Blackwater Accused of Creating 'Killing Program'

Source: Spiegel

Blackwater Accused of Creating 'Killing Program'

A memo obtained by SPIEGEL indicates that cooperation between the CIA and private security firm Blackwater was deeper than previously known. SPIEGEL has uncovered further details about a plan to set up squads for targeted killings of suspected al-Qaida leadership in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, the CIA disclosed that it had hired private security contractor Blackwater to kill senior al-Qaida members. The assassination-program has since drawn strong criticism in Washington. However, SPIEGEL has learned that the level of cooperation between the CIA and the paid mercenaries at Blackwater was even deeper than previously known.

In a memo obtained by SPIEGEL, two former employees describe details of cooperation between the firm and the intelligence agency that then-Vice President Dick Cheney asked the CIA not to disclose to the United States Congress. Even today, members of Congress do not have a complete image of the activities Blackwater undertook on behalf of the government.

The intelligence service commissioned Blackwater and its subsidiaries to transport terror suspects from Guantanamo to interrogations at secret prison camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The paper identifies aircraft movements and unveils how the flights were disguised. The memo says: "The CIA hired Blackwater to conduct extraordinary renditions". And: "Blackwater flew the rendition targets from Fort Perry and Cuba to Kandahar, Afghanistan."

.................

Now, further details have emerged. The memo names five participants who were responsible for building the assassination team, including a member of the Blackwater's paratrooper team and an employee of Blackwater Security Consulting, who, according to the memo was meant to be used as a "hitman." The most important person named in the memo is the former third from the top at the CIA, ex-executive director Alvin Bernard Krongard. "Krongard set up the teams," the paper claims. After he left the CIA, Krongard switched to Blackwater's advisory board.


Read more: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,644405,00.html

are covering this and other stories more thoroughly than most of the US papers, that I can see.

In my experience, much of the world outside the US knows more about what is happening relative to the actions of the USG than the US MSM ever covers.
I am better informed via local media (radio, TV and newspapers) in Europe about what is happening in the US (and elsewhere in the world) than I am by any of our much-vaunted 24-hour news stations or our flagship newspapers. The Sunday talk shows are clearly exercises in futility and in hyping the corporate message of the week. PBS and C-Span are better than most but if it were not for the "internets" and the "YouTubes" and many very dedicated bloggers, we would all still be in the dark.
Our "free press" does not exist except as a myth.

Just like our government, apparently. So, instead of exposing evils in our system, both our government and our media cover them up. Instead of fulfilling its role as a watchdog of our corporatist government, it is in partnership with our corporatist government to keep people in the dark, quietly plodding along, paying taxes and paying through the nose for everthing else.

They've also become lazy as anything. Investigative reporting is a dinosaur. Just take someone's press release release, change a word or two here or there and put in a call to the other side to get a comment to wedge in. Of course, you won't actually reach anyone from the other side in five minutes. So, you couldn't reach them for comment by press time, to make it seem as though they dodged you.

They've earned our mistrust. Therefore, newspapers all over the country are going out of business because no one feels a real need to buy them.

have journalists that were not beholden to anyone so that they could report the truth about everyone and everything, as well we know. Sigh.
But to paraphrase something that I saw on a recent visit to the Newseum in DC, whoever owns the presses owns the media. We used to recognize that before Raygun & Co, with the help of some Dems shamefully, struck down the Fairness Doctrine and amended the rules on media ownership to allow literally for monopolistic control.
Something that also struck me especially poignantly after that visit is how much the so-called Patriot Act of today resembles the early Alien and Sedition Acts, as well as the Sedition Acts during WWI in this country. When will we ever learn?

Maybe Blackwater controlled the agency with the help of donald rumsfeld and dick cheney.

whose decision? cheneys?

To hire the successor to this criminal enterprise and others who essentially do the same thing.

Like the 600 or so US mercenaries who guard the Puppet Mayor of Kabul from his population.

but it seems to be yet another thing that people here called a long time ago and won't be surprised about.

More projection from the right to make the left seem like the bad guys. God, it makes my head hurt.

citizens have no medical insurance and maybe no way to pay for medical care, either.

The insurance companies and their executives are death panels, disallowing coverage for all kinds of things and pricing people our of coverage.

Providers are death panels, from clinics to drug companies, that keep raising costs mercilessly.

A visit with a nurse practitioner in the health center nearest me has increases from $40 to $262 in the past 8 or 10 years, but I'd bet the sslary of that nurse practitioner has increased minimally during that time. However, during that time, a major hospital took over that little local health center and many others, and also some other hospitals, giving it a monopoly on the one stop care available in several adjacent towns.

In our current health system, death panels abound. Republicans don't care about rationing of care or meedless deaths, if the "decider" is ability to pay, or the Almighty--Dollar. They want to preserve a system in which both death panels and needless deaths abound.

Why aren't Democrats saying that?

(As I type, Bishop Harry Jackson is speaking (C-Span) against reform, talking about the racism of abortion, calling it genocidal, and "reverse classism"--which he defines an incorrect assumption that rich people can afford all the health care they need. He ended with the hope that the entire reform process will grind to a halt. So much for bi-parisanship. However, during the Q and A he talked about needing a more detailed bill bc the 1000 page bill is high on pages, but "slim on details.")

God help us all.

somewhere on DU.

Like individuals who were 'problematic' to * Gang.

"Now, further details have emerged. The memo names five participants who were responsible for building the assassination team, including a member of the Blackwater's paratrooper team and an employee of Blackwater Security Consulting, who, according to the memo was meant to be used as a "hitman." The most important person named in the memo is the former third from the top at the CIA, ex-executive director Alvin Bernard Krongard. "Krongard set up the teams," the paper claims. After he left the CIA, Krongard switched to Blackwater's advisory board."

Krongard is a Knight of Malta (SMOM)

A. B. Krongard

AKA Alvin Bernard Krongard

Born: 1936
Birthplace: Baltimore, MD

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Business, Government

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: CIA Executive Director, 2001-04

Military service: USMC (Capt.)

Father: Harry Krongard
Mother: Rita
Brother: Howard J. Krongard (attorney, b. 12-Dec-1940)
Wife: Patricia A. Lion (d., three sons)
Son: Alexander Lion Krongard
Son: Randall Harris Krongard
Wife: Cheryl Gordon Krongard (executive, m. 31-Jul-2004)

University: AB, Princeton University (1958)
Law School: JD, University of Maryland School of Law (1975)

CIA employee Executive Director (2001-04)
CIA employee Counsel to George Tenet (1998-2001)
Bankers Trust Vice Chairman (1997-98)
Alex. Brown & Sons CEO (1991-97)
Alex. Brown & Sons General Partner (1980-97)
Alex. Brown & Sons (1971-80)
Member of the Board of Alex. Brown & Sons (as Chairman, 1994-97)
Member of the Board of DLA Piper
Member of the Board of In-Q-Tel
Member of the Board of Iridium Satellite (2006-)
Member of the Board of PHH Corporation (2005-)
Securities Industry Association Chairman (1996)
Blackwater Worldwide Advisory Board (2007)

http://www.nndb.com/people/663/000168159/

Be sure to try the nndb mapper at the bottom of the page to see his social network.

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http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/opedne_bill_dou_080110_what_do_a_renowned_9.htm

--snip--

Let’s begin with the LAPD detective’s story, who’d become a research writer after leaving LAPD. Not long after 9/11/2001, researcher Michael C. Ruppert, a former LAPD detective, smelled something not quite right about the events of 9/11.

His nose eventually led him to call on sources he’d developed over the years as a researcher and author, with military and intelligence insiders, and discovered that mysteriously there had been many multiple war games . . . war games which do not happen that often . . . but coincidentally all were ordered by "someone" to be held on 9/11/2001. Yes, the same day as the infamous 9/11 attacks.

I personally became aware of Ruppert’s work when he did what the US media failed to do, he followed up on mainstream media’s initial insight that there had been mysterious “insider stock trades” in the days leading up to 9/11 that signaled that someone with “insider knowledge” of the coming attacks had profited obscenely by betting “against” United and American Airlines “before” 9/11, by placing put options (bets that a stock will fall) on those ill fated airlines in trades that vastly eclipsed activity on other airlines in those days. Ruppert’s research found that $5 million in “winnings” were made at a known CIA-connected financial institution called AB Brown Trust. AB Brown had been headed by the man who was the current Executive Director of the CIA, Buzzy Krongard, on 9/11. The current head of AB Brown, a friend of Krongard's, mysteriously resigned with no explanation immediately after the attacks on 9/11, and oddly $2.5 million of the winnings made against United and American Airlines by bets made the day before 9/11 . . . were never claimed.

As far as I know the man was never questioned about that, and the 9/11 Commission, led by Bush Admin. confidant Phil Zelikow, refused to look into the insider trades with any enthusiasm.

--snip--

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/10_10_01_heroin.html

"The most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden had planned to develop a 'super heroin' drug and export the same to United States and West Europe to wreak havoc there much before the deadly September 11 attacks. 'The terror network headed by Osama bin Laden has tried to develop a high-strength form of heroin that it planned to export to United States and Western Europe," a major American daily said today quoting intelligence reports."

This is the most patent b.s. I have ever read. I specialized in heroin at LAPD. I was also trained by the DEA in 1976. There is no such thing as super heroin. Heroin is a chemical, diacetyl morphine. Its purest form is 100%. It is usually "cut" at least four times - each time by 50% - to 6.25% purity or less before it is sold on the streets. There is no way to make it stronger unless you just cut it less, which automatically cuts the profits to street vendors. And it is the middlemen and retailers who do the cutting, not the manufacturer. It is easier to smuggle one kilo of pure heroin from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan or Pakistan or Turkey than it is to smuggle eight kilos at 6.25%. It would take eight times as many airplanes and trucks.

...

Now, as the CIA moves to control the drug trade in the region you can be sure of several things. First, when the world sees an explosion of heroin from the region it won't be the Taliban's doing. Second, the cash flows from the smuggling will now be directed through U.S. banks and stocks. That is what the CIA does. Third, those cash flows - as direct air operations from Tashkent to the U.S. become commonplace - will be taken away from Russia, the Balkans, Turkey and Eastern Europe. Fourth, the result of that will be de-stabilization of the entire region. Fifth, destabilization in the region will Balkanize Russia. Sixth, the increasing U.S. military and economic presence will consolidate U.S. control over the vast oil and gas reserves in the region. A revived Unocal-Saudi pipeline project, which will begin construction soon after the U.S. establishes control, will take the oil and gas from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, and down to the Pakistani coast where it will then be sold to China and Japan. The profits from those sales will come back into Wall Street. This will be a further drain on Russian influence in the region and greatly increase global instability.

mainly due to a lack of Vodka for the enlisted snuffies. A former Afghan Army Colonel that I spoke with said they were glad to supply the Soviet troops with Hash. It was mostly Opium. They were trading the Hash for weapons and ammunition. They were even offered armored vehicles in exchange.

Perhaps they were talking about another Morphine analog more powerful than Heroin.

some, if not many, of the Soviet troops went AWOL so that they could participate in the more lucrative Opium trade. Simultaneously, trade routes opened up through former Soviet satellite nations and through Asia.

when he tried to move to the US with a fridge load of Hash as a nest egg. Too bad he fell for the easy money. He was a pleasant fellow to work with.