The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Prince

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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 05, 2017 3:16 pm

Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 06, 2017 10:15 am

Erik Prince Is a Name You Need to Know

The Blackwater founder is dealmaking with the Russians.

Getty Mark Wilson
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 4, 2017
2.9k
Tuesday's entry in our continuing series, What In The Fck Is Going On Here?, takes us to the golden shores of the Seychelles Island, where, as The Washington Post informs us, a curious meeting took place as gentle breezes blew and seabirds wheeled in the sky.

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials. The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump's inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would be likely to require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions. Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.
On any list of loathsome Americans, Erik Prince has to be right at the top. He got rich behind Blackwater, the renegade mercenary army that is responsible for a great deal of the hatred directed toward this country in the Middle East. (Privatized hatred was Blackwater's primary gift to the world.) Since his brand cratered (Blackwater was renamed Xe, pronounced, I believe, "Kill." It is now known as Academi. Why? Who knows?), Prince has become an International Man of Sleaze, taking on clients from China to the UAE, which is probably how the meeting in the Seychelles came about, since it was brokered by the UAE government, and since prying Russia and Iran apart is something that the UAE would love to see happen. But what in the hell is Erik Prince doing negotiating on behalf of the United States government, even given the fact that administrations of both parties have done business with him overseas?

RELATED STORY

Revisionist History. Hypocrisy. Mockery.
Well, Erik Prince was one of the first—and most vigorous—passengers on the Trump Train. He was a member of a kind of shadow transition team and, as Jeremy Scahill told Amy Goodman in this interview from Democracy Now!, Prince is also tied in with Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund cowboy who is one of the primary financial powers behind El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago.

Erik Prince is very close to Robert Mercer. Prince was also at the "Heroes and Villains" party that Mercer threw in Long Island after the election. And, in fact, there's a picture that Peter Thiel, the right-wing billionaire who destroyed Gawker—a picture of Peter Thiel, Donald Trump and Erik Prince, that Peter Thiel says is not safe for the internet. But it's clear that Erik Prince, through Betsy DeVos, through Robert Mercer and through his very right-wing paramilitary crowd, has the ear of President-elect Donald Trump. And our understanding, from a very well-placed source, is that Prince has even been advising Trump on his selections for the staffing of the Defense Department and the State Department.
And, of course, Prince's sister, Betsy DeVos, is now the Secretary of Education.

Erik Prince is a focal point for the confluence of influence peddling that has become this administration's trademark. He is tied into an unaccountable military financed by an unaccountable money power. And he was out there brokering deals in our name. This might make a kind of mad sense if the administration on whose behalf he was running these errands weren't also shot through with a kind of manifest incompetence. But I do hear the Seychelles are quite nice that time of year.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/po ... eychelles/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Apr 13, 2017 8:17 pm

Erik Prince in the Hot Seat
Blackwater’s Founder Is Under Investigation for Money Laundering, Ties to Chinese Intel, and Brokering Mercenary Services

Matthew Cole, Jeremy Scahill
March 24 2016, 3:00 a.m.

ERIK PRINCE, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.

What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the Bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince’s relationship with Chinese intelligence.

Prince, through his lawyer, Victoria Toensing, said he has not been informed of a federal investigation and had not offered any defense services in Libya. Toensing called the money-laundering allegations “total bullshit.”

The Intercept interviewed more than a half dozen of Prince’s associates, including current and former business partners; four former U.S. intelligence officers; and other sources familiar with the Justice Department investigation. All of them requested anonymity to discuss these matters because there is an ongoing investigation. The Intercept also reviewed several secret proposals drafted by Prince and his closest advisers and partners offering paramilitary services to foreign entities.

For more than a year, U.S. intelligence has been monitoring Prince’s communications and movements, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence officer and a second former intelligence official briefed on the investigation. Multiple sources, including two people with business ties to Prince, told The Intercept that current government and intelligence personnel informed them of this surveillance. Those with business ties were cautioned to sever their dealings with Prince.

Erik Prince Sought to Recreate a Blackwater-Style Operation

In 2010, amid public scandals and government investigations, Prince began to sell off his Blackwater empire. Using new vehicles, he continued to engage in controversial private security ventures, including operations in Somalia and the United Arab Emirates. Eventually, the former Navy SEAL and self-proclaimed American patriot began building close business ties with powerful individuals connected to the Chinese Communist Party. In January 2014, Prince officially went into business with the Chinese government’s largest state-owned investment firm, the Citic Group, and founded Frontier Services Group, which is based in Hong Kong. Citic Group is the company’s single largest investor, and two of FSG’s board members are Chinese nationals.

Despite the provenance of FSG’s funding and Prince’s history of bad publicity, Prince was able to recruit an impressive line-up of former U.S. military and intelligence officers to run the company. Key to Prince’s ability to retain such personnel, given FSG’s ties to China, has been the firm’s strictly circumscribed mission, which does not include military-related services. FSG is a publicly traded aviation and logistics firm specializing in shipping in Africa and elsewhere. The company also conducts high-risk evacuations from conflict zones. Prince has described his work with FSG as being “on the side of peace and economic development” and helping Chinese businesses to work safely in Africa.

But behind the back of corporate leadership at FSG, Prince was living a double life.

Working with a small cadre of loyalists — including a former South African commando, a former Australian air force pilot, and a lawyer with dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel — Prince sought to secretly rebuild his private CIA and special operations enterprise by setting up foreign shell companies and offering paramilitary services, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept and interviews with several people familiar with Prince’s business proposals.

Several of the proposals for private security services in African nations examined by The Intercept contained metadata in the digital files showing Prince and his inner circle editing and revising various drafts.

Since 2014, Prince has traveled to at least half a dozen countries to offer various versions of a private military force, secretly meeting with a string of African officials. Among the countries where Prince pitched a plan to deploy paramilitary assets is Libya, which is currently subject to an array of U.S. and United Nations financial and defense restrictions.

Prince engaged in these activities over the objections of his own firm’s corporate leadership. Several FSG colleagues accused him of using his role as chairman to offer Blackwater-like services to foreign governments that could not have been provided by the company, which lacks the capacity, expertise, or even the legal authority to do so.

FSG’s CEO, Gregg Smith, a decorated former U.S. Marine who deployed twice to Beirut in the 1980s, vehemently denies the firm’s complicity in any such efforts by Prince. “FSG has no involvement whatsoever with the provision of — or even offering to provide — defense services in Libya,” Smith told The Intercept. “To the extent that anyone has proposed such services and purported that they were representing FSG, that activity is unauthorized and is not accepted or agreed to by the company.”

Smith said that any proposals advanced by Prince in Libya were not made on behalf of FSG, explaining that the company “has strict protocols in place and has a board-level committee to review any high-risk project, which would certainly include any proposal” involving Libya.

“He’s a rogue chairman,” said one of Prince’s close associates, who has monitored his attempts to sell mercenary forces in Africa.

That source, who has extensive knowledge of Prince’s activities and travel schedule, said that Prince was operating a “secret skunkworks program” while parading around war and crisis zones as FSG’s founder and chairman. “Erik wants to be a real, no-shit mercenary,” said the source. “He’s off the rails exposing many U.S. citizens to criminal liabilities. Erik hides in the shadows … and uses [FSG] for legitimacy.”

Last October, FSG’s corporate leadership grew so concerned about Prince’s efforts to sell paramilitary programs and services that the board passed a series of resolutions stripping Prince of most of his responsibilities as chairman.

FSG also terminated the contracts of two of Prince’s closest associates within the company after management became suspicious that they were assisting Prince in his unapproved dealings, according to two people with knowledge of FSG’s inner workings. Smith declined to comment on internal FSG personnel matters.

In recent months, FSG employees became alarmed when they began to hear reports from sources within the U.S. government that their chairman’s communications and foreign travel were being monitored by U.S. intelligence. According to three people who have worked with Prince, his colleagues were warned not to get involved with his business deals or discuss sensitive issues with him. “I would assume that just about every intelligence agency in the world has him lit up on their screen,” said one of the people advised to avoid Prince.

Operation Lima: Prince Exploited Refugee Crisis to Peddle Paramilitary Services in Libya

Prince developed the paramilitary services proposal for Libyan officials in 2013, before FSG was created, according to documents and two people familiar with the pitch. He made several trips to Libya to meet with government officials there.

The Libyan proposal, reviewed by The Intercept, was code-named Operation Lima. It offered the Libyans an array of military equipment and services — including weaponized vehicles, helicopters, boats, and surveillance airplanes — to help stabilize eastern Libya. The ground force, according to a person involved with the plan, would consist of a troop of former Australian special operations commandos. Given the instability of the government and Prince’s inability to navigate complex Libyan factions to vet potential partners, he had trouble finding the right power brokers to help sell the proposal.

By May 2015, Prince had rebranded himself and claimed a legitimate public reputation as FSG’s chairman. Without the approval of FSG’s management, he returned to Libya offering a freshly repackaged proposal, according to a person involved with the plan. Rather than a counterinsurgency force, Prince proposed a similar set of equipment and services, but with a new justification: The mercenaries would be there to engage in border security.

According to an internal slide presentation, Prince’s private force would operate in Libya for the stated purpose of stopping the flow of refugees to Europe. Libya is one of the main routes for migrants trying to enter Europe from eastern Africa and parts of the central Sahel region.

Prince told colleagues that he received preliminary approval for the border force from a senior Libyan official, but would need to secure European support to loosen up restrictions on Libyan money and weapons, which would otherwise impede the plan, according to a person who discussed the proposal with Prince.

By exploiting European fears of a mass exodus from the Middle East and North Africa, Prince believed he could obtain political buy-in from Europe to bring a foreign force into Libya.

Prince arranged a meeting in Germany to pitch the plan and also shared the proposal with the Italian government, according to two people familiar with his drive to drum up support for Operation Lima. In Italy, Prince found only lukewarm interest, according to a person with knowledge of the effort. The Intercept was unable to confirm the German response.

Prince’s May 2015 proposal for the Libya operations suggested, “Funding can be jointly shared by the EU and Libyan government from Libyan Investment Authority money frozen in European Banks.”

However, according to two people involved in the proposal, Prince grew frustrated with the failure to get European help in releasing the frozen Libyan funds, and began looking for other ways to get his border force funded.

By then, the U.S. government was already investigating Prince for possible weapons deals in Africa, according to the former senior U.S. intelligence official and the former intelligence official briefed on the matter. In the course of the surveillance operation for that investigation, U.S. intercepts revealed Prince appearing to discuss efforts to open bank accounts in China to help his Libyan associates.

“Money laundering for Libyan officials using a Chinese bank — that is the issue that pushed it over the edge” for the Justice Department, said the second former intelligence official.

The U.S. spies monitoring Prince soon discovered that he had traveled to the Chinese-controlled peninsula of Macau in an effort to open a bank account, according to two people familiar with the investigation. A well-connected source within the Macau banking community told The Intercept that Prince first attempted to open an account at the Macau branch of a European-connected bank, but was denied after a review by the bank’s European headquarters.

Later, Prince traveled to Beijing, where he met with Chinese agents from the Ministry of State Security, according to the second former intelligence official and a source familiar with the meeting.

In January, Prince returned to Macau and opened an account at the Bank of China, according to several sources, including the second former intelligence official and the source with close connections to Macau’s banking community.

“It was not a personal account,” said the former U.S. intelligence official briefed on the investigation. “He was doing it for the purpose of what is considered now — in the investigation — money laundering on behalf of the Libyans.”

The CEO of FSG China is a former Chinese security official who was once described by a defense trade publication as “Prince’s right-hand man in China, oiling the wheels of his relationship with the government.”

“If Erik is fucking around with the Chinese, I don’t even want to imagine what the U.S. government is thinking about,” said Prince’s close associate with in-depth knowledge of his activities.

Toensing, Prince’s lawyer, confirmed that Prince successfully opened an account with the Bank of China. “He opened an account on behalf of a business,” she said. Toensing declined to say for which business he opened the account, but said that it complied with U.S. banking regulations. “This is not an FSG bank account,” a spokesperson for FSG told The Intercept.

As for Prince’s alleged meetings with Chinese intelligence, Toensing confirmed that Prince had met with internal security officials in Beijing, but claimed it was in connection to medical evacuation operations. Toensing was unable to answer allegations that Chinese intelligence assisted Prince in setting up a bank account in Macau because she could not reach Prince, whom she said was not in the United States. “What he told me about visiting China was that he was there selling his book and he’s given various speeches there,” she said.

While Prince’s re-invented Libya “border security” proposal was framed as a means of stopping migration, sources with knowledge of Prince’s business strategy allege that he had greater ambitions in that country. One person involved in Prince’s plan said the anti-migration force was seen as a vehicle for Prince to build a “backdoor” for so-called kinetic, or lethal, operations in Libya — a form of mercenary mission-creep. “During the day, you do interdiction of migrants — not kinetic,” said the person involved in the plan. “But those routes are used by weapons smugglers and drug traffickers at night. Insurgents too. Erik’s guys can then be offered to the Libyans to help with their other problems. That’s how you get kinetic.”

The plan called for a series of “border security” bases housing intelligence centers, helicopters, surveillance airplanes, and weaponized vehicles. Prince proposed a fully equipped, contemporary military force to be staffed in part by foreign mercenaries.

“This is Erik Prince using the refugee crisis in Europe in an effort to put mercenaries on the ground in Libya,” said Malcolm Nance, a former U.S. Naval officer who trained special operations forces and has extensive experience in Libya since the fall of Qaddafi. “They think they’re going to solve the migration problem with technology and a bunch of Western mercenaries?” Nance, who reviewed a copy of Prince’s plan provided by The Intercept, called the proposal “fantasy baseball.”

Government Investigation Focuses on Violations of U.S. Defense Export Regulations

Among the concerns of government investigators is that Prince’s attempts to provide defense-related services to Libya and other countries violate U.S. defense export regulations. Under federal law, U.S. citizens seeking to offer military services or technologies to Libya must have a license certifying that the services or articles are approved under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. “Many of these services and articles are designed to kill people or defend against killing people,” said John Barker, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for export controls. “To protect U.S. national security and foreign policy as well as that of its allies, the U.S. requires prior authorization.”

FSG officials told The Intercept that the company has no such licenses, nor has it sought them. “Since our inception, FSG has had bright-line policies against the provision of defense services and the purchase of U.S.-origin items that might be ITAR-controlled,” said Smith, the CEO of FSG.

The State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, which issues the licenses, told The Intercept that it would not comment on what licenses companies possess or lack, calling them “proprietary corporate data,” and asserted that information on the licenses is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. The Intercept has a long-standing FOIA request with the State Department seeking information on licenses granted to Prince and his former network of companies. To date, no information has been provided.

According to documents reviewed by The Intercept, as recently as 2014, Prince was registered as a defense services broker with the State Department through a limited liability corporation in Delaware, Westcomi LLC. That registration would permit Prince to engage in brokering without further authorization for some transactions in some countries, but not in Libya. Even with a valid brokering registration, according to legal experts, Prince would still need to get State Department approval for specific deals and report them to the U.S. government. “He could not solicit or promote the brokering of defense articles such as armored equipment delivered from abroad, or engage in or make a proposal to engage in brokering activities, absent prior U.S. government approval,” said Barker, the former state department official.

An FSG official said the company did not know if Prince obtained a license for his activities in Libya, but noted that he did not have one in his capacity as FSG’s chairman. One of Prince’s Libya proposals reviewed by The Intercept lists FSG as the commercial vendor for the project.

Last October, concerned about Prince’s unsanctioned international activities, FSG’s board approved a resolution clarifying that the company does not “engage in activities that require ITAR licenses.” A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, saying, “We are restricted under Federal Regulations from commenting on specific defense trade export licensing activities.”

Prince’s lawyer, Victoria Toensing, told The Intercept: “I’m not going to get into what licenses [Prince] has.”

Prince has run up against ITAR in the past. In 2010, Prince sold most of his equity in the companies that fell under the Blackwater umbrella. Claiming that left-wing activists, Democratic politicians, and lawsuits had destroyed his companies, he left the United States and became a resident of Abu Dhabi. The remnant of his network was renamed Academi LLC. Federal prosecutors eventually attempted to prosecute Prince’s former companies, culminating in a 2012 deferred prosecution agreement to settle a lengthy list of U.S. legal and regulatory violations committed from 2005 through 2008 when Prince was in charge, including ITAR violations.

A senior official involved with the Blackwater-related litigation, who has since left the government, told The Intercept that the Obama administration’s continued willingness to award contracts to former Blackwater entities while the case was active was a fatal impediment to a successful prosecution. The official, comparing the former Blackwater empire to a drug syndicate, added that prosecutors could not get anyone under Prince to testify against him personally. “This is very much the concern,” the former official told The Intercept. “You push the buttons on the company, but the main bad guy gets away and does it again.”

No criminal charges were filed against Prince.

In federal court filings, Prince’s former companies admitted to providing — on numerous occasions during Prince’s tenure — defense goods and services to foreign governments without the required State Department licensing. In some cases, they admitted to providing services even after failing to obtain a license from the State Department.

As part of their settlement with the government, Prince’s companies ultimately agreed to pay nearly $50 million in fines and other penalties and to implement compliance procedures to ensure such illegal activities did not continue. In September 2015, the deferred charges were dismissed after the U.S. government certified that the companies had “fully complied” with all of its conditions.

At that point, Prince was already deep into creating new companies registered outside of the United States and appeared poised to return to the conduct that had marked his time at the helm of Blackwater.

An internal document from Prince’s inner circle, reviewed by The Intercept, shows his team openly discussing the need to avoid U.S. and international defense export regulations and to mask the involvement of Prince and his cohort in efforts to provide mercenary services and military equipment to foreign governments. “Erik is always pressing the limits as to what is possible,” said the close associate of Prince’s.

Project November: Prince Offered Services to Nigeria to Fight Boko Haram

Several of the proposals for paramilitary services Prince has shopped around the world called for the use of a foreign force to conduct operations, according to the proposals and a person familiar with Prince’s plans. These documents, including one for Nigeria, were not authorized or approved by FSG and do not exist on any of its internal computer systems, according to company officials.

Prince has long been interested in raising a private military force to battle Islamic militant groups in a variety of countries. In 2014, he traveled to Nigeria and met personally with then-President Goodluck Jonathan to offer a $1.5 billion proposal to wipe out the radical Islamic group Boko Haram, according to a person familiar with Prince’s meeting. “It was a proposal to fix roads,” Toensing, Prince’s lawyer, said in a phone interview. “It was for fixing roads and not military related.”

But the internal proposals Prince and his team drafted, reviewed by The Intercept, offered a markedly different set of services than street repairs. They explicitly promised to confront the sabotage and theft of Nigerian oil, provide VIP protection for Nigerian officials, and engage in counterinsurgency activities. Code-named Project November, the Nigeria plans were originally created with the FSG logo, though the company’s emblem was omitted from the plan presented to the Nigerians.

Nigeria later hired Eeben Barlow, the legendary South African special forces mercenary — and Prince’s longtime business rival — to conduct a three-month operation inside the country to fight Boko Haram. Two sources close to Prince said that, as Prince saw it, Barlow had taken his plan and effectively stole the contract. “Erik was smokin’ hot” over that, said one of the sources.

In recent months, Gregg Smith and some members of FSG’s board, which includes retired Adm. William Fallon, the former commander of U.S. Central Command, began examining the possibility that Prince’s unauthorized activities could lead to a criminal indictment or other sanctions against the FSG chairman by the U.S. government. Toensing dismissed the notion Prince had broken any laws. “When he has legitimate business, he does legitimate business,” she said.

According to multiple sources familiar with Prince’s activities, as well as documents reviewed by The Intercept, Prince is considering an invitation to speak at a conference later this month in China sponsored by the country’s main domestic security organization, the Ministry of Public Security.

Internally, FSG executives determined that any presentations by the company’s U.S. citizen personnel at the conference could potentially violate U.S. laws against providing defense advice to China. Smith issued a directive that no U.S. personnel from FSG were authorized to attend. Erik Prince, Smith told his staff, would need to make his own decision.



I'm wondering why the name Victoria Toensing is familiar to me. Does anyone remember if she defended some other notorious POS?
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 13, 2017 8:19 pm

married to DiGenova...the right winger that was constantly going after clinton...the one that JPR loved to link to :P

think Benghazi

POS

the two of them investigating Democrats and defending Republicans

Toensing pushed media falsehood that Plame's CIA status was widely known on D.C. "Cocktail Circuit."

Toensing advanced falsehood that "Plame was not covert."
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby stillrobertpaulsen » Thu Apr 13, 2017 8:55 pm

seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 13, 2017 7:19 pm wrote:married to DiGenova...the right winger that was constantly going after clinton...the one that JPR loved to link to :P

think Benghazi

POS

the two of them investigating Democrats and defending Republicans

Toensing pushed media falsehood that Plame's CIA status was widely known on D.C. "Cocktail Circuit."

Toensing advanced falsehood that "Plame was not covert."


That's what I was thinking of. Thanks seemslikeadream!
"Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security."
-Jim Garrison 1967
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Apr 19, 2017 9:12 pm

Blackwater Founder Said to Have Advised Trump Team
by Keri Geiger and Michael Riley
April 18, 2017, 4:00 AM CDT April 18, 2017, 11:07 AM CDT
From Trump Tower to Acela, conversations with Flynn and others
White House says he had no role in presidential transition


In the very public, post-election parade of dignitaries, confidantes and job-seekers filing in and out of Donald Trump’s marquee Manhattan tower, Blackwater founder Erik Prince was largely out of sight. And yet Prince was very much a presence, providing advice to Trump’s inner circle, including his top national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, according to people familiar with his activities.

Trump was weakest in the area where the stakes were highest -- foreign affairs. Among those his aides turned to was Prince, a man whose specialty is paramilitary security forces, and whose company is best remembered after its employees were convicted of killing Iraqi citizens, including children, in the notorious 2007 Nisour Square gun battle. Prince wasn’t implicated in the shootings. In the decade since, Prince has carved out a role as a controversial critic of U.S. policies to fight terrorism, a view often espoused by the incoming Trump administration, which was eager to ramp up its anti-terrorism policies.


Prince speaks during an interview on Nov. 13, 2013.Photographer: Melissa Golden/Redux
According to people familiar with his activities, Prince entered Trump Tower through the back, like others who wanted to avoid the media spotlight, and huddled with members of the president-elect’s team to discuss intelligence and security issues. The conversations provide a glimpse of Prince’s relationship with an administration that’s distanced itself from him since the Washington Post reported earlier this month that Prince had met with a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Seychelles in January.

That island encounter was the latest in a series of conversations between Trump advisers and Russians that have come to light as U.S. investigators probe allegations that Russia interfered with the presidential election.

Click here for more on probes into Russia’s role in the 2016 election

A person close to Prince said the Seychelles meeting was arranged at the request of the United Arab Emirates. The person added that it was a private meeting and that Prince was not representing the Trump administration.

“Erik had no role in the transition,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said again when asked about Prince last week.

A Prince spokesman in London said the same in a prepared statement: “Erik had no role on the transition team. This is a complete fabrication. The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump.” The statement also questioned whether Prince’s activities were being monitored. “Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?”

Yet over a two to three month period around the election, Prince met several times with top aides as the incoming government took shape, offering ideas on how to fight terror and restructure the country’s major intelligence agencies, according to information provided by five people familiar with the meetings. Among those he conferred with was Flynn, a member of the transition team who joined the administration and was later dismissed, some of the people said. He discussed possible government appointees with people in the private sector, one person said. Prince himself told several people that while he was not offering his advice in any official capacity, his role was significant.

Acela Trip

The meetings occurred in Trump Tower, the administration’s transition office in Washington and elsewhere, according to people familiar with them. In one informal discussion in late November, Prince spoke openly with two members of Trump’s transition team on a train bound from New York to Washington. He boarded the same Acela as Kellyanne Conway and they sat together. Joining the conversation at one point was Kevin Harrington, a longtime associate of Trump adviser Peter Thiel who is now on the National Security Council. They discussed, in broad terms, major changes the incoming administration envisioned for the intelligence community, as recounted by a person on the train who overheard their conversation.

Conway declined to comment for this story. Harrington said through a spokesman that he recalled speaking briefly to Prince on the train ride but that was the only time he talked to him.

Prince was a generous financial backer of the Trump campaign, along with his sister, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Prince contributed at least $100,000 through a political action committee run by billionaire hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer. That PAC also funneled contributions from Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has acted as an informal liaison to the high-tech world for the White House.

Neither Mercer nor Thiel responded to requests for comment sent to their spokesmen.

Defense Rethink

A longtime critic of government defense and security policies, Prince advocated a restructuring of security agencies as well as a thorough rethink of costly defense programs, even if it meant canceling existing major contracts in favor of smaller ones, said a person familiar with the matter.

Prince is no longer talking to those in the administration, said the person close to him, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were intended to remain private. His influence waned after Flynn was ousted as National Security Adviser in February over concerns about his own disclosures and conversations with the Russian ambassador. And Prince has no relationship with Flynn’s successor, General H. R. McMaster.

Flynn did not respond to a request for comment.

Prince’s discussions can be seen as a testament to the all-comers-welcome nature of the Trump transition, which listened to theories and suggestions from a range of supporters with conservative views.

Prince would have been among the more controversial. During the Iraq war, Blackwater landed more than $1 billion worth of government contracts to provide personal protection for visiting officials and assist with military operations and, according to Prince’s memoir, carry out covert operations for the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 2007, guards working for Blackwater, which had been running a lucrative executive protection mission for the State Department in Iraq since the start of the war, were accused of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in a bloody shootout on a Baghdad street corner. A year earlier, a Blackwater guard had killed a bodyguard to an Iraqi official. He was fired, sent home and never charged with a crime. Four contractors were later convicted by a federal jury in the street corner shootout and sentenced to jail. Their cases are on appeal.

These incidents prompted a grilling by lawmakers in a public hearing in 2007, wrongful death lawsuits against the company and a criminal investigation by federal authorities into the shooting. Blackwater, which had been among the most prominent military contractors in Iraq, was forced out of the country.

After years of additional investigations and lawsuits, Prince sold the firm to an investor group in 2010. Blackwater was renamed Xe Services, then Academi, and entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the government in 2012 over violations of arms sales rules and paid a $7.5 million fine. Prosecutors said it was the conclusion of “a lengthy and complex investigation into a company which has provided valuable services to the United States government, but which, at times, and in many ways, failed to comply with important laws and regulations.”

Prince was never charged with a crime, and he said allegations of wrongdoing were baseless. He now runs Frontier Services Group, a Hong Kong fund with Chinese investors who see opportunities in natural resources in Africa.

More recently, Prince’s money, connections and conservative credentials have allowed him to move easily in and around Trump World. He was a guest, along with Trump, at Mercer’s Villains and Heroes holiday party last year. Prince also attended the election-night victory party at Trump Tower.

Last year, Prince was often heard on Breitbart radio, overseen by Steve Bannon, who today serves as White House chief strategist. Speaking on topics such as immigration and how to defeat terrorists, Prince laid out a three-point plan to deal with ISIS.

In the heat of the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Prince claimed New York police found evidence of Hillary Clinton and her closest advisers committing “criminal activity,” including money laundering and “under-age sex.” The evidence was purportedly in Clinton emails seized in the investigation of former Congressman Anthony Weiner. Prince cited sources at the New York Police Department. The claim was never substantiated, nor did the police address the allegations.

https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/arti ... trump-team




$500 Billion at Stake for Russia

Exxon Seeks U.S. Waiver to Resume Russia Oil Venture


Blackwater founder held secret Seychelles meeting to establish Trump-Putin back channel


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnQHPvaArU4
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Apr 20, 2017 9:15 am

THE RIGHT WING
Why We Really Deserve to Know a Lot More About Erik Prince's Role in Shaping Trump's Foreign Policy
Founder of a disgraced mercenary outfit that committed war crimes in Iraq, Erik Prince is way too close to Trump.
By Heather Digby Parton / Salon April 19, 2017

Back in January, Jeremy Scahill, the journalist who literally wrote the book on Blackwater, the notorious mercenary outfit, reported at the Intercept that Erik Prince, the company’s founder, was with Donald Trump and his family at Trump Tower on election night in November. That suggested a degree of intimacy between them that had not been previously revealed. Scahill went on to report that Prince had been advising the Trump team on defense and intelligence matters and had given input into the possible choices to head the Pentagon and the State Department.

To anyone familiar with Prince and his history, this was an ominous sign. Blackwater had been so tarnished by criminal activity during the Iraq War, including convictions for the murders of Iraqi civilians, including children, that Prince had to rename the company more than once and his personal reputation was shredded. Prince and his family had a long association with Mike Pence, however, through mutual religious and political affiliations based on a militant theocratic worldview. Prince and his sister Betsy DeVos, now the Secretary of Education, were big donors to Trump’s campaign. Considering that Trump’s knowledge of world affairs can barely fill a shot glass, seeing Prince among his inner circle of advisers is unnerving to say the least.

While it has been clear for some time that Trump was not the isolationist people wanted to believe he was, Prince represents something much more malevolent than simple “realism.” This is a man whose loyalties are anything but clear. In fact, Scahill and Matthew Cole reported last month that Prince is under investigation by the Justice Department and other federal agencies for money laundering and attempts to broker military services to foreign governments.

According to their reporting, the government has had Prince under surveillance for more than a year for suspected criminal activity:

Working with a small cadre of loyalists — including a former South African commando, a former Australian air force pilot, and a lawyer with dual citizenship in the U.S. and Israel — Prince sought to secretly rebuild his private CIA and special operations enterprise by setting up foreign shell companies and offering paramilitary services.

One of their sources told them, “Erik wants to be a real, no-shit mercenary. He’s off the rails exposing many U.S. citizens to criminal liabilities. Erik hides in the shadows …”

The details of this investigation are astonishing. According to Scahill and Cole, Prince was working on this mercenary project, which includes alleged money laundering for the Libyan government through a Chinese investment bank, as recently as January. The source with close knowledge of Prince’s activities told the Intercept, “If Erik is fucking around with the Chinese, I don’t even want to imagine what the U.S. government is thinking about.” This is the same time period in which, according to the Washington Post, Prince met with a representative of Russian President Vladimir Putin to establish a secret back channel of communication with President Trump. He’s a busy guy.

Prince is publicly wringing his hands over the fact that his movements as a private citizen were being monitored by the government, but this is hardly shocking: He was under criminal investigation. Indeed, the Intercept article says that most of his business associates were warned by the government to cease doing business with him. Everyone who knows Prince must assume he’s on the radar of every intelligence service in the world at this point.

Despite denials by White House press secretary Sean Spicer as recently as last week, Bloomberg reported more evidence Tuesday that Prince was very much involved in advising the Trump team:

He discussed possible government appointees with people in the private sector, one person said. Prince himself told several people that while he was not offering his advice in any official capacity, his role was significant.

If it weren’t for the deep connections between Prince and Pence and the appointment of his sister, one might be inclined to think Prince was simply embellishing his closeness to power. But the Bloomberg article contains an interesting anecdote relayed by someone who overheard the conversation that suggests Prince was was a familiar person to the Trump transition:

In one informal discussion in late November, Prince spoke openly with two members of Trump’s transition team on a train bound from New York to Washington. He boarded the same Acela as Kellyanne Conway and they sat together. Joining the conversation at one point was Kevin Harrington, a longtime associate of Trump adviser Peter Thiel who is now on the National Security Council. They discussed, in broad terms, major changes the incoming administration envisioned for the intelligence community, as recounted by a person on the train who overheard their conversation.

It’s frightening to imagine how someone like Prince may have influenced Trump’s thinking. We know that last July he appeared on Steve Bannon’s radio show and recommended that Trump recreate the former CIA assassination ring known as the Phoenix program, as a means of fighting ISIS. He said:

It was a vicious, but very effective, kill/capture program in Vietnam that destroyed the Viet Cong as a military force. That’s what needs to be done to the funders of Islamic terror. And that would be even the — the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East and any of the other illicit activities they’re in.

One would hope any president would dismiss such nonsense but according to Scahill, this plan was actually implemented during the Bush administration under the authority of Dick Cheney! (Obama’s CIA director has said the program was shut down during his tenure without killing anyone.) It certainly sounds like something Donald Trump would also find intriguing, and Scahill suspects that something like that could be back on the agenda.

Since the president insists that U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy must be impenetrable and unpredictable, we really have no way of knowing. Our best hope of keeping Erik Prince away from the White House is for the media to continue to shine a light on his activities. Prince is the last person we need whispering in Donald Trump’s ear.
http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/why- ... ign-policy
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun May 21, 2017 9:52 am

Blackwater, late called Xe, become Academi
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=33680
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jul 07, 2017 4:44 pm

Erik Prince to Prince bin Zayed: The Private Military Connection

by David Isenberg

In 2014, retired Gen. James Mattis, now secretary of defense, reportedly referred to the United Arab Emirates as “Little Sparta.” He was favorably comparing the UAE to the historic Greek city-state, known for its military prowess, especially against the Persians during the Greco-Persian Wars. Mattis presumably did so not only because of a strong politico-military alliance between the United States and the UAE, but also because the UAE has for years been working on strengthening its military capabilities.

But in a fundamental sense Mattis’s comparison is wrong. The Spartans were unique for, among other things, the military training and excellence it required of its own citizens. That is not the route the UAE has chosen.

Despite their recent entries into dirty wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, Persian Gulf states have had very little in the way of their own effective, military forces. They traditionally have had to depend on outside states for weapons, training, and manpower.

The Emiratis went a step further and brought in none other than Erik Prince to train Christian mercenaries to go after Islamic enemies. The UAE has not only utilized private security contractors to bolster its own ability for self-defense but has used them to engage in foreign wars and, potentially, domestic repression. Gone are the days when tiny kingdoms worked clandestinely with the CIA to fund people like Osama bin Laden or negotiate tricky hostage deals. Now only a handful of Emiratis on the front lines are dying alongside their hired guns.

None of this should come as a surprise. In 2011, The New York Times broke the story that the crown prince of Abu Dhabi hired Erik Prince, co-founder of the Blackwater private security firm, to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops. Reflex Reponses (R2), the private army that Prince put together, was to train the force to “conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolt.” But, as time has shown, its role has been far greater.

In April, The Washington Post reported that “the United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in the Seychelles this January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladimir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump.”

When Prince appears in high level meetings, you can be sure an army of contractors and trainers aren’t far off. Foreigners working for the UAE, as part of the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis in Yemen, have played a prominent role.

On the Ground in Yemen

Although some dispute that those foreigners now serving in the UAE military are mercenaries in the Geneva Conventions sense of the word, those hired by the UAE are clearly nothing like private security contractors in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

In late 2015 the Middle East Eye reported that Mike Hindmarsh, a former senior Australian army officer, is publicly listed as commander of the UAE’s Presidential Guard. The Presidential Guard is a unit of marines, reconnaissance, aviation, special forces, and mechanized brigades. According to the Eye, Hindmarsh oversaw the guard’s formation in early 2010 shortly after he took up his estimated $500,000-a-year, tax-free job in Abu Dhabi, where he reports directly to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.

Foreigners have been taking casualties on behalf of the UAE. The Eye reported that:

Some mercenaries have been killed in Yemen. The Houthi-run Saba News reported on 8 December that six Colombians and their Australian commander were killed in fighting around the flashpoint southeast province of Taiz.
Saba News updated their report on 9 December to say 14 foreign mercenaries had been killed—including two Britons and one French citizen on top of the Australian and Colombians—although this claim is unconfirmed.
Colombian mercenaries were first reported to have been fighting to Yemen in October, when about 100 former Colombian soldiers were said to have joined coalition troops, with about 800 in total planned to be sent in to back up pro-Hadi forces.
Reportedly, the Colombians fighting for the UAE can look forward to some benefits. CounterPunch previously reported that they “will receive a pension and also UAE citizenship, along with family members. If they die in combat, their children will go to university free.”

Although it is not clear whether the casualties thus far come from members of the Presidential Guard or from what is known as R2, both forces report to Prince bin Zayed.

Regardless of the unit, hundreds of foreigners are fighting for the UAE in Yemen. The New York Times reported in December 2015 that, “It is the first combat deployment for a foreign army that the Emirates has quietly built in the desert over the past five years…The arrival in Yemen of 450 Latin American troops—among them are also Panamanian, Salvadoran and Chilean soldiers—adds to the chaotic stew of government armies, armed tribes, terrorist networks and Yemeni militias currently at war in the country.”

Foreign soldiers are far from the only kind of foreign contractors the UAE uses. Knowledge International LLC, which operates near Washington, DC’s Reagan National airport, reportedly facilitates $500 million a year in sales of military training and equipment to the UAE

Licensed as an arms dealer and broker, the company sends American trainers and arms to the UAE, arranging the necessary licenses and agreements with the State Department and the Defense Department.
The company’s strategic advisory board consists of some of the past decade’s brightest names in American land warfare: retired Army Gen. Bryan “Doug” Brown, who headed the U.S. Special Operations Command; retired Gen. James Conway, former commandant of the Marine Corps and a charismatic figure during the 2003 Iraq invasion; and retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded the International Security Assistance Force, NATO’s Afghanistan command.
Beyond Yemen

Nor is Yemen the only country where the UAE is relying on contractors. The New York Times reported in 2012, in an article that was bizarre, even by private military and security world standards:

It seemed like a simple idea: In the chaos that is Somalia, create a sophisticated, highly trained fighting force that could finally defeat the pirates terrorizing the shipping lanes off the Somali coast.
But the creation of the Puntland Maritime Police Force was anything but simple. It involved dozens of South African mercenaries and the shadowy security firm that employed them, millions of dollars in secret payments by the United Arab Emirates, a former clandestine officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, and Erik Prince, the billionaire former head of Blackwater Worldwide who was residing at the time in the emirates.
And its fate makes the story of the pirate hunters for hire a case study in the inherent dangers in the outsourced wars in Somalia, where the United States and other countries have relied on proxy forces and armed private contractors to battle pirates and, increasingly, Islamic militants.
It was thought that Erik Prince fell out of love with the Emirates after two major exposes in The New York Times and decided to fall in love with the Chinese government to develop Africa.

But Erik Prince is back. He’s not only pitching colonial capitalism in DC. He’s huckstering ex-SF-led armies of sepoys to wrest Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and perhaps, if he is ever able to influence likeminded hawks in the Trump administration, even Iran back from the infidels.
http://lobelog.com/erik-prince-to-princ ... onnection/
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby Grizzly » Fri Jul 07, 2017 5:20 pm

Image
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Jul 11, 2017 12:28 pm

onward Christian soldiers

TUESDAY, JUL 11, 2017 10:01 AM CDT
Blackwater founder Erik Prince wants America’s Afghanistan strategy outsourced
While Trump's domestic policy is being outsourced to lobbyists, Blackwater may take control of the Afghanistan war

President Donald Trump may have promised to drain the swamp, but that hasn’t stopped him from appointing officials with conflicts of interest to positions of influence.

One of his new proposals for the war in Afghanistan, which involves hiring contractors instead of using federal troops, was developed by Blackwater Worldwide founder Erik Prince and Stephen Feinberg, who owns the military contractor DynCorp International, according to a report by The New York Times.

The strategy, which is being pushed by chief strategist Steve Bannon and senior adviser Jared Kushner, has not seemed to take off with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, but it nevertheless demonstrates another potential conflict of interest with the people developing Trump’s policies.

On the domestic policy front, at least 28 of Trump’s appointees for deregulatory positions have potential conflicts of interest, according to a report by The New York Times. These include Scott Cameron at the Department of the Interior, who is a member of its deregulatory team and had a meeting with a pesticide company lobbyist whose company had partnered with his nonprofit group; Samantha Dravis, who is chairwoman of the Environmental Protection Agency’s deregulatory team despite once serving as president of an organization that helped energy companies join Republican attorneys general to sue the government; Rebeckah Adcock, who used to lobby the Department of Agriculture on behalf of a trade association for pesticide makers before being hired to its deregulatory team; and Brian McCormack, who is a part of the Department of Energy’s deregulatory team despite his previous job dealing with political and external affairs for a trade association involved in investor-owned electrical utilities.
http://www.salon.com/2017/07/11/blackwa ... utsourced/
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jul 30, 2017 4:24 pm

Proxy Wars: Erik Prince updates his 'Viceroy of Afghanistan' plan for Trump


........

The indecision has given more time for skeptics of a modest increase, like White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, to explore unconventional alternatives. One such proposal offered by former Blackwater founder Erik Prince would rely on contractors instead of U.S. troops to work with Afghan security forces.

Mr. Prince has briefed key administration officials at the White House, Mr. Mattis, Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Pompeo and various lawmakers, including Sen. Bob Corker (R., Tenn.), according to people familiar with the meetings.

“I’m all for continuing to try to come to a conclusion that is something that will change the trajectory there,” said Mr. Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We’ve been doing the same thing for a long time, and the Taliban has gained significant territory in the interim.”

White House interest in Mr. Prince’s plan was piqued by his Wall Street Journal op-ed in May that called for creation of an American viceroy—an empowered leader like Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II—who would have expansive power to push reforms in Afghanistan.

Mr. Prince refined his ideas and created a more detailed proposal presented to Trump administration officials looking for alternatives to a troop increase.

Mr. Prince is pitching his idea as Mr. Trump’s new “Wollman Rink” moment, a reference to the president’s successful 1986 rehabilitation of a landmark Central Park ice-skating rink that was over-budget and years behind schedule.

The proposal, seen by The Wall Street Journal, outlines ways for the U.S. to quickly replace most U.S. troops with contractors who would help carry out airstrikes and work side by side with Afghan forces across the country.

“The goal is to provide a clear exit lane and provide a clear end to the longest war in U.S. history,” Mr. Prince said in an interview.

So far, Mr. Prince has yet to generate enough interest among key officials, who view his plan with skepticism. The ideas have been dismissed by military officials as impractical, according to administration officials. And Mr. Prince is a divisive figure. Four of his former Blackwater guards were convicted in U.S. federal court on murder or manslaughter charges over the 2007 killing of Iraqi civilians during a chaotic shooting in Baghdad. The incident triggered intense scrutiny of Mr. Prince and Blackwater, which lost its license to operate in Iraq after the incident. Mr. Prince sold the company in 2010.

Meanwhile, frustration with the slow process is building among U.S. officials who are awaiting word from the White House about a new strategy.

“I think there’s frustration on the ground in Afghanistan,” one U.S. official said.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-hous ... 1501426803
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Sep 01, 2017 1:07 pm

I Was a Mercenary. Trust Me: Erik Prince’s Plan Is Garbage.

A few thousand military contractors can save Afghanistan? Give me a break.

By SEAN MCFATE August 31, 2017

For the past year, Erik Prince has been peddling an idea that should alarm anyone who has followed his career: We should replace U.S. troops in Afghanistan with mercenaries, preferably his.

For those who do not know Prince, he was a founder of Blackwater International, the private military contractor that became so toxic, he had to change the company’s name. Under his management, Blackwater committed perhaps the worst war crime of the Iraq war: A squad of armed contractors killed 17 civilians at the Nisour traffic circle in Baghdad. The incident sparked a political uproar in Iraq, vastly complicated the mission of the State Department diplomats the contractors were ostensibly there to protect, and set off multiple probes into Blackwater’s conduct. A FBI inquiry later found that 14 of the 17 deaths were unjustified. For Americans, the “Nisour Incident” was a stain on their country’s moral character. For Iraqis, Blackwater’s reckless behavior and callous disregard for Iraqi lives seemed emblematic of America’s handling of the war as a whole, and helped to hasten our exit.

Now Prince wants to privatize the Afghanistan war. And Afghans thought the worst we could do was bomb them.

The generals laughed at Prince, and thankfully the president went with the non-mercenary option. But Prince refuses to disappear, excoriating the generals in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, and pushing again for mercenaries, suggesting “it is not too late to alter the course.”

As a former military contractor, I cannot imagine a worse outcome for Afghanistan or the U.S. than handing everything over to mercenaries.

Prince’s argument has lots of problems. He insists contractors should not be stigmatized as “mercenaries,” even though he is proposing armed civilians in conflict zones—the classic definition of a mercenary. Instead, he says they are like the Flying Tigers, the popular name of the 1st American Volunteer Group that flew against the Japanese in 1941–1942. Here is where his analogy takes a nose dive: The Flying Tigers were not mercenaries. Rather, they were U.S. military pilots who took off their uniforms to fly as civilians, so that FDR did not have to declare war. Once war was declared, they flew as American fighter pilots once again. That’s hardly the same thing as contractors being paid, often exorbitantly, to fight a war on our behalf.

Prince also compares mercenaries to SpaceX, the private space company, probably offending SpaceX employees everywhere. Elon Musk does not kill people for money.

Crazy as all this sounds, it is a marked improvement over Prince’s earlier op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, where he advocates neocolonialism—a deeply un-American idea. He urged an American “viceroy” be installed to rule Afghanistan like a colonial overlord, backed by a mercenary army modeled on the old British East India Company. That’s like recommending plantations to assist African Americans in poverty. Anger was swift. Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s ex-president, tweeted this: “I vehemently oppose the proposal to the U.S. govt to outsource its war in Afghanistan to private security firms.”

Besides being offensive, Prince’s proposal is unworkable. I know because I’ve done these things. For years, I worked as a private military contractor in Africa and elsewhere. I built armies for clients, dealt with warlords, conducted strategic reconnaissance, worked with armed groups in the Sahara, transacted arms deals in Eastern Europe and even helped prevent a genocide in Central Africa. I use fiction to reveal the secretive world of mercenaries. It’s worse than people think.

Mercenaries are back, a dangerous trend occurring in the shadows. Their very lack of accountability is their main selling point; they offer plausible deniability and brute force to those too weak or squeamish to wage war. Customers are buying too, with mercenary proliferation in Afghanistan, Congo, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. Clients include countries, extractive industry and even terrorists. This trend may one day alter international relations: When anyone can rent a military, then super-rich and large corporations can become a new kind of superpower. Worse, mercenaries can start and elongate conflicts for profit, breeding endless war. A world with more mercenaries means a world with more war, which is why Prince’s proposal is so dangerous.

Prince is an amateur and makes rookie mistakes, which is probably why the generals laughed at him. Somehow, he believes 6,000 mercenaries and a small air force can solve Afghanistan’s problems. This is magical thinking: NATO could not succeed with 140,000 troops eight years ago, when the Taliban was in retreat. Now they run half the country. It is unclear what Prince’s 6,000 mercenaries will do now, other than create more Nisour incidents.

Prince’s plan, such that it is, involves putting contractors “at the lowest company and battalion levels” to train up the Afghan security forces. This is not new; U.S. troops have been doing this for years in one form or another. What is new is his mercenary air force, flown with Afghan markings, an Afghan and something he calls “a contractor safety pilot.” Whatever that means.

When I raised an army in West Africa, under worse conditions, it took more than a handful of contractors at the battalion and company levels to create a professional, fully functioning military. A lot more. The U.S. Army War College asked me to write a monograph on how we did this, and—spoiler alert—it’s more complicated than Prince’s breezy plan. Then again, Prince has never raised a legitimate army.

The price is a problem too. Prince promises his plan will save “American taxpayers more than $40 billion a year.” Don’t believe him. Prince has not shared any financial details with the public, a curious omission. Would you buy a house without first asking the price? Of course not.

Where will these mercenaries come from? According to Prince, all will be “brave Americans” who are “former Special Operations veterans.” More sales talk. To keep costs down, he will probably have to outsource to the so-called Third World, where military labor is cheap. When I was in the industry, I worked alongside other ex-special forces and ex-paratroopers from places like the Philippines, Colombia and Uganda. We did the same missions, but they got Third World wages. Private warriors are just like T-shirts; they are cheaper in developing countries. Call it the globalization of private force.

But do we want Filipino, Colombian and Ugandan mercenaries fighting our wars for us, their way? To them, military operations might involve massacring a village that could harbor terrorists. We might have to send in the U.S. Marines just to save the situation and America’s reputation, costing far more than the $40 billion Prince thinks he will save.

Prince assures us that nothing will go wrong. To avoid Nisour incidents in the future, he wants to place all mercenaries under U.S. military law, known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice. However, this resolves little. Take, for example, jurisdiction: What happens if a Guatemalan mercenary massacres an Afghan family while on an American contract? Does he go to trial in: a) Afghanistan b) U.S. c) Guatemala d) nowhere? No one really knows, and a good labor lawyer could probably shred the case in minutes.

Lastly, where has Prince been these last seven years? Why did he show up now? Like many mercenaries, he follows the money. After the Nisour Incident, he left Blackwater and helped raise a mercenary force for the United Arab Emirates. Now, he is working for the U.S.’s main geopolitical competitor, China.

Prince smells an opportunity in Donald Trump. His sister is Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, giving him access to the White House. Prince is looking for a billion-dollar paycheck while wrapping himself in the American flag. No one should fall for his con.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... age-215563
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Nov 28, 2017 8:08 pm

Trump Envoy Erik Prince Met with CEO of Russian Direct Investment Fund in Seychelles

Erin Banco
November 28 2017, 8:34 a.m.
Shortly before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and head of Frontier Services Group, traveled to the Seychelles, an island nation in the Indian Ocean, and met with a Russian official close to President Vladimir Putin. According to the Washington Post, the meeting between the Russian and Prince, who presented himself as an unofficial envoy of Trump, took place “around January 11” and was brokered by Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, to establish a backchannel between the president-elect and Putin.

The identity of the Russian individual was not disclosed, but on January 11, a Turkish-owned Bombardier Global 5000 charter plane flew Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, to the Seychelles, flight records obtained by The Intercept show. Dmitriev’s plane was an unscheduled charter flight and flew to the island with two other Russian individuals, both women. The RDIF is a $10 billion sovereign wealth fund created by the Russian government in 2011.

On August 7, Prince told CNN that he was in the Seychelles “on business” in January to meet with Emirati officials and met “some fund manager — I can’t even remember his name.” Prince said the meeting “probably lasted about as long as one beer.”



Although Prince repeatedly stated he couldn’t remember the Russian’s name — “We didn’t exchange cards” — a spokesperson for Frontier Services Group confirmed to The Intercept in September that Prince “crossed paths” with Dmitriev in the Seychelles.

The apparent encounter between Prince and Dmitriev offers yet another glimpse into the growing web of connections between the Trump administration and the Russian government, and raises the possibility that U.S. sanctions against Russia could have been violated if a business deal took place. Compliance lawyers and current and former U.S. officials say the mere presence of RDIF in a transaction that touches the U.S. financial sector or involves American individuals or companies risks violating sanctions.

The Washington Post reported in April that the FBI was looking into the Seychelles meeting as part of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Prince is scheduled to testify on November 30 before the House Intelligence Committee as part of its Russia investigation.

During the same period in January when Dmitriev and Prince were in the Seychelles, Alexander Mashkevich, a Kazakh businessman linked to a shady Trump investment vehicle known as Bayrock, also arrived to meet with Zayed, who was “holding court” at his mansion on the island, a source familiar with the meetings said. Abdulrahman Khalid bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire whose grandfather founded the first Saudi private bank and whose father allegedly helped Al Qaeda, was also present. The meetings came several weeks after Zayed flew to New York to meet with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who is now a subject in the federal Russia probe.

A spokesperson for Mashkevich said he was vacationing with his family on his yacht in the Seychelles and did not meet with any government officials during his trip. Mahfouz could not be reached for comment. The RDIF declined to comment.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this [meeting] happened,” said Barry Faure, secretary of state for foreign affairs of the Seychelles, when contacted by The Intercept. “We have businessmen coming in all the time meeting here. We are an open country so people can come in here and have their business meetings and no one will ask them about it.”

Ahmed Afif, a prominent member of Parliament in the Seychelles, said it was likely the visitors did not have their passports stamped by immigration. “They just fly into the airport and then get in their black cars and drive away,” said Afif, adding that VIPs who go to the island for work often use their own security services.

Dmitriev’s fund, which is closely connected to the Kremlin, has come under scrutiny this year from members of Congress because of its interactions with Anthony Scaramucci, who was briefly tapped to be Trump’s communications director, in Davos just days after the Seychelles meetings. In February, Sen. Elizabeth Warren flagged the Davos meeting for potential sanctions violations in correspondence with Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin.

As one of Russia’s official sovereign wealth funds, RDIF is closely tied to the government and has the ability to funnel public money into private projects. When President Barack Obama implemented sanctions in 2014, he wanted to make it difficult for Russia to obtain operating capital and tried to slow the country’s overall economic growth. RDIF was an important target, compliance lawyers say.

RDIF is also a political entity, said Chris Weafer, a senior partner at Macro Advisory, an investment advisory firm in Moscow. When the government puts forward an economic project, RDIF helps execute it. “They are the ones responsible for actually managing the projects,” he said. “It is not a case of RDIF going out and looking for deals on their own. They tend to be part of the political delegation that go to different places, whether it is Rio or Riyadh or somewhere else. … Their business has greatly expanded because they are the investment consiglieri of the Kremlin.”

While it is legal to do business with RDIF in certain circumstances, there are several nuanced restrictions that if ignored or overlooked can easily lead to a violation. The resulting uncertainty has created opportunities for companies and individuals to find loopholes to bypass sanctions.

Analysts say RDIF attempted to do this in 2016 when the fund distanced itself from its parent company, the Russian bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB, which is also subject to U.S. sanctions. Legislation signed by Putin in June 2016 enabled RDIF to transfer its management company, known as the RDIF Management Company LLC, to the Russian Federal Agency for State Property Management.

“Why would you separate the management company?” asked Patrick Schena, an expert on sovereign wealth funds who teaches at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “One of the reasons is to give the appearance of a degree of separation to show independence in decision-making.” In other words, he said, RDIF wanted to move away from a highly controversial sanctioned entity to appease potential business partners.

VEB is owned by the Russian state, and its chief, Sergey Gorkov, attended the academy of the FSB, Russia’s domestic intelligence service. VEB provided “non-official cover” to Evgeny Buryakov, a Russian spy who pleaded guilty in 2016 to working as an unregistered intelligence agent. VEB also attracted the attention of the FBI after Gorkov met with Kushner last December.

Despite the transfer of the management company, RDIF’s pool of assets stayed under VEB’s control and was listed on the bank’s books as of December 2016. It is unclear if those assets have transferred to a different owner since then. In October, the Treasury Department confirmed to The Intercept that RDIF remains subject to sanctions.

Top photo: Erik Prince at the Oxford Union, UK on April 26, 2017.
https://theintercept.com/2017/11/28/bla ... ment-fund/




Will the House Intelligence Committee Get the Truth From Erik Prince?

The notorious military contractor has a history of spreading disinformation.

David CornNov. 29, 2017 6:30 AM

Susan Walsh/AP

When Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious Blackwater security firm, heads into a private meeting with staffers and members of the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, the No. 1 topic will be a secret trip he made in January to the Seychelles islands to huddle with a Russian close to Vladimir Putin. According to the Washington Post, the rendezvous was arranged by the United Arab Emirates, where Prince moved in 2010 and formed a mercenary army for the regime, and this get-together was part of an attempt to set up a back-channel communication between Putin and Donald Trump, then the president-elect. The visit has drawn the attention of the FBI, which has been investigating contacts between Trump associates and Russia, but a Prince spokesman last April claimed the “the meeting had nothing to do with President Trump.”

There is much congressional investigators can ask Prince about. He has had a long, controversial career buckraking in the dark corners of the national security world. The brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, Prince has been an avid cheerleader for Trump (donating $250,000 to help elect him), an informal postelection adviser for Trump, and a pal of Stephen Bannon. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Bannon recruited Prince earlier this year to draft a plan that would replace US troops in Afghanistan with for-profit mercenaries—supplied, of course, by a military contractor like Prince. (The Pentagon said no thank you.) But perhaps the most important thing for Intelligence Committee members and staffers to keep in mind, as they try to pry information from Prince, is this: Prince is a fabricator.

During the election, the usually media-averse ex-Navy SEAL was a regular contributor to Breitbart News, the Bannon-backed far-right outlet, defending Trump and promoting conspiratorial swill.

On October 7, 2016, WikiLeaks began posting emails stolen from John Podesta, the Clinton campaign’s chairman. Earlier that day, the US intelligence community issued a statement declaring the Russian government was behind the hack-and-dumps targeting Democrats during the election. It noted that the posting of the stolen emails by WikiLeaks and Guccifer 2.0 [an online persona named after a real-life Romanian hacker who went by the name of Guccifer] was “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.” The statement also pointed a finger at Putin, asserting “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” Yet Prince joined Trump and his crew in denying there was any Russian connection to the hacking aimed at Democrats.

On the Breitbart radio show, he insisted the Podesta caper had nothing to do with Russian intelligence. He added, “The fact is, a Romanian hacker, Guccifer, is the guy who hacked the Clinton Foundation a few years ago. That guy is in prison. Before he went to prison, all of Sidney Blumenthal—Hillary’s adviser on Libya—all his emails were removed from Guccifer’s server, and those too have been leaking out. John Podesta’s emails, I can assure you, did not come from the Russians.” Prince was conflating a 2013 hack against a Clinton friend (Blumenthal) with the 2016 cyberattack on Podesta. Subsequent cyber-sleuthing has confirmed that Podesta was targeted and successfully spear-phished as part of a massive assault mounted by Russian military intelligence. Yet in the heat of the presidential campaign, Prince was pushing pro-Trump (and Putin-helping) disinformation.

In the same interview, Prince hyped one of the right wing’s favorite anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. He claimed that Hillary Clinton had been complicit in “selling 20 percent of the United States’ uranium supply to a Russian state company.” And he went on: “I think the Clinton Foundation got a very nice spiff off of that, of $25 or $50 million,” meaning a pay-to-play payment. Prince was referring to what has now become the Uranium One scandal, which is not really a scandal. The transaction he referenced involved the acquisition of 20 percent of production capability, not the full supply, and there is no evidence that Clinton had any role in the US government approval process for this deal.

On an earlier Breitbart broadcast, Prince claimed that “due to a significant donation into the Clinton Foundation, the State Department ended up approving the sale of a company that owns 20 percent of the uranium in the United States, certainly a strategic fuel stock for us here, for nuclear energy production, and of course for nuclear weapons, if necessary. It’s now in the hands of a Russian state enterprise.” He was wrong here, too. The deal was approved not by the State Department, but by representatives of nine different federal agencies who sat on an interagency review board; there was no proven connection between a Clinton Foundation donation and the decision, and the uranium in question was not suitable for nuclear weapons.

During the campaign, the Clinton-gave-uranium-to-the-Russians-for-a-foundation-payoff tale was being enthusiastically peddled by Trump (who still has not let go of this faux scandal)—even though this accusation was fully debunked. And since the election, Republicans and conservatives have tried to use the Uranium One deal to deflect attention from the Trump-Russia scandal. Prince has been a loyal foot-soldier in this reality-bending, anti-Clinton propaganda effort.

Prince has gone even further in fueling the anti-Clinton fevers on the right. During a Breitbart radio appearance four days before the election, Prince, citing a “well-placed source” in the New York Police Department, said that emails discovered on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, the disgraced former congressman then separated from Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide, included evidence of Clinton perversion and criminality: “They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times.” He maintained these emails held proof “of criminal activity by Hillary, by her immediate circle, and even by other Democratic members of Congress.” He claimed that Abedin had “flipped.” If Clinton were to be elected, Prince warned, there would be a “constitutional crisis.”

Prince’s unsubstantiated comments were quickly embraced by far-right extremists pushing the particularly crazy Pizzagate conspiracy theory that claimed Clinton and Podesta were part of a covert pedophilia ring operating out of the basement of a Washington pizzeria. That day, conspiracy con-man Alex Jones, citing Prince’s interview, exclaimed, “When I think about all the children Hillary Clinton has personally murdered and chopped up and raped . . . yeah, you heard me right. Hillary Clinton has personally murdered children.” And WikiLeaks tweeted, “Astounding claims from Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater on Clinton & NYPD.” (A month later, a man armed with guns entered the pizzeria to investigate Pizzagate and fired several shots, harming no one, before he was arrested.)

Prince, once mostly known for owning a company that employed private military contractors who committed a 2007 massacre in downtown Baghdad, has become a fabulist who has used his national security credentials to dress up and legitimize the most outlandish and paranoid fantasies of the far right. (He also has recently considered challenging Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming as part of Bannon’s war on so-called establishment Republicans.) No matter what Prince says when he’s sitting before the interrogators of the House Intelligence Committee, they ought to remember this valuable guideline: consider the source.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... ik-prince/
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Re: The Domestic Conspiracy Is Hiding In Plain Sight Erik Pr

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Nov 30, 2017 7:40 am

Blackwater founder pitches plan to quell Libya migrant crisis with private police

The military contractor and Trump ally Erik Prince, who has faced scrutiny for his human rights record, has a ‘humane’ proposal to try to stop the flow of migrants

Stephanie KirchgaessnerLast modified on Thursday 30 November 2017 04.34 EST
Erik Prince wants to build three police bases in Libya and deploy about 750 of his foreign trainers, who would work alongside the Libyans.
Erik Prince wants to build three police bases in Libya and deploy about 750 of his foreign trainers, who would work alongside the Libyans. Photograph: Stefan Zaklin/EPA
Erik Prince, the founder of the private military contractor Blackwater, is pushing a plan to intervene in the migrant crisis in Libya with a proposal involving a privately-trained police force that would mirror his company’s work in Afghanistan.

The proposal, he said, would be a more humanitarian option for the European Union compared to the chaos that is now gripping the oil-rich nation, given widespread reports of grave human rights abuses by militia groups against migrants.

Prince, who is close to the Trump administration and is mulling a run for Senate in Wyoming, said it would be relatively easy for his company, Frontier Services Group, to stop, detain, house and “repatriate” hundreds of thousands of African migrants who are seeking a path to Europe through Libya.

He has also proposed to do so for a “fraction” of the price the EU is spending on boats that intercept migrant vessels in the Mediterranean.

“The traffic of human beings from Sudan, Chad, Niger is an industrial process,” he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. “To stop it, you have to create a Libyan border police along the southern border.”

Prince suggested that his plan would be more “humane and professional” than the programmes that are being supported by the EU to try to stop the flow of migrants.

Those rely heavily on militia groups within Libya who detain migrants before they reach the coast and have been accused of using rape, beatings and forced labour in detention centres. The system has been called inhumane and been condemned by the United Nations and human rights groups.

African migrants try to reach a rescue boat in the Mediterranean Sea, about 12 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, on 23 July 2017.
African migrants try to reach a rescue boat in the Mediterranean Sea, about 12 miles north of Sabratha, Libya, on 23 July 2017. Photograph: Santi Palacios/AP
Prince works as a security consultant in the United Arab Emirates, which has – alongside Egypt and Saudi Arabia – played a critical role in helping the Libyan strongman Khalifa Haftar expand his military foothold in Libya, where he controls about half the country.

The Trump administration is likely to take any proposal by Prince seriously: he donated $250,000 to support Trump’s campaign and his sister, Betsy DeVos, serves as education secretary.

Trump is meeting with Libyan prime minister Fayez Serraj at the White House on Friday. A White House spokesman said that the pair will discuss US support for Libya’s government.

Asked if he has discussed his plan with officials in the EU or the Trump administration, a spokesman for Frontier said: “Erik does not wish to comment on any private discussions he has had concerning Libya.”

Prince has faced intense scrutiny for his own human rights record as the world’s most well-known mercenary.

Blackwater employees were accused of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007, when the private military contractors opened fire on a crowd in Baghdad while they were escorting a US government convoy. Prince faced congressional scrutiny but was never charged with wrongdoing.

Four Blackwater contractors were convicted for manslaughter in connection to the incident. A court in the US has ordered a retrial for one man who was convicted, and three others are expected to be re-sentenced after a court ruled that their 30-year prison sentences were too long.

Blackwater became immensely wealthy during the Iraq war. It won about $1bn in contracts to protect US personnel. But Prince sold the firm in 2010 and eventually opened up a new company – Frontier – with the help of Chinese investors.

By agreeing to an interview with Corriere della Sera, the Italian newspaper, Prince appears to be seeking to generate support in the EU for his possible involvement in Libya.

His plan calls for the building of three police bases in Libya and the deployment of about 750 of his “foreign trainers”, who would work alongside the Libyans.

“They will provide leadership, intelligence, communications support, surveillance aircraft and a couple of helicopters,” Prince said. “Traffickers must drive over vast distances, so it’s easy to locate their truckloads of migrants, intercept them, and stop the driver.”

He added: “I imagine that Europe wants to block the flow of migrants in the most humane and professional way possible. I do not think that paying militias is a solution in the long run.”

Prince acknowledged that a separate proposal to “privatise” the war in Afghanistan with 5,500 Frontier contractors who would serve alongside Afghan police, had been endorsed by both Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser for Trump who is now at the centre of the Trump/Russia probe, and Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist.

The plan was not adopted, however.

Prince said it was rejected by the Pentagon and Trump’s current national security adviser, HR McMaster, who Prince called “a very conventional general”.

The White House plan to send 3,000 additional troops to Afghanistan was, Prince predicted, bound to fail.

“The approach is the same as the last 16 years,” he told the Italian paper. “The White House will come back to me within six months or a year. It is inevitable.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... are_btn_tw
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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