Obama administration uses Blackwater in drone killings

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Obama administration uses Blackwater in drone killings
By Tom Eley
22 August 2009

In the wake of Thursday’s revelations that the Bush administration
hired Blackwater USA to carry out assassinations of alleged Al Qaeda
operatives, more information has come to light regarding the intimate
and ongoing relationship between the shadowy paramilitary security
contractor and the American state.

In spite of Blackwater’s well-established record of indiscriminate
killings of Iraqi civilians, the Obama administration has retained its
services in Afghanistan, where a new report reveals that Blackwater
has been contracted to work with the unmanned Predator drones that
carry out assassinations and terrorize villages in eastern and
southern Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan.

Under Obama, the close links between the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) and Blackwater have continued. These relationships reveal not
only the corruption and conflicts-of-interest that are ubiquitous in
the multi-trillion dollar world of military contracting. It raises the
question of where the US military—ostensibly controlled by the elected
representatives of the American people—ends, and Blackwater, a
for-profit entity accountable to no one, comprised largely of former
US military special operations personnel, begins.

It is clear, moreover, that what has so far been revealed regarding
Washington’s relationship to Blackwater—pacts concluded behind the
backs of the American people—is only the tip of the iceberg. The
military-intelligence community, a state-within-a-state that is
connected with Blackwater through numerous personal and money ties, is
mounting a campaign to prevent further information from coming to light.

The Obama administration has carried over from the Bush administration
Blackwater’s critical role in the use of the remote-controlled
Predator drones that have killed many civilians in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, a Friday report by the New York Times reveals. The drones’
purported purpose is to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders. Their deployment
in Pakistan is in clear violation of international law, as the US has
never declared war on the South Asian state.

There exists no substantive distinction between the Bush
administration’s hiring of Blackwater to carry out “targeted
assassinations” in Iraq with snipers and ambushes, and the Obama
administration’s farming out to the military security firm its drone
assassination program in the “Af-Pak theater,” whose victims have
consisted predominantly of civilians.

Blackwater, which has since renamed itself Xe Services LLC (“Xe” is
pronounced “Zee”), provides security to “hidden bases in Pakistan and
Afghanistan” that carry out the drone attacks which have dramatically
increased since Obama took office, the Times. Blackwater personnel
also “assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided
bombs,” work formerly carried out by the CIA.

For years the CIA has launched its Predator attacks from a base in
Shamsi, Pakistan, but has recently added a second, secret base in
Jalalabad, Afghanistan, anonymous sources have told the Times. Most
drone missions are now launched from Jalalabad, with CIA agents
operating the attacks, and launching the missiles, from agency
headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Blackwater began assisting the CIA in Afghanistan after gaining a
contract to protect a new intelligence station in Kabul in 2002.
Company employees who work on the Predator missions are trained by the
US Air Force at a base in Nevada.

The Defense Department and the CIA are not the only agencies working
with Blackwater in the Obama administration. Since the Obama took
office, the State Department has contracted out more than $174 million
in security work to the company in Iraq and Afghanistan, a recent
analysis by The Nation reveals.

In its most infamous episode, in September 2007 Blackwater agents
killed 17 unarmed Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square. The
agents, who investigators have determined were unprovoked, opened fire
with machine guns and rocket launchers without warning on motorists
and pedestrians, and continued to kill civilians as they attempted to
surrender and flee. Five Blackwater guards were ultimately indicted
for murder.

In a lawsuit initiated by survivors of Iraqis killed in the Nisour
Square massacre, two former Blackwater agents testified that
Blackwater owner Erik Prince “and his employees murdered, or had
murdered, one or more persons who have provided information, or who
were planning to provide information, to the federal authorities about
the ongoing criminal conduct” of the company.

A report issued by Giovanni Claudio Fava, the European Parliament’s
rapporteur on the CIA secret prisons and “extraordinary renditions”,
concluded that Blackwater subsidiaries played a critical role in
conducting the extraordinary rendition program that abducted “terror
suspects” and shipped them via secret flights to a global network of
detention and torture centers.

Despite Blackwater’s association with extraordinary rendition and the
killing of innocent civilians, Obama has retained its services, a
decision doubtlessly based in part on Blackwater’s ties to powerful
elements within the military-intelligence apparatus.

“Over the years, Blackwater has hired several former top CIA
officials,” the Times notes. Among these is Cofer Black. Black, who
headed the CIA’s counter-terrorism center from 1999, two years before
9/11, until 2004, was one of the architects of the CIA’s extraordinary
rendition program. He left the agency to become vice president of
Blackwater in 2005.

The same year, the CIA’s asociate deputy director of operations, Rob
Richer, resigned from the agency to become Blackwater’s vice president
of intelligence.

Commenting on the propensity for CIA personnel to go to work for
Blackwater, former CIA director Porter J. Goss (2004-2006) explained
that “there are some folks at retirement age who still feel like they
have some horsepower left, so they go off into a consulting business
and make themselves available.”

Another possible explanation is that the agency encouraged key
personnel to join the firm as part of an effort to “outsource”
criminal activity, including assassinations, to a private company
unaccountable to the Congress or the American people.

Leading figures of Blackwater are also tied to the Republican Party as
well as far-right and fascistic organizations. Prince has given
liberally to Republican candidates and right-wing causes. His father
co-founded with Gary Bauer the right wing, Christian fundamentalist
Family Research Council.

Leon Panetta claims that he only learned of the secret assassination
program involving Blackwater six months after he was appointed by
Obama to head the CIA. And Congress had been kept in the dark on the
program for seven years prior to Panetta’s secret Congressional
testimony. Evidently, the program was kept secret at the behest of
Vice President Dick Cheney. After Panetta’s testimony, members of
Congress kept the information on Blackwater’s role secret from the
public until the Times report surfaced Thursday.

Leading members of Congress continue to deny the public information on
the CIA-Blackwater assassination program, including Senator Diane
Feinstein, of California, the Democrat who chairs the Senate
Intelligence Committee. Feinstein has refused to comment on the
explosive revelations, beyond issuing a generic statement on outsourcing.

“It is too easy to contract out work that you don’t want to accept
responsibility for,” Feinstein said. “I have believed for a long time
that the Intelligence Community is over-reliant on contractors to
carry out its work. This is especially a problem when contractors are
used to carry out activities that are inherently governmental.”

In other words, Congressional Democrats are not opposed to the
assassination program per se; they merely prefer that it be carried
out by CIA employees rather than private contractors.

The CIA is legally barred from carrying out assassinations by an
executive order issued by President Gerald Ford in 1976, after the
agency’s numerous assassinations and attempted killings in previous
decades earned it the epithet of “Murder Inc.” the world over.

Panetta has sought to cover for the CIA. He reputedly told
Intelligence Committee members that he brought the matter to their
attention not because he thought it was illegal, but because the
program had moved beyond a planning stage and now required legislative
review, even though he intended to cancel the program. But officials
inside or close to the agency say that Cheney offered a different
rationale for keeping it secret. Cheney claimed that Congress had
already given the CIA authority to assassinate Al Qaeda leaders.

The notion that the program remained in the planning stages has been
dismissed by anonymous sources close to the CIA. “It’s wrong to think
this counterterrorism program was confined to briefing slides or
doodles on a cafeteria napkin,” one anonymous official told the
Washington Post. “It went well beyond that.”

This has not stopped the media from repeatedly assuring the public
that the assassination program “did not successfully capture or kill
any terrorist suspects,” as the Post put it. The basis for this bald
assertion is evidently the CIA’s own account of Blackwater’s activities.

As is well known, Blackwater killed with impunity in Iraq. There is no
reason to believe that it failed to use the carte blanche provided by
the CIA’s assassination program to carry out similar murders elsewhere.

The recent revelations notwithstanding, the full extent of
Blackwater’s activities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the secret
flights and torture chambers of the “extraordinary rendition” program
remains hidden.

On Monday, declassified sections of an internal CIA report issued in
2004, which reputedly criticized the use of torture at secret prisons,
are expected to be released.

The military-intelligence apparatus is digging in its heals against
any investigation or hearings, even of a symbolic character, into its
illegal activities, with Goss recently warning of “a hurricane coming
through Washington that is aimed right at the intelligence community,”
and another former Bush CIA Director, Michael Hayden, openly defending
Blackwater.

Goss and Hayden know that at every juncture, the Obama administration
has quickly capitulated to such pressure, and that it is determined to
cover up the illegal methods of its predecessor as it continues the
“war on terror.” In recent months, Obama has promised that there will
be no investigations into the abundant evidence that top Bush
officials ordered and even oversaw torture, and has moved to suppress
the release of photos documenting US intelligence agents and military
personnel brutalizing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The author also recommends:

America’s Death Squads Inc.
[21 August 2009]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/blac-a22.shtml

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