Prince, Erik bw

Erik Prince

new tag blkwtr 1.19

SEE ERIK 2

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amazing # links to russia?!

capt 519

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NOTE ERIK PRINCE TRYING TO GET INTO BIZ W/ BUKELE

Effects and Results

At the end of March 2022, Salvadoran security forces announced that they had arrested 576 gang members; since the declaration of the state of exception, more than 83,000 individuals linked to gang structures have been arrested, including gang leaders.^[10]

As of December 9, 2024, the Bukele government has totaled 776 non-consecutive days without homicides.^[11][12]

10 11 12

Arias, Diana (6 December 2024). "Régimen de excepción seguirá garantizando la seguridad pública". El Salvador. Diario El Salvador.
Infobae, Por Newsroom (2024-09-13). "El Gobierno de El Salvador anuncia que el país suma 700 días no consecutivos sin homicidios". infobae (in European Spanish). Retrieved 2024-12-09. {{cite web}}: |first= has generic name (help)
"Diciembre sigue sin registrar homicidios en todo el país". Diario La Página (in Spanish). 2024-12-09. Retrieved 2024-12-09.

Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › State_of_Exception_in_El_Salvador

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omfg venezuela 5k troops

omfg

https://theintercept.com/2017/12/04/trump-white-house-weighing-plans-for-private-spies-to-counter-deep-state-enemies/

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION is considering a set of proposals developed by Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a retired CIA officer — with assistance from Oliver North, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal— to provide CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House with a global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials and others familiar with the proposals. The sources say the plans have been pitched to the White House as a means of countering “deep state” enemies in the intelligence community seeking to undermine Donald Trump’s presidency.

The creation of such a program raises the possibility that the effort would be used to create an intelligence apparatus to justify the Trump administration’s political agenda.

“Pompeo can’t trust the CIA bureaucracy, so we need to create this thing that reports just directly to him,” said a former senior U.S. intelligence official with firsthand knowledge of the proposals, in describing White House discussions. “It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

North, who appears frequently on Trump’s favorite TV network, Fox News, was enlisted to help sell the effort to the administration. He was the “ideological leader” brought in to lend credibility, said the former senior intelligence official.

Some of the individuals involved with the proposals secretly met with major Trump donors asking them to help finance operations before any official contracts were signed.

The proposals would utilize an army of spies with no official cover in several countries deemed “denied areas” for current American intelligence personnel, including North Korea and Iran. The White House has also considered creating anew global rendition unit meant to capture terrorist suspectsaround the world, as well as a propaganda campaign in the Middle East and Europe to combat Islamic extremism and Iran.

“I can find no evidence that this ever came to the attention of anyone at the NSC or [White House] at all,” wrote Michael N. Anton, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, in an email. “The White House does not and would not support such a proposal.” But a current U.S. intelligence official appeared to contradict that assertion, stating that the various proposals were first pitched at the White House before being delivered to the CIA. The Intercept reached out to several senior officials that sources said had been briefed on the plans by Prince, including Vice President Mike Pence. His spokesperson wrote there was “no record of [Prince] ever having met with or briefed the VP.” North did not respond to a request for comment.

According to two former senior intelligence officials,Pompeo has embraced the plan and lobbied the White House to approve the contract. Asked for comment, a CIA spokesperson said, “You have been provided wildly inaccurate information by people peddling an agenda.”

At the heart of the scheme being considered by the White House are Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his longtime associate, CIA veteran John R. Maguire, who currently works for the intelligence contractor Amyntor Group. Maguire also served on Trump’s transition team. Amyntor’s role was first reported by BuzzFeed News.

Michael Barry, who was recently named NSC senior director for intelligence programs, worked closely with Prince on a CIA assassination program during the Bushadministration.

Prince and Maguire deny they are working together. Those assertions, however, are challenged by current and former U.S. officials and Trump donors who say the two men were collaborating.

As with many arrangements in the world of CIA contracting and clandestine operations, details of who is in charge of various proposals are murky by design and change depending on which players are speaking. An Amyntor official said Prince was not “formally linked to any contract proposal by Amyntor.” In an email, Prince rejected the suggestion that he was involved with the proposals. When asked if he has knowledge of this project, Prince replied: “I was/am not part of any of those alleged efforts.”

The former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the efforts scoffed at Prince’s denials. “Erik’s proposal had no company names on the slides,” this person said, “but there is no doubt that Prince and Maguire were working together.”

Prince and Maguire have a long professional relationship. Maguire recently completed a stint as a consultant with Prince’s company, Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong-based security and logistics company partially owned by the Chinese government.FSG has no known connections to the private spy plan.

Prince has strong ties to the Trump administration: His sister Betsy DeVos is secretary of education, he was a major donor to the Trump election campaign, and he advised the transition team on intelligence and defense appointments, as The Intercept has previously reported. Prince has also contributed to Pence’s campaigns.

Maguire spent more than two decades as a paramilitary officer in the CIA, including tours in Central America working with the Contras. He has extensive experience in the Middle East, where he helped plan the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Maguire and Prince met together in September with a senior CIA official at a Virginia restaurant to discuss privatizing the war in Afghanistan.

Prince told a top fundraiser that Maguire was working on part of his Afghanistan plan, characterizing it as the first part of a multi-pronged program. The fundraiser added that Prince never directly asked him for money. But sources close to the project say Maguire did seek private funding for Amyntor’s efforts until a CIA contract materialized. “They’ve been going around asking for a bridge loan to float their operations until the CIA says yes,” said a person who has been briefed on the fundraising efforts.

Beginning last spring and into the summer, Maguire and a group of Amyntor representatives began asking Trump donors to support their intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, the initial piece of what they hoped would be a broader program.Some Trump fundraisers were asked to provide introductions to companies and wealthy clients who would then hire Amyntorfor economic intelligence contracts. Maguire explained that some of the profit from those business deals would fund their foreign intelligence collection. Others were asked to give money outright.

“[Maguire] said there were people inside the CIA who joined in the previous eight years [under Obama] and inside the government, and they were failing to give the president the intelligence he needed,” said a person who was pitched by Maguire and other Amyntor personnel. To support his claim, Maguire told at least two people that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven Bannon and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Adding to these unsubstantiated claims, Maguire told the potential donors he also had evidenceMcMaster used a burner phone to send information gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.

Amyntor employees took potential donors to a suite in the Trump Hotel in Washington, which they claimed was set up to conduct “secure communications.” Some White House staff and Trump campaign supporters came to refer to the suite as “the tinfoil room,” according to one person who visited the suite. This account was confirmed by another source to whom the room was described. “John [Maguire] was certain that the deep state was going to kick the president out of office within a year,” said a person who discussed it with Maguire. “These guys said they were protecting the president.”

Maguire and others at Amyntor have boasted that they have already sent intelligence reports to Pompeo.

...

PRINCE, MAGUIRE, AND North have long shared a common frustration over the failure of the U.S. government to bring two suspects from a high-profile terrorist event in the 1980s to justice. Last summer, Maguire discussed rendering the suspects with White House officialsafter learning the men had been located in the Middle East. Despite having no U.S. government approval, associates of Maguire began working on a snatch operation earlier this year, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Prince colleague.

Maguire, concerned that the FBI would not take action, made an offer to senior White House officials. The message, according to a person with direct knowledge of the rendition plan, was: “We’re going to go get these guys and bring them to the U.S. Who should we hand them over to?”

The rendition plan was meant to be a demonstration that Maguire and his associates had an active intelligence network and the capability to grab suspects around the world. Prince maintains he has nothing to do with that plan. But according to a source with extensive knowledge of Prince’s networks, Prince was working in parallel to assemble a team to help apprehend the men.

According to two people who have worked extensively with Prince in recent years, Prince has been contacting former Blackwater personnel who worked on a post-9/11 era CIA assassination program targeting Al Qaeda operatives. That program, which the Bush White House prohibited the CIA from disclosing to congressional intelligence committees, was revealed to Congress in 2009 by then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. The CIA says the program did not result in any assassinations.

Among the capabilities Prince offers is a network of deniable assets — spies, fixers, foreign intelligence agents — spread across the globe that could be used by the White House. “You pick any country in the world Erik’s been in, and it’s there,” said a longtime Prince associate. “They’re a network of very dark individuals.” The associate, who has worked extensively with Prince, then began rattling off places where the private spies and paramilitaries already operate — Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, “all across North Africa.”

Opaque contracting arrangements are typical for Prince, who became a lightning rod in his Blackwater days and now prefers to minimize controversy by operating in the shadows, disguising his involvement in sensitive operations with layers of subcontractors and elaborately crafted legal structures. “That’s his exact MO,” said the longtime Prince associate, adding that Prince consistently attempts to ensure plausible deniability of his role in U.S. and foreign government contracts.

“I have zero to do with any such effort and saying that I did/do would be categorically false,” Prince said in his email to The Intercept. “Knowingly publishing false information exposes you to civil legal action. The only effort I’ve quite publicly pitched is an alternative to Afghanistan.”

THE INTELLIGENCE AND covert action program would mark an unorthodox return to government service for Prince, the onetime CIA contractor who built a mercenary force that became notorious during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would also raise new questions about Prince’s foreign entanglements since he sold Blackwater.

In addition to Prince’s former assassination network, the hidden cadre of spies with no official cover — NOCs in CIA jargon — includes the assets of another key player in the Iran-Contra affair, CIA Officer Duane Clarridge, who died in 2016. Maguire, who worked under Clarridge as a young CIA paramilitary in Central America during the mid-1980s, took over the network of contract spies, who operate mostly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last summer, as Prince pushed his public proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan, he and Maguire had broader ambitions, according to a person involved in the discussions. “The goal was to eventually get their network of NOCs worldwide, but they initially started with Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

“Prince seems to be firing on a lot of cylinders and pitching overt and covert plans,” said a current intelligence officer who has closely monitored Prince’s career and been briefed on several of Prince’s recent efforts, including the proposals to Pompeo. The official declined to discuss details of the plans but pointed to Prince’s much-discussed pitch to privatize the war in Afghanistan as a smokescreen for offering other more controversial programs and operations.

Prince’s Afghanistan plan, which received substantial media attention and got a hearing at the highest levels of the Trump administration, “was brilliant because it changed the narrative and made him relevant,” the officer said, referring to Prince’s scandal- and investigation-plagued career at Blackwater. The officer also added that the very public Afghanistan pitch, replete with cable news interviews and op-eds, provided a legitimate reason “to justify meeting with people” at the White House, CIA, or other government agencies.

“Erik has no hobbies,” said the longtime Prince associate. “Counterterrorism is his hobby.”

In some ways, these plans mirror operations Prince led during the Bush-Cheney administration. When Prince was running Blackwater, he and a former CIA paramilitary officer, Enrique Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their “deniability” as a “big plus” for potential Blackwater customers, according to internal company communications.

In a 2007 email, with the subject “Possible Opportunity in DEA—READ AND DELETE,” Prado sought to pitch the network to the Drug Enforcement Administration, bragging that Blackwater had developed “a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.” He added, “These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer ‘play’ on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

The longtime Prince associate said that the nexus of deniable assets has never gone away. “The NOC network is already there. It already exists for the better part of 15 years now,” he said.

Prince has long admired North and viewed his role in Iran-Contra as heroic, said the Prince associate. In 2007, Prince testified defiantly before Congress following the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, in which Blackwater operatives gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians, including women and children. Shortly after his testimony, Prince’s longtime friend, conservative California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, praised the Blackwater chief. “Prince,” Rohrabacher said, “is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was.”

North, a Marine lieutenant colonel on the Reagan National Security Council, oversaw a scheme to divert proceeds from illicit arms sales to Iran to Contra death squads in Nicaragua. The resulting scandal became known as the Iran-Contra affair, and North was convicted of three felonies, though these convictions were later thrown out.

Both North and Maguire attended a small reception in 2014 celebrating Prince’s third marriage — to his former spokesperson Stacy DeLuke. “It was an intimate affair,” said the Prince associate. “Only Erik’s closest friends were invited to that reception.” On election night in 2016, DeLuke posted photos on social media from inside Trump headquarters.

On November 30, Prince testified behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee about his January trip to the Seychelles to meet with Mohammad bin Zayed, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, and a Russian fund manager close to Vladimir Putin. According to the Washington Post, Prince presented himself as an unofficial envoy of President-elect Trump. The Intercept reported last week that the fund manager was Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund. Prince repeatedly said that he did not remember the identity of the Russian, but on Thursday, in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Prince admitted that he did in fact meet with Dmitriev.

Prince may have revealed part of his strategy in a July 2016 radio interview with Steve Bannon, when he proposed recreating the CIA’s Phoenix Program, an assassination ring used in the Vietnam War, to battle the Islamic State. Prince said in the interview that the program would be used to kill or capture “the funders of Islamic terror, the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13032018/mike-pompeo-koch-brothers-secretary-state-climate-change-rex-tillerson-exxon?

With Rex Tillerson's firing, President Donald Trump's new choice for Secretary of State—Mike Pompeo, a former Kansas congressman currently serving as director of the CIA—signals a hardening stance against international engagement on climate change.

Pompeo's career in business and politics was tightly intertwined with the oil magnate Koch brothers, and he has shown a deep disregard for climate science and the need to address the climate crisis.

As a congressman, Pompeo said the Paris climate agreement amounted to "bow(ing) down to radical environmentalists," and he blasted President Barack Obama for what Pompeo called a "perverse fixation on achieving his economically harmful environmental agenda" in the 2015 talks.

Pompeo's past statements indicate a far more recalcitrant stance than Tillerson's.

Tillerson, a longtime oil executive, argued that the U.S. should keep a "seat at the table" in global climate change talks and unsuccessfully sought to persuade Trump to stay in the Paris accord. Environmentalists noted the irony that the best advocate of their cause in the Trump administration—albeit never an effective one—was the former CEO of Exxon.

omg

http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/steve-bannon-war-afghanistan

So according to Donald Trump Jr.’s own emails it looks like he, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort knowingly met with a woman said to be representing the Russian government who was peddling derogatory information about Hillary Clinton. Whether that constitutes a crime is still unknown, but it proves that the Trump campaign was at best dumb as rocks, and at worst willing to collude with a foreign government to win an election in return for God knows what.

That story has sent an electric shock through Washington with tales of a White House in chaos and a Shakespearean family drama unfolding before our eyes. The president has uncharacteristically withdrawn from public sight as his son and son-in-law become the central players in the scandal with speculation running rampant about who is leaking the information and why.

Ever since President Trump’s inauguration there has been a tremendous amount of palace intrigue with factions loyal to Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon fighting for influence alongside whichever policy advisers and cabinet officials happen to be relevant that particular week. The Russia scandal has implicated Kushner in ways that make him especially vulnerable, however, and Bannon appears to be filling the vacuum.

According New York Magazine’s Joshua Green, who has been following Bannon for years and has a new book coming out on the subject called “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency,” Bannon is fully back in the fold after a few shaky months and he’s advising Trump to fight and win by any means necessary. Green reports that the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the recent moves on immigration and Trump’s Warsaw speech are all signs that Bannon’s influence is once again on the rise. He notes that Bannon, so far, is personally untouched by the Russia scandal:

Bannon’s feud with Kushner has quieted down. And so far, while at least ten White House officials and former aides, including Kushner, have retained lawyers in the special counsel’s probe, distancing themselves from Trump, Bannon is not among them.

Instead, he’s back in the bunker alongside a boss who is often angry, always under fire, and, on the matter of Russia, increasingly isolated from all but a handful of advisers and family members.

Green calls Bannon “Trump’s indispensable henchman, the man he turns to when everything’s going to hell,” and says he is in charge of Trump’s “war room.” That has largely been concentrated on assassinating the character of Robert Mueller, which Bannon evidently sees as the fight’s most important priority.

In a startling story that got overlooked this week amid all the Don Jr. email excitement, the New York Times reported that Bannon and Kushner have been dabbling in real war planning as well:

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. On Saturday morning, Mr. Bannon sought out Defense Secretary Jim Mattis at the Pentagon to try to get a hearing for their ideas, an American official said.

I wrote about Prince’s relationship with Trump a few months ago. They’re close enough that Prince was with Trump and the family on election night. Prince has also been implicated in the Russian scandal, according to the Washington Post, having arranged a secret meeting in the Seychelles Islands with an emissary from Vladimir Putin to set up a back channel between the two presidents. Prince is also currently under investigation by the Justice Department and other federal agencies for money laundering and attempts to broker military services to foreign governments. His history of running a criminal operation in Iraq is well known, but he seems to have landed on his feet. It’s easy to see why Trump has such a high regard for him. He’s almost like family.

Prince wrote about his plan in the Wall Street Journal in May, suggesting that the president appoint a “viceroy” for Afghanistan, using the colonial model of the East India Company to illustrate his idea. Salon’s Matthew Pulver explained how Prince planned to bring this idea up to date:

The British East India Company was not simply a mercenary army like his Blackwater but an armed corporation that colonized like a state power. It was not merely a government contractor like Blackwater but an autonomous military and administrative entity sharing the worst aspects of both the corporation and the imperial state. So, Prince’s first innovation is to do away with civilian-military control administered by the Department of Defense and overseen by civilian, elected leadership, as is currently in place, and replace that apparatus with an armed corporation.

The second innovation will be to use cheap local labor paid for by resource extraction. Pulver wrote:

“There’s a trillion dollars in value in the ground: mining, minerals, and another trillion in oil and gas,” Prince says of Afghanistan. This would provide the revenue stream to replace government contracts. Prince’s firm would be self-funded, self-reliant, and thus autonomous to a degree more similar to a nation-state than a military contractor like Blackwater serving under a defense department.

I have long believed that the notion Trump is an isolationist is a grave misunderstanding., who believes we should “take the oil” because “to the victors belong the spoils.” Lately, it’s become less clear that Bannon’s “nationalism” is aligned with America rather than some vague (and racist) notion of “the West.” It looks more and more as if Trump’s loyalties lie wherever the Trump Organization has a real estate or licensing deal. Prince’s plan sounds like it’s a perfect fit for both of them.

Thankfully, according to the New York Times, Secretary Mattis “listened politely” but told Bannon that he had no intention of including this daft idea into the review of Afghanistan policy that he and national security adviser H.R. McMaster are leading. Let’s just hope that Bannon and Trump are now so immersed in their Russia scandal “war” plans that they lose interest in privatizing a real one.

digby

ref http://www.salon.com/2017/06/03/erik-princes-dark-plan-for-afghanistan-military-occupation-for-profit-not-security/

see bak

mojo

Erik Prince

In January, according to the Washington Post, the founder of notorious private security contractor Blackwater—whose sister is Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos—held a secret meeting in the Seychelles with a Russian close to Putin in an effort to establish an unofficial back channel between Moscow and Trump. Prince also reportedly advised Trump aides, including Flynn, during the transition. (Prince denies both claims.)

...“Erik had no role on the transition team. This is a complete fabrication,” a spokesman for Prince said in a statement to the Post. “The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump. Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?” The White House offered a similar denial to the newspaper. “We are not aware of any meetings and Erik Prince had no role in the transition,” Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary said in a statement.

The Post reports that the Seychelles meeting was set up by the crown prince of [UAE] Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and his brother, and took place shortly after Zayed also met with Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in New York City. Zayed, according to Western officials, also met with Putin twice in 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/blackwater-founder-held-secret-seychelles-meeting-to-establish-trump-putin-back-channel/2017/04/03/95908a08-1648-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.8b745e739513

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.

The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.

Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.

Prince was an avid supporter of Trump. After the Republican convention, he contributed $250,000 to Trump’s campaign, the national party and a pro-Trump super PAC led by GOP mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, records show. He has ties to people in Trump’s circle, including Stephen K. Bannon, now serving as the president’s chief strategist and senior counselor. Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos serves as education secretary in the Trump administration. And Prince was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December.

U.S. officials said the FBI has been scrutinizing the Seychelles meeting as part of a broader probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged contacts between associates of Putin and Trump. The FBI declined to comment.

The Seychelles encounter, which one official said spanned two days, adds to an expanding web of

connections between Russia and Americans with ties to Trump — contacts that the White House has been reluctant to acknowledge or explain until they have been exposed by news organizations.

“We are not aware of any meetings, and Erik Prince had no role in the transition,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.

A Prince spokesman said in a statement: “Erik had no role on the transition team. This is a complete fabrication. The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump. Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?”

Prince is best known as the founder of Blackwater, a security firm that became a symbol of U.S. abuses in Iraq after a series of incidents, including one in 2007 in which the company’s guards were accused — and later criminally convicted — of killing civilians in a crowded Iraqi square. Prince sold the firm, which was subsequently re-branded, but has continued building a private paramilitary empire with contracts across the Middle East and Asia. He now heads a Hong Kong-based company known as the Frontier Services Group.

...

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/1/18/scahill_blackwater_founder_erik_prince_the

GOODMAN: I want to ask you about Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, who you’ve been talking about, the founder of Blackwater. In July, he spoke to Steve Bannon, who at the time was the head of Breitbart News, the white supremacist, white nationalist news site; Steve Bannon, who’s now Trump’s senior adviser. Prince said Trump should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS.

ERIK PRINCE: It was a vicious, but very effective, kill/capture program in Vietnam that destroyed the Viet Cong as a military force. That’s what needs to be done to the funders of Islamic terror. And that would be even the—the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East and any of the other illicit activities they’re in.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Erik Prince. The significance of what he’s saying here, Jeremy?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, you know, remember, Erik Prince views himself as the rightful heir to the legacy of "Wild Bill" Donovan, who was the head of the agency that was the precursor to the CIA. And, you know, immediately after 9/11, Erik Prince became very, very close to a number of people within the CIA and also Dick Cheney and Dick Cheney’s office. And they jointly came up with this idea that Erik Prince could run a kind of off-the-books hit squad that could roam the world conducting assassinations for the United States, and there would be no effective paper trail and no ability for Congress to engage in any oversight. Now, Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s CIA director early on in Obama’s term, said, "Oh, we shut down that program, and no one was ever killed." I don’t believe that for one moment. That was—that was part of the legacy of the Phoenix Program, that was a murderous death squad operation in Vietnam, that also included enhanced interrogation. What Erik Prince being around Trump indicates to me is that—

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what you found out about election night and what his role is. We just have 50 seconds.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right, well, Robert Mercer, the billionaire hedge funder, his daughter Rebekah ran one of the most important super PACs to Trump, Make America Number 1 super PAC. And Trump—and Erik Prince and his mother, Elsa, were two of the largest contributors to one of the most significant super PACs that supported Donald Trump. Erik Prince is very close to Robert Mercer. Prince was also at the "Heroes and Villains" party that Mercer threw in Long Island after the election. And, in fact, there’s a picture that Peter Thiel, the right-wing billionaire who destroyed Gawker—a picture of Peter Thiel, Donald Trump and Erik Prince, that Peter Thiel says is not safe for the internet. But it’s clear that Erik Prince, through Betsy DeVos, through Robert Mercer and through his very right-wing paramilitary crowd, has the ear of President-elect Donald Trump. And our understanding, from a very well-placed source, is that Prince has even been advising Trump on his selections for the staffing of the Defense Department and the State Department.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have a post-show discussion and post it online at democracynow.org. That’s Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept.

Donald Trump's Top Foreign Adviser, Joseph Schmitz, is a Former Blackwater Executive

When asked this week about how he would approach foreign policy, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told MSNBC, "I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things." He also announced his lineup of little-known foreign policy advisers, includingJoseph Schmitz, a former Pentagon inspector general with ties to the Center for Security Policy, who was forced out of his job amid accusations that he protected high-level officials in the George W. Bush administration who were suspected of wrongdoing. We get reaction from The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill, who notes Schmitz is a radical Christian supremacist with an "insane worldview" who was a former executive with Blackwater.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Scahill, I wanted to ask about Donald Trump. He originally said on MSNBC, when asked about who his foreign policy advisers were, "I’m speaking with myself, number one," he said, "because I have a very good brain." But then, with The Washington Post, he talked about his top foreign policy advisers and named Joseph Schmitz as one of them. Talk about who Joseph Schmitz is.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, Joseph Schmitz was the Pentagon inspector general under Donald Rumsfeld, and he didn’t really inspect much of anything. He was a big cheerleader, actually, for many of the most kind of excessive policies of Rumsfeld and the Pentagon in the post-9/11 world. And when Schmitz left the DOD, he became an executive at Blackwater. And Joseph Schmitz is a—you know, is a radical Christian supremacist. He is a member of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta and really is sort of a—you know, has a neo-crusader worldview. And I’m choosing those words carefully. I mean, that’s—he is definitely a radical Christian supremacist.

And he was an enthusiastic fan of Erik Prince and Blackwater, and he goes and he joins that company. And, you know, this is a guy, though, who—when I was researching him for the Blackwater book, he wrote a series of letters to the editor of conservative newspapers—Washington Times and others—in the '90s. He was a fanatical opponent of abortion. And in one of the letters, he—I actually want to quote this correctly, because Joseph Schmitz threatened to sue me once—and, of course, he couldn't, because everything I said was true. But he said, "As a former fetus the plight of aborted innocent human life is as real to me as rape is to most women."

This is Donald Trump’s, you know, top foreign policy adviser right now. And, you know, I mean, Joseph Schmitz is, in many ways, in Washington a total clown and a joke because of his insane worldview that has no bearing in the modern world, and yet he continues to get government contracts. He was—he was getting paid by the inspector general on Afghanistan under the Obama administration. And, you know, so he’s part of—I wouldn’t even put him in the category of neoconservatives. I mean, it’s really more the neo-crusader crowd that Joseph Schmitz is a part of.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2016/12/betsy-devos-big-giving-relatives-family-qualifies-gop-royalty/

Not so for her brother, Erik Prince, co-founder of controversial private security contractor Blackwater (now known as Academi). He made two donations to Make America Number 1, a super PAC that backed Cruz and then Trump; Prince’s $150,000 in gifts came after Trump had become the Republican party nominee. Since 1990, he and his ex-wives have given $519,546, including $175,309 in 2016.

blog

Erik Prince is a U.S. war criminal, arms smuggler and war profiteer, who made millions off the U.S. wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Prince came to Grand Rapids to speak and sign his book:Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror.

Mercenary army for profit

The founder of the private army Blackwater, Prince is responsible for war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater was hired by the State Department under Bush during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. With cover from the Bush Whitehouse, Blackwater operated outside the law and killed countless Iraqis and Afghans. Amongst the many notorious Blackwater war crimes was the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians and wounding 20 more at Nisour Square in Baghdad in 2007. Prosecutions are still pending, seven years later.

Four Blackwater soldiers of fortune were killed and hung from a bridge in Fallujah in 2004 - which many consider the turning point, the beginning of the end, leading to the withdrawal of the U.S. from Iraq.

Blackwater and its remnants were fined $50 million by the U.S. government for smuggling arms in 2012. This is a slap on the wrist for a company that held nearly $1 billion in U.S. government contracts.

Heavily-armed Blackwater mercenaries invaded New Orleans during hurricane Katrina, not to help poor people who lost everything and needed food and water, but to ‘stop looting.’

Unholy alliance

From Holland, Michigan, Erik Prince is the brother of Grand Rapids billionaire Betsy DeVos. The Acton Institute, run by a local Catholic priest Robert Sirico, sponsored Prince’s war talk. Acton claims to be “Integrating Judeo-Christian truths with free market principles.”

Mike Franz, the local coordinator for MoveOn.org, asked, “What is this unholy alliance? What do the Acton Institute and Erik ‘Prince of Blackwater’ have in common?”

http://www.fightbacknews.org/2014/2/20/grand-rapids-protests-war-criminal-erik-prince-founder-blackwater

bw bk:

sis (bush pioneer) married richard devos (lost gov race) his dad founded amway) both funded 1994 takeover (amway 2.5 m, biggest soft $ ever) plus 1.3m infomercials convention; devos huge in vouchers

1988 g bauer and dobson (foc on fam) start Family res council (evangelical, voucher, stem cell); erick early intern, then b1 intern (beef with clean air act?), then rohrabacher

erik funded helms, north, pombo, spencer abraham, santorum, coburn, delay, demint, pense, hunter,

backed pat buchanan (hillsdale?)

sold co 1.3b$; wife cnp (fdr lehaye, turn am rt; CFR too liberal) , frc

cnp: fallwell, schasfly, robertson, perkins dobson baur, r reed; norquust, north, gaffney, NRA lapierre; visits by DC, bolton, rumy, ashcroft, senor, delay, frist

colson alleged to hire teamsters to beat up antiwar protest, firebomb brookings; runs prison in Sugar Land (delay distr) 18 vs islam spread in prison rev robt sirico

ECT free mkt is xian ; creative cooperative leads to common good 21

theocons

erik claims idea his vs facts

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BLACKWATERPart of a series onBlackwater USA
Subsidiaries: Aviation Worldwide Services Greystone, Ltd. Presidential Airways, Inc. Principals: Erik Prince J. Cofer Black Robert Richer

BLACKWATERPart of a series onBlackwater USA

**Subsidiaries:**

**Principals:**

Erik Prince
J. Cofer Black
Robert Richer

Erik Prince is the founder of private military corporation Blackwater USA.^{[1]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erik_Prince#cite_note-0) In February 2009, shortly after Blackwater changed its name to "Xe," Prince announced he was stepping down as the company's CEO, but would remain its chair. "I'm a little worn out by the whole thing, the politics of it all," he said. ^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erik_Prince#cite_note-1)

Prince is a former Navy Seal and 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."^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erik_Prince#cite_note-NNDB-2)

Prince's father, Edgar Prince, and Gary Bauer started the Family Research Council, where Prince interned. Prince's sister, Betsy DeVos, is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party.^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erik_Prince#cite_note-NNDB-2) (RightWeb profile)

Contents[hide]

1 Resources

Resources

References

↑ "Q&A: Blackwater's founder on the record", The Virginian Pilot, July 24, 2006.
↑ August Cole, "Founder, CEO of Blackwater Steps Aside, 'Worn Out'," Wall Street Journal (sub req'd), March 2, 2009.
↑ ^{3.0^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erik_Prince#cite_ref-NNDB_2-0) ^{3.1^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Erik_Prince#cite_ref-NNDB_2-1) Profile: Erik Prince, NNDB.com.