[NYTr] Bush Regime's Ties to Blackwater - Full Salon story

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Dave Muller (southnews) 
who has the patience to slog thru Salon's shitty web design

Salon - Oct 2, 2007
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/print.html

The Bush administration's ties to Blackwater

Blamed in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the private security firm has 
long ties to the White House and prominent Republicans, including Ken
Starr.

By Ben Van Heuvelen

Oct. 02, 2007 | When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State 
Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on 
September 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial 
shooting incidents associated with the private security firm.
Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since 2005,
the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in
Iraq, has reported 195 "escalation of force incidents"; in 156 of those
cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times,
Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms
protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in
shooting incidents.

On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House 
Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will be holding a hearing on 
the U.S. military's use of private contractors. When Waxman announced 
plans for the hearing last week, the State Department directed 
Blackwater not to give any information or testimony without its 
sign-off. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater CEO
and founder Erik Prince is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

But the attempt to shield Prince was apparently not the first time
State had protected Blackwater. A report issued by Waxman on Monday
alleges that State helped Blackwater cover up Iraqi fatalities. In
December 2006, State arranged for the company to pay $15,000 to the
family of an Iraqi guard who was shot and killed by a drunken
Blackwater employee. In another shooting death, the payment was $5,000.
As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also allowed a Blackwater
employee to write State's initial "spot report" on the September 16
shooting incident -- a report that did not mention civilian casualties
and claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a
convoy.

The ties between State and Blackwater are only part of a web of 
relationships that Blackwater has maintained with the Bush 
administration and with prominent Republicans. From 2001 to 2007, the 
firm has increased its annual federal contracts from less than $1 
million to more than $1 billion, all while employees passed through a 
turnstile between Blackwater and the administration, several leaving 
important posts in the Pentagon and the CIA to take jobs at the
security company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater's luminaries
with their professional -- and political -- resumes.

Erik Prince, founder and CEO: How did Blackwater go from a small 
corporation training local SWAT teams to a seemingly inseparable part
of U.S. operations in Iraq? Good timing, and the connections of its
CEO, may be the answer.

Prince, who founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a 
behind-the-scenes role in the company until after 9/11, has connections 
to the Republican Party in his blood. His late father, auto-parts 
magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in the creation of the Family 
Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian groups most 
influential with the George W. Bush administration. At his funeral in 
1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian conservative 
movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince's widow Elsa, who 
remarried after her husband's death, has served on the boards of the
FRC and another influential Christian right organization, Dobson's
Focus on the Family. She currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince
Foundation, where, according to IRS filings, her son Erik is a
vice-president. The foundation has given lavishly to some of the
marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July 2006,
the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to Focus
on the Family.

Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for National 
Policy, the secretive Christian conservative organization whose
meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul
Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph
Reed and Dobson. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave the CNP
$80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006.

The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister -- 
married into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to 
Republican and conservative causes. ("I know a little something about 
soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft
money to the national Republican party," Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997
op-ed in Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan
Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her
husband Dick ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in
2006.

Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans 
and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his 
first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican 
candidates and political action committees. Through his Freiheit 
Foundation, he also gave $500,000 to Prison Fellowship Ministries, run 
by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in 2000. In the same year, he 
contributed $30,000 to the American Entreprise Institute, a
conservative think tank. During college, he interned in George H.W.
Bush's White House, and he also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher
(R-Calif.). Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Congressman
John Doolittle have visited Blackwater's Moyock, N.C. compound, on a
trip arranged by the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm founded
by former aides of then-House Majority Leader Tom Delay. ASG partner
Paul Behrends is a long-time associate of Prince.

Prince's connections seem to have paid off for Blackwater. Robert Young 
Pelton, author of "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," 
has reported that one of Blackwater's earliest contracts in the
national arena was a no-bid $5.4 million deal to provide security
guards in Afghanistan that came after Prince made a call to then CIA
executive director Buzzy Krongard. Harper's Magazine's Ken Silverstein
has also reported that Prince has a security pass for CIA headquarters
and "meets with senior people" inside the CIA. But Prince's most
important benefactor was fellow conservative Catholic convert L. Paul
Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American
occupation government in Iraq. Bremer. In August 2003, Blackwater won a
$27.7 million contract to provide personal security for Bremer. In
charge of the Blackwater team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who
had provided personal security for former secretary of state Henry
Kissinger when Bremer was managing director of Kissinger's consulting
firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s.

By 2005, Blackwater was earning $353 million annually from federal 
contracts. Blackwater's benefits from government largesse haven't ended 
at Iraq. The company was recently one of five awarded a Department of 
Defense counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth 
as much as $15 billion. Blackwater also became involved in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and profited handsomely. According to
Jeremy Scahill, the author of "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most 
Powerful Mercenary Army," Blackwater had made roughly $73 million for 
Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less than a year after
the hurricane hit.

Joseph Schmitz, Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel: In 2002, 
President Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon's 
military contracts as the Defense Department's Inspector General. 
Schmitz presided over the largest increase of military-contracting 
spending in history: as of 2005, 77 companies were awarded 149 "prime 
contracts" worth $42.1 billion, with hundreds of millions going to 
Blackwater. Unlike previous IGs, Schmitz reported directly to the 
Secretary of Defense -- a setup that both Democratic and Republican 
lawmakers objected to, given Schmitz's oversight responsibility.
Schmitz even carried Donald Rumsfeld's "twelve principles" for the
Pentagon in his lapel pocket. The first principle read, "Do nothing
that could raise questions about the credibility of DoD."

Schmitz has many ties to the Republican party establishment. His
father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican Congressman, and his
brother, Patrick Schmitz, served as George H.W. Bush's deputy counsel
from 1985 to 1993. Joseph himself worked as a special assistant to
Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese.

Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic 
and Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal 
investigations into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind 
eye to conflicts of interest and other failures of oversight. According 
to an October 2005 article in Time Magazine, Schmitz showed the White 
House the results of his staff's multi-year investigation into a 
contract in which the Air Force leased air-refueling tankers from
Boeing for more than it would have cost to buy them, then agreed to
redact the names of senior White House staffers involved in the
decision before sending the final report to Congress. Schmitz informed
his staff on August 26, 2005 that he was leaving the Pentagon; in
September of that year, he went to work for Blackwater.

J. Cofer Black, Vice Chairman: Black spent most of his 28-year CIA 
career running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations,
where he worked with Rob Richer (below). At the time of the 9/11
attacks, he was director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC).
There he was former CIA Director George Tenet's ace in the hole when it
came to convincing Bush the CIA should lead initial U.S. combat
operations in Afghanistan after 9/11. Black is, according to published
accounts, a man with a flair for the dramatic, the kind of briefer
President Bush likes. In one briefing, according to several reports,
Black told the president, "When we're through with [terrorists in
Afghanistan], they will have flies walking across their
eyeballs." (Black also ordered CIA field officer Gary Schroen to bring
back Osama bin Laden's head packed in dry ice so Black could show it to
Bush.) Black's Afghanistan presentation earned him "special access" to
the White House, the Washington Post's Dana Priest reported in December
2005.

Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush 
administration's interrogation and extraordinary rendition policies. In 
a famous moment, Black told Congress in 2002, "after 9/11, the gloves 
came off." And the group within the CIA responsible for extraordinary 
renditions -- operations in which covert agents grab terror suspects
and take them to secret prison facilities for interrogations that would 
normally be prohibited as torture -- fell under Black at the CTC,
Priest has reported.

Black later went to the State Department, where one of his roles was to 
begin coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. In 2003, 
the State Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic 
security teams.

In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part of 
what Harper's Magazine's Ken Silverstein termed a "revolving door to 
Blackwater" from the CIA. In addition to his work with Blackwater and 
his own company, Total Intelligence Solutions, Black also recently 
joined the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt 
Romney, where he serves the Republican hopeful as senior adviser for 
counterterrorism and national security.

Rob Richer, Vice President for Intelligence: Richer was head of the 
CIA's Near East division -- and the agency's liaison with King Abdullah 
of Jordan -- from 1999 to 2004. In 2003, he briefed President Bush on 
the nascent Iraqi insurgency. In late 2004, he became the associate 
deputy director in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, making him the 
second-ranking official for clandestine operations. He left the agency 
for Blackwater in the fall of 2005, effectively taking the agency's 
relationship with Abdullah with him. The CIA had invested millions of 
dollars in training Jordan's intelligence services. There was an
obvious quid pro quo: in exchange for the training, Jordan would share 
information. Jordan has now hired Blackwater's intelligence division -- 
headed by Richer -- to do its spy training instead. The CIA isn't
happy, writes Silverstein: "People [at the agency] are pissed off,"
says Silverstein's source. "Abdullah still speaks with Richer regularly
and he thinks that's the same thing as talking to us. He thinks Richer
is still the man."

Fred Fielding, former outside counsel: After four Blackwater employees 
were tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq in 2004, their families 
brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Blackwater, charging that the 
company had not provided adequate arms, armor, or backup. Blackwater 
feared that, if it were found liable for its employees' deaths, a 
floodgate of future litigation could be opened. To fight the suit, 
Blackwater hired Fielding, the consummate Republican insider. Dan 
Callahan, a lawyer representing the families, told Salon he was shocked 
when he learned Fielding would be representing the company. "How the 
hell," Callahan says he wondered at the time, "did I draw Fred Fielding 
on this case?"

Fielding has had a long career as a lawyer to prominent Republicans. 
 From 1970 to 1972, he was an associate White House counsel in the
Nixon administration; from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the
denouement of that administration as deputy White House counsel. Under
President Ronald Reagan, he served as White House Counsel from 1981 to
1986, where he was the boss of a young assistant counsel named John
Roberts, now the Chief Justice of the United States. After the 2000
election, he served the current administration as transition counsel,
and he also held a spot on the 9/11 Commission. In January of 2007,
Bush chose him as White House counsel.

Ken Starr, outside counsel: According to Dan Callahan, Fred Fielding 
represented Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months
beginning in February of 2005. After Fred Fielding left the case, the
law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home to Jack Abramoff and
worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount, represented
Blackwater till October 2006. Blackwater then hired another
high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials -- Ken
Starr, now the dean of Pepperdine Law School in California. Starr was
appointed to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan, was U.S. Solicitor
General under George H. W. Bush, and was on Bush's short list to
replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court. He is best known,
however, as the Independent Counsel who investigated Bill Clinton. He
revealed the intimate details of Clinton's affair with intern Monica
Lewinsky in the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton's
impeachment by Congress.

Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks 
jurisdiction in the contractor's lawsuit. On October 18, 2006, Starr 
petitioned Chief Justice John Roberts on behalf of Blackwater,
asserting that the company was "constitutionally immune" to the
lawsuit. "If companies such as Blackwater must factor the defense costs
of state tort lawsuits into [their] overall costs," argued Starr,
"Blackwater will suffer irreparable harm." Roberts denied the petition
on October 24. In December, Starr filed a motion to bring the matter
before the entire Supreme Court. The motion was denied in February.

[Additional reporting by Tracee Herbaugh]