Blackwater = CIA (new Vanity Fair article)

Blackwater's Erik Prince to step down, reveals CIA role

Source: Vanity Fair, via Raw Story

'Power struggle' inside Blackwater over Prince's successor

Blackwater's Erik Prince was recruited as a CIA agent in the years after the 9/11 attacks, says an exclusive report at Vanity Fair that also reveals the billionaire ex-Navy SEAL plans to step down from Blackwater to teach high school.

For the past six years, Prince "appears to have led an astonishing double life," writes Adam Ciralsky. "Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s CEO and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the CIA’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into 'denied areas'—places US intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies."

Ciralsky reports that Prince became a CIA "asset," or spy, who became a "Mr. Fix-It" in the war on terror.

"Prince wasn’t merely a contractor; he was, insiders say, a full-blown asset," Ciralsky reports. "Three sources with direct knowledge of the relationship say that the CIA’s National Resources Division recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest. As assets go, Prince would have been quite a catch. He had more cash, transport, matériel, and personnel at his disposal than almost anyone Langley would have run in its 62-year history."

Read more: http://rawstory.com/2009/12/blackwaters-prince-cia-role /

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Surprise, surprise.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, imo. The intelligence agencies have always used private fronts. In the last 30 years and especially in the last eight years they have privatized themselves almost completely to evade any form of official oversight (lame as that usually is) and to rake in huge profits. Two-thirds of intelligence budgets (about $50 billion total) now goes to private contractors. The result is a full-blown parapolitical branch of government, structured like an octopus with many heads and thousands of tentacles. These structures benefit from instability, wars, disasters and chaos, and their actions tend to create the very same crises with which their existence is justified. We worry about (or sneer at) mere "conspiracy theory," but in fact we have a privatized deep state with room for hundreds of "conspiratorial" (i.e., criminal) networks.

:tinfoilhat:

It happens sometimes at random when you get an error message on posting (including on trivial posts) and thus is nothing suspicious. The post goes through but the error claims it doesn't, it appears in GD but not in MyDU. If you post again, you get a dupe in GD.

That character (or characters) portrayed an intelligence agency gone rogue. Hope that is not the reality we are dealing with.

I note that Secretary of Defense Gates is also a long-time CIA member.

BFEE

Know your BFEE: Robert Gates did more than keep the doors open at BCCI

Big Time

The Gates File

It must not be illegal when the president says you can do it.

EDIT: Forgot -- You may be thinking of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, head of SPECTRE, the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terror, Revenge and Extortion. Ian Fleming, however, never imagined that a criminal organization would ever hijack the government of the United States. From what I see, that happened on Nov. 22, 1963.

“I’m through,” Prince told Vanity Fair. “I’m going to teach high school. ... History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/blackwaters-prince-cia-role/

He'll find that, as a rogue cowboy, he has rough riding in a classroom. Maybe he'll manage coaching the wrestling team. But, teaching history and economics . . . . Unfortunately, teachers have to obey the rules of the school. They don't get to make up their own. And, uh, you get into trouble for using violence in the classroom. You get insulted, physically injured even (know of several teachers who were physically injured in their classrooms by fights with or among students) and if you answer anger with anger, you are likely to lose.

No. Prince needs to try some other line of work. I would suggest that he buy a meat processing plant. That is more his speed.

Also, if Prince was outed by the Pakistanis or overtly by the administration, then that is equivalent to firing him. He could sue for breach of contract, I suppose. Prince was never working undercover in the sense that Plame was. Prince was always openly on the offensive, never hiding the fact that he worked for the U.S. So, I doubt that his "outing" was equivalent to the "outing" of Plame. Prince broke too many laws and other things -- like people. He apparently got out of hand. We need to protect CIA assets, but can't protect those who get out of line and become a danger to our nation. Whether he was a danger or not remains to be seen, but had to be "outed" in order to determine that. Was he operating without proper supervision? Did he exceed his mandate? These are all questions that need to be answered. I have no idea because I am surprised that he was CIA in the first place. But then I know nothing about these things.

His lectures were certainly tinted with a right wing, authoritarian worldview, but I never thought much about it.

That is, until fifteen years later his body was found miles from town near some railroad tracks, the victim of apparent suicide.

Elections still happen in the Homeland?

Just askin'.

Domestic Contracts.

"Bush - Blackwater Family Ties"


Joseph Schmitz, COO & general counsel of the Prince Group, Blackwater's parent company, is married to one Lucila Garnica Gallo, Colomba Bush's sister (Jeb Bush's wife).

And Joseph Schmitz's sister is------>Mary Kay Letourneau.

and their father is ~~>> John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman from California and a prominent member of the John Birch Society, an ultra-conservative group that flowered during the Cold War. He ran for president in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party after its founder, George Wallace, was paralyzed by a would-be assassin.

John Schmitz’s political career ended with the revelation that he had a mistress who bore two of his children. He then moved to Washington, where he bought a house once owned by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

:hi:

on this story, but yet I hear plenty about Tiger and the Whitehouse crashers. Like President Obama stated today he was in China no one asked him about China and the US's economic situation, but plenty of questions on whether he will read the quitters book she didn't even write. Losers.

As for Blackwater they are the CIA, and that is scary, because that means they still answer to evil Dick Cheney. I either read somewhere or heard an interview where someone said it will take Obama at least 3 years to clean out the buried Bush/Cheney rats and replace them. That includes the DOD, DOJ, and the FBI as well. Not confident this will happen though due to the slow pace of the DOJ in replacing Bush attorneys.

My impression of the Bush years, was that it was an all out assault on the CIA or the remnants of it. This was odd, given Poppy's background, but one can never underestimate Oedipal complexes.

At the beginning of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld was trying to transfer all operational competences from the CIA to DoD black ops. Then after 9/11, the Bush administration placed much of the blame on the CIA, and then tried to destroy their intelligence capacity with capers like the Valerie affair.

I never could figure out what was happening, and I never understood how Bush et al got away with it, but it was a fairly anti-CIA administration. That Blackwater was a CIA asset is puzzling, because it's connections to DoD black ops was so much more obvious.

I guess they were so well connected that they could take both sides in that bureaucratic war to control the "war on terrrrr."

From the time of Bush Sr.'s tenure during CIA's crisis of exposure (Church and Pike Committees, etc.) and the subsequent firing of the covert operations wing by Carter's DCI Stansfield Turner in 1977, a rogue CIA coalesced around Bush and stormed back to power under Reagan and Casey. They increasingly privatized what they do on the Enterprise model (of which we got only a peak during the Iran-Contra scandals) and took to large-scale plunder activity, as in the S&L bust-out, until they had set themselves up independently and the bureaucracy in Langley was itself reduced to the CIA's biggest front. The rogue CIA - the octopus of dozens of semi-hidden, semi-independent power centers with 1000 tentacles running through MIC and Finance, crisscrossed by countless backscratching mutual extortion networks - is the real CIA, with Bush Sr. and his old crew (including Gates, whose inclusion in the Obama administration is one of several glaring red flags revealing the method) as the sort of honorary chairmen of the board. But perhaps most of what goes on any more isn't even within their purview, as at this point with the accelerated privatization following the 9/11 enabling event, 2/3 of the "intelligence" budget goes to the private contractors, PICs and PMCs like Blackwater et al., themselves composed mostly of "former" CIA, NSA, DIA, Pentagon and Co. It's a vast underground industry and quasi-secret branch of government with opaque authorities and structures and endless room for conspiratorial maneuvers. The official CIA at Langley exists so that whoever happens to be executive can still use it as a covert policy arm (or scapegoat, as you say), and so that Congress can still pretend to conduct oversight over something. The pretend blame game around 9/11 and the Plame business were kabuki theater, distractions found (or designed) to prevent the need for further damage control. Look at all the MSM space devoted to these relative trivialities, compared to the real evidentiary trails dangling from both 9/11 and the genesis of the effectively genocidal wars of aggression in the Middle East and Central Asia. Am I telling you something you don't already know? See you in the Dungeon some time, I guess.