Jeffrey Scahill writes at his blog Rebel Reports:
Some parts of Blackwater’s clandestine work for the CIA have begun
to leak out from behind the iron curtain of secrecy. The company’s role
in the secret assassination program and its continued involvement in
the CIA drone attacks that occur regularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan
have become front page material in the Washington Post and New York Times.
There is much more to this story than has been reported publicly and
details will continue to emerge, particularly about Blackwater’s
aviation division(s).
Now we learn
(unsurprisingly) that Blackwater offered “foreign” operatives to work
on the CIA assassination program. Blackwater told the CIA that it
“could put people on the ground to provide the surveillance and support
— all of the things you need to conduct an operation,” a former senior
CIA official familiar with the secret program told The Associated Press.
If that’s true, those foreign individuals would appear to have been
privy to information that vice president Cheney and other US officials
deemed not appropriate for Congressional ears, not to mention oversight.
In light of all of these developments, it is important to remember
how Erik Prince essentially hired George W Bush’s top people from the
CIA’s Directorate of Operations to create his own private CIA, Total
Intelligence Solutions. He also offered Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, the
former number 3 man at the CIA, a paid position on Blackwater’s board.
Buzzy was the guy who got Blackwater its first known CIA contract back
in 2002 in Afghanistan. Buzzy is also the one whining about the CIA’s
“morale” problem, in light of the recent scandals, in the Washington Post. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he told the paper.
When you hear reports that a “private” company was hired to do
clandestine work, remember that this particular “private” company,
Blackwater, is, in part, being run by Agency veterans, including
several of the top people running the torture and assassination
programs under Bush. At the end of the day, using Blackwater and/or
other companies represents taking covert, lethal operations even
further away from anything vaguely resembling oversight by the
Congress. By using ex-Agency people instead of “current” Agency
personnel, yet another barrier is thrown up and the case for “plausible
deniability” becomes stronger. When you are dealing with a billionaire
like Erik Prince who apparently viewed himself as a crusader tasked
with eliminating muslims and Islam globally, as has been alleged by a
former Blackwater official, it is not difficult to imagine how all of
this could remain—at least in part— off the books. Would it be a great
shock if we learn that Prince volunteered some of his men or his
company’s time to lethal missions for the CIA free of charge? “I’m not
a financially driven guy,” Prince told Congress in October 2007. Take that with a grain of salt, but it is probably not flat out false. He was a believer in the crusade.
That is why it is essential
that Congress dig deep into all aspects of the CIA assassination
program and Blackwater’s total involvement. But it is important to
remember that it is so much bigger than this one company and certainly
bigger than one clandestine program.
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