A federal appeals court on Friday threw out lengthy prison sentences for three former Blackwater Worldwide security contractors and ordered a new trial for a fourth involved in a deadly 2007 shooting in Baghdad that became a symbol of unchecked, freewheeling American power in Iraq.

The shooting killed or injured at least 31 civilians when contractors unleashed a torrent of machine-gun fire and launched grenades into a crowded downtown Baghdad traffic circle from their heavily armored trucks. An F.B.I. agent once called it the “My Lai massacre of Iraq.”

The ruling is a setback to the effort — which now stretches across three presidential administrations — to demand stiff consequences for the shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. Along with the massacre by Marines of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha and the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, it was among the war’s darkest moments and stained the reputation of the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/world/middleeast/blackwater-contractors-iraq-sentences.html

A mercenary air force that became a symbol of the U.S. occupation of Iraq is back in action—this time in Central Africa, supporting a shadowy American U.S. Special Forces commando operation targeting the Lord’s Resistance Army.

In late January, a source on the ground in Central African Republic spotted a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter with the registry number N408RC carrying American Special Forces troops. The LRA, a cultish band of thieves and rapists led by warlord Joseph Kony, is most active in the forested region where Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo meet.

In 2010, President Barack Obama deployed around 100 Green Berets and other personnel to Central Africa to help local forces hunt down Kony and the LRA. Seven years later, Operation Observant Compass continues, mostly unnoticed by the press. The Pentagon asked Congress for $23 million to extend the operation through 2017.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/13/blackwater-air-is-back-and-flying-for-u-s-special-forces.html

A lawyer for the former Blackwater president who has been charged with gun crimes hinted at his client's defense Wednesday, telling a North Carolina court room that a US government agency approved of what the company was doing.

Ken Bell -- attorney for Gary Jackson, who was arrested last week along with four other Blackwater staffers -- told the court that "all of this was with the knowledge of, the request of, for the convenience of, an agency of the US government," reports the News & Observer in North Carolina.

While Bell would not say which US government agency that may have been, the News & Observer article suggests that he was talking about the CIA.

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Federal prosecutors charged the former president of Blackwater Worldwide and four other former senior company officials on Friday with weapons violations and making false statements in the first criminal inquiry to reach into the top management ranks of the private security company.

While the indictment is somewhat limited in scope, it could be the government’s opening salvo in a broader offensive to bring criminal charges against the company. They could include charges for bribery and export violations, according to officials familiar with the case, perhaps under a strategy of turning former and current executives of the company against one another.

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By Jeremy Scahill

A few days after the dismissal of the criminal case, Blackwater reached a civil settlement with many of the Nisour Square victims, reportedly paying about $100,000 per death.

Blackwater released a statement declaring it was "pleased" with the outcome, which enabled the company to move forward "free of the costs and distraction of ongoing litigation." But Mohammed Kinani would not move on. He refused to take the deal Blackwater offered. As a result, he may well be the one man standing between Blackwater and total impunity for the killings in Nisour Square.

On September 15, 2009, the night before the second anniversary of his son's death, Mohammed Kinani sued Blackwater in its home state of North Carolina, along with company owner Erik Prince and the six men Mohammed believes are responsible for his son's death. In an exclusive interview providing the most detailed eyewitness account of the massacre that has yet been published, Mohammed told his story to The Nation.

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Democracy NOW! EXCLUSIVE…Blackwater’s Youngest Victim: Father of 9 Year-Old Killed in Nisour Square Gives Most Detailed Account of Massacre to Date »»

By Jeremy Scahill

As Gates's comments began to make huge news in Pakistan, US defense officials tried to retract his statement. As the Wall Street Journal reported, "Defense officials tried to clarify the comment Thursday night, telling reporters that Mr. Gates had been speaking about contractor oversight more generally and that the Pentagon didn't employ Xe in Pakistan."

Bilour's statements are consistent with what a former Blackwater executive and a US military intelligence source told me in December--that Blackwater is working on a subcontract for Kestral, a Pakistani security and logistics firm. That contract, say my sources, is technically with the Pakistani government, which helps cloak Blackwater's presence.

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By Jerry Mazza

Yet, dating back to 1991, just after Barre left the country, SomaliaWatch.org, reported about The Oil Factor in Somalia. “Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside. That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.” This was during the closing days of Bush Sr.’s administration. He lost his bid for reelection in November 1992, leaving the “peace-keeping” mission to Clinton.

“According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia’s [then] pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. [Conceivably, Barre awarded the rights to the US in return for the millions in aid his country was receiving from us]. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions [were] hoping that the Bush [Sr.] Administration’s decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia [would] also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.”

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Democracy Now! Friday January 8, 2010

In the last seventy-two hours, a series of breaking developments involving the notorious private military firm have come to light, ranging from their involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, and even Germany, as well as legal cases here at home.

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Blackwater Worldwide's legal woes haven't dimmed the company's prospects in Afghanistan, where it's a contender to be a key part of President Barack Obama's strategy for stabilizing the country.

Now called Xe Services, the company is in the running for a Pentagon contract potentially worth $1 billion to train Afghanistan's troubled national police force. Xe has been shifting to training, aviation and logistics work after its security guards were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.

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By Jeremy Scahill

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. "The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence," said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. "Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?"

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In a significant blow to the Justice Department, a federal judge on Thursday threw out the indictment of four former Blackwater Worldwide security guards over a shooting in Baghdad in 2007 that left 17 Iraqis dead and about 20 more wounded.

In a 90-page opinion, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina wrote that the government’s mishandling of the case “requires dismissal of the indictment against all the defendants.”

In a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights,” the judge wrote, investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shooting. The State Department had hired the guards to protect its officials.

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Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

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By Jeremy Scahill

The in-depth Vanity Fair profile of the infamous owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, is remarkable on many levels--not least among them that Prince appeared to give the story's author, former CIA lawyer Adam Ciralsky, unprecedented access to information about sensitive, classified and lethal operations not only of Prince's forces, but Prince himself. In the article, Prince is revealed not just as owner of a company that covertly provided contractors to the CIA for drone bombings and targeted assassinations, but as an actual CIA asset himself. While the story appears to be simply a profile of Prince, it might actually be the world's most famous mercenary's insurance policy against future criminal prosecution. The term of art for what Prince appears to be doing in the VF interview is graymail: a legal tactic that has been used for years by intelligence operatives or assets who are facing prosecution or fear they soon will be. In short, these operatives or assets threaten to reveal details of sensitive or classified operations in order to ward off indictments or criminal charges, based on the belief that the government would not want these details revealed. "The only reason Prince would do this [interview] is that he feels he is in very serious jeopardy of criminal charges," says Scott Horton, a prominent national security and military law expert. "He absolutely would not do these things otherwise."

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Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy
By Adam Ciralsky

But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.

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By Jeremy Scahill

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater's involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so "compartmentalized" that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

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Despite news reports that the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater has seen its contracts dry up and its influence wane, the company continues to do brisk business in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and the Obama administration may be too afraid of the firm to do anything about it, says investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill.

"Another way of looking at this is Blackwater knows where a lot of bodies are buried," Scahill told Maddow. "These are guys who worked on the CIA assassination program, the drone bombing campaign, and regarding all of the senior officals, they know a heck of a lot about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those are not guys that you want on the other side of the fence if you're running Washington."

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Blackwater Attempted to Bribe Iraqi Officials
By Jeremy Scahill »»

Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees.

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In order to achieve desired results as early as possible, Blackwater is said to have hired retired officials of Pakistan’s law-enforcement agencies at highest ever salary packages, TheNation has learnt reliably.

To the surprise of many, the agency is said to have hired Pakistani officials at the rate of astonishing $60,000 per month salary package.
Most important thing is Blackwater has hired former CIA intelligence officer Steven Cash to operate as Commander In Charge of its operations in Peshawar.

According to the online edition of “ Pakistan Daily”, Blackwater has approached various journalists to implement the PSYOPs in newspapers and electronic media in Pakistan while offering them lucrative salary packages. They are pushing journalists to publish news stories of Taliban, as the Psychological Operations group of US Army has planned.

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American Police Force, the paramilitary unit patrolling a small town in Montana, has been exposed as being a front group for the disgraced private military contractor Blackwater, now called “Xe”.

The American Police Force website, on a page that has swiftly been deleted but remains cached here, states that APF runs the “U.S. Training Center,” which proves “a wide range of instruction and training for all types of law enforcement organizations, from basic firearms training to complex SWAT tactics,” according to the website.

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

Xe Services, LLC
PO Box 1029
Moyock, NC 27958

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

PO Box 1029
Moyock, NC 27958

Since Blackwater runs the U.S. Training Center, and the American Police Force stated on its own website, before it was deleted this morning, that it also runs the U.S. Training Center, there is no other conclusion to draw but that APF and Blackwater are one and the same. Or in other words, APF is a front group for Blackwater.

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We have determined that the incident in Montana is not “Martial Law” or some FEMA Camp waiting in the wings. No… They use your sports Stadiums and G -20 police for that. The question of using private, accountable security forces for prison control, city control. Civil unrest and war… Will remain a question that ALL Americans should find themselves engaged in.

After all…. We must face the consequences. Could a private security firm have been involved in the attacks of 911? Maybe you should do a search on KROLL 911, or SECURICOM 911, or PTECH 911. Or for fun do a search on DYNCORP private military, or HALLIBURTON / KBR …. CARLYLE GROUP, LOCKHEED MARTIN, RAYTHEON Security.

You will find what I have found, and that is, that these private Merc armies are everywhere, and operate on levels never conceived by our founders. These guys aren’t your revolutionary Hessians. They are way more complicated.

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