The Prince of Fascism Surfaces His Malignant Head

Erik Prince is pitching Trump on using mercenaries to round up immigrants. Because nothing typifies evil in service of the government as Prince and his mercs. They're the same group of goons who sparked the Battle of Falluja and who massacred civilians in Baghdad.

There has been distain for mercenaries in this country ever since the Battle of Trenton. Mercenaries owe no loyalty to the Flag or the Constitution, only to their paymaster.

They are beyond evil. And Prince is one of the masters of evil.

In Other Stupid Shit From the Trump White House

President* Trump’s advisers recruited two businessmen who profited from military contracting to devise alternatives to the Pentagon’s plan to send thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, reflecting the Trump administration’s struggle to define its strategy for dealing with a war now 16 years old.

Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.

Let's not forget for a moment that it was the brutal, arrogant and trigger-happy chuckleheads working for Prince that caused Iraq to blow up and damn near fall apart. Prince is about as close to being an unindicted war criminal as one can be. Once he fell out of favor with the Pentagon and the State Department, he left the country and was seen sucking up to the Chinese government.

No doubt that it was Bannon's vast military experience as a division officer on a tin can in the early `80s that has enabled him to come up with ideas such as turning the Afghan War over to those two chuckleheads.

After All, Hiring Mercenaries Worked Well Before

The overstretched US military has hired hundreds of private sector contractors in the heart of its drone operations to analyse top secret video feeds and help track high value terror targets, an investigation has found. ... Some individual analysts even publicly advertise their skills on sites such as LinkedIn, with one boasting of helping with the “kill/capture of high-value targets”.

What can possibly go wrong with turning some functions in warfare over to contractors?

Blackwater- Nisour Square Massacre Convictions

Three security guards working for the private US contractor Blackwater have been found guilty of the manslaughter of a group of unarmed civilians at a crowded Baghdad traffic junction in one of the darkest incidents of the Iraq war.

A fourth, Nicholas Slatten, was found guilty of one charge of first-degree murder. All face the likelihood of lengthy prison sentences after unanimous verdicts on separate weapons charges related to the incident.

The sad thing is that the massacre wasn't charged as a war crime. If they had charged the Blackwater goons with war crimes, then they could have gone after Blackwater Führer Prince and nailed his slimy ass under the Yamashita doctrine.

Which, of course, they'd never do because then they'd set a precedent for charging Chimpy, Darth, Condi and the rest of the senior Bushies.

And, probably, now, Barry and his boys.

Temper, Temper!

A CIA contractor freed by Pakistani authorities after the families of two men he killed in a shootout agreed to accept a $2.34 million "blood money" payment was charged Saturday in Colorado, with authorities saying he got into a fight over a shopping center parking spot.

Deputies responding to an altercation between two men outside an Einstein Bagel in Highlands Ranch, south of Denver, took Raymond Davis into custody Saturday morning, said Douglas County Sheriff's Lt. Glenn Peitzmeier. He was charged with third-degree assault and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.

Want to guess who this guy was working for when he shot those guys in Pakistan? You won't be surprised.

Outsourcing the Operation of Concentration Camps

While I am aware that the title of this post skirts Godwin's Law, the analogy is apt. For private prison companies, especially in the area of detaining unlawful immigrants, have been operating prisons that are little more than brutal concentration camps.

Inhuman treatment, including locking prisoners into closed vans on hot days and not providing them with water. Poor food. Lengthy detentions in solitary confinement. Lack of competent medical care, or any medical care.

The goons doing this include the GEO Group, which detains thousands of immigrants in this country, a Brit-Danish conglomerate called, cryptically, G4S, and Serco Group, plc,  a company whose governing principles have nothing to do with either ethics or humanity.* And yes, CCA is also playing this game. of warehousing detainees.

The companies love this because few people care what happens to unlawful immigrants. They don't have families that can vote or protest. Their families aren't in the country, so they can't hire lawyers or buttonhole politicians.

The real surprise is why isn't Blackwater Xe or Halliburton/KBR involved in this racket. It would seem to be a natural for them.
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*But they proudly support the Annapolis Opera, which might soothe their consciences.

UAE Confirms Hiring Prince's Battalion of Gun Thugs

Not that it matters much, but the UAE has confirmed hiring Erik Prince's battalion of mercenaries.

It's going to be interesting to see if anyone in the Arab world cars about UAE's importation of Christians whose sole task is to shoot down Muslims.

Are You a Dictator of a Small Nation? Are Your People Demonstrating In the Streets?

Oh, you probably would like to deploy troops to gun those ungrateful fuckers down. But your cops and soldiers may not be as eager to gun down people from their own neighborhoods and tribes as you are.

You've got a problem.

Don't worry. Erik Prince has your back. He's already formed a battalion of gun thugs for the United Arab Emirates.

Given the arrogance and trigger-happy bloodthirstiness shown by Blackwater's mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, the UAE is playing with fire by hiring Prince to set up and run a battalion of goons.

War Criminal News; Blackwater Edition

Xx, formerly Blackwater Worldwide (and soon to be the Sunny Day Security Corp.) has agreed to pay a $42 million dollar penalty in order to stave off criminal charges, and to keep their current Federal contracts.

In June, the State Department awarded Blackwater a $120 million contract to provide security at its regional offices in Afghanistan, while the C.I.A. renewed the firm’s $100 million security contract for its station in Kabul. At the time, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, defended the decision, saying that the company had offered the lowest bid and had “cleaned up its act.”

Ah, horseshit.

I think it's a very telling point that ol' patriotic Erik Prince fled the country to Dubai, most likely to avoid prosecution.

US State Department- Plumbing the Depths of the Stupid Ocean

The State Department is planning to field an army of contractors in Iraq, complete with Blackhawk helicopters and MRAPs.

One of the biggest fiascoes in the whole Iraq War clusterfuck was the massacre of civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square by the trigger-happy goons of a past State Department security contractor: Formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, now known as Xe (and probably soon to be known as the Princess Sparkle Pony Armed Escort Service). Blackwater was not the only contracting company that acted like a pack of thugs, they were just the most prominent.

And so now the State Department is going to try it again.

When you do something that doesn't turn out right and you keep trying again, there is a line where you cross from "stubborn" into "stupid".

We have a group of people whose job is to provide security for embassies. They are called the United States Marines. If the problem is that the Iraqis don't want American soldiers in Iraq, then fine, put the Marines in civilian clothes and we'll all pretend they are not Marines.

It worked for decades when the Japanese said that they did not want nuclear weapons on their territory and everyone pretended that they didn't know that American warships during the Cold War had nukes in their magazines.

Time to Shut Down the Gusher of Money

Part II of the Top Secret America series.

Contractors whose job it to kill people are called "mercenaries".

Beyond that, the clear implication of the series so far is that there is zero accountability for the hundreds of billions of dollars that are being blown on all of this security folderol.

How Very Appropriate

The Department of Homeland Stupidity Security is building a huge-ass headquarters on the grounds of an abandoned mental hospital.

The WaPo's first installment on their series about Top Secret America is up. The clear implication is that there are nearly a million people who are generating untold volumes of intelligence reports, most of which are of dubious worth and 99% of which will never be read by anybody.

I have no idea how many hundreds of billions of dollars are being blown because agencies like the DHS and DoD and all of those faceless contractors are suffering from edifice complexes. But the existence of all of those shadowy contractors and black-funded projects probably pose a far greater security threat to this nation than any group of terrorists living in the hills of Yemen and Afghanistan.

Fleeing Rats

Just like ol' Robert Vesco and Marc Rich, the corrupt rats from the Chimpy Years are fleeing the country.

Sources close to Blackwater and its secretive owner Erik Prince claim that the embattled head of the world's most infamous mercenary firm is planning to move to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The Middle Eastern nation, a major hub for the US war industry, has no extradition treaty with the United States. In April, five of Prince's top deputies were hit with a fifteen-count indictment by a federal grand jury on conspiracy, weapons and obstruction of justice charges. Among those indicted were Prince's longtime number-two man, former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, former vice presidents William Matthews and Ana Bundy and Prince's former legal counsel Andrew Howell.

...

While Prince has not personally been charged with any crimes, federal investigators and several Congressional committees clearly have his company and inner circle in their sights. The Nation learned of Prince's alleged plans to move to the UAE from three separate sources.

I assume that his lawyers have looked into whether the UAE is a signatory nation to the International Criminal Court, which is why he is reportedly planning to move there. Presumably he can continue to make big donations to the party of Hoover from the UAE. Whether he has thought about if it is a good idea for the president of a company which earned its reputation from slaughtering women and children in a Muslim nation to flee to a nominally Islamic nation is another question.

Don't let the screen door hit you on the way out, Erik.

Company For Sale

Blackwater Worldwide is for sale. Of course, any buyer will have to deal with acquiring a company that has a global reputation for being a pack of arrogant killers, so there should be some sort of adjustment for that in the purchase price.

Rolling Over on Blackwater

Care to bet whether or not any of these guys are going to roll over on Prince, now that their protectors in the White House are long gone?

Federal prosecutors charged the former president of Blackwater Worldwide and four other former senior company officials on Friday with weapons violations and making false statements in the first criminal inquiry to reach into the top management ranks of the private security company.

The executives were some of the closest advisers to Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, and helped him steer the company during its swift rise to become the leading contractor providing security for American diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan, working for the State Department, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.

Blackwater 61

A Blackwater flight slammed into a mountain in Afghanistan in 2004, killing all aboard.

60 Minutes is running a story about it. Blackwater tried to blame one of the passengers, an Army lieutenant colonel, whose widow sued them.

Blackwater settled the case after CBS News filmed their interviews (but not with Blackwater, who refused).


Watch CBS News Videos Online

Wingnut Welfare Fraud

Wingnut Corporate Welfare Queens are defrauding the government:

Two former employees of Blackwater Worldwide have accused the private security contractor of defrauding the government for years with phony billing, including charging for a prostitute, alcohol and spa trips.

In newly unsealed court records, a husband and wife who once worked for Blackwater said they had personal knowledge of the company falsifying invoices, double-billing federal agencies and charging the government for personal and inappropriate items whose real purpose was hidden. They said they witnessed "systematic" fraud on the company's security contracts with the State Department in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

Only these Wingnut Welfare Queens ride around in Gulfstreams. They'd regard riding in a Caddy as slumming.

The Murderous Bastards of Blackwater

One man's story of the day when the trigger-happy goons of Blackwater (now known as Xe) shot his nine-year old son in the head.

A Subsidiary of the CIA

Blackwater.

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials. ...

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

The questions of the use of mercenaries on the battlefield should be asked thus: "What the fuck were you clowns thinking?"

The CIA should have recalled this line, from a couple of centuries ago:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

The use of mercenaries brings dishonor upon our country. Those goons have been totally unaccountable to any authority for their misdeeds. Worse, the use of mercenaries has been a serious propaganda windfall for the enemy, for their behavior has been imputed to our own soldiers. I do not think it is overstating the case to say that Blackwater's behavior in Iraq got some of our own soldiers killed.

The use of mercenaries on the battlefield is an evil that should be stopped. If it cannot be stopped, the laws should be changed so that those guys, when in the pay of the United States, no matter how disguised or "cut-out", are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Then we can indeed hold them accountable. And that accountability should extend to the very top of the mercenary companies and, if they have been arranged as interlocking corporations, to all of the managers and officers.

A Fine Royal Whine

From Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, who feels that his company has been "thrown under the bus."

Yeah, that can happen when you richly earn a reputation for running a pack of trigger-happy goons. This quote in the story, reprised from 2008, was classic Blackwater arrogance:

"The experience we've had would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk."

It's more of a disincentive to run people off the road and shoot into crowds of fleeing civilians. Blackwater's offenses ran from major homicides committed by its employees to stupidly offensive stunts such as freezing up plastic bottles of water and then throwing them at pedestrians.

Blackwater's problems were of their own making.

Another young Marine major referred to Blackwater’s conduct on September 16 [2007] as another demonstration of their practice of “spray and pray.” “Lighting up an entire city block because a car engine backfires,” he said, “doesn’t protect lives; it endangers the lives of American soldiers performing a mission in Iraq.”

$2 million in legal bills each month sounds low, considering all the crimes and misdeeds that Blackwater has alleged to have been behind. Death by litigation: Cry me a river.