Blackwater managed CIA Predator drone assassination program

[Octafish]

The mafia got rich by doing dirty work for gentlemen
who didn't want to get their own hands dirty.

C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones

By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI
The New York Times
August 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees.

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater. It has grown through government work, even as it attracted criticism and allegations of brutality in Iraq.

SNIP...

In interviews on Thursday, current and former government officials provided new details about Blackwater’s association with the assassination program, which began in 2004 not long after Porter J. Goss took over at the C.I.A. The officials said that the spy agency did not dispatch the Blackwater executives with a “license to kill.” Instead, it ordered the contractors to begin collecting information on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s leaders, carry out surveillance and train for possible missions.

“The actual pulling of a trigger in some ways is the easiest part, and the part that requires the least expertise,” said one government official familiar with the canceled C.I.A. program. “It’s everything that leads up to it that’s the meat of the issue.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/us/21intel.html

So. Blackwater means deep, deep wet work.

I wonder what else they do we don't know about?

[bridgit]

1. Shadow Govt shake down cruise

[Octafish]

3. Panic In Detroit

A trickle of strangers were all that were left alive.

[bridgit]

6. I'm say'n, as we'd mentioned before this RW is selling to the reptilian brain - no real nuance there

But no need for law either when fear will fit that breach :thumbsdown:

[Octafish]

9. Signs in the fields.

Blackwater Aided by PR Giant

Those who discover what's in your signature line move the world, bridgit.

[nc4bo]

26. Octafish - Link leading to "The article requested is no longer available" message

Have another link? Looks like a good read.

[Octafish]

27. Sorry nc4bo! Try this...

Here's the article, archived by our good friends at SFGate.com:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/10/05/national/w001254D70.DTL&type=printable

[nc4bo]

37. Thanks! nt

[EFerrari]

2. Good catch, my friend. Porter Goss, running true to form. n/t

[Octafish]

5. There's something to be said for a Dusty Foggo-Duke Cunningham-Jack Abramoff Axis of Warmongers

Blackwater's Private CIA

[Richard Steele]

4. K&R

[Octafish]

7. Tomgram: Filling the Skies with Assassins

The only difference is that today we the War Party has control of the H-Ks.



Terminator Planet

[G_j]

8. K&R

learning more and more,,

[Octafish]

10. Even CIA Inspector General was a Wall Street insider

There's no better place to be because there's no inside information like secret inside information.

Blackwater and the Brothers Krongard: How Cookie Crumbled

[opihimoimoi]

11. KnR :o) Those guys scammed a whole bunch of monies to do Bushies dirty work

[Octafish]

16. Former CIA Agent: ''What the Agency Was Doing With Blackwater Scares the Hell Out of Me''

DANGER: WARMONGERS AT WORK



From Jeremy Scahill:

"What we know now, if this is true, is that Blackwater was part of the highest level, the innermost circle strategizing and exercising strategy within the Bush administration," Schakowsky told The Nation. "Erik Prince operated at the highest and most secret level of the government. Clearly Prince was more trusted than the US Congress because Vice President Cheney made the decision not to brief Congress. This shows that there was absolutely no space whatsoever between the Bush administration and Blackwater."

Former CIA Agent: "What the Agency Was Doing With Blackwater Scares the Hell Out of Me"

[opihimoimoi]

29. Surely this is cause of a Holder Investigation/Inquiry with The Fact/Pain Collar

Shocks um when they lie..6879 volts outta curl their hair a bit whenever they try to fool us.

[Octafish]

31. The Science of Star Trek

Certainly, Mr. B, the Agony Booth™ might be better in terms of results, but for fun, there's nothing like...



"Mr. Kyl, your Agonizer™, please."

Man, my wife and I just saw "Slumdog Millionaire" a couple of nights ago.
Wow. Wow wow wow. Wow.
We got work to do -- us, them and the whole darn planet.
For real.

[opihimoimoi]

38. Now ya talking...2nd Level...above the ME and YOU Level...its the US Level

How Society can come together to build New: Cities, Nations, then Groups of Nations

1 mechanical, primitive society

2 technical, #1 plus Tech, smarter Society

3 1 + 2 = Advanced Social Structure/System = Global Stability

[Solly Mack]

12. K&R

[Octafish]

17. Dusty Gets a Green Light for Green Badge

R. J. Hillhouse, "The Spy Who Billed Me," has done a lot of heavy lifting on this subject and gotten very little public recognition for her important work:

Dusty Gets a Green Light for Green Badge

[ManiacJoe]

13. At least this time

it was honest manual labor they were doing. Probably grossly over paid, but....

[Octafish]

30. Master of War

The guy hasn't had to work a day in his life,
yet he served as a SEAL and Poppy knows what else.



There's no business, like war business, there's no business I know.

HarperCollins is Rupert Murdoch's publishing arm, so this may be an example of Rovian Framing, where the first to lie gets in the Public's idée fixe.

[Norrin Radd]

14. kr

Strange days -- though hopeful -- first, I hear John Dean use the term "limited hangout" on KO, and now this.

[Octafish]

55. 2001: A Genocide Odyssey

"I interned with the Bush administration for six months... I saw a lot of thing I didn't agree with--homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns." - Grand Rapids Press, February 23, 1992.

Gee. This guy is leading America's Crusade 2001?

"Everybody carries guns, just like Jeremiah rebuilding the temple in Israel--a sword in one hand and a trowel in the other." - Defense Daily, February 23, 2005.

It's no leap of faith to think this guy would lead the charge against the Infidel at home, too, like godless humanist liberal homosexual minority-loving Democrats.

[laststeamtrain]

15. K & R - n/t.

[Octafish]

59. Soldiers of Good Fortune

Fusing religion, modern weaponry, feaudalism, and cronie capitalism, these guys are something.



From way back when, Fallujah:

Soldiers of Good Fortune

What that something is, is very, very disturbed.

[Joanne98]

18. When is the State Department going to cancel their contact?

[Octafish]

60. HRC's Blackwater Connection -- Mark Penn

Murkin money isn't red or blue. It's green.

HRC's Blackwater Connection

I know-I know-It's only business. And that's a shame, when it comes to democracy.

[nc4bo]

19. I find this all so fucking disturbing...

There are 2 armies, one of them is private and seemingly exempt from most of our laws.

Then our own government hires this private/exempt from laws army to do exactly what our regular special forces can do for themselves UNDER various laws?

Americans should be horrified. I'm horrified. Blackwater (and Dyncorp for that matter) should be disarmed, disbanded and prosecuted. BUSH & Co. should be investigated, prosecuted and punished for giving birth to these Frankenstein companies.

The American Ministry of Propaganda, as usual, sleeps on this giant and the average American citizen remains clueless.

:kick:

[Octafish]

61. Outsourcing the Pentagon

From 2003, a press conference detailing who-privatized-what that should've been on the front page of NYT, LAT, WaPo and leading ABCNNBCBSFauxNoiseNutwork:

Outsourcing the Pentagon

The reason We the People don't know about the corruption is the same stooges own Corporate McPravda.

Corruption in public office IS treason. Remember, the American service personnel have been killed -- electrocuted -- in Halliburton-built showers. Halliburton even got a BONUS.

[PRETZEL]

20. I wish I could remember in whose book I read it,

but in hindsight, this made sense.

I seem to remember at the time when there was talk of arming the Predator that neither the CIA nor Defense wanted to take responsibility for it.

What easier way to get the job done than to contract it out (probably off budget also) and then wash their hands of the whole mess.

[Octafish]

58. Problems with 'transformational' defense technologies...

In searching for the book, I found an excellent summary of the situation:

The Problem With the Predator

"Success has a thousand fathers. Failure is an orphan."

[PRETZEL]

21. delete, double post n/t

[DCKit]

22. That explains the high level of civilian casualties - The Blackwater Cowboys just don't care...

and, I'm sure, were guaranteed immunity.

No wonder all the GOP heavyweights are demanding there be no investigation of the CIA. Dog knows what will happen to the (R) brand if ALL this shit comes out.

[Octafish]

62. The U.S. Military’s Assassination Problem

If the subject weren't so hideous, it would be interesting to trace the evolution of our nation's understanding of this particular treason.

The U.S. Military’s Assassination Problem

Someone's got to, though, for the sake of the United States.

[leveymg]

23. This contradicts stories that nobody was actually assassinated by Xe. Predator killed a US Citizen

Kamal Derwish was blown up by a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator in Yemen during 2002, in the first such attack. See, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/14/AR2005051401121.html

SNIP

Al-Yemeni's death is one of only a handful of known incidents in which the CIA has fired the remote-controlled, missile-equipped Predator to kill an al Qaeda member. In November 2002, the CIA used a Predator fitted with a five-foot-long Hellfire missile to kill a senior al Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, as he was riding in a car in the Yemeni desert. Also killed with Harithi, who was suspected of masterminding the October 2000 attack on the destroyer USS Cole, was a naturalized U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish.

Derwish, it was determined later, was part of the Lackawanna, N.Y., group of Yemeni men who admitted to training in al Qaeda camps.

The CIA is permitted to operate the lethal Predator under presidential authority promulgated after the Sept. 11 attacks. Shortly after the attacks, Bush approved a "presidential finding" that allowed the CIA to write a set of highly classified rules describing which individuals could be killed by CIA officers. Such killings were defined as self-defense in a global war against al Qaeda terrorists.

The rules have been vetted by the White House, CIA and State Department lawyers. They allow CIA counterterrorism officials in the field to decide much more quickly when to fire, according to former intelligence officials involved in developing the rules.

This report of Blackwater/Xe operating the Predator program does not square with the claim heard elsewhere in today's news that nobody was actually killed by Blackwater's assassination program. It's gotta be one or the other, unless Blackwater was running multiple wet ops.

P.S. - Derwish has been identified as a possible double-agent who was in Afghanistan with bin Laden just weeks before the 9/11 attack. He was one of the first to be silenced. Derwish was a key figure in US intelligence surveillance of al-Qaeda cells inside the U.S., and provided a direct link between the bombings of the USS Cole and 9/11.

Derwish had trained in Afghanistan in 1992 and fought with the U.S.-backed Muslim Army in Bosnia. In the Spring of 2002, U.S. intelligence intercepted communications between him and two important al-Qaida figures, one of them involved in the USS Cole bombing. Derwish had been instrumental in organizing the the Lackawanna 6 into an al-Qaeda sleeper cell. Warrants were issued to conduct round-the-clock surveillance on members of the group.

The FBI monitored phone calls from Derwish in Yemen to some members of the group that appeared to be intended to assess their status or availability. It also intercepted e-mails from one of the group, Mukhtar al-Bakri, who was then in Bahrain. One of them appeared particularly suspicious. The e-mail was entitled "Big Meal" and read in English translation as follows:

"How are you my beloved, God willing you are fine. I would like to remind you of obeying God and keeping him in your heart because the next meal will be very huge. No one will be able to withstand it except those with faith. There are people here who had visions and their visions were explained that this thing will be very strong. No one will be able to bear it." 12

The phone calls and e-mails had the intense interest of the White House, the CIA and the FBI that the Lackawanna group was about to be activated for a major terrorist attack. At this point, the Buffalo FBI field office was required to send briefings on the results of their investigation to FBI Headquarters twice a day, and these were often passed on to the White House in the president's daily threat briefings.

At the request of the CIA, al-Bakri was detained by the Bahrain police, coincidentally on his wedding night. He admitted to having traveled to the Al Farooq camp in late spring and early summer and also gave the names of the rest of the Lackawanna group. Based on al-Bakri's testimony, the six Lackawanna men were arraigned in September, 2002, and charged with providing material support to Al-Qaeda. Somehow, despite the intense surveillance, Derwish was allowed to leave the U.S. and travelled to Yemen, where he was killed by a CIA Predator drone. See, http://www.rjhresearch.com/ADR/counterterrorism/Counterterrorism.doc

[Bluerthanblue]

24. "Derwish, it was determined later, was part of the Lackawanna, N.Y.

group of Yemeni men who admitted to training in al Qaeda camps."

it was determined later !

....well, that's a relief. :shrug:


I am a strong supporter of President Obama, but I completely disagree with him on the continued and escalated use of "predator drones".

This kind of ...'warfare' just plain wrong.

[leveymg]

25. The problem here is that Xe is run by the same guys who let the 9/11 hijackers into the US

-- former CIA Counter-terrorism Center (CTC) Director Cofer Black (later a Blackwater Director, and head of a Blackwater subsidiary company) also directed the assassination targeting, along with rendition and torture programs that silenced the surviving al-Qaeda conspirators. Some targets, like Derwish, were done away with permananently, while others like KSM and Abu Zubyadeh - figures with long ties to US intelligence - were allowed to run around for a while before capture. The Al-Qaeda figures subjected to brainwahing and waterboarding that turned them into near-vegetables all had ties with the CIA during the 1990s in Bosnia and Chechnya.

Cofer Black was the head of CIA station in Khartoum when bin Laden and Abu Zubaydeh were there. He admitted in testimony before Congress that they had contact with each other.

Basically, Cofer Black and some others got away with allowing the Flt. 77 hijackers (one of whom was also intimately involved with the Cole attack) into the country and then were put in charge of eliminating the surviving witnesses.

[Bluerthanblue]

28. clean up you mean?

Or damage control?

I can believe that.

[bobthedrummer]

32. Yep...this is simply TREASON

[AntiFascist]

49. K&R, MIHOP anyone? n/t

[DU GrovelBot]

33. ## PLEASE DONATE TO DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND! ##

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[bluesmail]

34. The Fourth Reich. eom

[Octafish]

63. That is the path they're taking us.

Know your BFEE: America’s Ruling Gangster Class

[pjt7]

35. When will criminal charges be filed against Prince?

....

[Flatulo]

36. I cannot for the life of me find a single thing wrong with trying to kill al-Quaeda operatives,

Fuck 'em. They've been waging war on us for nigh 20 years.

Clinton tried to get them with cruise missiles, and rightly so.

[CJCRANE]

47. That's what they say they're doing. Who knows what they're actually doing.

No oversight, no accountability.

[boppers]

39. We've been contracting out work ever since it was determined to be unsuitable for american employees

None of this is new, which is why the media doesn't care, it's simply not news. Wiretaps? Contracted. Forgeries? Contracted. Assassinations? Contracted. Torture? Contracted. Secret flights? Contracted. It's quite a big list.

I suppose the real news story is about people who have no idea how this kind of stuff works, or has worked for the last 50 years.

I think that's part of the amusement/design, people will find a connection, and start making all kinds of silly assumptions about exact connections. Once the assumptions are easily dismissed as false, or over-inflated, the actual connections get more "cover".

Take, oh, MOCKINGBIRD, the media program. The US government paid media folks for inserting stories or perspectives. The people being paid weren't employees, they were basically on contract, and they didn't outright falsify stuff very often. When people finally figured MOCKINGBIRD out, the folks who screamed the loudest insinuated stuff straight out of 1984, and when no such results were found, the screaming folks were dismissed as cranks.

With this example, folks who have figured out that Xe was doing munitions and support work are going off about Blackwater/Xe committing assassinations, when Xe weren't buying or flying the planes, pulling the trigger, or making the final decisions on targets. In this very thread there's been even more conflation about Xe intelligence work, base perimeter work, etc. Once a decent investigator looks into it, however, the people making shrill claims about Xe being "assassination squads" (and similar claims) will be discredited, giving Xe more cover.

[Octafish]

56. Disinformation is part of their ''Perspective Management'' toolkit.

Karl Rove practices the oldest trade in the media: Be the first to get your point out, especially when it's a lie about your opponent. That makes it 20-times harder (my guesstimate) to replace with the truth, later.

The thing about Blackwater / Xe / Prince is oversight and accountability. Outsourcing and privatizing spy wet work and the rest means that they can do pretty much what they want, and We the People who pay for it won't be the wiser. Secret spyworks also mean the main beneficiaries are the insiders, from Wall Street to Pipelineistan. It's Oh-So-Social all over again, without the hassles of reporting to anybody who's not getting a piece of the action.

[bobthedrummer]

40. The HELLFIRE AGM-114 series (Lockheed Martin) isn't the only system used on Predators

for instance, the Defense Update article linked below mentions some of the Israeli systems launched from UAV's-probably used against people in places like Gaza City and those other Military Operations in Urban Terrain/MOUT. This is important because of the known extremist religious orientations of Erik Prince's many associates-they are the 21st century Knights Templars hooked up with Israeli RW extremists that are so much a part of what was called the "global war on terror"-not to mention the neoconservatives.

"Evolution of UAV Employed Missiles" (January 2007 Defense Update article)
http://defense-update.com/features/du-1-07/armedUAVs_4.htm

The Federation of American Scientists has a HELLFIRE page too

AGM-114 Hellfire
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/missile/agm-114.htm

Oh yeah, it's so convenient to have all this done "privately".

[bridgit]

41. Lockheed Martin-Lockheed Martin where have I/well isn't it a small world after all: Liz Cheney...

The Pride of Lockheed Martin - Speaketh

'Something is troubling Elizabeth Cheney, the other daughter of the Lockheed-Halliburton syndicate. Although the problem troubling our dear Lizzie is not her conscience, because that would require first that she have a conscience. No, what is troubling Lizzie is the lack of courage and an interest in losing she ascribes to those who are opposed to her daddy's war.' - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larisa-alexandrovna/lizzie-cheney-the-pride-o_b_39398.html

[bobthedrummer]

42. Isn't it something when she was one of Daddy's deferments that kept him from service in Vietnam???

:puke::argh:

[bridgit]

43. Word! Pft, "her daddy's war" - daddy's little girl thinks she's too precious by half

[bobthedrummer]

44. "I wonder what else they do we don't know about?" Nothing would surprise me-I wonder too-kick

[karynnj]

45. The NYT reports that Kerry is pursuing answers on this

On Friday, Mr. Kerry wrote to the founder and chairman of Xe, Erik D. Prince, asking for details of his company’s dealings with the C.I.A. In the letter, a copy of which was supplied to The New York Times, Mr. Kerry expressed concern that contractors could have used their State Department assignments as a “cover to gather information for the targeted killing program.” Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, canceled the program this year, in part because he learned the C.I.A. had used an outside company for the program, government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity have said.

This week, government officials and current and former Blackwater employees said the company had also taken on a role in the United States’ most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda leaders.

Mr. Kerry also plans to write to Mrs. Clinton to raise his concerns, said one of his aides.

In a meeting with department employees in February, Mrs. Clinton said, “I certainly am of the mind that we should, insofar as possible, reduce our dependence.” But she added, “Whether we can go all the way to banning, under current circumstances, seems unlikely.”

NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/us/22intel.html?_r=1&hpw

DU thread:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6371437

[defendandprotect]

46. k i c k

[bobthedrummer]

48. ^

[LWolf]

50. I can't speak for current uses,

but my ex is a predator mechanic. (He's also a mechanic for some of GA's other UAVs.)

When I was still married to him, he was deployed for all military uses; air force personnel who weren't sharp enough for the big craft were relegated to the drones. They resented it, and didn't exactly use them with care. It was routine to bring GA mechanics along as civilian support whenever they were used. He was deployed to Bosnia, to Kuwait, and to Hungary, among other places.

At that time, they weren't being equipped with weapons. Just with spy cameras. They were the new craft on the block; the CIA wasn't using them.

I'd ask the ex about it, but I haven't spoken to him in 8 years. I know he's still working on UAVs for GA, though; I do talk to my in-laws a couple of times a year.

[bobthedrummer]

51. Obviously this is only the tip of a privatized killer iceberg-kick

[mod mom]

52. Have you read Sharlet's "The Family", Octafish? Really well written & researched

account of the religious zealots running this country and how they have convinced their sheeple that Jesus is for de-regulation & free markets. Privatize everything so that the ruling elite can keep power and grow fatter. :mad:

[Octafish]

54. Chimpageddon

Hi, mod mom! I'm sorry, I haven't read "The Family" yet. Based on the subject matter --
combining fascism with the worship of Mammon --
it is a must-read and a must-own. I have quoted Mr. Sharlet often and on DU:

Know your BFEE: The Fellowship ‘Preys’ for America



Some of those crazy Dominionist and Reconstructionists are a threat to mankind.
Tough to be rational with people who think God is on their side -- to the point of speciecide.

[bobthedrummer]

53. BLACKWATER USA: HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM (pdf)

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 110TH CONGRESS
October 2, 2007
(Takes a few seconds to load)
http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20071127131151.pdf

[samsingh]

57. Who are watching Blackwater?

thanks Alan Moore.

[bobthedrummer]

64. "I wonder what else they do we don't know about?" Needs continuous asking...kick

[MinM]

65. William Colby stipulated to "foreign assassination plots" to protect what?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x463349

Why does this remind me of the case of William Colby giving up half the house (foreign assassinations), to The Church Committee, to protect the other half (domestic?)?

The American Public, to the extent they've been informed about the drone program, seems to be alright with it. So what are they really copping to here?



:dem:

[bobthedrummer]

66. kick