Blackwater’s Erik Prince Speaks
A leaked recording of secretive Blackwater founder Erik Prince giving a private talk reveals that if it’s up to him, the company’s role in 21st-century history is just beginning. Prince wants to have Blackwater (now Xe) mercenaries embedded in Islamic countries around the globe and leading the war on drugs. The Nation reports:
Despite Prince’s attempts to shield his speeches from public scrutiny, The Nation magazine has obtained an audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Prince to a friendly audience. The speech, which Prince attempted to keep from public consumption, provides a stunning glimpse into his views and future plans and reveals details of previously undisclosed activities of Blackwater.
In the speech, Prince proposed that the US government deploy armed private contractors to fight “terrorists” in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence. He expressed disdain for the Geneva Convention and described Blackwater’s secretive operations at…
Jeremy Scahill Discussing the Blackwater/CIA Connection
Here’s an interview with Blackwater author Jeremy Scahill on The Rachel Maddow Show discussing the recent Vanity Fair article about Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s CIA connection:
Blackwater Founder Erik Prince Revealed As CIA Spy
Fascinatingly, according to a just-released article from Vanity Fair, Erik Prince, the “Christian-supremacist” founder of Blackwater, worked secretly as a CIA agent from 2004 until two months ago:
The truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.
For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been helping [the C.I.A.] to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members.
While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts…Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy.
