From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: October 3, 2007 7:56:21 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Blackwater and CIA, "Theocratic Illuminati," and "Vast
Right Wing Conspiracy"
The law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home to Jack
Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount,
represented Blackwater till October 2006. Blackwater then hired
another high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials
-- Ken Starr.
See what's new at AOL.com and Make AOL Your Homepage.
From: "Jim S." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: October 3, 2007 6:34:48 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Bush Administration's Ties to Blackwater!!
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they
don't have
any."-- Alice Walker
http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2007/10/bush-
administrations-ties-to-blackwater.html
*The Bush Administration's Ties to Blackwater*
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Blamed in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the private security firm
has long ties
to the White House and prominent Republicans, including Ken Starr.
The Bush Administration's Ties to Blackwater
By Ben Van Heuvelen
Salon, Oct. 02, 2007
When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy
allegedly
killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, it was only the
latest in a series
of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private
security firm.
Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since
2005, the North
Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq,
has reported
195 "escalation of force incidents"; in 163 of those cases
Blackwater guns fired
first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were
twice as likely
as employees of two other firms protecting State Department
personnel in Iraq to
be involved in shooting incidents.
On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the
House Oversight
and Government Reform Committee, will hold a hearing on the U.S.
military's use
of private contractors. When Waxman announced plans for the
hearing last week,
the State Department directed Blackwater not to give any
information or testimony
without its signoff. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and
Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater
C.E.O. and
founder, Erik Prince, is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
But the attempt to shield Prince was apparently not the first time
State had
protected Blackwater. A report issued by Waxman on Monday alleges
that State
helped Blackwater cover up Iraqi fatalities. In December 2006,
State arranged
for the company to pay $15,000 to the family of an Iraqi guard who
was shot and
killed by a drunken Blackwater employee. In another shooting death,
the payment
was $5,000. As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also
allowed a
Blackwater employee to write State's initial "spot report" on the
Sept. 16
shooting incident -- a report that did not mention civilian
casualties and
claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a
convoy.
The ties between State and Blackwater are only part of a web of
relationships
that Blackwater has maintained with the Bush administration and
with prominent
Republicans. From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual
federal
contracts from less than $1 million to more than $500 million, all
while
employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the
administration,
several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to
take jobs at
the security company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater's
luminaries with
their professional -- and political -- résumés.
*Erik Prince, founder and C.E.O.*: How did Blackwater go from a
small corporation
training local S.W.A.T. teams to a seemingly inseparable part of
U.S. operations
in Iraq? Good timing, and the connections of its C.E.O., may be
the answer.
Prince, who founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-
the-scenes
role in the company until after 9/11, has connections to the
Republican Party in
his blood. His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was
instrumental in
the creation of the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing
Christian
groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration. At
his funeral
in 1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian
conservative
movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince's widow, Elsa,
who remarried
after her husband's death, has served on the boards of the F.R.C.
and another
influential Christian-right organization, Dobson's Focus on the
Family. She
currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where,
according to I.R.S.
filings, her son Erik is a vice president. The foundation has
given lavishly to
some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July
2003 and July
2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the F.R.C. and
$531,000 to Focus
on the Family.
Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for
National Policy,
the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings
have been
attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer, and
whose membership
is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Dobson. The
Edgar and Elsa
Prince Foundation gave the C.N.P. $80,000 between July 2003 and
July 2006.
The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister
-- married
into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to
Republican and
conservative causes. ("I know a little something about soft money,
as my family
is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national
Republican
Party," Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill
newspaper Roll
Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000
and again
from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican
candidate for
Michigan governor in 2006.
Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to
Republicans and
cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his
first and
second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates
and political
action committees. Through his Freiheit Foundation, he also gave
$500,000 to
Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by former Nixon official Charles
Colson, in
2000. In the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the American
Enterprise
Institute, a conservative think tank. During college, he interned
in George H.W.
Bush's White House, and also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-
Calif.
Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Rep. John Doolittle
have visited
Blackwater's Moyock, N.C., compound, on a trip arranged by the
Alexander Strategy
Group, a lobbying firm founded by former aides of then House
Majority Leader Tom
Delay. A.S.G. partner Paul Behrends is a longtime associate of
Prince's.
Prince's connections seem to have paid off for Blackwater. Robert
Young Pelton,
author of "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," has
reported that
one of Blackwater's earliest contracts in the national arena was a
no-bid $5.4
million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan, which came
after Prince
made a call to then C.I.A. executive director Buzzy Krongard.
What's more,
Harper's Ken Silverstein has reported that Prince has a security
pass for C.I.A.
headquarters and "meets with senior people" inside the C.I.A. But
Prince's most
important benefactor was fellow conservative Roman Catholic convert
L. Paul
Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the
American
occupation government in Iraq. In August 2003, Blackwater won a
$27.7 million
contract to provide personal security for Bremer. In charge of the
Blackwater
team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who had provided personal
security for
former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when Bremer was managing
director of
Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s.
By 2005, Blackwater was earning $353 million annually from federal
contracts.
Blackwater's benefits from government largess haven't ended with
Iraq. The
company was recently one of five awarded a Department of Defense
counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as
much as $15
billion. Blackwater also became involved in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina,
and profited handsomely. According to Jeremy Scahill, author of
"Blackwater: The
Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," Blackwater had
made roughly
$73 million for Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less
than a year
after the hurricane hit.
*Joseph Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel*: In
2002, President
Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon's
military contracts as
the Defense Department's inspector general. Schmitz presided over
the largest
increase of military-contracting spending in history: As of 2005,
77 companies
were awarded 149 "prime contracts" worth $42.1 billion, with
hundreds of millions
going to Blackwater. Unlike previous I.G.s, Schmitz reported
directly to the
secretary of defense -- a setup that both Democratic and Republican
lawmakers
objected to, given Schmitz's oversight responsibility. Schmitz
even carried
Rumsfeld's "12 principles" for the Pentagon in his lapel pocket.
The first
principle read, "Do nothing that could raise questions about the
credibility of
D.o.D."
Schmitz has many ties to the Republican Party establishment. His
father, John G.
Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman and his brother,
Patrick Schmitz,
served as George H.W. Bush's deputy counsel from 1985 to 1993.
Joseph himself
worked as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin
Meese.
Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both
Democratic and
Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal
investigations
into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to
conflicts of
interest and other failures of oversight. According to an October
2005 article
in Time magazine, Schmitz showed the White House the results of his
staff's
multiyear investigation into a contract in which the Air Force leased
air-refueling tankers from Boeing for more than it would have cost
to buy them,
then agreed to redact the names of senior White House staffers
involved in the
decision before sending the final report to Congress. Schmitz
informed his staff
on Aug. 26, 2005, that he was leaving the Pentagon; in September of
that year, he
went to work for Blackwater.
*J. Cofer Black, vice chairman*: Black spent most of his 28-year
C.I.A. career
running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, where
he worked with
Rob Richer (below). At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was
director of the
C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center. There he was former C.I.A.
Director George
Tenet's ace in the hole when it came to convincing Bush that the
C.I.A. should
lead initial U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11.
Black is,
according to published accounts, a man with a flair for the
dramatic, the kind of
briefer President Bush likes. In one briefing, according to several
reports,
Black told the president, "When we're through with [terrorists in
Afghanistan],
they will have flies walking across their eyeballs." (Black also
ordered C.I.A.
field officer Gary Schroen to bring back Osama bin Laden's head
packed in dry ice
so Black could show it to Bush.) Black's Afghanistan presentation
earned him
"special access" to the White House, the Washington Post's Dana
Priest reported
in December 2005.
Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush
administration's interrogation and extraordinary rendition
policies. In a famous
moment, Black told Congress in 2002, "After 9/11, the gloves came
off." And the
group within the C.I.A. responsible for extraordinary renditions --
operations in
which covert agents grab terror suspects and take them to secret
prison
facilities for interrogations that would normally be prohibited as
torture --
fell under Black at the C.T.C., Priest has reported.
Black later went to the State Department, where one of his roles
was to begin
coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. In 2003,
the State
Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic security
teams.
In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part
of what
Harper's Silverstein termed a "revolving door to Blackwater" from
the C.I.A. In
addition to his work with Blackwater and his own company, Total
Intelligence
Solutions, Black also recently joined the presidential campaign of
former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, where he serves the Republican
hopeful as senior
advisor for counter-terrorism and national security.
*Rob Richer, vice president for intelligence*: Richer was head of
the C.I.A.'s
Near East division -- and the agency's liaison with King Abdullah
of Jordan --
from 1999 to 2004. In 2003, he briefed President Bush on the
nascent Iraqi
insurgency. In late 2004, he became the associate deputy director
in the
C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations, making him the second-ranking
official for
clandestine operations. He left the agency for Blackwater in the
fall of 2005,
effectively taking the agency's relationship with Abdullah with
him. The C.I.A.
had invested millions of dollars in training Jordan's intelligence
services.
There was an obvious quid pro quo: In exchange for the training,
Jordan would
share information. Jordan has now hired Blackwater's intelligence
division --
headed by Richer -- to do its spy training instead. The C.I.A.
isn't happy,
writes Silverstein: "People [at the agency] are pissed off," said
Silverstein's
source. "Abdullah still speaks with Richer regularly and he thinks
that's the
same thing as talking to us. He thinks Richer is still the man."
*Fred Fielding, former outside counsel*: After four Blackwater
employees were
tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, their families
brought a
wrongful-death lawsuit against Blackwater, charging that the
company had not
provided adequate arms, armor and backup. B lackwater feared that
if it was found
liable for its employees' deaths, a floodgate of future litigation
could be
opened. To fight the suit, Blackwater hired Fielding, the
consummate Republican
insider. Dan Callahan, a lawyer representing the families, told
Salon he was
shocked when he learned Fielding would be representing the company.
"How the
hell," Callahan says he wondered at the time, "did I draw Fred
Fielding on this
case?"
Fielding has had a long career as a lawyer to prominent
Republicans. From 1970
to 1972, he was an associate White House counsel in the Nixon
administration;
from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the denouement of that
administration as
deputy White House counsel. Under President Reagan, he served as
White House
counsel from 1981 to 1986, where he was the boss of a young
assistant counsel
named John Roberts, now the chief justice of the United States.
After the 2000
election, he served the current administration as transition
counsel, and he also
held a spot on the 9/11 Commission. In January 2007, Bush chose him
as White
House counsel.
*Ken Starr, outside counsel*: According to Callahan, Fielding
represented
Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months beginning in
February 2005.
After Fielding left the case, the law firm Greenberg Traurig, which
was once home
to Jack Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount,
represented Blackwater till October 2006. Blackwater then hired
another
high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials -- Ken
Starr, now the
dean of Pepperdine Law School in California. Starr was appointed
to the federal
bench by Reagan, was U.S. solicitor general under George H.W. Bush
and was on
Bush's shortlist to replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court.
He is best
known, however, as the independent counsel who investigated Bill
Clinton. He
revealed the intimate details of Clinton's affair with intern
Monica Lewinsky in
the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton's impeachment
by Congress.
Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks
jurisdiction in the wrongful-death lawsuit against the security
firm. On Oct.
18, 2006, Starr petitioned Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of
Blackwater,
asserting that the company was "constitutionally immune" to the
lawsuit. "If
companies such as Blackwater must factor the defense costs of state
tort lawsuits
into [their] overall costs," argued Starr, "Blackwater will suffer
irreparable
harm." Roberts denied the petition on Oct. 24. In December, Starr
filed a
motion to bring the matter before the entire Supreme Court. The
motion was
denied in February.
(Additional reporting by Tracee Herbaugh.)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/
print.html
[Posted by Alex Constantine at 12:13 p.m.]
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