Malachi Smith's List: MERCENARIES-PRIVATE ARMIES

• Blackwater protected Barack Obama in Afghanistan
• Tuesday, July 29, 2008,
• During the Democratic primary battle, blasting the private security firm Blackwater USA as a bunch of unaccountable trigger-happy mercenaries was an easy crowd pleaser -
• particularly after the September 2006 Nisoor Square incident and a subsequent congressional report that stated the company's use of force was "frequent and extensive".
• Hillary Clinton announced she was sponsoring legislation banning the use of private security contractors.
• Barack Obama didn't sign up to this and would not rule out using Blackwater and its ilk. But he made clear his disdain for the outfit, trumpeting in Iowa City last October his proposal for "tougher government reforms than any other candidate in this race - reforms that would eliminate the kind of no-bid contracts that this administration has given to Blackwater".
• He added: "Most contractors act as if the law doesn't apply to them. Under my plan, if contractors break the law, they will be prosecuted."
• In Pennsylvania in March he stated that "we have to crack down on private contractors like Blackwater, because I don't believe they should be able to run amok and put our own troops in danger and get paid three or four times or ten times what our soldiers are getting paid".
• So who do you think protected Obama and his fellow senators Jack Reed and Chuck Hagel during their recent and much ballyhooed congressional delegation trip to Afghanistan? Yep, that's right - Blackwater.

  • It's my opinion that Blackwater, like so much else within the United States these past 9 or so years, is a mirror of Nazi Germany and in Blackwater's case, the "elite" guards of the SS. Portions of the U.S. Government seem to admire and have for a long time, aspects of Hitler's Germany. They sure seem to be exhausting themselves trying to erect a 21st century version of the Nazi state. A private army and a "preatorian guard" of elite military as opposed to the regular armed forces of the U.S. certainly seem to be where the NWO low lifes are headed.
• In his Washington Whispers column, the well-connected Paul Bedard reports that Obama was overheard saying that "Blackwater is getting a bad rap".
• A fairly startling alleged observation given his previous utterances about the company - though perhaps unsurprising given he was in a war zone and his life was in the hands of Blackwater guards.
• A tight-lipped Anne Tyrrell, spokeswoman for Blackwater, said she could neither confirm nor deny that the company had been involved in the visits by the senators to Afghanistan or Iraq.
• My request to Bill Burton, Obama's national spokesman, for comment on the Bedard story - including whether the alleged quote or its sentiment was genuine - went unanswered.
• But a source familiar with Obama's security arrangements told me that Blackwater, along with the Secret Service, did pull security for the three senators in Afghanistan, though not Iraq.
• Deceiver describes this as Obama's "Rosie O'Donnell moment"  That's maybe a tad harsh but it will be interesting to see whether Obama's public position on Blackwater changes as a result of his up-close time with their personnel in Afghanistan.

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• Blackwater: Our Secret Mercenary Army
• Author and The Nation contributor Jeremy Scahill talks to Jon about his new book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. The rise of private security companies in general, and Blackwater in particular, is a troubling development on so many levels � especially when they're used domestically as with NOLA. That role would usually be filled by the National Guard.
• Where m More..ight they be? Perhaps the GOP will contract Blackwater for security at the 2008 convention, too.

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• Blackwater: Our Secret Mercenary Army
• Author Jeremy Scahill speaks in Chicago at “Socialism 2007: Socialism for the 21st Century”
• In his landmark book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” Scahill details the Bush administration’s accelerated program to privatize the US military through the use of a ’shadow army’ of mercenaries in Iraq and else where, most notably New Orleans after the devastation of hurricane Katrina.

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• Paramilitary Force To Boss Internment Camp In Montana

• Empty detention facility could serve as Gitmo in the U.S., as reports emerge of APF thugs harassing citizens

   

  
• Paul Joseph Watson
   Prison Planet.com
   Tuesday, September 29, 2009
• Following our earlier report about a paramilitary security force occupying a town in Montana, it has now become clear that the purpose of American Police Force is to boss a state of the art internment camp that some fear will be used to incarcerate American citizens, as reports come in of the private paramilitary unit setting up roadblocks and harassing citizens in Hardin.
• A CNN report on the $27 million dollar facility in Hardin Montana states that it could become “Gitmo West” and be filled with detainees from Guantanamo Bay and other terrorists.
• Since a majority of the American people have now been designated as potential domestic terrorists by the federal government, fears are growing that the prison camp will be used to incarcerate citizens against their will during a flu pandemic or any other declared emergency.
• The Two Rivers Detention Center is a state of the art facility, festooned with surveillance cameras and surrounded by razor wire and open land to prevent escape.
• The camp is also filled with riot equipment such as gas masks, riot helmets, shields and batons, as well as guns.
• Since the camp is currently empty, a private paramilitary unit calling itself American Police Force has been hired by local authorities to boss the facility.
• However, as we reported earlier, APF, which has all the hallmarks of being another Blackwater, has virtually occupied the town, festooned their vehicles with police decals and started carrying out law enforcement duties.
• According to an article carried on the Steve Quayle website, 75% of the APF agents will be foreign mercenaries after training is completed and the organization’s ultimate goal is to establishment a permanent presence in the town while scouting out another 30 U.S. towns for a similar occupation-style mandate.
• The writer claims that APF agents are already harassing citizens, setting up roadblocks and that they told a local business owner that they had a register of all the gun owners in the town.
• All of this is of course completely illegal and unconstitutional. A private army cannot pose as a police force unless we’re talking about a third world dictatorship or a banana republic, which is what the U.S. has seemingly become.
• It seems that Obama’s promise of a “national civilian security force” is being implemented as private mercenary armies are brought in to occupy American towns and set up internment camps for dissidents and people who resist a federal government takeover under the pretext of a swine flu outbreak or similar pandemic
• We will have reports directly out of Hardin Montana over the next few days as we track this shocking development.
• Watch the CNN clip and the KULR News 8 clip below. Further videos follow.

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• Served time in prison for theft
• APF head Hilton has history of legal trouble
• RUFFIN PREVOST  Of The Gazette Staff | Posted: Wednesday, September 30, 2009 6:25 pm
• Michael Hilton of American Police Force arrived in Hardin with promises of Mercedes police cars and expertise in operating prisons.
• He delivered the cars last week, but may have learned about prisons following a 1993 conviction for grand theft.
• Public records from police and state and federal courts in California show that Michael Anthony Hilton, using that name and more than a dozen aliases over several years, is cited in multiple criminal, civil and bankruptcy cases, and was sentenced in 1993 to two years in state prison in California.
• Hilton pleaded guilty in March 1993 to 14 felonies, including 10 counts of grand theft, one count of attempted grand theft and three counts of diversion of construction funds, according to Orange County court records. He was sentenced to two years in prison, but it is unclear how much time he served.
•        

              LARRY MAYER/Gazette Staff
       American Police Force's president Michael Hilton addresses the media during a press conference at the Two Rivers Authority jail Saturday, September 26, 2009
• Court records in that case list his real name as Michael Hilton, but they also include the aliases Midrag Ilia Dokovitch, Midrag Ilia Dokovich and Michael Miodrag.
• Hilton, who speaks heavily accented English, has told reporters that he is a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from Montenegro, a country bordering Serbia, and once part of the former Republic of Yugoslavia.
• The same aliases and other similar ones, all with slightly different spellings, show up in many other court documents citing Hilton, including a May 2003 Orange County case in which Hilton pleaded guilty to driving under the influence of alcohol.
• A booking photo from the Huntington Beach Police Department from Hilton's DUI arrest on March 14, 2003, shows him heavier, beardless and with more hair than he has now.
• It also shows the same facial features, including a distinct arched wrinkle over his left eye, along with three deep brow furrows, small, circular indentations in the center of his forehead and a cleft tip on the nose.
• Michael Hilton and his aliases are listed as defendants in various Orange County civil cases alleging fraud and breach of warranty, including a March 2000 case where he is accused of fraud, larceny, breach of contract and false pretenses.
• Court documents in that case allege that Hilton and others solicited investments of hundreds of thousands of dollars from the plaintiff for the creation of collectible Super Bowl commemorative coins.
• The complaint alleges that Hilton and others falsely told the plaintiff that the money would be used for the design and manufacture of the coins, and to pay for a National Football League license to produce them.
• In fact, the complaint states, no such license was ever issued by the NFL.
• Court documents show that the plaintiff obtained a 2001 judgment for $200,000 against Hilton, listing his aliases of Miodrag Dokovich and Midrag Ilia Dokovich.
• Hilton also declared Chapter 13 bankruptcy twice during a 15-month period.
• He filed under his real name, citing the alias Miodrag A. Dokovich, in November 2002, listing a Stanton, Calif., home address and a Fountain Valley, Calif., business address tied to the Belgrade Market Liquor and Deli.
• In February 2004, Hilton filed under his real name, citing the alias Miodrag Dokovich, and listing a Santa Ana, Calif., home address. He estimated his assets at less than $50,000, and listed as creditors only a credit union and his landlord.
• Both bankruptcy filings appear to have been intended to delay eviction proceedings against him. Under federal bankruptcy law, tenants are generally protected from eviction while they reorganize their finances.
• Anh Q.D. Nguyen, a Garden Grove attorney, said in an e-mail that he represented Hilton's landlord in an eviction case against Hilton that was filed in January 2004.
• Nguyen said that Hilton "filed an eleventh-hour bankruptcy petition in which my office successfully obtained relief from the bankruptcy automatic stay, in order to reclaim possession of the rented premises."
• Hilton had also been named as a defendant in July 2002 as part of separate eviction proceedings before his bankruptcy filing that year.
• Hilton filed both bankruptcies without an attorney, paying less than $275 in filing fees for each. Both petitions were dismissed by the court after Hilton failed to provide necessary documentation, including a financial reorganization plan.
• Chapter 13 bankruptcies generally remain on personal credit histories for seven years, and show up on standard credit checks.
• When asked on Wednesday about Hilton's business dealings before his involvement with APF, company spokeswoman Becky Shay said, "That information is not going to be made available at this point."
• "That's his private business. He is a man who distinguishes between private and business, between personal and corporate," she said.
• Shay said she would check with Hilton for a comment about his DUI arrest, but did not provide further details.
• She did not respond to an additional call made later Wednesday seeking more information about Hilton's other past legal problems.

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• How Quickly We Forget
• Jim Kirwan
    10-6-9
• In  March of 1970, just over thirty-nine years ago, there was a full-blown  riot in Isla Vista (Santa Barbara, California), in which the Bank of America  was burned to the ground, in a very public demonstration about the differences  between Defiance & Submission, when the government does not listen  to the public. 

   
• ". . .students rose up for three days of insane  violence. The immediate spark was the arrest of a young black militant,  accused of using obscene language in public. As deputies tried to take  him to jail, they were attacked by 50 of his sympathizers.
• He was soon forgotten, and the reasons to riot became  diffused-Viet Nam, pollution, the Establishment, a faculty dispute, the  Chicago Seven verdict.
• That night, a mob of 400 attacked local realty offices,  which, students claim, charge inflated rents.
• The rioters also broke every  window in the Isla Vista branch of the Bank of America.
• The atmosphere was still tense the next day, when William  Kunstler, chief defense attorney at the Chicago trial, addressed the students  at Campus Stadium.* Though Kunstler chided the students for acts of vandalism  ("I had never thought breaking windows is a good tactic"), his  manner and some of his statements were irresponsible and inflammatory.
• "The real violence occurs in the back rooms of police stations,"  he said. "The shadow of the swastika is on every courthouse, on universities,  on Government buildings."
• Ugly Mood. After the speech, a crowd of 500 gathered  in a park to listen to student radicals.
• Many of the wholesome-looking  youths, clenched fists raised, appeared to be out for a lark. But the mood  suddenly turned ugly, and when police patrol cars appeared a block away,  the crowd began hurling rocks.
• With 1,000 students and street people shouting "Burn,  baby, burn!" youths set fire to piles of debris and shoved them through  the Bank of America doorway. Some of the students argued that the attack  was senseless. The burners, unable to articulate their reasons, answered  that the bank was a "symbol of corporate corruption."
• Though outnumbered, state patrolmen and sheriff's deputies  took the offensive. But after a ten-minute rock barrage, they retreated,  leaving a patrol car behind. The students set it afire. Meanwhile, the  bank burned to the ground-a $275,000 loss." (1)
• This was a real protest, from the same kind of young  people that are today stone-cold-silent on all things political.
• This riot  grew in the community from the criminal practices of local businesses,  the policies of the federal government in Viet Nam, and a host of other  complaints that at the time had found no other outlet.
• In the world today  with the elites in-charge of everything to do with our money, and the total  capture of the Justice System, the courts, the congress and the Tarnished  House-the temptation for "the owners" is to just issue orders  and pass whatever laws they like-just because they can.
• But the lessons  of the Isla Vista riots are concerned with what can happen when the government  thinks that it is all powerful and that the public's point-of-view is meaningless!
• This is being done across the nation, on the assumption  that there really is nothing that the public can do except to surrender  to their newly militarized-mercenary-forces that are dressed as cops, or  security forces,
• when in fact they are private mercenaries with a mission  to attack the public at every opportunity and inflict as much harm and  damage upon the public as possible:
• As they prepare to shut down this Republic  with wanton fascistic force while inflicting maximum terror throughout  the general public.
• One of the latest twists in the New-Barbarism  being introduced to the public by the Obamanation that believes they can  do anything they like-also because we "have no choice" except  to surrender to their every whim of criminal activity or fascist dictates,  because they are supposedly "in control" of everything that once  belonged to the people. Now these same mercenaries have begun to occupy  entire towns. Here is the "new" logo for Hardin Montana's special  police force.
• "In response to growing criticism and suspicion,  American Police Force has changed its name, changed its logo and altered  several areas of its website in an attempt to "diffuse tension"  surrounding the private paramilitary organization that wants to take over  law enforcement duties while bossing a $27 million dollar detention facility  in Hardin, Montana.
• Following threats of legal action on behalf of the government  of Serbia against APF for using a near copy of the Serbian Coat of Arms,  on Sunday the logo was changed although it still remains a double-headed  eagle, which is widely accepted as signifying imperial power, not something  many would be comfortable with for an organization that wants to provide  law enforcement.
• Here is the logo of the Rothschilds family  crest for the Red Hand, from which the 'other logo' was taken. 

    

  In addition, the company has changed its name from American  Police Force to American Private Police Force.
• The organization has also changed the language on its  website and altered the claim that it runs the U.S. Training Center, which  is actually controlled by Blackwater." (2)
• How much more will the American public tolerate from  this openly fascistic takeover of the whole nation that was once called  the United States?
• Obama supposedly plans to replicate these small-town  takeovers in at least thirty more places throughout the nation, to discourage  anything like the Isla Vista riots from ever happening again-especially  while the New World Order is trying desperately to close off the remaining  exits from their tyrannical dictatorship?
• San Francisco just hosted a form of "Lovefest"  last weekend, to celebrate free sex, open drug use, and free flowing booze  was available on every street corner, downtown, along with supposedly some  music for people the same age as the ones that did the rioting in Isla  Vista thirty-nine years ago.
• Not a single arrest was made among the tens of thousands  of those participating, from all over the world.
• In fact the cops got their  uniforms out of mothballs for the occasion, and put away their Darth-Vader  gear for the occasion.
• Public drunkenness happened but did not result in  any arrests, and a fantastic time was had by all the brain-dead morons  that tried to participate, but since there were no instructions to guide  them, many just stood around and gawked at everyone else.
• The size of the  outpouring would have put Lovefest somewhere below Woodstock; but as this  is 2009, instead of that far-away time from the 1960's, no comparisons  could be made.
• The devastating thing is that when compared to the several  groups of a few hundred that tried to demonstrate against the G-20; only  to be arrested even after they tried to disperse-as per the ORDERS from  out-of-control riot police that provided the riots themselves; who they  were supposedly called into the public sector to protect the public and  its property against.
• Listen to the tapes of the Police as they plan to  capture those that were following their orders to "DISPERSE."  (3)
• The time to begin to stop these things is here and now.  If you have to call someone else, then I suggest that you call the Attorney  General of the states affected or the Governor's-congress will not be of  any use, because they are the ones that have actually sponsored all this  treachery.
• kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net 

    

  1) Protest: The Isla Vista Uprising 

  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,878774,00.html 

    

  2) APF Changes Name, Logo and Website to Diffuse Tension 

  http://www.infowars.com/apf-changes-name-logo-website-to-diffuse-tension/ 

    

  3) G-20 / Oakland / Schenley Police Scanner (condensed  & captioned) 

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5qhquzewJ8

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• "RAVENWOOD"   COMES TO AMERICA
• By   Chuck Baldwin
    October 9, 2009
    NewsWithViews.com
• Fans   of the CBS-terminated TV series JERICHO will recognize the name "Ravenwood."
• This was the ruthless mercenary force used by the illegitimate federal   government at Cheyenne to subjugate the citizens of Kansas in the aftermath   of a massive nuclear attack against two dozen American cities.
• As with   much of JERICHO's superbly written story line, Ravenwood reflected real-world   entities.
• Private mercenary forces have been used extensively throughout   the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as in many other theaters.
• And   as JERICHO correctly depicted, these "private contractors"   have largely operated without oversight or accountability. (Can anyone   say, "Blackwater"?)
• For the most part, the American people   are unfamiliar with these mercenary forces, because they normally operate   in foreign theaters of war.
• JERICHO put them on the streets of U.S.   cities. Now it looks like JERICHO was more prophecy than fiction.
• An   underreported (what's new?) story out of a little town in Montana has   brought real-life drama to the CBS blockbuster TV series.
• Interestingly   enough, CBS is the only major news network that has covered the Montana   story.
• In   the little town of Hardin, Montana (which is about the same size as   the fictitious town of Jericho, Kansas, in the TV series), a private   security firm, American Police Force (APF), has been contracted to provide   all police services and to manage the operation of the town's jail.
• According to local news reports out of Billings, Montana, "American   Police Force officials showed up in Mercedes SUV's that had 'Hardin   Police' stenciled on the vehicles. The twist, the city of Hardin doesn't   have a police department.
• "Two   Rivers Authority [the city's economic development agency] officials   say having APF patrol the streets was never part of their agenda."   (Source: KULR-8 Television, Billings, Montana)
• Until   now, the Big Horn County Sheriff's Office was responsible for patrolling   the city. However, numerous Hardin citizens have testified to APF mercenaries   patrolling Hardin's streets.
• The   Hardin jail is an interesting situation, all by itself. Completed in   September 2007, the 464-bed facility has sat totally empty (which begs   an investigative analysis as to how and why the facility was built in   the first place).
• APF promises to fill the jail (with whom is not clear)   and also intends to build a 30,000-square-foot military-style training   facility and a 75,000-square-foot dormitory for trainees.
• Costs are   to be covered by Ravenwood's—excuse me—APF's "business   activities," which includes security and training, weapons and   equipment sales, surveillance, and investigations.
• Of   course, under our Constitution, there can be no such thing as an "American   Police Force" in the United States.
• Any kind of national police   force is not only unconstitutional; it is anathema to everything American   law and jurisprudence is built upon.
• Law enforcement is clearly and   plainly the responsibility of the states and local communities.
• That   a mercenary organization would take the moniker American Police Force   is, by itself, disconcerting. But there is much more.
• APF   touts itself as providing security and investigative work to clients   in "all 50 States and most Countries."
• It boasts having "rapid   response units awaiting our orders worldwide."
• It further brags   that it can field a battalion-sized team of Special Forces soldiers   "within 72 hours."
• APF states that it "plays a critical   role in helping the U.S. government meet vital homeland security and   national defense needs."
• Yet,   an Associated Press search of two comprehensive federal government contractor   databases turned up no record of American Police Force.
• Representatives   of security trade groups said they had never heard of APF.
• Alan Chvotkin,   executive vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council,   said, "They're really invisible."
• An   attorney for APF, Maziar Mafi, said the company was a spin-off of a   major security firm, but declined to name the parent company or give   any other details.
• But   at least one source reports, "American Police Force, the paramilitary   unit patrolling a small town in Montana, has been exposed as being a   front group for the disgraced private military contractor Blackwater,   now called 'Xe'."

  • I thought as much. Blackwater was my guess days ago
  Add Sticky Note
• Whoever   is backing APF has deep pockets; that much is for sure. That APF might   be connected to Blackwater makes this situation even more problematic.   But there is still more.
• According   to numerous local news reports, APF's lead figure has a criminal history.
• APF's head is a man named Michael Hilton. And recent revelations have   turned up the fact that Hilton has served several years in jail--along   with being served several civil judgments--for fraud.
• In fact, Hilton   is currently scheduled to appear in a California court over an outstanding   judgment in a fraud case.
• This has caused the Two Rivers Authority (TRA)   to step back from the APF deal. And at this writing, the future of the   agreement between TRA and APF is uncertain.
• Adding   to the dubious image of APF is the accusation that their on-the-ground   leaders seem to be Russians.
• According to Hardin residents, the APF   officer in charge had a "thick Russian accent." (Of course,   Hilton himself is Serbian, and it appears that many of his personnel   are likewise Serbian.)
• Residents also state that they were told seventy-five   percent of the security officers that were to be trained would be "international."
• Is this what we have to look forward to: foreign mercenaries--employed   by international corporations and backed by the federal government--being   used to police American cities?

  • It wouldn't be the first time the Federal Government has used foreign "mercenaries" against its own citizens.
  Add Sticky Note
• Local   protests against the introduction of APF mercenaries in Hardin have   already caused APF to change its name.
• Late news reports state that   the private contractor is now operating under the name of American Private   Police Force.
• In   the meantime, Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock has launched an   investigation into the Hardin matter.
• According to the AG's office,   the investigation is predicated upon concerns that the company might   be violating the Montana Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection   Act.
• The   Hardin saga is both noteworthy and troublesome. It is the latest example--but   certainly not the first--of how private security companies are being   employed as law enforcement personnel.
• Retired   lawman Jim Kouri recently wrote a fascinating piece in which he chronicles   the growing trend of private security companies exercising police powers.
• Kouri summarizes an American Society for Industrial Security report,   saying, "There are more than one million contract security guards,   with perhaps another million guards who are proprietary security officers   who are hired directly by businesses and institutions.
• On the other   hand, there are about 700,000 sworn law enforcement officers working   for towns, cities, counties, states and the federal government."
• Of   course, most of these "private police" mercenaries are military-trained.   And they are also the ones providing most of the military-style training   to America's various law enforcement agencies.
• Kouri   goes on to point out that Lexington's (Kentucky) Police Department contracted   Blackwater Security International to provide "homeland security   training."
• And in New Orleans, Louisiana, mercenaries openly patrol   city streets.
• Kouri notes Blackwater officials as saying they are on   contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given   the authority "to use lethal force if necessary."
• See   Kouri's column   here.
• All   of the above is disconcerting enough, but when one factors in President   Barack Obama's desire to create a "Civilian Defense Force,"   potential problems only intensify.
• For example, in 1995, the United   Nations' International Police Task Force (UNIPTF) was created.
• Ostensibly,   the UNIPTF was formed to "carry out programs of police assistance   in Bosnia and Herzegovina."
• Then, in 2003 the Civilian Police International   (CPI) was created. This was a joint venture between the U.S. State Department   and such notable private companies as Wackenhut and Kellogg Brown &   Root (a Halliburton company; and, by the way, so is Blackwater.
• But   this is just a coincidence, right?).
• The stated purpose was for "international   law enforcement and criminal justice programs." Inertia for mercenary-style   (backed by the federal--or even international--government) law enforcement   has been growing ever since.
• The   question must then be asked: "Could the whole APF and Hardin, Montana,   affair be a test run for Obama's budding Civilian Defense Force?"
• In   the CBS TV series, JERICHO, residents resisted the federal government's   mercenary force, Ravenwood, and fought ferociously for their freedom   and independence.
• At the time the show aired, it all seemed like fantasy.   But if you talk with the residents of Hardin, Montana today, they might   say that fantasy is fast becoming reality.
• Stay   alert, America: your town could be next.
• P.S.   I have posted a web page devoted to the Hardin, Montana, story for anyone   that wants to review or keep abreast of this situation. Go here.

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• Mystery 'Police' Force Has Small Montana City on Edge
• Thursday, October 08, 2009    
• By Katie Landan
• When two brand new, shiny black Mercedes SUVs bearing a "Hardin Police Department" logo drove through the main thoroughfare of Hardin, Mont., last week, people took notice.
• “How many police forces have Mercedes?” said Charlene Warren, a local business owner who has lived in Hardin for more than half a century. “That threw up a red flag.”
• And speaking of flags, it did not go unnoticed that the emblem on the sides of the SUVs bore a strong resemblance to the Serbian national flag.
• Furthermore, those "police department" cars were rolling through Hardin, a small southeastern Montana town of 3,600 that just happens not to have a police department.
• The luxury vehicles that rolled through town belonged to the American Police Force (APF), a California-based security firm that is drafting a contract that will give it control over a $27 million medium-security prison that was built in Hardin more than two years ago, but has never held any prisoners.
• But that contract is now on hold as the Montana State Attorney General’s Office investigates APF and the Big Horn County Sheriff's Department enters preliminary talks about incorporating a real police department in Hardin so a similar episode doesn’t occur in the future.
• At first, Hardin residents were pleased that APF was planning to turn their empty prison into a training facility.
• Hardin has a double-digit unemployment rate and is desperate for revitalization, and the area was left high and dry last spring when the federal government decided not to use the facility to harbor Guantanamo Bay detainees. Opening the prison would mean jobs.
• But since the SUV incident, APF's reputability is under scrutiny.
• “We have covered this story for years now, and for the last month, it’s been one twist and turn from the other” Nick Lough, a reporter at KULR-8 in Billings, Mont., told FOXNews.com.
• The latest twist: The owner of APF, Michael Hilton, is a convicted felon, including two convictions in grand theft cases, and an alleged con-artist who, according to some sources, utilizes more than 20 aliases.
• “That is big controversy, is the unknown,” said Warren. “There are too many lies.”
• Michael Cohen, a former Secret Service agent named as the would-be operator of the prison, served 14 months in prison for stealing $2,800 from the agency after his conviction in 2004.
• Cohen told the Associated Press he spoke with Hilton about the position but was not offered the job.

• Hardin's Two Rivers Authority Board — an economic development agency — was contacted by APF about a month ago to draft a contract that would hand over control of the prison. But now the board's Web site prominently displays the following words:

         

  We welcome anyone to visit our town!
   

         

  There are no commandos in the streets.
• There is no fence or gate being built around Hardin. People are free to come and go as they please. APF is not running our town or our police force.
• Residents and concerned citizens now are voicing their opinions on street corners, at town hall meetings and in the blogosphere. They are demanding to know who APF’s parent company is, what the company plans to do in their town and, finally, what on earth those two Mercedes were doing roaming their streets.
• Bob van der Valk, contributing writer for the Terry Tribune and editor of the travel website Montanawithkids.com, doesn't think the people of Hardin will let the APF get the contract to run the prison.
• "I think the people found out that what occurred was an under-the-table deal that shouldn't have happened," he told FOXNews.com.
• He said he hopes the facility will be turned into a high school to combat school overpopulation in the community.
• The company's public relations director, Becky Shay, formerly a reporter for the Billings Gazette, also refused to comment.
• FOXNews.com contacted Hilton’s office at APF, but he declined to comment.
• According to one report, Shay fears for her own safety and recently hired her own security team.
• Residents, bloggers and the media are said to be filling her inbox with their grievances, and there are reports that she has received death threats.
• “They just can’t give us any answers,” Warren told FOXNews.com. “People are afraid. This is a good little town, we got a nice people here, and I wouldn’t want to see some dishonest person, like this American Police Force, do any harm to our town.”
• “They found us real vulnerable right now," Warren says, "and they are just taking advantage of a good thing.”

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• Exposed: American Police Force Is A Blackwater Front Group

• APF web page admits it runs Blackwater-controlled U.S. Training Center, proving that the two organizations are one and the same

   

  
• Paul Joseph Watson
   Prison Planet.com
   Thursday, October 1, 2009
• UPDATE: Blackwater Claims APF Illegally Using Logos, Material
• UPDATE: The American Police Force website page which clearly states that they run the Blackwater-controlled U.S. Training Center is back online here.
• American Police Force, the paramilitary unit patrolling a small town in Montana, has been exposed as being a front group for the disgraced private military contractor Blackwater, now called “Xe”.
• The American Police Force website, on a page that has swiftly been deleted but remains cached here, states that APF runs the “U.S. Training Center,” which proves “a wide range of instruction and training for all types of law enforcement organizations, from basic firearms training to complex SWAT tactics,” according to the website.

• The Blackwater website carries on its contact page the following address, underneath the logo for U.S. Training Center.

   

  Xe Services, LLC
   PO Box 1029
   Moyock, NC 27958

• Xe Services LLC is the new name of Blackwater USA. In addition, the U.S. Training Center contact page carries the exact same address.

   

  PO Box 1029
   Moyock, NC 27958
• Indeed, The U.S. Training Center website, can be accessed via Blackwater’s forwarding URL at http://www.blackwaterusa.com/.
• The U.S. Training Center is run by Blackwater.
• According to a February 2009 NY Times article, the U.S. Training Center is a Blackwater “subsidiary that conducts much of the company’s overseas operations and domestic training.”
• Blackwater changed the name of the facility from its old title, Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, earlier this this when they also changed their own name to “Xe”.
• Since Blackwater runs the U.S. Training Center, and the American Police Force stated on its own website, before it was deleted this morning, that it also runs the U.S. Training Center. This means that either APF is lying about running the U.S. Training Center and is therefore effectively posing as Blackwater, or APF and Blackwater are one and the same.
• 
   CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENT: The American Police Force website, on a page that has now been deleted, states that the organization runs the U.S. Training Center.
• A domain registry check confirms that the U.S. Training Center website is registered to XE Services.
• The fact that American Police Force attempted to hide the link by deleting the page on their website is further evidence that they are trying to conceal the fact that they are nothing more than a front group for Blackwater.
• The U.S. Training Center is the training facility for Blackwater’s front group, American Police Force. This means that the new training facility that “American Police Force” are trying to build in Hardin is another Blackwater training facility.
• This also means that Blackwater troops, under the guise of “American Police Force” have been patrolling Hardin, posing as law enforcement, and are also attempting to boss the $27 million dollar detention center recently built in the Montana town.
• Many people have expressed suspicions that the convicted criminal running “American Police Force,” Michael Hilton, is not really the leader of the company and is merely a go between for his bosses. This is now confirmed by the revelation that APF is a front group for Blackwater.
• APF’s reticence to divulge who their parent company was to reporters is also explained by the fact that they are a Blackwater front.
• As the videos below discuss, Blackwater has been widely attacked for its involvement in atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• To have such individuals patrolling the streets of American towns posing as law enforcement and manning detention camps is a chilling precedent and all the more reason why American Police Force – or Blackwater as we should now call them – should be kicked out of Hardin immediately and face criminal charges for violating article 2 section 33 of the Montana Constitution.

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• Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder

• By Jeremy Scahill

    

   

  August 4, 2009
• A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia.
• The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company.
• The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."
• In their testimony, both men also allege that Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq.
• One of the men alleges that Prince turned a profit by transporting "illegal" or "unlawful" weapons into the country on Prince's private planes.
• They also charge that Prince and other Blackwater executives destroyed incriminating videos, emails and other documents and have intentionally deceived the US State Department and other federal agencies.
• The identities of the two individuals were sealed out of concerns for their safety.
• These allegations, and a series of other charges, are contained in sworn affidavits, given under penalty of perjury, filed late at night on August 3 in the Eastern District of Virginia as part of a seventy-page motion by lawyers for Iraqi civilians suing Blackwater for alleged war crimes and other misconduct.
• Susan Burke, a private attorney working in conjunction with the Center for Constitutional Rights, is suing Blackwater in five separate civil cases filed in the Washington, DC, area.
• They were recently consolidated before Judge T.S. Ellis III of the Eastern District of Virginia for pretrial motions. Burke filed the August 3 motion in response to Blackwater's motion to dismiss the case.
• Blackwater asserts that Prince and the company are innocent of any wrongdoing and that they were professionally performing their duties on behalf of their employer, the US State Department.
• The former employee, identified in the court documents as "John Doe #2," is a former member of Blackwater's management team, according to a source close to the case.
• Doe #2 alleges in a sworn declaration that, based on information provided to him by former colleagues, "it appears that Mr. Prince and his employees murdered, or had murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about the ongoing criminal conduct."
• John Doe #2 says he worked at Blackwater for four years; his identity is concealed in the sworn declaration because he "fear[s] violence against me in retaliation for submitting this Declaration."
• He also alleges, "On several occasions after my departure from Mr. Prince's employ, Mr. Prince's management has personally threatened me with death and violence."
• In a separate sworn statement, the former US marine who worked for Blackwater in Iraq alleges that he has "learned from my Blackwater colleagues and former colleagues that one or more persons who have provided information, or who were planning to provide information about Erik Prince and Blackwater have been killed in suspicious circumstances."
• Identified as "John Doe #1," he says he "joined Blackwater and deployed to Iraq to guard State Department and other American government personnel."
• It is not clear if Doe #1 is still working with the company as he states he is "scheduled to deploy in the immediate future to Iraq." Like Doe #2, he states that he fears "violence" against him for "submitting this Declaration." No further details on the alleged murder(s) are provided.
• "Mr. Prince feared, and continues to fear, that the federal authorities will detect and prosecute his various criminal deeds," states Doe #2. "On more than one occasion, Mr. Prince and his top managers gave orders to destroy emails and other documents. Many incriminating videotapes, documents and emails have been shredded and destroyed."
• The Nation cannot independently verify the identities of the two individuals, their roles at Blackwater or what motivated them to provide sworn testimony in these civil cases. Both individuals state that they have previously cooperated with federal prosecutors conducting a criminal inquiry into Blackwater.
• "It's a pending investigation, so we cannot comment on any matters in front of a Grand Jury or if a Grand Jury even exists on these matters," John Roth, the spokesperson for the US Attorney's office in the District of Columbia, told The Nation.
• Asked specifically about whether there is a criminal investigation into Prince regarding the murder allegations and other charges, Roth said: "We would not be able to comment on what we are or are not doing in regards to any possible investigation involving an uncharged individual."
• The Nation repeatedly attempted to contact spokespeople for Prince or his companies at numerous email addresses and telephone numbers. When a company representative was reached by phone and asked to comment, she said, "Unfortunately no one can help you in that area."
• The representative then said that she would pass along The Nation's request. As this article goes to press, no company representative has responded further to The Nation.
• Doe #2 states in the declaration that he has also provided the information contained in his statement "in grand jury proceedings convened by the United States Department of Justice."
• Federal prosecutors convened a grand jury in the aftermath of the September 16, 2007, Nisour Square shootings in Baghdad, which left seventeen Iraqis dead. Five Blackwater employees are awaiting trial on several manslaughter charges and a sixth, Jeremy Ridgeway, has already pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempting to commit manslaughter and is cooperating with prosecutors.
• It is not clear whether Doe #2 testified in front of the Nisour Square grand jury or in front of a separate grand jury.
• The two declarations are each five pages long and contain a series of devastating allegations concerning Erik Prince and his network of companies, which now operate under the banner of Xe Services LLC.

  • "Xe Services LLC" - SEE: AFP (American Police Force; Michael Hilton and Hardin, Montana)
  Add Sticky Note
• Among those leveled by Doe #2 is that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe":
• To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.
• Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."
• Among the additional allegations made by Doe #1 is that "Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq."
• He states that he personally witnessed weapons being "pulled out" from dog food bags. Doe #2 alleges that "Prince and his employees arranged for the weapons to be polywrapped and smuggled into Iraq on Mr. Prince's private planes, which operated under the name Presidential Airlines," adding that Prince "generated substantial revenues from participating in the illegal arms trade."
• Doe #2 states: "Using his various companies, [Prince] procured and distributed various weapons, including unlawful weapons such as sawed off semi-automatic machine guns with silencers, through unlawful channels of distribution." Blackwater "was not abiding by the terms of the contract with the State Department and was deceiving the State Department," according to Doe #1.
• This is not the first time an allegation has surfaced that Blackwater used dog food bags to smuggle weapons into Iraq.
• ABC News's Brian Ross reported in November 2008 that a "federal grand jury in North Carolina is investigating allegations the controversial private security firm Blackwater illegally shipped assault weapons and silencers to Iraq, hidden in large sacks of dog food." Another former Blackwater employee has also confirmed this information to The Nation.
• Both individuals allege that Prince and Blackwater deployed individuals to Iraq who, in the words of Doe #1, "were not properly vetted and cleared by the State Department."
• Doe #2 adds that "Prince ignored the advice and pleas from certain employees, who sought to stop the unnecessary killing of innocent Iraqis."
• Doe #2 further states that some Blackwater officials overseas refused to deploy "unfit men" and sent them back to the US. Among the reasons cited by Doe #2 were "the men making statements about wanting to deploy to Iraq to 'kill ragheads' or achieve 'kills' or 'body counts,'" as well as "excessive drinking" and "steroid use."
• However, when the men returned to the US, according to Doe #2, "Prince and his executives would send them back to be deployed in Iraq with an express instruction to the concerned employees located overseas that they needed to 'stop costing the company money.'"
• Doe #2 also says Prince "repeatedly ignored the assessments done by mental health professionals, and instead terminated those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men."
• He says Prince and then-company president Gary Jackson "hid from Department of State the fact that they were deploying men to Iraq over the objections of mental health professionals and security professionals in the field," saying they "knew the men being deployed were not suitable candidates for carrying lethal weaponry, but did not care because deployments meant more money."
• Doe #1 states that "Blackwater knew that certain of its personnel intentionally used excessive and unjustified deadly force, and in some instances used unauthorized weapons, to kill or seriously injure innocent Iraqi civilians."
• He concludes, "Blackwater did nothing to stop this misconduct."
• Doe #1 states that he "personally observed multiple incidents of Blackwater personnel intentionally using unnecessary, excessive and unjustified deadly force." He then cites several specific examples of Blackwater personnel firing at civilians, killing or "seriously" wounding them, and then failing to report the incidents to the State Department.
• Doe #1 also alleges that "all of these incidents of excessive force were initially videotaped and voice recorded," but that "Immediately after the day concluded, we would watch the video in a session called a 'hot wash.' Immediately after the hotwashing, the video was erased to prevent anyone other than Blackwater personnel seeing what had actually occurred." Blackwater, he says, "did not provide the video to the State Department."
• Doe #2 expands on the issue of unconventional weapons, alleging Prince "made available to his employees in Iraq various weapons not authorized by the United States contracting authorities, such as hand grenades and hand grenade launchers.
• Mr. Prince's employees repeatedly used this illegal weaponry in Iraq, unnecessarily killing scores of innocent Iraqis."
• Specifically, he alleges that Prince "obtained illegal ammunition from an American company called LeMas. This company sold ammunition designed to explode after penetrating within the human body. Mr. Prince's employees repeatedly used this illegal ammunition in Iraq to inflict maximum damage on Iraqis."
• Blackwater has gone through an intricate rebranding process in the twelve years it has been in business, changing its name and logo several times.
• Prince also has created more than a dozen affiliate companies, some of which are registered offshore and whose operations are shrouded in secrecy.
• According to Doe #2, "Prince created and operated this web of companies in order to obscure wrongdoing, fraud and other crimes."
• "For example, Mr. Prince transferred funds from one company (Blackwater) to another (Greystone) whenever necessary to avoid detection of his money laundering and tax evasion schemes."
• He added: "Mr. Prince contributed his personal wealth to fund the operations of the Prince companies whenever he deemed such funding necessary. Likewise, Mr. Prince took funds out of the Prince companies and placed the funds in his personal accounts at will."
• Briefed on the substance of these allegations by The Nation, Congressman Dennis Kucinich replied, "If these allegations are true, Blackwater has been a criminal enterprise defrauding taxpayers and murdering innocent civilians."
• Kucinich is on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and has been investigating Prince and Blackwater since 2004.
• "Blackwater is a law unto itself, both internationally and domestically. The question is why they operated with impunity. In addition to Blackwater, we should be questioning their patrons in the previous administration who funded and employed this organization. Blackwater wouldn't exist without federal patronage; these allegations should be thoroughly investigated," Kucinich said.
• A hearing before Judge Ellis in the civil cases against Blackwater is scheduled for August 7.

• About Jeremy Scahill

   Jeremy Scahill, a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the author of the bestselling Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, published by Nation Books. He is an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!. more...

59 more annotations...

• Sunday, October 04, 2009

   

    

   The Hardin Saga: Waiting for the Punchline 

   

   

   
• A lovely town, a nasty predicament: Thanks to the less-than-visionary "leadership" of its municipal government, the friendly residents of the beautiful town of Hardin, Montana are burdened with $27 million in debt for a huge, empty prison and a business deal with a shadowy mercenary group fronted by a convicted felon.
• Hardin, Montana -- In his memoir Against All Hope, former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares tells the story of a Cuban ruler who built a huge prison, a structure several times larger than necessary to incarcerate the island's criminal population.
• When he was chastised by an adviser for spending a considerable sum on a prison too big to use, the dictator smiled and replied: Don't worry, someday a ruler will come along who will fill it up.
  
  
  The "someone" predicted by that ruler was Fidel Castro.
• Just inside the city limits of Hardin, Montana (pop. 3,500), next to an IGA grocery store and not far from a sugar plant, there sits a huge, empty "jail" -- actually, a small prison -- that cost $27 million to construct.
• Driven to desperation as its construction bonds went into default, the city government, acting through its economic development arm, the Two Rivers Authority (TRA), offered last March to accept prisoners from the Gitmo detention camp.
• 
  
  Who's going to fill it up? The empty Two Rivers Detention Facility in Hardin, which became a minor tourist attraction last week.
• That offer piqued the interest of some yet-unnamed people in California, who chartered a security pseudo-firm calling itself the American Police Force (APF).
• The figurehead of that ersatz mercenary outfit is a diminutive Montenegrin Serb known by several aliases, most recently "Captain" Michael Hilton.
• Although he originally claimed to have extensive military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, "Captain" Hilton -- a convicted felon and veteran scam artist -- eventually admitted that he had no military experience; this means he's a "captain" in roughly the same sense that Captain Crunch is worthy of the honorific.
• Last summer Hardin's TRA reportedly entered into an agreement with APF to operate the jail for a fee of $2.6 million annually. TRA also promised to spend even larger sums to expand the detention center; they also announced plans to build an international training center for law enforcement and military personnel, as well as to construct housing for the personnel who would soon supposedly besiege the economically depressed town.
• The company also promised to provide a bounty of other civic assets, including a homeless shelter -- despite the fact that Hardin is a small town with no homeless population.
• While discussions over management of the jail (more aptly called a prison) were going on, a second and possibly related process was nearing its conclusion.
• 
  Two views of "Captain" Hilton: Here he poses as head of the APF...
  
  (Billings Gazette photo)
• Since 1976, Hardin has had a contract with the Big Horn County Sheriff's Office (which is headquartered in the town) to provide law enforcement coverage.
• In recent years, the sheriff's office has complained that the city government wasn't providing sufficient resources to provide services for Hardin while simultaneously covering a very large territory.
• Accordingly, the city and sheriff's office have been negotiating a "deconsolidation" agreement, under which the contract with the sheriff's office would be terminated, and Hardin would provide its own police force.
• 
  ... and here's the "Captain" in a 2003 booking photo taken by the Huntington Beach Police Department.
  
  (Via the Billings Gazette.)
• Just as the "deconsolidation" negotiations were nearly finished, "Captain" Hilton and another APF personality styling himself "Sergeant" Martin came rolling into town in two black Mercedes SUVs sporting magnetic decals advertising themselves as the "City of Hardin Police Department."
• This naturally led to speculation, both locally and -- via the internet -- nationally and beyond, that the APF, a mercenary outfit led by an odd little man with a thick Slavic accent, was taking over law enforcement in Hardin.
• In an interview with Pro Libertate, Big Horn County Undersheriff Rondell Davis -- a candid and thoroughly professional young man who arrived in Hardin about a year and a half ago -- pointed out that the APF had violated both the Montana State Code and state constitution by depicting themselves as Hardin's new police force.
• Davis described the convergence of APF's arrival and the soon-to-be-completed deconsolidation talks as a "coincidence." "If Hardin wants to set up its own police force, and can find the resources to fund it," he said, "that's fine." The APF, however, obviously wasn't suitable for the job.
• "If this outfit had been legitimate, the first thing they did when they came to town would have been to have a town meeting to introduce themselves, explain who they were and what they were going to do, and take questions," Davis observed.
• Instead, the group -- which, as far as anybody knows, includes only "Captain" Hilton and "Sergeant" Martin -- emitted a dense fog of extravagant promises while being cryptic and disingenuous in dealing with questions about its parent company, activities, personnel, assets, and qualifications, if any.
• Interestingly, Undersheriff Davis described Hardin as a town with little-to-no violent crime. The most persistent problem, he pointed out, was dealing with people who have a bit too much to drink -- an assessment validated by a quick glance at the arrest reports published in the town's weekly newspaper, the Big Horn County News.
• 
  
  A welcome Throwback: He's a young man, but Big Horn County Undersheriff Rondell Davis is a candid, personable, low-key peace officer of the Old School. On the desk in front of him, incidentally, could be found materials provided to him by the Oath Keepers.
• When he spoke with Pro Libertate, Davis was preparing for a Friday night during which he would provide backup for the single deputy assigned to patrol the entire county.
• During a long walk late that evening in which I explored the length and breadth of the town, I saw nothing to indicate that there was a crime problem of any kind in Hardin.
• The only sign of potential trouble I encountered was a small knot of visibly drunken young people -- several Indian youth from the local Crow Reservation in the company of a few local non-Indians -- outside a local convenience store. The "ringleader" of the group, a tall kid who appeared to be about 22 years old, reacted to the arrival of a stranger by offering me a friendly fist-bump.
• 
  What's up with this? Your correspondent at the entrance of the much-discussed Two Rivers Detention Facility.
• During that nocturnal excursion, as well as a second one undertaken the following morning, I also failed to find any evidence that Hardin was being turned into a garrison state.
• Contrary to reports given wide cyber-circulation, there was no portcullis being constructed at either end of the town.
• Armed commandos said to be patrolling the streets failed to materialize. Nor was there any indication that people were being disarmed by foreign troops, or rounded up for incarceration and compelled injections of the legitimately dreadful H1N1 vaccine.
• As was the case with many others, the situation in Hardin came to my attention by way of an anonymous e-mail account that portrayed the town as an open-air prison quite similar to the totalitarian community described in Out of the Gray Zone, the terrific recent novel written by the estimable team of Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman.
• My reaction, which I shared with those who listen to my weekday radio broadcast, was to suggest that there might be a nucleus of disturbing truth inside the accretions of alarmist speculation and apocalyptic embellishment. That much is certainly true, as I'll discuss anon.
• I want to emphasize that some of the speculation was, up to a point, entirely justified, given the grandiose claims made by the APF and the clinically demented credulity of the Hardin municipal government:
• Where did people get the idea that the group calling itself the "American Police Force" was going to be patrolling the mean street(s) of Hardin?
  
  
  This idea came directly from the mouth of "Captain" Hilton himself.
• As quoted in the September 17 Big Horn County News, Hilton (we'll use that surname for the sake of convenience) boasted of his group's purported manpower, assets, and experience in providing security for cruise ships, airliners, and convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Hilton then asserted that the group could draw on the services of "contractors" from around the world to provide Hardin with a security force. "Hardin will be the safest place in the United States to live, and in six months the best place to live," Hilton insisted.
• If I may be forgiven for employing the cliche, Hilton was carrying coals to Newcastle: Hardin already is an exceptionally safe place to live, in large measure because that town, like most others in Montana, is populated by people who own and know how to use firearms.
• Of particular interest in this connection is the fact that Hilton's proposal to use APF as a city police force was repeated at face value, and with considerable enthusiasm, by Jim Eshleman, a reporter and photographer for the Big Horn County News, in a September 24 column assailing APF's local critics and defending the organization's compulsive secrecy.
• "Having spoken with a representative from the American Police Force I was told on a number of occasions that Hardin will be the safest town in the United States and in six months will be the best place to live in the United States," regurgitated Eshleman.
• Besides, who could complain about turning over control of the town to a secretive, unaccountable paramilitary group as long as their checks clear?
• "As far as I'm concerned, if a little secrecy means good, high-paying jobs and an economic boost to the city, then I say go for it," insisted Eshleman.
• "There is no reason to do anything that might put the project into jeopardy.... [I]n spite of the secrecy, it's in the best interests of the community that we partner with the American Police Force and work together for the economic good of not only Hardin, but of Big Horn County and the Crow Reservation."
  
  Charming.
• If Hardin were faced with the prospect of conquest by a sentient race of alien space ants, Eshleman would likely publish a column welcoming the town's new insect overlords and reminding them that, as a trusted local media personality, he could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.
• Given that Hilton's claim was given wide circulation, and prominently endorsed by a local representative of the "respectable" media, it isn't surprising that rumors began to proliferate that Hardin was either preparing to give APF the run of the town, or that APF had already dispatched battle-hardened paramilitary operators to police the streets.
• How did the notion arise that the APF had brought foreign troops to Hardin?
• Again, the fons et origo of this rumor was none other than the illustrious "Captain" Hilton.
• "APF is going to be bringing in high-level military and police to train," claimed Hilton, as reported in the September 24 Big Horn County News. "Twenty-five percent from America and seventy-five percent international top military leaders from around the world."
• Also noteworthy was Hilton's bogus boast that APF had been "running international detention facilities since it was incorporated in 1984."
• This statement, though entirely false, probably contributed to speculation about foreign prison guards being imported to staff the Two Rivers Detention Facility. And that speculation was fortified by Hilton's claim that the cost of maintaining the military/police training facility would be paid either by "the international community ... or the U.S. government."
• How on earth did people come to the conclusion that Hardin residents would be rounded up and compelled to undergo flu vaccinations?
• An October 1 Associated Press report quoted Hilton as promising to "dispatch security to patrol Hardin's streets" and also that he had offered "free health care to city residents out of the jail's clinic." This seems to be the acorn that grew into a mighty oak of misinformation regarding round-ups of recalcitrant residents for compelled injections.
• It's worth remembering that all of these claims were made at a time when the Hardin city government was talking about creating its own police force -- and the APF rolled into town advertising itself as the "City of Hardin Police Department." Add a large dose of impenetrable secrecy, stir lightly, and the result is a casserole of rumors and innuendo lightly seasoned with fact.
• The Hardin city government fled the scene once media attention was focused on its deal with the Goniff Michael Hilton.
• When Pro Libertate visited Hardin municipal offices on October 2, we were told by a very nice woman working as a cashier at the utilities office that the City Council were in "meetings." If those meetings took place, they occurred somewhere other than City Hall, which was locked down tight at 3:28 PM on a Friday afternoon.
• Mayor Ron Adams was nowhere to be found. Greg Smith, executive director of the TRA, and his wife, mayoral candidate Kerri Smith, had likewise disappeared.
  
• "Captain" Hilton headed back to California on October 1, promising to return a few days later to preside over a "job fair."
• Becky Shay, the former Billings Gazette reporter hired as a spokesperson for APF, likewise left town.
• The only people connected in any way to the APF or the prison with whom I was able to speak were two people hired to clean the facility. When I spoke with them just outside the prison's front gate they seemed eager to be finished with the job and anxious regarding the question of whether their check would clear.
• During a press conference in Billings, after deflecting several questions and making the robustly implausible claim that APF "welcomed" a fraud investigation by the Montana Attorney General, Shay broke down in tears claiming that she feared that her life was imperiled -- not by the felon running the fraudulent company she was hired to front, but by that company's critics.
• On Saturday morning (October 3), the Gazette reported that Allied Defense Systems, an authentic military contractor that had supposedly agreed to provide uniforms for APF prison guards, announced that it had sent a letter to Hilton threatening a lawsuit over the use of the company's name.
  
• Maziar Mafi, the Santa Ana attorney who acted as "legal affairs director" for APF, was suspending his involvement with the group. This he did despite the fact that Michael Hilton generously conferred on Mafi the rank of "captain" in the APF, which appears to consist entirely of two "captains" and a "sergeant."
• Mafi's sudden disenchantment with the group may have something to do with the fact that APF had missed the first payment on the black SUVs it had used to make its grand entrance into Hardin. Mafi was the one who had co-signed the loan to buy the vehicles.
• Becky Shay, who has already suffered a great deal in exchange for a promised $60,000 annual salary, an APF-provided black Mercedes SUV, and a new, APF-provided home, most likely will receive a visit from a repo man in the near future.
• With Hilton's scam falling apart as quickly as a Ritz cracker in hydrogen peroxide, it's likely that Hardin's taxpayers will end up being fed some substantial portion of the $27 million in rotten bonds issued to pay for the construction of the Two Rivers prison. But somebody will end up owning that huge, empty prison.
• First, who provided the money behind Hilton's little con game? Second, what was Hilton or his sponsor going to get out of conning the Hardin city government?
• This brings me to a couple of important questions that have yet to be answered.
• Hilton promised a great deal, but unless he received as-yet undisclosed cash payments or other blandishments from the TRA, it's difficult to see how he would profit from his deception.
• The point of a con, of course, is to get something, rather than to give something.
• This wouldn't be the case, however, if he was working on behalf of somebody with an interest other than financial enrichment.
• There remains a possibility that somebody acting with malign intentions wanted to acquire that prison -- and it's also possible that the same individual or group could run a more competent version of this scam in some other economically depressed town that turns to incarceration as a new source of revenue.
• "We're just a big joke," complained a sad-eyed but sweet middle-aged waitress the morning of our departure from Hardin. No, it's your municipal government that's made itself look ludicrous, I insisted.
• The chief unanswered question is this: If the APF affair is a joke, then what's the punchline? Who is going to fill up Hardin's empty prison?
• For additional coverage of the Hardin controversy, go here for my first radio program on the subject, and here for my live report from Hardin. And watch for a video report that will be available soon.
• (My sincere thanks to my good friend Scott Watson for his invaluable help on this story.)

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• Originally published Saturday, October 24, 2009
• Death row may go private in Arizona
• Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal-justice world, the state's death-row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.

• By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

   

  The New York Times
• FLORENCE, Ariz. — One of the newest residents on Arizona's death row, serial killer Dale Hausner, poked his head up from his television to look at several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore face masks and vests to protect against the sharp homemade objects that often are propelled from the cells of the condemned.
• It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates such as Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison.
• But in a first in the criminal-justice world, the state's death-row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.
• State officials soon will seek bids from private companies for nine of the state's 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 on death row.
• It is the first attempt by a state to put its entire prison system under private control.
• The privatization effort, in its breadth and aggressive financial goals, demonstrates what states — broke, desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and their associated costs — are willing to do to balance the books.
• Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state's roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.
• "Let's not kid ourselves," said Andy Biggs, a Republican in the state Legislature who supports private prisons. "If we were not in this economic environment, I don't think we'd be talking about this with the same sense of urgency."
• But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million upfront to operate one or more prison complexes. Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided between the state and the firm.
• Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state and charge per prisoner to run them.
• Questions raised
• The privatization move has raised questions about the ability of the private sector to handle the state's most hardened criminals.
• While executions would be performed by the state, officials said, the Department of Corrections would relinquish all other day-to-day operations to the private operator and pay a per-diem fee for each prisoner.
• "I would not want to be the warden of death row," said Todd Thomas, the warden of a prison in Eloy, Ariz., run by the Corrections Corporation of America.
• The company, the country's largest private prison operator, has six prisons in Arizona with inmates from other states. "That's not to say we couldn't," Thomas added.
• James Austin, a co-author of a Department of Justice study in 2001 on prison privatization and president of the JFA Institute, a corrections-consulting firm, said companies tend to oversee minimum- and medium-security inmates and have little experience with the most dangerous prisoners.
• "As for death row," Austin said, "it is a very visible entity, and if something bad happens there, you will have a pretty big news story for the Legislature and governor to explain."
• Arizona is no stranger to private prisons. Nearly 30 percent of the state's prisoners are being held in prisons run by firms outside the state's 10 complexes.
• Further, other states have contracts with companies to house their prisoners in Arizona.
• Under the Arizona legislation, any bidder would have to take an entire complex — many of them mazes of multiple levels of security risks and complexity — and would not be permitted to pick off the cheapest or easiest buildings and inmates.
• The state also wants to privatize prisoners' medical care.
• Potential problems
• Throughout the years, there have been high-profile riots, escapes and other violent incidents. The companies also do not generally provide the same wages and benefits as states, which has resulted in resistance from unions and concerns that the private facilities attract less-qualified workers.
• The number of federal prisoners in private prisons in the U.S. has more than doubled, to 32,712 in 2008 from 15,524 in 2000.
• The federal government, with a surge of new immigrant inmates, also contracts with firms.
• The number of state prisoners in privately run prisons has increased to 93,500 from 75,000 in that time.

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• Scahill: Obama may be afraid of Blackwater
• Scahill: Obama may be afraid of Blackwater
• By David Edwards and Daniel Tencer
    Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
• Despite news reports that the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater has seen its contracts dry up and its influence wane, the company continues to do brisk business in Iraq and Afghanistan --
• and the Obama administration may be too afraid of the firm to do anything about it, says investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill.
• "You know who's guarding Hillary Clinton in Afghanistan right now? Blackwater," Scahill told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Tuesday night.
• "You know who guards members of Congress? Blackwater.
• They have half a billion dollars in contracts in Afghanistan right now.
• CIA, State Department, Defense Department. Why is President Obama keeping these guys on the payroll?
• There has never been a company in recent history that made the case that corporations are corrupt, evil organizations [better] than Blackwater."
• Scahill was on The Rachel Maddow Show discussing the New York Times' revelation that senior Blackwater executives allegedly arranged for bribes of up to $1 million for Iraqi politicians in a bid to retain its contracts and silence criticism of the company in the wake of the Nissour Square massacre in 2007, in which 17 Iraqi civilians died after Blackwater guards opened fire.
• Though the Times report stated that it's unknown if the approved bribes ever reached their targets -- Iraqi politicians -- Scahill drew a connection between the alleged bribes and the fact that, after the Nissour Sqaure massacre, the Iraqi government first decided to bar Blackwater from operating in the country, and then reversed its position.
• "You had the Iraqi government saying Blackwater was banned from that country, then suddenly doing an about face, and Blackwater remains in Iraq to this day," Scahill said.
• That sentiment was echoed by Spencer Ackerman at the Washington Independent, who also suggested a link between the alleged bribes and Blackwater's continued presence in Iraq. "Now we have some inkling of why the Iraqis allowed the firm to stay," Ackerman blogged.
• Scahill suggested that the security firm's deep and continued involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars means the company could potentially embarrass any administration with the things it can reveal.
• "Another way of looking at this is Blackwater knows where a lot of bodies are buried," Scahill told Maddow.
• "These are guys who worked on the CIA assassination program, the drone bombing campaign, and regarding all of the senior officals, they know a heck of a lot about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those are not guys that you want on the other side of the fence if you're running Washington."
• Scahill dismissed as "nonsense" the idea that Blackwater continues to have contracts because its services can't be carried out by regular military forces.
• This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Nov. 10, 2009.

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• Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy
• Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month.
• Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.
• By              Adam Ciralsky         

   

   

        

                             <!-- MMMM yyyy -->            January 2010              
• Iput myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina.
• “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.”
• Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.
• Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover.
• The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art.
• In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism.
• Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater.
• And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia,
• and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.”
• (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)
• In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien, has become the screenwriters’ darling.
• In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp.) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder.
• On the Fox series 24, Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince, whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for use against U.S. targets.
• But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.
• For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies.
• Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy.
• While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror.
• His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.
• But Prince, with a new administration in power, and foes closing in, is finally coming in from the cold.
• This past fall, though he infrequently grants interviews, he decided it was time to tell his side of the story—to respond to the array of accusations,
• to reveal exactly what he has been doing in the shadows of the U.S. government, and to present his rationale. He also hoped to convey why he’s going to walk away from it all.
• To that end, he invited Vanity Fair to his training camp in North Carolina, to his Virginia offices, and to his Afghan outposts. It seemed like a propitious time to tag along.
• Split Personality
• Erik Prince can be a difficult man to wrap your mind around—an amalgam of contradictory caricatures.
• He has been branded a “Christian supremacist” who sanctions the murder of Iraqi civilians, yet he has built mosques at his overseas bases and supports a Muslim orphanage in Afghanistan.
• He and his family have long backed conservative causes, funded right-wing political candidates, and befriended evangelicals,
• but he calls himself a libertarian and is a practicing Roman Catholic.
• Sometimes considered arrogant and reclusive—Howard Hughes without the O.C.D.—he nonetheless enters competitions that combine mountain-biking, beach running, ocean kayaking, and rappelling.
• The common denominator is a relentless intensity that seems to have no Off switch.
• Seated in the back of a Boeing 777 en route to Afghanistan, Prince leafs through Defense News
• (The father of seven, Prince remarried after his first wife died of cancer in 2003.)
• You can’t escape the impression that Prince sees himself as somehow destined, his mission anointed
• It comes out even in the most personal of stories. During the flight, he tells of being in Kabul in September 2008 and receiving a two a.m. call from his wife, Joanna. Prince’s son Charlie, one year old at the time, had fallen into the family swimming pool.
• Charlie’s brother Christian, then 12, pulled him out of the water, purple and motionless, and successfully performed CPR. Christian and three siblings, it turns out, had recently received Red Cross certification at the Blackwater training camp.
• But there are intimations of a higher power at work as the story continues.
• Desperate to get home, Prince scrapped one itinerary, which called for a stay-over at the Marriott in Islamabad, and found a direct flight.
• That night, at the time Prince would have been checking in, terrorists struck the hotel with a truck bomb, killing more than 50.
• Prince says simply, “Christian saved Charlie’s life and Charlie saved mine.”
• At times, his sense of his own place in history can border on the evangelical.
• When pressed about suggestions that he’s a mercenary—a term he loathes—he rattles off the names of other freelance military figures, even citing Lafayette, the colonists’ ally during the Revolutionary War.
• Prince’s default mode is one of readiness. He is clenched-jawed and tightly wound.
• Waiting in the security line at Dulles airport just hours before, Prince had delivered a little homily: “Every time an American goes through security, I want them to pause for a moment and think, What is my government doing to inconvenience the terrorists? Rendition teams, Predator drones, assassination squads. That’s all part of it.”
• Such brazenness is not lost on a listener, nor is the fact that Prince himself is quite familiar with some of these tactics.
• In fact Prince, like other contractors, has drawn fire for running a company that some call a “body shop”—many of its staffers having departed military or intelligence posts to take similar jobs at much higher salaries, paid mainly by Uncle Sam.
• And to get those jobs done—protecting, defending, and killing, if required—Prince has had to employ the services of some decorated vets as well as some ruthless types, snipers and spies among them.
• Erik Prince flies coach internationally. It’s not just economical (“Why should I pay for business? Fly coach, you arrive at the same time”) but also less likely to draw undue attention.
• Prince describes the diplomats and dignitaries Blackwater protects as “Al Jazeera–worthy,” meaning that, in his view, “bin Laden and his acolytes would love to kill them in a spectacular fashion and have it broadcast on televisions worldwide.”
• He considers himself a marked man.
• Stepping off the plane at Kabul’s international airport, Prince is treated as if he, too, were Al Jazeera–worthy. He is immediately shuffled into a waiting car and driven 50 yards to a second vehicle, a beat-up minivan that is native to the core: animal pelts on the dashboard, prayer card dangling from the rearview mirror.
• Blackwater’s special-projects team is responsible for Prince’s security in-country, and except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans.
• They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers. They remove Prince’s sunglasses, fit him out with body armor, and have him change into Afghan garb.
• Prince is issued a homing beacon that will track his movements, and a cell phone with its speed dial programmed for Blackwater’s tactical-operations center.

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  Prince in the tactical-operations center at a company base in Kabul. Photograph by Adam Ferguson
• Once in the van, Prince’s team gives him a security briefing.
• Using satellite photos of the area, they review the route to Blackwater’s compound and point out where weapons and ammunition are stored inside the vehicle.
• The men warn him that in the event that they are incapacitated or killed in an ambush Prince should assume control of the weapons and push the red button near the emergency brake, which will send out a silent alarm and call in reinforcements.
• Black Hawks and Zeppelins
• Blackwater’s origins were humble, bordering on the primordial. The company took form in the dismal peat bogs of Moyock, North Carolina—not exactly a hotbed of the defense-contracting world.
• In 1995, Prince’s father, Edgar, died of a heart attack (the Evangelical James C. Dobson, founder of the socially conservative Focus on the Family, delivered the eulogy at the funeral).
• Edgar Prince left behind a vibrant auto-parts manufacturing business in Holland, Michigan, with 4,500 employees and a line of products ranging from a lighted sun visor to a programmable garage-door opener.
• At the time, 25-year-old Erik was serving as a navy seal (he saw service in Haiti, the Middle East, and Bosnia), and neither he nor his sisters were in a position to take over the business.
• They sold Prince Automotive for $1.35 billion.
• Erik Prince and some of his navy friends, it so happens, had been kicking around the idea of opening a full-service training compound to replace the usual patchwork of such facilities.
• In 1996, Prince took an honorable discharge and began buying up land in North Carolina.
• “The idea was not to be a defense contractor per se,” Prince says,
• touring the grounds of what looks and feels like a Disneyland for alpha males.
• “I just wanted a first-rate training facility for law enforcement, the military, and, in particular, the special-operations community.”
• Business was slow. The navy seals came early—January 1998—but they didn’t come often, and by the time the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center officially opened, that May, Prince’s friends and advisers thought he was throwing good money after bad.
• “A lot of people said, ‘This is a rich kid’s hunting lodge,’” Prince explains. “They could not figure out what I was doing.”
• Today, the site is the flagship for a network of facilities that train some 30,000 attendees a year.
• Prince, who owns an unmanned, zeppelin-esque airship and spent $45 million to build a fleet of customized, bomb-proof armored personnel carriers, often commutes to the lodge by air, piloting a Cessna Caravan from his home in Virginia.
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  Blackwater outpost near the Pakistan border, used for training Afghan police. Photograph by Adam Ferguson.
• The training center has a private landing strip. Its hangars shelter a petting zoo of aircraft:
• Bell 412 helicopters (used to tail or shuttle diplomats in Iraq),
• Black Hawk helicopters (currently being modified to accommodate the security requests of a Gulf State client),
• a Dash 8 airplane (the type that ferries troops in Afghanistan).
• Amid the 52 firing ranges are virtual villages designed for addressing every conceivable real-world threat: small town squares, littered with blown-up cars, are situated near railway crossings and maritime mock-ups.
• At one junction, swat teams fire handguns, sniper rifles, and shotguns; at another, police officers tear around the world’s longest tactical-driving track, dodging simulated roadside bombs.
• In keeping with the company’s original name, the central complex, constructed of stone, glass, concrete, and logs, actually resembles a lodge, an REI store on steroids.
• Here and there are distinctive touches, such as door handles crafted from imitation gun barrels. Where other companies might have Us Weekly lying about the lobby, Blackwater has counterterror magazines with cover stories such as “How to Destroy Al Qaeda.”
• In fact, it was al-Qaeda that put Blackwater on the map.
• In the aftermath of the group’s October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen, the navy turned to Prince, among others, for help in re-training its sailors to fend off attackers at close range.
• (To date, the company says, it has put some 125,000 navy personnel through its programs.)
• In addition to providing a cash infusion, the navy contract helped Blackwater build a database of retired military men—many of them special-forces veterans—who could be called upon to serve as instructors.
• When al-Qaeda attacked the U.S. mainland on 9/11, Prince says, he was struck with the urge to either re-enlist or join the C.I.A.
• He says he actually applied.
• “I was rejected,” he admits, grinning at the irony of courting the very agency that would later woo him.
• “They said I didn’t have enough hard skills, enough time in the field.”
• Undeterred, he decided to turn his Rolodex into a roll call for what would in essence become a private army.
• After the terror attacks, Prince’s company toiled, even reveled, in relative obscurity, taking on assignments in Afghanistan and, after the U.S. invasion, in Iraq.
• Then came March 31, 2004. That was the day insurgents ambushed four of its employees in the Iraqi town of Fallujah. The men were shot, their bodies set on fire by a mob. The charred, hacked-up remains of two of them were left hanging from a bridge over the Euphrates.
• “It was absolutely gut-wrenching,” Prince recalls. “I had been in the military, and no one under my command had ever died. At Blackwater, we had never even had a firearms training accident.
• Now all of a sudden four of my guys aren’t just killed, but desecrated.”
• Three months later an edict from coalition authorities in Baghdad declared private contractors immune from Iraqi law.
• Subsequently, the contractors’ families sued Blackwater, contending the company had failed to protect their loved ones.
• Blackwater countersued the families for breaching contracts that forbid the men or their estates from filing such lawsuits;
• the company also claimed that, because it operates as an extension of the military, it cannot be held responsible for deaths in a war zone.
• In 2007, a congressional investigation into the incident concluded that the employees had been sent into an insurgent stronghold “without sufficient preparation, resources, and support.”
• (After five years, the case remains unresolved.)
• Blackwater called the report a “one-sided” version of a “tragic incident.”
• After Fallujah, Blackwater became a household name.
• Its primary mission in Iraq had been to protect American dignitaries, and it did so, in part, by projecting an image of invincibility, sending heavily armed men in armored Suburbans racing through the streets of Baghdad with sirens blaring.
• The show of swagger and firepower, which alienated both the locals and the U.S. military, helped contribute to the allegations of excessive force.
• As the war dragged on, charges against the firm mounted.
• In one case, a contractor shot and killed an Iraqi father of six who was standing along the roadside in Hillah. (Prince later told Congress that the contractor was fired for trying to cover up the incident.)
• In another, a Blackwater firearms technician was accused of drinking too much at a party in the Green Zone and killing a bodyguard assigned to protect Iraq’s vice president.
• The technician was fired but not prosecuted and later settled a wrongful-death suit with the man’s family.
• Those episodes, however, paled in comparison with the events of September 16, 2007, when a phalanx of Blackwater bodyguards emerged from their four-car convoy at a Baghdad intersection called Nisour Square and opened fire.
• When the smoke cleared, 17 Iraqi civilians lay dead.
• After 15 months of investigation, the Justice Department charged six with voluntary manslaughter and other offenses, insisting that the use of force was not only unjustified but unprovoked.
• One guard pleaded guilty and, in a trial set for February, is expected to testify against the others, all of whom maintain their innocence.
• The New York Times recently reported that in the wake of the shootings the company’s top executives authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi higher-ups in order to buy their silence—a claim Prince dismisses as “false,” insisting “[there was] zero plan or discussion of bribing any officials.”
• Its role in Iraq was curtailed, its revenue dropping 40 percent.
• Nisour Square had disastrous repercussions for Blackwater.
• Today, Prince claims, he is shelling out $2 million a month in legal fees to cope with a spate of civil lawsuits as well as what he calls a “giant proctological exam” by nearly a dozen federal agencies.
• “We used to spend money on R&D to develop better capabilities to serve the U.S. government,” says Prince. “Now we pay lawyers.”
• Does he ever. In North Carolina, a federal grand jury is investigating various allegations, including the illegal transport of assault weapons and silencers to Iraq, hidden in dog-food sacks.
• (Blackwater denied this, but confirmed hiding weapons on pallets of dog food to protect against theft by “corrupt foreign customs agents.”)
• In Virginia, two ex-employees have filed affidavits claiming that Prince and Blackwater may have murdered or ordered the murder of people suspected of cooperating with U.S. authorities investigating the company
• —charges which Blackwater has characterized as “scandalous and baseless.
• One of the men also asserted in filings that company employees ran a sex and wife-swapping ring, allegations which Blackwater has called “anonymous, unsubstantiated and offensive.”
• Meanwhile, last February, Prince mounted an expensive rebranding campaign.
• Following the infamous ValuJet crash, in 1996, ValuJet disappeared into AirTran, after a merger, and moved on to a happy new life.
• Prince, likewise, decided to retire the Blackwater name and replace it with the name Xe, short for Xenon—
• an inert, non-combustible gas that, in keeping with his political leanings, sits on the far right of the periodic table.
• Still, Prince and other top company officials continued to use the name Blackwater among themselves. And as events would soon prove, the company’s reputation would remain as combustible as ever.

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  Prince at a Kandahar airfield. Photograph Adam Ferguson
• Spies and Whispers
• Last June, C.I.A. director Leon Panetta met in a closed session with the House and Senate intelligence committees to brief them on a covert-action program, which the agency had long concealed from Congress.
• Panetta explained that he had learned of the existence of the operation only the day before and had promptly shut it down.
• The reason, C.I.A. spokesman Paul Gimigliano now explains: “It hadn’t taken any terrorists off the street.”
• During the meeting, according to two attendees, Panetta named both Erik Prince and Blackwater as key participants in the program.
• (When asked to verify this account, Gimigliano notes that “Director Panetta treats as confidential discussions with Congress that take place behind closed doors.”)
• Soon thereafter, Prince says, he began fielding inquisitive calls from people he characterizes as far outside the circle of trust.
• In July, The Wall Street Journal described the program as “an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives.”
• It took three weeks for details, however sketchy, to surface.
• The agency reportedly planned to accomplish this task by dispatching small hit teams overseas.
• Lawmakers, who couldn’t exactly quibble with the mission’s objective, were in high dudgeon over having been kept in the dark.
• (Former C.I.A. officials reportedly saw the matter differently, characterizing the program as “more aspirational than operational” and implying that it had never progressed far enough to justify briefing the Hill.)
• The New York Times published a story headlined cia sought blackwater’s help to kill jihadists. The Washington Post concurred: cia hired firm for assassin program.
• On August 20, the gloves came off.
• Prince confesses to feeling betrayed. “I don’t understand how a program this sensitive leaks,” he says. “And to ‘out’ me on top of it?”
• The next day, the Times went further, revealing Blackwater’s role in the use of aerial drones to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders:
• “At hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan … the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.”
• Erik Prince, almost overnight, had undergone a second rebranding of sorts, this one not of his own making.
• The war profiteer had become a merchant of death, with a license to kill on the ground and in the air.
• “I’m an easy target,” he says. “I’m from a Republican family and I own this company outright. Our competitors have nameless, faceless management teams.”
• Prince blames Democrats in Congress for the leaks and maintains that there is a double standard at play.
• “The left complained about how [C.I.A. operative] Valerie Plame’s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor [was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it.”
• As in the Plame case, though, the leaks prompted C.I.A. attorneys to send a referral to the Justice Department, requesting that a criminal investigation be undertaken to identify those responsible for providing highly classified information to the media.
• By focusing so intently on Blackwater, Congress and the press overlooked the elephant in the room.
• Prince wasn’t merely a contractor; he was, insiders say, a full-blown asset.
• Three sources with direct knowledge of the relationship say that the C.I.A.’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.
• The C.I.A. won’t comment further on such assertions, but Prince himself is slightly more forthcoming.
• “I was looking at creating a small, focused capability,” he says, “just like Donovan did years ago”—the reference being to William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who, in World War II, served as the head of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the modern C.I.A.
• (Prince’s youngest son, Charles Donovan—the one who fell into the pool—is named after Wild Bill.)
• Two sources familiar with the arrangement say that Prince’s handlers obtained provisional operational approval from senior management to recruit Prince and later generated a “201 file,” which would have put him on the agency’s books as a vetted asset.
• It’s not at all clear who was running whom, since Prince says that, unlike many other assets, he did much of his work on spec, claiming to have used personal funds to road-test the viability of certain operations.
• “I grew up around the auto industry,” Prince explains. “Customers would say to my dad, ‘We have this need.’ He would then use his own money to create prototypes to fulfill those needs. He took the ‘If you build it, they will come’ approach.”
• According to two sources familiar with his work, Prince was developing unconventional means of penetrating “hard target” countries—where the C.I.A. has great difficulty working either because there are no stations from which to operate or because local intelligence services have the wherewithal to frustrate the agency’s designs.
• “I made no money whatsoever off this work,” Prince contends.
• “I’m painted as this war profiteer by Congress. Meanwhile I’m paying for all sorts of intelligence activities to support American national security, out of my own pocket.”
• He is unwilling to specify the exact nature of his forays.
• (His pocket is deep: according to The Wall Street Journal, Blackwater had revenues of more than $600 million in 2008.)
• Clutch Cargo
• The Afghan countryside, from a speeding perch at 200 knots, whizzes by in a khaki haze. The terrain is rendered all the more nondescript by the fact that Erik Prince is riding less than 200 feet above it.
• The back of the airplane, a small, Spanish-built eads casa C-212, is open, revealing Prince in silhouette against a blue sky. Wearing Oakleys, tactical pants, and a white polo shirt, he looks strikingly boyish.
• As the crew chief initiates a countdown sequence, Prince adjusts his harness and moves into position. When the “go” order comes, a young G.I. beside him cuts a tether, and Prince pushes a pallet out the tail chute. Black parachutes deploy and the aircraft lunges forward from the sudden weight differential. The cargo—provisions and munitions—drops inside the perimeter of a forward operating base (fob) belonging to an elite Special Forces squad.
•  

  A Blackwater aircraft en route to drop supplies to U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan in September. Photograph by Adam Ferguson
• Five days a week, Blackwater’s aviation arm—with its unabashedly 60s-spook name, Presidential Airways—flies low-altitude sorties to some of the most remote outposts in Afghanistan.
• Since 2006, Prince’s company has been conscripted to offer this “turnkey” service for U.S. troops, flying thousands of delivery runs.
• Blackwater also provides security for U.S. ambassador Karl Eikenberry and his staff, and trains narcotics and Afghan special police units.
• Once back on terra firma, Prince, a BlackBerry on one hip and a 9-mm. on the other, does a sweep around one of Blackwater’s bases in northeast Afghanistan, pointing out buildings recently hit by mortar fire.
• As a drone circles overhead, its camera presumably trained on the surroundings, Prince climbs a guard tower and peers down at a spot where two of his contractors were nearly killed last July by an improvised explosive device.
• “Not counting civilian checkpoints,” he says, “this is the closest base to the [Pakistani] border.”
• His voice takes on a melodramatic solemnity. “Who else has built a fob along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?”
• Going “Low-Pro”
• At the time, the C.I.A.’s executive director, A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, responding to his operatives’ complaints of being “worried sick about the Afghans’ coming over the fence or opening the doors,” enlisted the company to offer protection for the agency’s Kabul station.
• Blackwater has been in Afghanistan since 2002.
• Going “low-pro,” or low-profile, paid off: not a single C.I.A. employee, according to sources close to the company, died in Afghanistan while under Blackwater’s protection.
• (Talk about a tight-knit bunch. Krongard would later serve as an unpaid adviser to Blackwater’s board, until 2007.
• And his brother Howard “Cookie” Krongard—the State Department’s inspector general—had to recuse himself from Blackwater-related oversight matters after his brother’s involvement with the company surfaced. Buzzy, in response, stepped down.)
• As the agency’s confidence in Blackwater grew, so did the company’s responsibilities, expanding from static protection to mobile security—shadowing agency personnel, ever wary of suicide bombers, ambushes, and roadside devices, as they moved about the country.
• By 2005, Blackwater, accustomed to guarding C.I.A. personnel, was starting to look a little bit like the C.I.A. itself.
• Enrique “Ric” Prado joined Blackwater after serving as chief of operations for the agency’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC).
• A short time later, Prado’s boss, J. Cofer Black, the head of the CTC, moved over to Blackwater, too.
• He was followed, in turn, by his superior, Rob Richer, second-in-command of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service.
• Of the three, Cofer Black had the outsize reputation.
• As Bob Woodward recounted in his book Bush at War, on September 13, 2001,
• Black had promised President Bush that when the C.I.A. was through with al-Qaeda “they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.”
• According to Woodward, “Black became known in Bush’s inner circle as the ‘flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.’”
• Richer and Black soon helped start a new company, Total Intelligence Solutions (which collects data to help businesses assess risks overseas), but in 2008 both men left Blackwater, as did company president Gary Jackson this year.

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• Off and on, Black and Richer’s onetime partner Ric Prado, first with the C.I.A., then as a Blackwater employee, worked quietly with Prince as his vice president of “special programs” to provide the agency with what every intelligence service wants: plausible deniability.
• Shortly after 9/11, President Bush had issued a “lethal finding,” giving the C.I.A. the go-ahead to kill or capture al-Qaeda members.
• (Under an executive order issued by President Gerald Ford, it had been illegal since 1976 for U.S. intelligence operatives to conduct assassinations.)
• As a seasoned case officer, Prado helped implement the order by putting together a small team of “blue-badgers,” as government agents are known.
• Their job was threefold: find, fix, and finish. Find the designated target, fix the person’s routine, and, if necessary, finish him off.
• When the time came to train the hit squad, the agency, insiders say, turned to Prince.
• Wary of attracting undue attention, the team practiced not at the company’s North Carolina compound but at Prince’s own domain, an hour outside Washington, D.C.
• The property looks like an outpost of the landed gentry, with pastures and horses, but also features less traditional accents, such as an indoor firing range.
• Once again, Prince has Wild Bill on his mind, observing that “the O.S.S. trained during World War II on a country estate.”
• Among the team’s targets, according to a source familiar with the program, was Mamoun Darkazanli, an al-Qaeda financier living in Hamburg who had been on the agency’s radar for years because of his ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers and to operatives convicted of the 1998 bombings of U.S. Embassies in East Africa.
• The C.I.A. team supposedly went in “dark,” meaning they did not notify their own station—much less the German government—of their presence;
• they then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down.
• Another target, the source says, was A. Q. Khan, the rogue Pakistani scientist who shared nuclear know-how with Iran, Libya, and North Korea.
• The C.I.A. team supposedly tracked him in Dubai.
• In both cases, the source insists, the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger.
• Khan’s inclusion on the target list, however, would suggest that the assassination effort was broader than has previously been acknowledged.

  • To shut up certain people who might have inside info on Sept 11?
  Add Sticky Note
• (Says agency spokesman Gimigliano, “[The] C.I.A. hasn’t discussed—despite some mischaracterizations that have appeared in the public domain—the substance of this effort or earlier ones.”)
• The source familiar with the Darkazanli and Khan missions bristles at public comments that current and former C.I.A. officials have made:
• “They say the program didn’t move forward because [they] didn’t have the right skill set or because of inadequate cover. That’s untrue.
• [The operation continued] for a very long time in some places without ever being discovered. This program died because of a lack of political will.”
• When Prado left the C.I.A., in 2004, he effectively took the program with him, after a short hiatus.
• By that point, according to sources familiar with the plan, Prince was already an agency asset, and the pair had begun working to privatize matters by changing the team’s composition from blue-badgers to a combination of “green-badgers” (C.I.A. contractors) and third-country nationals (unaware of the C.I.A. connection).
• Blackwater officials insist that company resources and manpower were never directly utilized—these were supposedly off-the-books initiatives done on Prince’s own dime, for which he was later reimbursed—
• and that despite their close ties to the C.I.A. neither Cofer Black nor Rob Richer took part.
• As Prince puts it, “We were building a unilateral, unattributable capability. If it went bad, we weren’t expecting the chief of station, the ambassador, or anyone to bail us out.”
• He insists that, had the team deployed, the agency would have had full operational control.
• Instead, due to what he calls “institutional osteoporosis,” the second iteration of the assassination program lost steam.
• Sometime after 2006, the C.I.A. would take another shot at the program, according to an insider who was familiar with the plan.
• “Everyone found some reason not to participate,” says the insider. “There was a sick-out. People would say to management, ‘I have a family, I have other obligations.’
• This is the fucking C.I.A. They were supposed to lead the charge after al-Qaeda and they couldn’t find the people to do it.”
• Others with knowledge of the program are far more charitable and question why any right-thinking officer would sign up for an assassination program at a time when their colleagues—who had thought they had legal cover to engage in another sensitive effort, the “enhanced interrogations” program at secret C.I.A. sites in foreign countries—were finding themselves in legal limbo.
• America and Erik Prince, it seems, have been slow to extract themselves from the assassination business.
• Beyond the killer drones flown with Blackwater’s help along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border
• (President Obama has reportedly authorized more than three dozen such hits),
• Prince claims he and a team of foreign nationals helped find and fix a target in October 2008, then left the finishing to others.
• “In Syria,” he says, “we did the signals intelligence to geo-locate the bad guys in a very denied area.”
• Subsequently, a U.S. Special Forces team launched a helicopter-borne assault to hunt down al-Qaeda middleman Abu Ghadiyah.
• Ghadiyah, whose real name is Badran Turki Hishan Al-Mazidih, was said to have been killed along with six others—though doubts have emerged about whether Ghadiyah was even there that day, as detailed in a recent Vanity Fair Web story by Reese Ehrlich and Peter Coyote.
• And up until two months ago—when Prince says the Obama administration pulled the plug—he was still deeply engaged in the dark arts.
• According to insiders, he was running intelligence-gathering operations from a secret location in the United States, remotely coordinating the movements of spies working undercover in one of the so-called Axis of Evil countries. Their mission: non-disclosable.
• Exit Strategy
• Flying out of Kabul, Prince does a slow burn, returning to the topic of how exposed he has felt since press accounts revealed his role in the assassination program.
• The firestorm that began in August has continued to smolder and may indeed have his handlers wondering whether Prince himself is more of a liability than an asset.
• He says he can’t understand why they would shut down certain high-risk, high-payoff collection efforts against some of America’s most implacable enemies for fear that his involvement could, given the political climate, result in their compromise.
• He is incredulous that U.S. officials seem willing, in effect, to cut off their nose to spite their face.
• “I’ve been overtly and covertly serving America since I started in the armed services,” Prince observes.
• After 12 years building the company, he says he intends to turn it over to its employees and a board, and exit defense contracting altogether.
• An internal power struggle is said to be under way among those seeking to define the direction and underlying mission of a post-Prince Blackwater.
• He insists, simply, “I’m through.”
• In the past, Prince has entertained the idea of building a pre-positioning ship—complete with security personnel, doctors, helicopters, medicine, food, and fuel—and stationing it off the coast of Africa to provide “relief with teeth” to the continent’s trouble spots or to curb piracy off Somalia.
• At one point, he considered creating a rapidly deployable brigade that could be farmed out, for a fee, to a foreign government.
• For the time being, however, Prince contends that his plans are far more modest. “I’m going to teach high school,” he says, straight-faced. “History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

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• Global Strike Force: The Real Story Behind, Blackwater, JSOC and the CIA's Private Army of Elite Assassins
• By Hawk | TruthAlliance.net | Dec. 12, 2009

• The Dark Prince

   

  
• This month Eric Prince has resigned from the scandal ridden Xe inc. formerly know as Blackwater, revealing a decade long relationship as a deep cover CIA operative specifically tasked with building and mobilizing an elite army of private assassins for the CIA.
• 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."
• Blackwater is and has been from the on set a private army or extension of the CIA. An army that has been implicated in killing civilians, bombing mosques [VIDEO], torture, smuggling weapons, dressing up as aid workers, CIA Raids, and even running child prostitution rings [VIDEO] only to be unsuccessful at paying off Iraqi officials in an attempt to cover up their crimes.
• As barbarically unnecessary and costly Blackwater is, the media has tried to dismiss a lot of these reports as just another one of Dick Cheney's Frankenstein monster hold overs from the Bush administration that is slowly being dismantled.
• Unfortunately Obama has also been utilizing the ever eager Blackwater special operatives for the Pakistani drone program that has been an absolute PR disaster due to the civilian casualties that stain headlines on a weekly basis.
• With these startling revelations, it is little wonder the U.S. government can't seem to stop using, or separate itself from an obviously mismanaged and brutal element of their supposed war on terror.
• This death squad role and relationship can be traced back to Israel and the training they gave these special forces in the lead up to the major ground assults in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• In fact it was reported in 2003 Israel had been training special forces units as assassination squads,
• and why not considering Bush adviser and future 9/11 cover-up artist Philip Zelikow stated right around that same time period that we invaded Iraq with the sole purpose of protecting Israel.
• The Pakistani drone program Jeremy Scahill writes in the nation is really a top-secret Joint Strategic Operation Command (JSOC) program.
• The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency's director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009.
• "This is a parallel operation to the CIA," said the source. "They are two separate beasts."
• The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war--knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan.
• In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.
• They are a compartmentalized group of elite operatives which have been tasked with finding and  killing Al-Qaeda militants is what we are being told,
• but what we really see here is a covert, military backed force, circumventing the oversight and constitutional authority of our elected officials in congress, and is shaping up to be one of the biggest scandals of the decade.
• Allowing the CIA, the masters of overthrowing Governments and staging coups to have it's own private army, stationed in training facilities on American soil has got to be the greatest threat to liberty America has seen in recent years.
• Just Al-Qeada Really? 
• Numerous reports state Al-Qaeda has been reduced to a handful of scattered pockets and even an acknowledgment by the Obama administration that Osama Bin Laden has been known to be dead since Dec. 13, 2001.
• In fact it has been reported that the JSOC is running the show in both Afghanistan and Pakistan by two high ranking Navy officers Vice Admirals William McRaven and Robert Harward
• "Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan civilians and narrowly tailored missions to find and kill terrorists."
• The Big Picture
• So besides protecting the Opium and Oil fields, what is the strategic objective of funding a Blackwater staffed JSOC organized, covert operations against middle eastern targets of the United States?
• Especially when Al-Qaeda is nothing more than an admitted specter.
• The answer is given to us through the suspiciously precognitive writing of former Sen. Gary Hart who writes in a Huffington post article this past Nov. 11, 2009
• "Among the early lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq, however, is that 21st century conflict demands Special Forces and small unit capabilities even more than traditional big divisions, large carrier task groups, and long range strategic bombers.  Historic nation-state wars, though always plausible, are declining.  Irregular, unconventional warfare involving dispersed terrorist cells, stateless nations, insurgencies, and tribes, clans, and gangs are increasing dramatically."

• He then asks,

   

  "...are our present and planned force structures configured for new military threats; are weapons procurement programs continuation of traditional acquisitions or focused on future requirements; is the intelligence community properly coordinated and focused on emerging realities; for non-military concerns--such as failed states, radical fundamentalism, pandemics, climate degradation, energy dependence, and resource competition-
• are new international coalitions needed; are existing alliances adequate to anticipate and respond to these crises or are new ones required; most of all, does our government require new legislative authority to achieve national security under dramatically changing conditions?"
• We see here that Hart who also wrote a book on the subject called Under the Eagles Wings: A National Security Strategy of the United States for 2009
• has easily just expanded the use and role of these rogue assassination units from foreign operations against terrorists, to operations against what he terms  as "non-military threats" or "stateless nations" inside the United States and abroad.

• He goes further in his book stating,

   

   

  "We will be required to conduct multinational training exercises between our special forces and those of other nations. We must operate jointly and collectively against Jihadi and other terrorist groups that endanger the security of all.
• We will find it necessary to integrate communications systems and databases among law enforcement and public safety agencies of liberal democratic nations. Pg. 17"
• Isn't this exactly what we are seeing with the reported CIA/Blackwater operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan?
• They're not over their just fighting Al-Qaeda, but using the war on terror as a front operation to train multinational privatized commandos and integrating the fighting forces of the developed nations? We have Delta Force, Rangers, CIA, Green Beret, S.E.A.L's, IDF,Mossad, Mi5, SAS, Marines etc. etc., all being utilized and training as rapid deployment forces and occupation forces to better serve as a cohesive militarily force in a increasingly globalized world.
• In the Homeland
• but in a incredibly revealing article from the New York Times we see that they were operational in the United States during the 2005 Bush inauguration in direct violation of Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 as stated in the article.
• It would be one thing if it was only Al-Qaeda and militants on foreign shores they were after,
• "These commandos, operating under a secret counter-terrorism program code-named Power Geyser, were mentioned publicly for the first time this week on a Web site for a new book, "Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operation in the 9/11 World," (Steerforth Press). The book was written by William M. Arkin, a former intelligence analyst for the Army.
• The precise number of these Special Operations forces in Washington this week is highly classified, but military officials say the number is very small. The special-missions units belong to the Joint Special Operations Command, a secretive command based at Fort Bragg, N.C., whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force."
• If you count Blackwaters apperance in Katrina, they are used to training and operating on American soil and conducting training exercises that run into unfortunate deaths like what happened on a Colorado Mountain top in August
• The Blackwater story is the actualized realization of Gary Hart's book, and it all happened in 2009 just like the title suggested.
• So if Al-Qaeda is Gone, Who is the New Enemy?
• The answer to that question is simply you,
• by expanding the definition of terrorist over the last decade DHS has increasingly been issuing report after report that middle America is potentially terrorists.
• According to the MIAC report, property rights activist, tax evaders, gun owners, home schoolers, Christians, and people angry about the economy are all potential terrorists.

• MIAC Report

   

  Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism

• Things to Come

   

  
• You can be sure that things will not stay the same,
• an economic collapse that could degrade into a full blown civil war is currently being planned for by the Obama administration as reported by the EU Times, and expanded upon by Chuck Baldwin in his latest column.
• The simple fact is while America has been sleeping, the groundwork to totally and finally break the American people into accepting global government as a solution to war, climate change, food, pandemics, and natural disasters is in place.
• Think about how many drills you have heard about in the past months of American soldiers training with foreign forces,
• and with the overly hyped swine flu being declared a level six pandemic recently we have the perfect cover to train and deploy multinational peace keeping forces all over America and the World, as shown in the NLE 2009 massive training drills conducted over the summer. 
• If you speak out against this rogue government after the collapse and clamp down, you will go to one of the hundreds of FEMA re-education and work camps that have gone up around the country.

  • You mean the ones Glenn Beck says do not exist?
  Add Sticky Note
• Those who choose to fight against it in an armed resistance, whether a nation state or an individual will be targeted by multinational private mercenary squads who have cut their teeth in the lawless deserts of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan and will have the full backing of both the military and intelligence apparatus of these United States when it comes to tracking down and killing those it deems enemies of the state.
• They want a Global Government and the United States middle class won't stand for it unless major panic ensues.

• The security state is ready to take the velvet gloves off in everything from...

   

  NSA Wiretapping and domestic surveillance, $5 Billion for Pentagon Funded Propaganda Campaigns,  Militarized Police Forces , and mobilizing a youth corp against veterans and patriots, it is a nightmare to contemplate but very, very real.
• Now if you want a real ugly glance at just how bad things have gotten with the use of mercs, look into Hardin, Montana and how a  foreigner and  felon with 17 aliases bought out the city, took over the jail and staffed it with foreign mercenaries.
• Choices
• With the planned collapse of our Economy by the Fed, the war on the Mexican border that is quickly spilling over into American cities nationwide, and the increasing militarized security grid that has invaded every aspect of American life we are faced with a choice as red blooded Americans as we come to the end of 2009.
• We either stand up and fight for the values of our constitutional republic by outing every criminal in government and reclaiming or nations capital and military, or we allow them to be integrated into the New World Order system that will violently suppress all opposition via Blackwater type hit teams.
• Your call America will you heed the warning signs all around you or will you drown out your conscience with football, and Friday night movies?
• As a final thought we have the newly announced Air force's Global Strike Brigade being assembled for rapid deployment of nuclear munitions anywhere in the world the
• architects of this global society are ruthless killers and deadly serious and will utilize any means necessary to assure success.
• Those of us who are awake are desperately praying the public can wake up in time, because this reality is being forced on us like it or not.

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