Mercenaries and assassins: The real face of Obama ’s “good war”

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Mercenaries and assassins: The real face of Obama’s “good war”
By Bill Van Auken
12 December 2009

Reports that mercenaries employed by the notorious Blackwater-Xe
military contracting firm participated in CIA assassinations in Iraq
and Afghanistan have further exposed the real character of so-called
“good war” that is being escalated by the Obama administration.

Citing former employees of the firm and US intelligence agents, the
New York Times reported Friday that Blackwater gunmen, ostensibly
contracted as security guards, “participated in some of the CIA’s most
sensitive activities—clandestine raids with agency officers against
people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the
transporting of detainees.”

These “snatch and grab” operations—many of them involving killings of
individuals suspected of participating in the resistance to US
occupation—“occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of
the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater employees
playing central roles,” the Times reports.

Both the Times and the Washington Post quoted unnamed intelligence
officials and ex-Blackwater operatives as asserting that the
involvement of the company’s mercenaries in assassinations and
abductions was not planned. Rather, they claimed, it was a matter of
the division of labor between CIA operatives and private guards
supposedly hired for the purpose of protecting them becoming “blurred.”

According to the Times, the Blackwater guards “were supposed to only
provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to CIA officers
and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected
insurgents.” The newspaper added, “But in the chaos of operations, the
roles of Blackwater, CIA and military personnel sometimes merged.”

The pretense that armed Blackwater contractors, most of them former US
Special Operations troops themselves, would be used merely as security
guards for CIA personnel is absurd on its face. Whatever justification
was given for the contract, the “skill set” that Blackwater offered
was precisely that of highly trained assassins.

A spokesman for Blackwater-Xe responded to the press reports by
insisting that there was never any contract for the firm to
participate in raids with CIA or Special Forces troops “in Iraq,
Afghanistan or anywhere else.” He added: “Any allegation to the
contrary by any news organization would be false.”

The absence of a contract spelling out Blackwater’s role in
assassination missions is hardly surprising, given that the mercenary
outfit’s chief attraction for the CIA is precisely its ability to act
without regard to any government oversight or regard for civil or
military law. As the Post put it, citing a retired intelligence
officer, “For government employees, working with contractors offered
ways to circumvent red tape.”

Blackwater’s role as an extra-legal extension of the Central
Intelligence Agency tasked with dirty operations with which the CIA
did not want its employees directly associated is more than evident.

An article published in the current (January) edition of Vanity Fair,
written by Adam Ciralsky, a former CIA attorney, cites intelligence
sources in reporting that Eric Prince, the multi-millionaire
Republican founder-owner of Blackwater, was not merely a private
contractor, but a “full-blown asset” recruited by the agency precisely
for such operations.

The central role played by Blackwater in the CIA’s activities became
increasingly clear as key agency officials left the CIA and took up
positions in Blackwater’s management. These included J. Cofer Black,
the former head of the agency’s Counter Terrorism Center, Enrique
Prado, the center’s former chief of operations, and Rob Richer,
formerly the second-in-command of the CIA’s clandestine service.

In Iraq, Blackwater’s employees acted with complete impunity, killing
large numbers of civilians without being held to account by either the
Iraqi regime or US military commanders. The scope of this violence
came to public attention in September 2007, when a convoy of
Blackwater operatives stopped in Baghdad’s Nisour Square and without
provocation opened fire on unarmed civilians, killing 17 Iraqis.

Six of the Blackwater mercenaries have been charged by federal
prosecutors with voluntary manslaughter over the killings. One of them
has pled guilty and is expected to testify against the others in a
trial starting in February.

Meanwhile, the company is being sued in separate civil cases brought
on behalf of 70 Iraqis over killings by the firm’s employees in Iraq.
Two ex-employees of Blackwater have filed affidavits in these cases
charging that company head Prince may have either murdered or ordered
the murders of individuals cooperating with the Justice Department’s
investigation of the firm.

Friday’s report in the Times follows a series of revelations that have
surfaced since last June, when CIA Director Leon Panetta briefed
Congressional intelligence committees about a covert assassination
program involving Blackwater, which he claimed to have only just
discovered and terminated. Panetta asserted that the program had never
been implemented. Until then, it had been kept secret from Congress,
reportedly on the orders of former vice president Dick Cheney.

It was subsequently revealed that employees of Blackwater, since
renamed Xe Services in an attempt to shed the firm’s infamous
reputation, were actively involved in an ongoing assassination program
on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, carried out by means of Predator
drones. The Blackwater mercenaries were assembling and loading the 500
pound bombs and Hellfire missiles used to carry out so-called
“targeted killings,” which have taken the lives of hundreds of
civilians. In addition, they provided security for the drone bases and
according to some reports, participated in intelligence operations
that determined the targets for the attacks.

There have been at least 65 such aerial assassination strikes in
Pakistan since August 2008, with a reported death toll of over 625
people. Some estimates put the number killed at over 1,000, many of
them women and children. Most of these attacks have taken place since
the Obama administration took office.

In addition to the more than 30,000 additional US troops being sent
into Afghanistan, Obama has authorized the CIA to dramatically
escalate the drone attacks. US officials have also warned the
Pakistani government that these attacks are to be extended beyond the
tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan into Baluchistan, and
potentially against the crowded city of Quetta, where Afghan Taliban
leaders have reportedly taken refuge.

It is far from clear, based on the Times report, to what extent
Blackwater’s role in targeted assassinations, both from the air and on
the ground, is continuing. Since 2001, the firm has netted over $1.5
billion in government contracts, providing armed mercenaries for the
CIA, the State Department and the Pentagon.

One thing is certain, assassinations of the kind involving Blackwater
mercenaries are going to be carried out on a far greater scale as part
of Obama’s escalation of the US war in Afghanistan.

These plans were hinted at by Central Command chief Gen. David
Petraeus during his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee on Wednesday. “There’s no question you’ve got to kill or
capture those bad guys that are not reconcilable,” Petraeus told the
senators. “And we are intending to do that.”

The general continued, “In fact, we actually will be increasing our
counterterrorist component of the overall strategy.” He said that
additional “national mission force elements” will be arriving in
Afghanistan by next spring.

The “elements” cited by Petraeus include Special Operations units like
the Army’s classified Delta Force, as well as CIA hit squads and, in
all probability, mercenary forces like those fielded by Blackwater.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, tapped by Obama to direct the Afghan war, was
previously the head of the super-secret Joint Special Operations
Command, which consists of such special forces troops and
assassination squads. Petraeus said that McChrystal could brief
members of the Senate committee on this element of the Obama surge in
a closed session.

It is noteworthy that the controversy in the major media is centered
on whether the use of Blackwater mercenaries to hunt down and murder
individuals suspected of opposing the US occupations in Iraq and
Afghanistan represented an illegitimate use of private contractors in
carrying out a core government function.

The murders themselves are not an issue. In 1976, President Gerald
Ford issued an executive order barring the CIA from directly carrying
out assassinations or contracting them out to others. The decision
followed a wave of public outrage over a series of revelations of CIA
assassination plots around the globe that earned the agency the
epithet “Murder, Inc.”

In 2001, President George W. Bush overturned Ford’s ruling, issuing
his own intelligence finding that such restrictions no longer applied
in the “global war on terrorism.” The Democrats offered no objections,
and the media has treated it entirely as a matter of course, while
blacking out any serious reporting on the resulting carnage and victims.

As with every other essential question, President Barack Obama has
adopted Bush’s policy. “Targeted assassinations,” extraordinary
rendition, the use of mercenaries, all of the sordid crimes carried
out under the Bush administration continue. These brutal methods are
about to be unleashed with redoubled force against the peoples of
Afghanistan and Pakistan as Obama oversees new war crimes.

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/blac-d12.shtml

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