Blackwater founder Erik Prince targets Democrats in memoir

[kpete]

Blackwater founder Erik Prince targets Democrats in memoir

Erik Prince, chairman of the private security firm once known as Blackwater, is writing a memoir that says Democratic officials in two administrations approved of his most sensitive and controversial operations, sources close to the company, now known as XE Services, said.

To date, the former Navy commando has been solely associated with the George W. Bush administration, during which Blackwater operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan gained notoriety for their swagger and alleged involvement in civilian killings.

But two sources, speaking independently, said that Prince will name Democratic officials in both the Clinton and Obama administrations who allegedly approved of clandestine intelligence operations carried out by Blackwater on behalf of the CIA and other government agencies.

“He’s going to drop the names of people who, before, were saying, ‘Yeah, go kill Osama Bin Laden’ and stuff like that, but went sideways on him when the investigations began,” said one of the sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity in order to maintain relations with the company.

A White House spokesman declined to comment.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/09/blackwater_chief_erik_prince_t.html?wprss=spy-talk

[leveymg]

1. It'll be interesting to hear more about what Prince was doing before 9/11, and his assignments to

clean up the dirty laundry afterwards. Not much is known about his CIA-related activities between his early days as a Special Forces guy in Bosnia in 1995 and the CIA contracts he got from CIA Deputy Director "Buzzy" Krongard to assassinate al-Qaeda operatives in 2002.

There's a lot of important details that need some filling-in, particularly since Cofer Black and the other CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) Bin Laden unit managers went over to Blackwater right after their mass resignations from the Agency in early and mid 2002, following the Jawbreaker failures. That Blackwater became an Agency subsidiary (or dumping ground) tells me that Erik and his Military Intelligence people may have also been in the loop before 9/11, during the period Bush and Tenet let CTC manage monitoring of the 9/11 hijackers as they wandered around the U.S. in the months leading up to the attack.

We know that Steve Cambone, Rummy's man, killed the DIA Able-Danger (AD) surveillance during that period after Atta was connected by AD analysts to the "Brooklyn Cell" in early 2001. Cambone was the details guy who ran HUMINT at the Pentagon, and if there was anyone outside CIA who would have known what was going on with Bin Laden's cells inside the US, and their links to various factions -- official and privatized -- within the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the UK, and others it would have been Cambone.

[Lint Head]

2. I will target this SOB in my memoir. Why would anyone want to read this

killer and war criminal's opinion about anything.

[leveymg]

3. Prince is a fascinating character, as is Blackwater's ties to CIA-CTC in the period before and after

9/11. Reason enough to read Prince's account, even the self-serving disinformation version.

[Solly Mack]

4. Frankly, when it comes to America's crimes, I don't care who gets exposed

or who goes down. If you're guilty, you're guilty.

That said, as for anything Prince says destroying the Democratic Party ...don't see it happening.