Blackwater managed CIA Predator drone assassination program

The mafia got rich by doing dirty work for gentlemen
who didn't want to get their own hands dirty.



So. Blackwater means deep, deep wet work.

I wonder what else they do we don't know about?

A trickle of strangers were all that were left alive.

But no need for law either when fear will fit that breach :thumbsdown:

Blackwater Aided by PR Giant

Those who discover what's in your signature line move the world, bridgit.

Have another link? Looks like a good read.

Here's the article, archived by our good friends at SFGate.com:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/10/05/national/w001254D70.DTL&type=printable

The only difference is that today we the War Party has control of the H-Ks.



Terminator Planet

learning more and more,,

There's no better place to be because there's no inside information like secret inside information.

Blackwater and the Brothers Krongard: How Cookie Crumbled

DANGER: WARMONGERS AT WORK



From Jeremy Scahill:

"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."

Former CIA Agent: "What the Agency Was Doing With Blackwater Scares the Hell Out of Me"

Shocks um when they lie..6879 volts outta curl their hair a bit whenever they try to fool us.

Certainly, Mr. B, the Agony Booth™ might be better in terms of results, but for fun, there's nothing like...



"Mr. Kyl, your Agonizer™, please."

Man, my wife and I just saw "Slumdog Millionaire" a couple of nights ago.
Wow. Wow wow wow. Wow.
We got work to do -- us, them and the whole darn planet.
For real.

How Society can come together to build New: Cities, Nations, then Groups of Nations

1 mechanical, primitive society

2 technical, #1 plus Tech, smarter Society

3 1 + 2 = Advanced Social Structure/System = Global Stability

R. J. Hillhouse, "The Spy Who Billed Me," has done a lot of heavy lifting on this subject and gotten very little public recognition for her important work:

Dusty Gets a Green Light for Green Badge

it was honest manual labor they were doing. Probably grossly over paid, but....

The guy hasn't had to work a day in his life,
yet he served as a SEAL and Poppy knows what else.



There's no business, like war business, there's no business I know.

HarperCollins is Rupert Murdoch's publishing arm, so this may be an example of Rovian Framing, where the first to lie gets in the Public's idée fixe.

Strange days -- though hopeful -- first, I hear John Dean use the term "limited hangout" on KO, and now this.

"I interned with the Bush administration for six months... I saw a lot of thing I didn't agree with--homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns." - Grand Rapids Press, February 23, 1992.

Gee. This guy is leading America's Crusade 2001?

"Everybody carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel--a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other." - Defense Daily, February 23, 2005.

It's no leap of faith to think this guy would lead the charge against the Infidel at home, too, like godless humanist liberal homosexual minority-loving Democrats.

Fusing religion, modern weaponry, feaudalism, and cronie capitalism, these guys are something.



From way back when, Fallujah:

Soldiers of Good Fortune

What that something is, is very, very disturbed.

Murkin money isn't red or blue. It's green.

HRC's Blackwater Connection

I know-I know-It's only business. And that's a shame, when it comes to democracy.

There are 2 armies, one of them is private and seemingly exempt from most of our laws.

Then our own government hires this private/exempt from laws army to do exactly what our regular special forces can do for themselves UNDER various laws?

Americans should be horrified. I'm horrified. Blackwater (and Dyncorp for that matter) should be disarmed, disbanded and prosecuted. BUSH & Co. should be investigated, prosecuted and punished for giving birth to these Frankenstein companies.

The American Ministry of Propaganda, as usual, sleeps on this giant and the average American citizen remains clueless.

:kick:

From 2003, a press conference detailing who-privatized-what that should've been on the front page of NYT, LAT, WaPo and leading ABCNNBCBSFauxNoiseNutwork:

Outsourcing the Pentagon

The reason We the People don't know about the corruption is the same stooges own Corporate McPravda.

Corruption in public office IS treason. Remember, the American service personnel have been killed -- electrocuted -- in Halliburton-built showers. Halliburton even got a BONUS.

but in hindsight, this made sense.

I seem to remember at the time when there was talk of arming the Predator that neither the CIA nor Defense wanted to take responsibility for it.

What easier way to get the job done than to contract it out (probably off budget also) and then wash their hands of the whole mess.

In searching for the book, I found an excellent summary of the situation:

The Problem With the Predator

"Success has a thousand fathers. Failure is an orphan."

and, I'm sure, were guaranteed immunity.

No wonder all the GOP heavyweights are demanding there be no investigation of the CIA. Dog knows what will happen to the (R) brand if ALL this shit comes out.

If the subject weren't so hideous, it would be interesting to trace the evolution of our nation's understanding of this particular treason.

The U.S. Military’s Assassination Problem

Someone's got to, though, for the sake of the United States.

Kamal Derwish was blown up by a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator in Yemen during 2002, in the first such attack. See, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051401121.html



This report of Blackwater/Xe operating the Predator program does not square with the claim heard elsewhere in today's news that nobody was actually killed by Blackwater's assassination program. It's gotta be one or the other, unless Blackwater was running multiple wet ops.

P.S. - Derwish has been identified as a possible double-agent who was in Afghanistan with bin Laden just weeks before the 9/11 attack. He was one of the first to be silenced. Derwish was a key figure in US intelligence surveillance of al-Qaeda cells inside the U.S., and provided a direct link between the bombings of the USS Cole and 9/11.

Derwish had trained in Afghanistan in 1992 and fought with the U.S.-backed Muslim Army in Bosnia. In the Spring of 2002, U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between him and two important al-Qaida figures, one of them involved in the USS Cole bombing. Derwish had been instrumental in organizing the the Lackawanna 6 into an al-Qaeda sleeper cell. Warrants were issued to conduct round-the-clock surveillance on members of the group.

The FBI monitored phone calls from Derwish in Yemen to some members of the group that appeared to be intended to assess their status or availability. It also intercepted e-mails from one of the group, Mukhtar al-Bakri, who was then in Bahrain. One of them appeared particularly suspicious. The e-mail was entitled "Big Meal" and read in English translation as follows:

"How are you my beloved, God willing you are fine. I would like to remind you of obeying God and keeping him in your heart because the next meal will be very huge. No one will be able to withstand it except those with faith. There are people here who had visions and their visions were explained that this thing will be very strong. No one will be able to bear it." 12

The phone calls and e-mails had the intense interest of the White House, the CIA and the FBI that the Lackawanna group was about to be activated for a major terrorist attack. At this point, the Buffalo FBI field office was required to send briefings on the results of their investigation to FBI Headquarters twice a day, and these were often passed on to the White House in the president's daily threat briefings.

At the request of the CIA, al-Bakri was detained by the Bahrain police, coincidentally on his wedding night. He admitted to having traveled to the Al Farooq camp in late spring and early summer and also gave the names of the rest of the Lackawanna group. Based on al-Bakri's testimony, the six Lackawanna men were arraigned in September, 2002, and charged with providing material support to Al-Qaeda. Somehow, despite the intense surveillance, Derwish was allowed to leave the U.S. and travelled to Yemen, where he was killed by a CIA Predator drone. See, http://www.rjhresearch.com/ADR/counterterrorism/Counterterrorism.doc

group of Yemeni men who admitted to training in al Qaeda camps."

it was determined later !

....well, that's a relief. :shrug:


I am a strong supporter of President Obama, but I completely disagree with him on the continued and escalated use of "predator drones".

This kind of ...'warfare' just plain wrong.

-- former CIA Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) Director Cofer Black (later a Blackwater Director, and head of a Blackwater subsidiary company) also directed the assassination targeting, along with rendition and torture programs that silenced the surviving al-Qaeda conspirators. Some targets, like Derwish, were done away with permananently, while others like KSM and Abu Zubyadeh - figures with long ties to US intelligence - were allowed to run around for a while before capture. The Al-Qaeda figures subjected to brainwahing and waterboarding that turned them into near-vegetables all had ties with the CIA during the 1990s in Bosnia and Chechnya.

Cofer Black was the head of CIA station in Khartoum when bin Laden and Abu Zubaydeh were there. He admitted in testimony before Congress that they had contact with each other.

Basically, Cofer Black and some others got away with allowing the Flt. 77 hijackers (one of whom was also intimately involved with the Cole attack) into the country and then were put in charge of eliminating the surviving witnesses.

Or damage control?

I can believe that.

....

Fuck 'em. They've been waging war on us for nigh 20 years.

Clinton tried to get them with cruise missiles, and rightly so.

No oversight, no accountability.

None of this is new, which is why the media doesn't care, it's simply not news. Wiretaps? Contracted. Forgeries? Contracted. Assassinations? Contracted. Torture? Contracted. Secret flights? Contracted. It's quite a big list.

I suppose the real news story is about people who have no idea how this kind of stuff works, or has worked for the last 50 years.

I think that's part of the amusement/design, people will find a connection, and start making all kinds of silly assumptions about exact connections. Once the assumptions are easily dismissed as false, or over-inflated, the actual connections get more "cover".

Take, oh, MOCKINGBIRD, the media program. The US government paid media folks for inserting stories or perspectives. The people being paid weren't employees, they were basically on contract, and they didn't outright falsify stuff very often. When people finally figured MOCKINGBIRD out, the folks who screamed the loudest insinuated stuff straight out of 1984, and when no such results were found, the screaming folks were dismissed as cranks.

With this example, folks who have figured out that Xe was doing munitions and support work are going off about Blackwater/Xe committing assassinations, when Xe weren't buying or flying the planes, pulling the trigger, or making the final decisions on targets. In this very thread there's been even more conflation about Xe intelligence work, base perimeter work, etc. Once a decent investigator looks into it, however, the people making shrill claims about Xe being "assassination squads" (and similar claims) will be discredited, giving Xe more cover.

Karl Rove practices the oldest trade in the media: Be the first to get your point out, especially when it's a lie about your opponent. That makes it 20-times harder (my guesstimate) to replace with the truth, later.

The thing about Blackwater / Xe / Prince is oversight and accountability. Outsourcing and privatizing spy wet work and the rest means that they can do pretty much what they want, and We the People who pay for it won't be the wiser. Secret spyworks also mean the main beneficiaries are the insiders, from Wall Street to Pipelineistan. It's Oh-So-Social all over again, without the hassles of reporting to anybody who's not getting a piece of the action.

for instance, the Defense Update article linked below mentions some of the Israeli systems launched from UAV's-probably used against people in places like Gaza City and those other Military Operations in Urban Terrain/MOUT. This is important because of the known extremist religious orientations of Erik Prince's many associates-they are the 21st century Knights Templars hooked up with Israeli RW extremists that are so much a part of what was called the "global war on terror"-not to mention the neoconservatives.

"Evolution of UAV Employed Missiles" (January 2007 Defense Update article)
http://defense-update.com/features/du-1-07/armedUAVs_4.htm

The Federation of American Scientists has a HELLFIRE page too

AGM-114 Hellfire
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/agm-114.htm

Oh yeah, it's so convenient to have all this done "privately".

The Pride of Lockheed Martin - Speaketh

'Something is troubling Elizabeth Cheney, the other daughter of the Lockheed-Halliburton syndicate. Although the problem troubling our dear Lizzie is not her conscience, because that would require first that she have a conscience. No, what is troubling Lizzie is the lack of courage and an interest in losing she ascribes to those who are opposed to her daddy's war.' - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/lizzie-cheney-the-pride-o_b_39398.html

:puke::argh:

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/us/22intel.html?_r=1&hpw

DU thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6371437

but my ex is a predator mechanic. (He's also a mechanic for some of GA's other UAVs.)

When I was still married to him, he was deployed for all military uses; air force personnel who weren't sharp enough for the big craft were relegated to the drones. They resented it, and didn't exactly use them with care. It was routine to bring GA mechanics along as civilian support whenever they were used. He was deployed to Bosnia, to Kuwait, and to Hungary, among other places.

At that time, they weren't being equipped with weapons. Just with spy cameras. They were the new craft on the block; the CIA wasn't using them.

I'd ask the ex about it, but I haven't spoken to him in 8 years. I know he's still working on UAVs for GA, though; I do talk to my in-laws a couple of times a year.

account of the religious zealots running this country and how they have convinced their sheeple that Jesus is for de-regulation & free markets. Privatize everything so that the ruling elite can keep power and grow fatter. :mad:

Hi, mod mom! I'm sorry, I haven't read "The Family" yet. Based on the subject matter --
combining fascism with the worship of Mammon --
it is a must-read and a must-own. I have quoted Mr. Sharlet often and on DU:

Know your BFEE: The Fellowship ‘Preys’ for America



Some of those crazy Dominionist and Reconstructionists are a threat to mankind.
Tough to be rational with people who think God is on their side -- to the point of speciecide.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 110TH CONGRESS
October 2, 2007
(Takes a few seconds to load)
http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20071127131151.pdf

thanks Alan Moore.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x463349

Why does this remind me of the case of William Colby giving up half the house (foreign assassinations), to The Church Committee, to protect the other half (domestic?)?

The American Public, to the extent they've been informed about the drone program, seems to be alright with it. So what are they really copping to here?



:dem: