Blackwater tapped foreigners on secret CIA program

[laststeamtrain]

Source: AP

Blackwater tapped foreigners on secret CIA program
By ADAM GOLDMAN and PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writers 12 mins ago

WASHINGTON – When the CIA revived a plan to kill or capture terrorists in 2004, the agency turned to the well-connected security company then known as Blackwater USA.

<snip>

The former senior CIA official said he had doubts during his tenure about whether Blackwater's foreign recruits had mastered the necessary skills to pull off such a high-stakes operation. Blackwater's later hiring of several senior CIA officials who were involved in or aware of the secret program, including one of the men who ran the operation, showed the blurred lines of using a private contractor for such a highly classified and dangerous project.

<snip>

Blackwater long has had a close and intertwined relationship with the CIA. Several senior agency leaders have taken up positions with the company. Among them were J. Cofer Black, once the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, who would have had operational involvement with the secret plan in the early 2000s. Others included Robert Richer, a former deputy director for operations, and Alvin B. Krongard, a former CIA executive

<snip>

At the time that Blackwater began working with the CIA on the death squad operation in 2004, the CIA had in place a long-standing policy mandating that senior officials leaving the agency could not go to work for private firms for a year after their departure. In 2007, Hayden toughened requirements for the entire agency, mandating an 18-month hold on security clearances for all departing employees who leave prior to retirement.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090830/ap_on_go_ot/us_cia_secret_program

[SpiralHawk]

1. Republicon darkside occultism

against honor, decency, and democracy.

[TriplD]

2. Cheney kept Congress in the dark

but it was ok to let foreigners in on it?

Sounds like treason.

[Solly Mack]

3. K&R

[JDPriestly]

4. So these people were hired without the proper clearances?

How could Blackwater award security clearances (or whatever is done before members of the CIA are hired) before hiring people?

Surely the FBI and CIA do not vet the Blackwater employees with American tax money and then also pay Blackwater for recruiting them. Or do we not require security clearances for people hired by private contractors before giving them our top secret information?

It would seem to me that neither the executive branch nor the military would have the legal authority to divulge the secrets of the U.S. to a third party outside the government without first making sure the person has a clearance for the information. How can a party that is not beholden to our federal government grant such a clearance?

It is one thing to hire someone to find out information for, to provide information to our government which later is classified. It is quite another to divulge to a person without a proper clearance even a small part of a top secret plan of our government or an agent of our government.

The American journalists who were citizens of our country and were to be embedded with American troops were carefully vetted by a private contractor. How did that private contractor with all its employees, etc. get cleared to vet the journalists. Did it hire people who had clearances already? How long do government clearances last? How is it possible that non-government employees might have been better informed about top secret information than our members of Congress? That is downright wrong and very dangerous in my view.

Think about it. If a private contractor hires Party A to hire Party B, then Party A 1) knows who Party A is and 2) could hire an untrustworthy person in order to manipulate that person. What leverage did Blackwater have that permitted it to insure that the people it hired could be trusted with American top secret information? What standards did Blackwater apply in hiring people? Did they apply a religious test? What went on there?

It appears that the only people from who state secrets are protected, the only people who cannot circumvent the restrictions on who gets to know our state secrets are ordinary Americans.

This Yahoo news story suggests to me that Cheney and Rumsfeld created a shadow military and intelligence apparatus that was not authorized by law. How can we determine whether it still exists? Was this shadow apparatus able to "earn" or steal enough money to become independent and threaten the autonomy and strength of our government and institutions including our press?

This apparatus knows many of our secrets. Yet when the ACLU goes to court to obtain access to the secrets for the American people (and we are talking about "secrets" that happened in the past, not secret plans, the administration stonewalls on obeying the court order to produce them.

I would like to see Congress investigate the possible circumvention of American security laws by the hiring of private contractors to do security work. Even if the people were vetted, it seems to me that this situation is in itself unsafe for our country.

[FarCenter]

5. Private firms do security work all the time.

For example, the Lockheed "Skunk Works" that developed the SR-71 Blackbird reconaisance aircraft would have had many employees with extremely high security clearances working on the plane.

This is how the military-industrial complex works.

[saigon68]

6. The "skunk works" does not run out and assassinate people

With 10 shots to the back of the head with a silenced 22 cal pistol

[laststeamtrain]

7. Nicely put together.

Private companies have all the secrets.

The condom tore. No protection.

If information is power, Cofer Black & Erik Prince have as much power as our government.

[JDPriestly]

8. I realize that Blackwater may not be the only private company with secrets

that are very, very confidential. AT&T and other phone companies, for example, know secrets about the wiretapping. I think, however, that far too many of our country's secrets are entrusted to a few carefully selected private individuals and companies. The private people are not elected and do not answer directly to the American people. They answer to the bureaucracy in the government, especially in the CIA and in the military. Thus, we have a powerful core of people, a clique that is privy to secret information that is withheld not only from the voters but often, from our elected representatives.

As long as that is the case, we do not have a democracy. An oligarchy that perpetuates itself through the award of contracts and that does not answer directly to voters knows our nation's secrets, the secrets that are hidden from us and about which we are not permitted to have any information. That is not compatible with a democratic form or republican form of government.

[Snazzy]

9. plus the phrase "death squad" kinda jumps out at you

(or rather you'd hope that it didn't).

[leveymg]

11. Some contractors, and their employees, are more responsible than others.

But, even the largest have had problems with people in very high positions doing things with classified information that is frankly illegal and even treasonous. Take the conversations that Sibel Edmonds overheard that referenced actions by Brent Scrowcroft (ATC Board member and Bush, Sr.'s ex-National Security Advisor). While at FBI, Edmonds overheard a conversation between a key Grumman Corp. employee and foreign nationals that revealed Valerie Plame's CIA cover at Brewster-Jennings after former Ambassador Marc Grossman revealed that BJ was a CIA proprietary.

The problem of misuse of classified information isn't confined to the CIA and its contractors. It's government-wide.

[laststeamtrain]

10. We Need a Special Prosecutor for Blackwater and Other CIA "Contractors"

We Need a Special Prosecutor for Blackwater and Other CIA "Contractors"

Blackwater’s web of connections includes a Who’s Who of former Bush-era CIA officials. And that’s just one company in a sea of “private contractors”

By Jeremy Scahill

Some parts of Blackwater’s clandestine work for the CIA have begun to leak out from behind the iron curtain of secrecy. The company’s role in the secret assassination program and its continued involvement in the CIA drone attacks that occur regularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan have become front page material in the Washington Post and New York Times. There is much more to this story than has been reported publicly and details will continue to emerge, particularly about Blackwater’s aviation division(s).

Now we learn (unsurprisingly) that Blackwater offered “foreign” operatives to work on the CIA assassination program. Blackwater told the CIA that it “could put people on the ground to provide the surveillance and support — all of the things you need to conduct an operation,” a former senior CIA official familiar with the secret program told The Associated Press. If that’s true, those foreign individuals would appear to have been privy to information that vice president Cheney and other US officials deemed not appropriate for Congressional ears, not to mention oversight.

In light of all of these developments, it is important to remember how Erik Prince essentially hired George W Bush’s top people from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations to create his own private CIA, Total Intelligence Solutions. He also offered Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, the former number 3 man at the CIA, a paid position on Blackwater’s board. Buzzy was the guy who got Blackwater its first known CIA contract back in 2002 in Afghanistan. Buzzy is also the one whining about the CIA’s “morale” problem, in light of the recent scandals, in the Washington Post. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he told the paper.

When you hear reports that a “private” company was hired to do clandestine work, remember that this particular “private” company, Blackwater, is, in part, being run by Agency veterans, including several of the top people running the torture and assassination programs under Bush. At the end of the day, using Blackwater and/or other companies represents taking covert, lethal operations even further away from anything vaguely resembling oversight by the Congress. By using ex-Agency people instead of “current” Agency personnel, yet another barrier is thrown up and the case for “plausible deniability” becomes stronger. When you are dealing with a billionaire like Erik Prince who apparently viewed himself as a crusader tasked with eliminating muslims and Islam globally, as has been alleged by a former Blackwater official, it is not difficult to imagine how all of this could remain—at least in part— off the books. Would it be a great shock if we learn that Prince volunteered some of his men or his company’s time to lethal missions for the CIA free of charge? “I’m not a financially driven guy,” Prince told Congress in October 2007. Take that with a grain of salt, but it is probably not flat out false. He was a believer in the crusade.

That is why it is essential that Congress dig deep into all aspects of the CIA assassination program and Blackwater’s total involvement. But it is important to remember that it is so much bigger than this one company and certainly bigger than one clandestine program.

Also, it is very important to remember this: Blackwater is hardly alone. Salon’s Tim Shorrock obtained documents in 2007 from the office of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) showing that Washington spends some $42 billion annually on private intelligence contractors, up from $17.5 billion in 2000. That means 70 percent of the US intelligence budget is going to private companies. “This is the magnet now. Everything is being attracted to these private companies in terms of individuals and expertise and functions that were normally done by the intelligence community,” former CIA division chief and senior analyst Melvin Goodman told me a year ago. “My major concern is the lack of accountability, the lack of responsibility. The entire industry is essentially out of control. It’s outrageous.”

<more>

http://rebelreports.com/post/175842520/we-need-a-special-prosecutor-for-blackwater-and-other

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6429188