Blackwater, Eric Prince's Private Army, still doing business with CIA, State Department, and in Iraq & Afghanistan.
Information about the abuses and the lawlessness of the CIA continues to come out. Murder for Hire. The CIA had a verbal contract for hiring Blackwarer "Hit Squads". An unnamed former intelligence officer said that Blackwater was paid millions to train and equip those who would do the killings. Blackwater, Eric Prince's Private Army, aka Xe, has been paid in excess of $ 1 Billion by US government. 2/3 of the contracts given Blackwater were no bid contracts. Iraq cancelled their contract to work in Iraq, yet some Blackwater mercenaries are still in Iraq working under the "US Training Center." And the State Department and the CIA continue to do business with Prince.
Some in Congress are questioning why the CIA, State Dept. still continue to contract with Blackwater. "These contracts with Blackwater need to stop. There's already enough evidence of gross misconduct and serious additional allegations against the company and its owner to negate any possibility that this company should have a presence in Iraq, Afghanistan or any conflict zone--or any contract with the US government." Representative Jan Schakowsky wrote in letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton August 6.
I watched Michael Hayden on C-Span yesterday, defending hiring Blackwater and other private contractors, for CIA's "high risk covert operations!".
The revolving door from CIA to Blackwater, and other private contractors:
Many CIA employees left the CIA to go to work for private contractors that were hired then by the CIA.
Washington Post: A former intelligence official familiar with the effort said the decision to outsource a substantial portion of the program stemmed partly from the agency's close ties to Blackwater, which hired several of the agency's top executives, including former CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black and former deputy director for operations Robert Richer.
Guardian UK:
Blackwater continues to benefit from US government contracts under Barack Obama's presidency. Under Obama the numbers of private military contractors have increased in Afghanistan by almost 30% – the company once known as Blackwater among them.
According to today's report it still has classified contracts with the CIA. The report also draws attention to the Bush presidency's practice of loosening legal constraints on the CIA's counterterrorist operations and failing to inform Congress. Former vice-president Dick Cheney has defended both the measures taken and the administration's secrecy, arguing they were justified by the special circumstances of the "war on terror". The Abu Ghraib prison scandal brought to light the CIA's use of private companies to interrogate suspected terrorists, but Blackwater's involvement in a program of targeted killing raises even more serious questions of accountability.
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And we await the appointment of an independent prosecutor by Eric Holder: The CIA Torture Report (from the CIA's Inspector General on the legality and effectiveness of the torture program) is finally to be released on Monday, and today the ACLU called on the Obama administration to release the report without significant redactions. Eric Holder worked with the the CIA to release portions of report, as "We will not be doing anything that will endanger the American people." Former CIA director Porter Goss said, "he expects the report's release to damage CIA morale."
"Waste, Fraud and Abuse" in the 2 theaters:
As I listened to the "investigation" on C-Span today on all of the Waste, Fraud and Abuse in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the incredible waste, the lack of oversight, the no-bid contracts, and that 70 per cent of the contractors, then sub contracted with a different company, it is a big concern that while this went on during the lawless Bush administration, do we as yet have controls, or will we have, to stop the waste of our billions of taxpayer dollars continuing to thrown into the trash?
As we attempt to slowly wind down one war, even though violence is on the increase there, we escalate another war, we hire Blackwater to send drones in, the death tolls mount, we also struggle to rebuild our economy, as charity food banks run out of food for the unemployed, the poor, some states with unemployment rates past 10%, foreclosures still increasing daily, families going bankrupt, companies going out of business or filing bankruptcy, more homeless begging on our streets, so many Americans, suffering without any health care, health insurance, and we have Congress who cannot find the votes for health coverage for our citizens; we have a congress that always finds the votes for war funding, and $ 1.4 billion for 2 embassies in the Mid-East. That we have put up with this type of conduct from our government, and keep voting back in too many of the same idiots, says something very wrong about us as a country, as a people.
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"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." >Dwight D. Eisenhower