"What the agency (CIA) was doing with Blackwater scares the hell out of me," said Jack Rice, a former CIA field operator who worked for the directorate of operations, which runs covert paramilitary activities for the CIA. "When the agency actually cedes all oversight and power to a private organization, an organization like Blackwater, most importantly they lose control and don't understand what's going on," Rice told The Nation.
Blackwater was setup by Eric Prince, in 2002 at the border of North Carolina and Virginia. Today the company (Xe) claims that its training facility in North Carolina is the largest in the world which trains almost 40,000 people yearly. Blackwater, renamed to Xe, on February 13th 2009, is the largest recipient of department of Defense and department of State. According to New York Times a congressional research Service, report states that civilian contractors working for Pentagon in Afghanistan now outnumber the number of US Military personal. [1]
PBS reported in June, that during the last three months, there has been a 29% increase in private military contractors in Afghanistan.After 9/11 Blackwater has become the frontline corporation for US expansionist wars. Blackwater has more than 2300 private soldiers deployed in at least nine countries, including inside the US.
Blackwaterhas more than $500 million in government contracts, and that does not include the secret, ‘black’ budget operations for US intelligence agencies or private corporations and for foreign governments. As one congressmen observed that in strictly military terms, Blackwater could overthrow many of the world’s governments. [2] The Times, of London reported that in post Iraqi invasion the boom was in security business not oil. [3] Cofer Black, the company's current vice chairman, was director of the CIA's
Counterterrorist Center (CTC) at the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001. He was the United States Department of State coordinator for counterterrorism with the rank of ambassador at large from December 2002 to November 2004. After leaving public service, Black became chairman of the privately owned intelligence gathering company Total Intelligence Solutions, Inc. (a Blackwater subsidiary), as well as vice chairman for Xe.
Eric prince the founder of Blackwater is a radical right-wing Christian multi millionaire who is a diehard republican supporter, and has a radical Christian agenda that he likes to follow. Prince graduated from Holland Christian High School, attended US Naval Academy for a brief period of time before leaving to attend Hillsdale College. Prince joined US Navy in 1992. He served as a Navy Seal officer. Blackwater was setup with money that Prince Family left for Eric Prince. A very important part of Prince’s religious beliefs are his upbringing in conservative surrounding in rural Michigan. He attended the conservative Dutch Reform Church. Followers of Dutch Reform church believe that God has predestined some people for salvation and others for damnation.
Jeremy Scahill reports that, “Prince views Blackwater as a neo-crusader force since the beginning”. Scahill also states that Blackwater had a private nod of approval from Christian Zionist in the White House during the Bush presidency.
The Ideology of Blackwater and Eric Prince is based upon the core beliefs of an ancient organization that was part of the original Crusades that were launched upon the Muslim world by Christian Europe. Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM) was basically the military wing of the Knights Templar. It takes its origins from the Knights Hospitaller, an organization founded in Jerusalem in 1050 as an Amalfitan hospital to provide care for poor and sick pilgrims to the Holy Land. After the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 during the First Crusade, it became a Catholic military order under its own charter. Following the loss of Christian territory in the Holy Land, the Order operated from Rhodes (1310-1523), and later from Malta (1530-1798), over which it was sovereign.
Although this state came to an end with the ejection of the Order from Malta by Napoleon, the Order as such survived. It retains its claims of sovereignty under international law and has been granted permanent observer status at the United Nations. SMOM is considered to be the main successor to the medieval Knights Hospitaller. Today the order has 12,500 members, 80,000 permanent volunteers, 13,000 medical personnel including doctors, nurses, auxiliaries and paramedics. It claims to be a traditional example of a sovereign entity other than a state. Its two headquarters in Rome, namely the Palazzo Malta in Via dei Condotti 68 (where the Grand Master resides and Government Bodies meet), and the Villa Malta on the Aventine (which hosts the Grand Priory of Rome, the Embassy of the Order to Holy See and the Embassy of the Order to Italy), are granted extraterritoriality.
Author Jeremy Scahill writes in his book “Blackwater”, “SMOM, a Christian militia formed in the eleventh century, before the first crusades, with a mission of defending territories that the crusaders had conquered from Muslims.”
These hardcore Christian beliefs of Eric Prince and Blackwater have also been verified in the recent ongoing investigation into the crimes of Blackwater. According to the MSNBC news report, one of the witnesses in the case has said that, “Prince views himself as a Christian crusader eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe. To that end Prince intentionally deployed in Iraq certain men who shared this vision of Christian supremacy.” The report says further, “many of these men used call signs based on the Knights Templar, the warriors who fought in the crusades”.
Blackwater is so powerful that in September 2005, after Hurricane Katrina devastated Gulf Coast and New Orleans, Blackwater sent in around 150 security personnel to New Orleans. This created a lot of controversy in the alert circles of US. It should be the responsibility of US law enforcement agencies to provide services to its citizens.
After 9/11 Blackwater, has become part and parcel of US military operations. Scahill says that Blackwater is like fifth pillar of US military after, army, air force, navy, and marines. Recent revelations by news reports show that CIA had asked Blackwater to help in their covert operations in Afghanistan. [4]
“In April 2002, the CIA paid Blackwater more than $5 million to deploy a small team of men inside Afghanistan during the early stages of US operations in the country. A month later, Erik Prince, the company's owner and a former Navy SEAL, flew to Afghanistan as part of the original twenty-man Blackwater contingent. Blackwater worked for the CIA at its station in Kabul as well as in Shkin, along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they operated out of a mud fortress known as the Alamo. It was the beginning of a long relationship between Blackwater, Prince and the CIA”. [5]
This shows that CIA and the Pentagon have been using Blackwater knowing that classified information will be shared with a private company. Other point is that when US forces moved into Afghanistan people around that world didn’t realize that Blackwater mercenaries also accompany US troops.
The New York Times interviewed, Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jan said that because of her oath of secrecy on sensitive intelligence issues, she could neither confirm nor deny that Congress was aware of Blackwater's involvement in this program before the New York Times report. Schakowsky also declined to comment on whether Blackwater came up at a June briefing by CIA director Leon Panetta, which she attended. That briefing sparked calls for an investigation into whether Vice President Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to conceal an assassination program from Congress.
"What we know now, if this is true, is that Blackwater was part of the highest level, the innermost circle strategizing and exercising strategy within the Bush administration," Schakowsky told The Nation. "Erik Prince operated at the highest and most secret level of the government. Clearly Prince was more trusted than the US Congress because Vice President Cheney made the decision not to brief Congress. This shows that there was absolutely no space whatsoever between the Bush administration and Blackwater."
Currently Blackwater is undergoing a federal investigation in to the alleged murder of seventeen civilians in 2007 at Nisour Square, Baghdad, Iraq. The Justice Department was originally not expected to bring criminal charges against the corporation, however in December 2008, the Justice Department announced they were charging five of the Blackwater employees, and ordered them to surrender themselves to the FBI. Charged with manslaughter are Donald Ball, a former Marine from West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard, a former Marine from Knoxville, Tennessee; Evan Liberty, a former Marine from Rochester, New Hampshire; Nick Slatten, a former Army sergeant from Sparta, Tennessee, and Paul Slough, an Army veteran from Keller, Texas. A sixth Blackwater guard, Jeremy Ridgeway of California, struck a deal with prosecutors, turned on his former colleagues, and pleaded guilty to one count each of manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, and aiding and abetting.
Apart from the main service of providing security personnel, Blackwater has its aviation branch, its own armored personal carriers; Blackwater has its K-9 dog unit. The main subsidiary of Blackwater is Total Intelligence Solution. This is basically Blackwater’s intelligence agency. The executives of Total Intelligence include CEO Robert Richer, the former associate deputy director of the CIA's Directorate of Operations and second-ranking official in charge of clandestine operations. From 1999 to 2004, Richer was head of the CIA's Near East and South Asia Division, where he ran covert operations in the Middle East and South Asia. As part of his duties, he was the CIA liaison with Jordan's King Abdullah, a key US ally and Blackwater client, and briefed George W. Bush on the burgeoning Iraqi resistance in its early stages. Total Intelligence's chief operating officer is Enrique "Ric" Prado, a twenty-four-year CIA veteran and former senior executive officer in the Directorate of Operations. He spent more than a decade working in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and ten years with the CIA's "paramilitary" Special Operations Group. Total Intelligence is run out of an office on the ninth floor of a building in the Ballston area of Arlington, Virginia. It’s Global Fusion Center, complete with large-screen TVs broadcasting international news channels and computer stations staffed by analysts surfing the web, "operates around the clock every day of the year" and is modeled after the CIA's counterterrorist center, once run by Black. The firm employs at least sixty-five full-time staff--some estimates say it's closer to 100. "Total Intel brings the...skills traditionally honed by CIA operatives directly to the board room," Black said when the company launched. [6]
