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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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August 24th,
2009 - Memo Reveals Details of Blackwater Targeted Killings Program |
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Memo Reveals
Details of Blackwater Targeted Killings Program By Gabor Steingart Der Spiegel August 24, 2009 Part 1: Memo Reveals Details of Blackwater Targeted Killings Program A US district court will
decide this week whether one of the darkest chapters of the Bush era, the
relationship between the administration and the private security company
Blackwater, should be reexamined. Former Blackwater employees want to shine
light on the company's shadowy activities. Susan Burke supported the
Democratic candidate, Barack Obama, during the 2008 US presidential campaign.
But now that Obama is in office, she finds her views diverging widely from
his. Obama is opposed to
investigating the excesses of the administration of his predecessor, former
President George W. Bush. Burke, an attorney, favors an investigation. Obama
has thus far avoided answering the question of whether the US Constitution
was violated in Bush's so-called "war on terror." Burke wants an
investigation to focus on precisely this question. Obama is looking forward,
while Burke is looking back. What Burke sees when she
looks into the rearview mirror is indeed ugly. She sees 17 dead, including
women and children, lying on Nisoor Square in Baghdad, killed on Sept. 16,
2007 by mercenaries working for Blackwater, a private American security firm.
She sees Blackwater employee Andrew Moonen who, after a Christmas party in
2006, drove through Baghdad, heavily armed, and shot a man for no reason. She
hears the shot, fired from a Blackwater helicopter, that killed an innocent
man on Baghdad's Wathba Square on Sept. 9, 2007. But most of all, Burke sees
Erik Prince, Blackwater's founder and former owner. In her suit, she refers
to him as a "modern-day merchant of death," and she alleges that
the 40-year-old created a "culture of lawlessness and
unaccountability" at Blackwater, where the "excessive and
unnecessary use of deadly force" was commonplace. In her motion, Burke
also accuses Blackwater of war crimes. The US District Court for the Eastern
District of Virginia, in Alexandria, Virginia, will now decide whether to
take on Burke's civil suit. Committed In the Name of America The political world will
also have to make some decisions. The first question is whether the US
government will make public on Monday the most comprehensive report to date
on the treatment of terrorism suspects. That alone would trigger a political
hurricane in Washington, says former CIA Director Porter Goss. It would also
make it much more difficult for the government to rebuff calls for it to
finally investigate all the alleged illegal activity carried out in the fight
against terrorism. It was not until the end of
June that US Attorney General Eric Holder read the report, which was prepared
by the CIA's inspector general in 2004. But then he spent a full two days in
his office in Washington D.C. studying the document. When he had finished
reading it, he apparently stood at the window for a long time, staring out at
Constitution Avenue. Horrified over what had been done in the name of
America, Holder looked into the possibility of appointing a special
prosecutor. Sources in Washington say that he has now achieved his goal,
which puts him more squarely in Burke's camp than Obama's. Blackwater characterizes
Burke's accusations as "scandalous and baseless," and claims that
the cases she cites were isolated incidents. According to Blackwater
attorneys, "no diplomat under the protection of this service died or even
was injured during the entire duration of the contract." Symbol of an Era Prince, who earlier in his
career claimed to have "the heart of a warrior," is intent on
preventing the civil suit from going to trial. To that end, he has hired a
team of lawyers working for the law firm of Mayer Brown, which also
represents 89 companies on Fortune magazine's list of the top 500 US
companies ranked by revenues. Peter White, the head of the
Mayer Brown team, plans to convince the judges in Alexandria this week that
the Blackwater case isn't a case at all. In his written response to Burke's
lawsuit, White argues that any public disclosure of Blackwater's methods
would endanger its personnel in war zones, and her suit should be dismissed. White also argues that if there
is any culpability, it rests with the individuals who committed the acts in
question, not the entire company. He points to unsuccessful lawsuits that
were filed against US corporations after the Vietnam War, including the case
of Vietnamese plaintiffs who tried and failed to sue the US multinational
corporation Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of the defoliant Agent Orange. In
one respect, the comparison is apt: Blackwater has become a symbol of an
entire era, just as Agent Orange was a potent symbol of the Vietnam War. Outsourcing War After the al-Qaida attack on
the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney
began using large numbers of private security contractors for the first time.
The mercenaries were intended to make up for a lack of manpower, especially
in the area of personal security, as well as to perform the dirty work, such
as interrogating detainees, thereby leaving US military personnel untainted.
Erik Prince's company turned into an empire practically overnight, collecting
more than $1 billion (€700 million) in revenues from US taxpayers. Seventy
percent of Blackwater's contracts with the government were no-bid contracts. The company's most important
personnel, its fighters, who were known internally as "shooters,"
were recruited around the world, including from places like the Philippines
and Latin America. In 2007, the company proudly changed its name to Blackwater
Worldwide. The advantage of privatizing
the war was obvious for the Bush administration. Blackwater contractors are
cheaper than regular US soldiers. When they were killed, their widows
received only minor compensation, while the US military pays lifelong survivor
benefits. Besides, Blackwater employees died quietly - in other words, they
were never part of the official death statistics, which was convenient for
the president. With the end of the Bush
administration, Blackwater received fewer contracts and the company changed
its name to Xe Services. But its founder's most determined adversary, Susan
Burke, continued her fight. ‘A Christian Crusader’ Burke now plans to call 40
witnesses to testify against Prince. If the court agrees to hear her suit on
Friday, eyewitnesses to the various killings will be summoned from Baghdad.
In the United States, Burke, who made a name for herself defending detainees
subjected to abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, will ask the court to
subpoena several former Blackwater employees, including a former executive. Two affidavits that have
been filed in the Alexandria court contain serious allegations against
company founder Erik Prince. The men who signed the affidavits, fearing that
their lives could be put in danger if their identities were revealed, are
identified anonymously as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2. In his affidavit, John Doe
1, who served in Iraq, writes that he "personally observed multiple
incidents of Blackwater personnel intentionally using excessive and unjustified
deadly force." John Doe 2, who worked for
Prince, writes that the former head of Blackwater "views himself as a
Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from
the globe." He claims that company employees treated the killing of
Iraqis as sport. The Blackwater attorney
questions the validity of these witnesses, saying that much of what they
claim is based on hearsay. The fact that the witnesses are remaining
anonymous, says White, makes it impossible to verify their credibility. He
calls the tactics "unfair" and highly prejudicial to defendants. But the key witnesses' fear
of retaliation is considerable, which also has something to do with the fact
that Prince has powerful friends in the government, particularly inside the
CIA. Part 2: Assassination Teams and Extraordinary Renditions In addition to working for
government departments, Blackwater also worked directly for the intelligence
agency, as the new CIA director recently confirmed in a closed-door hearing
in the US Congress. And in a memo SPIEGEL has obtained, two other former
employees describe, for the first time, the details of this covert
collaboration. The two informants are
referred to as "Source A" and "Source B" in the internal
memo. According to Source B, Blackwater, working on behalf of the CIA, flew
terror suspects from Guantanamo to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan,
where the detainees apparently faced "special treatment" in secret
prisons. The intelligence service
commissioned Blackwater and its subsidiaries to transport terror suspects
from Guantanamo to interrogations at secret prison camps in Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. The paper identifies aircraft movements and
unveils how the flights were disguised. The memo reads: "The CIA hired
Blackwater to conduct extraordinary renditions" and "Blackwater
flew the rendition targets from Fort Perry and Cuba to Kandahar,
Afghanistan." ‘The CIA Hired Blackwater’ According to the informant,
some of the flights were provided by two other companies Prince owned,
Presidential Airways and Aviation Worldwide, which were given special
clearance in 2003 by the US Defense Department to conduct such flights.
Source B even knew the tail numbers of the aircraft that were allegedly
involved: N962BW, N964BW and N968BW. The flights also involved
Satelles Solutions, another Prince subsidiary, which operates a training and
recruitment camp in the Philippines designed to accommodate about 1,000
soldiers. According to Source A,
Blackwater also helped out the CIA with another controversial activity during
the Bush years. In the memo, Source A writes: "The CIA hired Blackwater
to conduct targeted killings in Afghanistan." In June Leon Panetta,
Obama's new CIA director, told lawmakers in a closed-door hearing on Capitol
Hill about a secret program to kill or capture al-Qaida operatives that was
begun eight years ago. The purpose of the so-called assassination program was
to recruit and train special forces to assassinate senior al-Qaida leaders. Authority to Kill According to Panetta, Cheney
asked the CIA not to disclose the covert program to Congress. The argument
that was used at the time was that when combating terrorism, the CIA has the
authority to kill without special congressional approval. The program,
however, never quite went beyond the training phase, according to CIA
testimony before the US Senate. The memo by the two sources
gets more specific. Source A names five people who were allegedly involved in
the development of assassination teams, including a man who left Blackwater
in mid-2005 and last worked as the head of the Blackwater's OGA division. The
acronym stands for "Other Government Agencies," which included the
connection to the CIA. The other men on the source's list are a former member
of Blackwater's paratrooper unit, an employee of Blackwater Security
Consulting who, according to the memo, was designated as a "hit
man" within the unit and Alvin Bernard Krongard, the most senior
employee on the list, who the source claims was responsible for assembling
the teams. "Krongard set up the teams," the paper claims. But the memo does not
specify whether agreements were made with individuals or the company itself,
or what Krongard's role was exactly. The latter is particularly difficult to
determine, given that Krongard has worked on both sides of the desk. From
March 2001 to September 2004, Krongard served as the CIA's executive
director, under then-CIA Director George Tenet. After leaving office, he
switched to the private sector, joining Blackwater's advisory board. ‘We Are Not Inclined to Comment’ SPIEGEL confronted the
company, the CIA and Krongard with the contents of the memo last Wednesday,
but they had declined to comment by Friday. A CIA spokesman was unwilling to
confirm or deny cooperation with Blackwater with regard to the assassination
program or the secret detainee transports. "We do not comment on our
contractual relationships," the spokesman said. He did note, however,
that the details of the memo included "mistakes," although he chose
not to elaborate. Stacy DeLuke, the
spokeswoman of Xe Services (as Blackwater is now called), answered in an
e-mail: "Due to the sensitive nature of these allegations, we are not
inclined to comment at this time." Krongard's assistant Cathy Davis
said: "I received your e-mail and confirm receipt by Mr. Krongard as
well," but did not respond to questions about Krongard's role. The allegations have
triggered growing unease on Capitol Hill, where senators want to know more
about the covert assassination program. Last Friday, it was also revealed
that Blackwater assisted in drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In a
letter to fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky urged
the secretary of state "not to enter into further contracts with Xe and
to immediately review any existing contracts." Translated from the German
by Christopher Sultan External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,644571,00.html |