vertical when it comes down to U.S. foreign policy—and are now training local police departments.

But it should be even more frightful for Americans, usually oblivious to the mass murder of Iraqis. “When Hurricane Katrina hit, Blackwater started a domestic operations division of its company, and it began seeking greater contracting opportunities domestically inside of the United States. At one point, the federal government was paying Blackwater about $240,000 a day for Hurricane Katrina. The company was billing the government $950 per day, per Blackwater man deployed in the hurricane zone. They had about 600 guys stretched from Texas all the way through the Gulf region,” Scahill continues.

Now Blackwater’s been in negotiations with several state governments in the United States. Blackwater met recently with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger about doing disaster response in California. They’re opening up a new private military base in San Diego. Another one is in Mount Carroll, Illinois. They have applied for operating licenses in every coastal U.S. state. This is the expansion of a privatized army.

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, speaks boldly about Blackwater being the FedEx of the national security apparatus. They’re manufacturing surveillance blimps and trying to market them to the Department of Homeland Security to use to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, Blackwater and its executives continue to pour money into these Christian conservative causes, conservative politicians’ campaign coffers. This is really the embodiment of everything that President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address, when he talked about the dangers of unchecked power of the private sector, and the rise of the military-industrial complex.

Again, be afraid, very afraid, especially if you live in a coastal state hit by a hurricane.

In Iraq, Blackwater “initiated the shooting when a car did not heed a police officer and moved into an intersection.” Ali al-Dabbagh, spokesman for Iraq’s puppet government, said the “traffic policeman was trying to open the road for them. It was a crowded square. But one small car did not stop. It was moving very slowly. They shot against the couple and their child. They started shooting randomly,” the New York Times continues. As noted above by Amnesty International, shooting up cars seems to be the preferred method of traffic control in Iraq, that is when a “security” corporation, i.e., mercenaries, is in control.

“Among the rank and file of security contractors, Blackwater guards are regularly ridiculed as cowboys who are relentlessly and pointlessly aggressive, carry excessive weaponry and do not appear to have top-of-the-line training,” the New York Times notes. “Passing Blackwater convoys sometimes intimidates even Westerners, who fear coming under attack if they make a wrong move.”

And now Blackwater is passing this less than “top-of-the-line training” on to local police here in the United States.

Incidentally, the characterization of Blackwater as “thugs” above in the first paragraph is my opinion, based on the facts that follow. It is not slander. Last time I checked, opinion was protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Of course, that may have changed since the last time I checked, as our decider and commander guy considers the Constitution “just a goddamned piece of paper” and has vested himself with all manner of dictatorial power contrary to what that “goddamned piece of paper” states, not that it matters as the average American cannot be bothered, what with Britney running around in her underwear.

 

 

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