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Can legislators deny the fraudulent electoral votes ?
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 Erik PrinceDespicable fellow. With tentacles that reach deep into the swamp. Along with his idiot sister. |
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DM The Blackwater commander, Jimmy Watson, had received an order to stand by and not leave the Green Zone upon reaching a checkpoint, but he made a "tactical decision" to advance to Nisour Square after waiting for a few minutes; upon informing the Blackwater Tactial Operations Center, he was ordered to return to the Green Zone. However, after "Raven 23" entered Nisour Square, Watson was ordered to "lock down the traffic circle to expedite the travel of [the other Blackwater team]". Shortly after assuming their positions, "Raven 23" began firing on civilians in response to an approaching car, killing fourteen and wounding twenty more. |
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Erik Prince When Erik Prince arrived at the Four Seasons resort in the Seychelles in January 2017 for his now-famous meetings with a Russian banker and UAE ruler Mohammed bin Zayed, he was in the middle of an unexpected comeback. The election of Donald Trump had given the disgraced Blackwater founder a new opportunity to prove himself. After years of trying and failing to peddle a sweeping vision of mercenary warfare around the world, Erik Prince was back in the game. Bin Zayed had convened a group of close family members and advisers at the luxurious Indian Ocean resort for a grand strategy session in anticipation of the new American administration. On the agenda were discussions of new approaches for dealing with the civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Libya, the threat of the Islamic State, and the United Arab Emirates’ longstanding rivalry with Iran. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE had used its oil wealth to become one of the world’s largest arms purchasers and the third largest importer of U.S. weapons. A new American president meant new opportunities for the tiny Gulf nation to exert its outsized military and economic influence in the Gulf region and beyond. Prince was no stranger to the Emiratis. He had known bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, since 2009, when he sold the sheikh on creating an elite counterterrorism unit. That deal ended badly for Prince, but Trump’s election had recalibrated his usefulness. As a prominent Trump supporter and close associate of Steve Bannon, not to mention the brother of incoming cabinet member Betsy DeVos, Prince was invited to the meeting as an unofficial adviser to the incoming administration. Prince’s meeting with a Putin intimate shortly before Trump’s inauguration has drawn intense interest from Congress, the Mueller investigation, and the press. When Prince joined the Emirati royals and other government officials on a deck overlooking the Indian Ocean, bin Zayed made it clear to everyone there that “Erik was his guy,” said a source close to the Emirati rulers, who was briefed by some of those in attendance. Prince, in bin Zayed’s view, had built and established an elite ground force that bin Zayed had deployed to wars in Syria and Yemen, the first foreign conflicts in his young country’s history. It was because of Prince, bin Zayed said, that the Emiratis had no terrorists in their country. Prince had solved their problem with Somali pirates. “He let his court know that they owed Erik a favor,” the source said. Part of that favor apparently involved facilitating an introduction to Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of an $8 billion Russian sovereign wealth fund and a close associate of President Vladimir Putin. Prince repeatedly and under oath in testimony to Congress denied that his meeting with Dmitriev had anything to do with the Trump administration, describing it as no more than a chance encounter over a beer. “We were talking about the endless war and carnage in Iraq and Syria,” Prince told the House Intelligence Committee. “If Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin after the Ukraine terror famine, after killing tens of millions of his own citizens, we can certainly at least cooperate with the Russians in a productive way to defeat the Islamic State.” Although the UAE has been a very good customer of U.S. arms dealers, bin Zayed had grown frustrated with the Obama administration’s refusal to work with Russia to end the war in Syria. Russia was actively courting the UAE, and from bin Zayed’s perspective Russia was a key player that couldn’t be ignored, according to a current and a former U.S. intelligence official. Trump’s public infatuation with Putin and his apparent eagerness to improve relations with Russia gave the UAE a chance to play dealmaker and diminish Iran’s position in the Middle East, starting with the war in Syria. Prince’s 30-minute meeting with a Putin intimate shortly before Trump’s inauguration has drawn intense interest from Congress, the Mueller investigation, and the press. The Mueller report established that the meeting was a pre-arranged attempt to establish a backchannel between Russia and the incoming Trump administration and has led House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for perjury. Yet the focus on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election has deflected scrutiny from what the meeting reveals about Prince’s unique role in the world of covert services. Blackwater made Prince an infamous symbol of U.S. foreign policy hubris, but America’s most famous mercenary has moved on. Although he continues to dream of deploying his military services in the world’s failed states, and persists in hawking a crackpot scheme of privatizing the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Prince has diversified his portfolio. No longer satisfied with contracting out former special forces operators to the State Department and Pentagon, Prince is now attempting to offer an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cellphone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen of Prince’s former colleagues and peers, as well as court records, emails, and internal documents provided to The Intercept. An examination of Prince’s time working with the UAE in particular reveals suspicious financial transactions at a moment when his personal finances were under stress and his mercenary ventures were failing. The picture that emerges is one of a man desperately trying to avoid U.S. tax and weapons trafficking laws even as he offers military services, without a license, in no fewer than 15 countries around the world. Prince’s former and current associates describe him as a visionary, a brilliant salesman with remarkable insight into the future of warfare, who is nonetheless so shady and incompetent that he fails at almost every enterprise he attempts. And yet he endures. Prince is thus, in many ways, an emblematic figure for the Trump era. Suitcases Full of Cash Prince’s partnership with bin Zayed got underway, fittingly, with a slapstick moment in early 2010, when two of Prince’s men, a veteran of the Canadian special forces and a Lebanese fixer, were ordered by Emirati security officials to meet at an Abu Dhabi intersection. There, a few government employees helped Prince’s men load the trunk of a Chevy Impala with more than half a dozen carry-on suitcases, most worn and with busted wheels. The two drove back to their hotel, Le Méridian, where they unloaded the bags, returned to their room, and summoned their immediate supervisor, a former Navy SEAL who had known Prince in the military, telling the American that they had a problem. Their new company, Reflex Responses, often called R2 for short, was so new it didn’t yet have a bank account or even an office with a safe. When the former SEAL entered their hotel room, the contents of the suitcases had been largely removed, much of it dumped onto a bed: bricks of new, sequential $100 bills, in $10,000 stacks, each bound by a green and white band. The three men counted each stack, measuring the height to be sure that they all had 100 $100 bills, until they tallied it all: roughly $13 million. For the first two weeks of the program, the hotel room, always occupied by a security guard or a company employee, served as the Reflex Responses vault. Hotel staff were not allowed to clean the room, and by the time R2 opened a bank account and deposited the money, the room was covered in empty whiskey bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. Prince had arrived in the UAE at a low moment. The Obama administration had made clear in its first months that it would not welcome new Blackwater contracts. The company had become infamous after Blackwater security contractors shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded dozens more in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. By 2010, Prince had changed Blackwater’s name and sold the company, ceasing to work on any U.S. government contracts. As Prince negotiated a settlement with the Justice Department for a series of Blackwater arms trafficking violations, then-CIA Director Leon Panetta discovered a secret assassination program involving Blackwater operatives that former Vice President Dick Cheney had hidden from Congress. Prince was bitter, blaming the Obama administration for leaking his CIA role and comparing himself to exposed CIA operative Valerie Plame. Prince couldn’t understand why the American public viewed him as a villain. “He was genuinely upset,” said a former colleague who discussed the public scrutiny of Blackwater. “He kept asking, ‘Why do they hate me?’” A converted Catholic raised by Christian fundamentalists and the scion of a Midwestern auto-parts fortune would seem to be an unlikely ally to the Muslim crown prince of a tiny, oil-rich Arab kingdom, but from their first meeting in 2009, Prince and bin Zayed hit it off. Almost immediately it was clear they shared common enemies: Islamic militants and, especially, Iran. Prince was introduced to bin Zayed after pitching a two-page schematic of a light attack airplane — an agricultural crop duster modified with surveillance and laser-guided munitions — to the Emirati government as the Blackwater sale to a private equity group was being negotiated. When the Emirati ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, learned that Prince’s legal problems with the Justice Department would mean that he wouldn’t be able to be involved in building, selling, or brokering armed aircraft, the Emirati government approached another aviation manufacturer to help establish an entire air wing of armored and weaponized crop dusters. In exchange for Prince bowing out of the deal quietly, Otaiba introduced him to bin Zayed explicitly in order to find another role in which he could assist the UAE government. Bin Zayed was determined to bolster the UAE’s sphere of influence and project power in the Middle East. Despite Prince’s tarnished reputation, bin Zayed saw in him a glimpse of the future. It didn’t hurt that “Erik could sell you your own hat,” according to one former associate. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier. Prince sold bin Zayed on the idea of creating a half-billion-dollar program in which he would train, equip, and lead an elite cadre of foreign soldiers called the Security Support Group that would serve as a presidential guard for the Emirati monarchies and help quell any internal unrest. Bin Zayed insisted that Prince use non-Muslim ex-soldiers, according to two senior advisers who helped build the unit, telling him that he did not believe Muslim soldiers could be trusted to kill other Muslims. Eventually, Prince also sold bin Zayed on the creation of an armed aviation wing, a team to protect the Emirates from a weapons of mass destruction attack, and a separate force to combat Somali piracy. One indication of both Prince and R2’s growing value to bin Zayed was that Prince became a favored foreign policy and military adviser, joining bin Zayed’s inner sanctum. Prince told his colleagues at R2 that bin Zayed, whom Prince often referred to as “the boss,” gave him ownership of two side-by-side villas in Abu Dhabi, which were originally worth $10 million each. The wealthy enclave was built as a luxury community, each villa with a private beach, and quickly housed several foreign embassies. Prince’s neighboring houses sat at the end of a residential peninsula and had expansive views of central Abu Dhabi across a sea channel, a pool, and beachfront in the Persian Gulf. Prince built a dock for his sailboat, which has a Blackwater logo across the port side. Despite Prince’s tarnished reputation, bin Zayed saw in him a glimpse of the future. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier. The $13 million in the suitcases was an advance on $110 million the UAE gave Prince to get Reflex Responses off the ground. The deal gave Prince and his team a guaranteed 15 percent profit margin on whatever the company spent in addition to salaries. Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that. Structurally, Reflex Responses became a model for how Prince masks his involvement in selling or providing military services, which was a necessity given that he’s unlikely to obtain an arms trafficking license under the U.S. State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Officially, Prince was never an R2 employee. He officially worked for a company called Assurance Management Consultants, which shared a floor in an Abu Dhabi office tower with Reflex, where he oversaw the entire military program. It was Prince who hired and installed Reflex’s senior management, according to people directly involved in the effort. And it was Prince who recruited and hired the subcontractors who fulfilled Reflex’s contractual requirements. Prince flew to South America, where he helped oversee the recruitment of former Colombian soldiers who served as both hired guns and a training cadre for the fledgling Emirati security force. Prince’s approach to management created problems almost immediately, issues that would arise again and again in his various projects. In what would become a pattern, Prince’s American colleagues at Reflex were troubled by his directives about ITAR regulations. Prince argued to his lawyers that because Reflex was an Emirati company, working on an Emirati government contract, he was not required to have an ITAR license from the State Department to sell military services. “We’d tell him, ‘No, that’s not how it works. You’re an American,’” said one of Prince’s former colleagues involved in Reflex Responses. “It was stupid, honestly. There was a way to do it legally and make lots of money, but Erik didn’t care. When Erik wakes up in the morning, Erik does whatever he feels like doing. I always assumed that’s how it is when your father is a billionaire.” In response to a request for comment, a Prince spokesperson stated: “Mr. Prince at all times relied upon the advice of counsel, including both in-house compliance counsel and outside experts, to ensure compliance with ITAR and other laws.” Prince also hid his financial interest in subcontractors working with R2. Six months into the project, senior executives discovered that Prince had an arrangement with Thor Global, the company that he’d insisted Reflex use to hire the Colombian soldiers. On paper, Thor Global was wholly owned by Robert Owens, a former aide to Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair, but Prince received a substantial amount of the money R2 paid Thor Global, according to court documents and two former Prince colleagues familiar with the arrangement. “I asked Erik if the crown prince knew he was self-dealing,” said one of the former colleagues. “Erik wouldn’t answer.” Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that. Owens’s involvement and connection to North is not incidental. Prince and North are friends, and Prince has told others over the years that he greatly admires the former Marine officer and Reagan National Security Council staffer, who was convicted on three felony counts during the Iran-Contra scandal. (The convictions were reversed in 1991.) A former colleague said it took him some time to recognize that Prince generally works to control the entire supply chain of any mercenary or security contract. “Everything he does, he skims,” said the former colleague, who has known Prince for two decades and described how Prince generally operates as a military services provider. “He will run a contract through two companies and then dictate that those two companies have to subcontract out to another eight companies. What he doesn’t disclose is that he owns all or part of those eight companies and will take 25 percent from each company. Then, he can use those same eight entities to make the money disappear.” After Prince’s first team of U.S. executives quit, he brought in another former SEAL and a former CIA officer. That team conducted audits and quickly discovered financial problems. “There was massive embezzlement going on inside R2,” said a third former employee with direct knowledge of the company’s finances. “Overbilling, false billing, missing cash — millions were gone.” According to four former Reflex employees and consultants, the alleged graft and embezzlement ran through two of Prince’s lieutenants, who handled logistics and administration for R2. The first was a former Blackwater employee who told colleagues at Reflex that he’d done intelligence work in the Middle East for the Pentagon’s intelligence agency. Internal R2 documents list him as the first employee of the company. Several of Prince’s colleagues confronted him about the missing money and his lieutenants’ conduct, but Prince rebuffed any effort to remove them. Contacted by The Intercept for comment, Prince’s lieutenant denied that he had ever embezzled or stolen money and denied ever working for R2. He said that he had worked for Assurance Management and occasionally “consulted” for R2. Prince did not respond on the record to questions about the financial improprieties. Read more of the sordid details (there are plenty)!here: theintercept.com |
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Believing Lies <<A significant number of Americans currently believe the 2020 election was stolen, even though it wasn’t. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last week showed 52 percent of Republicans believe President Trump “rightfully won” the election. But the only “evidence” of election fraud has been widely debunked.>> What is it about the Republican mind that renders it so gullible to lies? Do Republicans TRULY believe Trump's lies, or are they just claiming to swallow the lies to score some political point? If they are lying about believing the lies, this makes them liars rather than just plain gullible. Curious. |
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Wholesale Slaughter It was the photographs he took of himself with the decapitated corpse that got him in trouble. War trophies are also against the Geneva Conventions--documents Bush found incomprehensibly vague (prisoners of war? What do you mean we cannot torture them? Well, wiring up genitals of hooded "detainees" forced to stand on boxes in pools of water can't constitute torture, right?) Trump has far less respect for international law than Bush did. America first, last, and only. You foreign scumbags can all go hang. If you don't like what we do, to hades with you! We'll just use you for target practice, and pardon ourselves afterwards. Pardons for everyone! |
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Thumper You’re justifying the massacre of 17 civilians? 20 more injured and and who even knows how many traumatized. And unless one has been in battle, one has no right to condemn said massacre??? Wow. |
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thump Excellent logic, Thump, and there's something there that might be mind reading, It's your usual stuff about your ideals and confirmation that you consider almost everybody to be small and incapable because they don't carry a pick, shovel and fire hose to work or love the feel of a loaded Glock caressing their crotch.. |
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Thumper |
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Mercenary types |
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zorroloco 30-Dec-20, 13:49 |
Deleted by zorroloco on 30-Dec-20, 13:51.
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Thumper For a reason most likely. They’ve moved on from defending their country to being paid killers. It takes a different mind set, don’t you agree, to do for money what had been done out of patriotism. Makes one wonder if the thrill of carrying a firearm and killing might be the motivation rather than either patriotism or lucre. |
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And occasionally murder children. |
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Thumper 13:31 And the vast majority of former marines, sailors, pilots and soldiers do NOT sign up to become mercenaries. Only those who don't mind who they kill or what the reason might be, so long as they get the power-buzz of slaughtering people. |
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Soldier of Fortune But the real beauty is not being answerable to anyone. Kill, maim, torture--all perfectly legal, without fear of overstepping UCMJ boundaries. That's how our boys (and girls) got in trouble, taking cues from the private contractors. |
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I've spent years working closely with such men. I know their motivation and their hearts. From what I've seen of you people, you aren't worthy to wash their feet even as you try to sit in judgement. The men of Benghazi are/were such men. “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” |
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Thumper 18:26 Once again, Thumper, you twist my words to make them into the exact opposite of what I said. To assist your recollection, I copy my words... "And the vast majority of former marines, sailors, pilots and soldiers do NOT sign up to become mercenaries. Only those who don't mind who they kill or what the reason might be, so long as they get the power-buzz of slaughtering people." The emphasis in the original was on the word 'NOT', just in case you might miss it, but it seems that didn't help. I wish you would show me enough respect to not attribute to me words that mean the opposite of what I actually say. Allow me to show you how it is done. First, you copy and paste the EXACT words to which you are responding. Then you respond to those words, not to something you have imagined. A worked example... <I've spent years working closely with such men. I know their motivation and their hearts.> I know you have worked with MANY such men, and I don't doubt for a moment that the vast majority of them are disciplined, honourable and courageous men. That is why I said (another cut-and-paste quote coming up to ensure I am not misleading. Get the idea?) "The vast majority of former marines, sailors, pilots and soldiers do NOT sign up to become mercenaries." Yes, I said that! But are you trying to tell me that ALL such special forces men are as honourable as yourself? That NONE of them would ever kill without pressing necessity? You might want to look at a few specific case studies before you answer that. Some have even done it under the UMCJ, and you would tell me this rare few would be totally disciplined when released from that Code? Maybe you might tell me that, but the courts decided that in this specific case, with all the evidence in front of it, these men were murderers. Do I believe you, who have never met these guys, or do I believe the court? |
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Bob Thumper, let me clarify. I believe the vast majority of soldiers are there for the right reasons. But there are always a few bad eggs, as I’m sure you’re aware. Soldiers who leave the military and become mercenaries are clearly not representative of soldiers. I would guess its a higher percentage of bad eggs. Not many. But enough that when 37 civilians get shot, saying ‘most of these guys are great people’ isn’t sufficient. Do you have evidence the courts didn’t? For the record, yes. I’ve know quite a few combat vets, including a Vietnam Green Beret who was my boss/mentor for 3 years when i was 19-22 |
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Is Democrat POTUS Truman, a war hero or criminaL ? Majority of the Americans at that time believed that he was a military genius and war hero. The end justifies the means, IMHO. |
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stalhandske 30-Dec-20, 20:52 |
ACE |
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dmaestro 30-Dec-20, 21:37 |
Thumper |
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stalhandske 30-Dec-20, 21:46 |
dmaestro I am by no means certain, but I somehow recall of international agreements on warfare that for "civilians" to participate in war operations, i.e. people without "uniform" or other signs of belonging to the military, is illegal. Such individuals can be shot without further notice. In my opinion outsourcing military activity against another nation is criminal. |
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Ace 20:38 Majority of the Americans at that time believed that he was a military genius and war hero. The end justifies the means, IMHO.> This post mystifies me. What does Harry Truman have to do with anything previously mentioned in this thread? Perhaps yo could enlighten me in your response. But to address your question, whether or not ANYONE is a war hero or a criminal after WW2 depended entirely on which side he was on. For example, 1. Doenitz was tried and convicted as a war criminal for flouting the 'Cruiser Rules' in the Submarine war. Even though merchant ships were under orders to report any submarine sightings or contacts, which made them reconnaissance vessels, not genuine non-combatants, so Doenitz was quite within his rights on that count. Meanwhile, Soviet submarines that torpedoed German Red Cross evacuation ships were not even charged. 2. In 1940, there was talk of the London Blitz being considered a war crime. That talk rapidly faded after the Bomber Offensive in 1943-1945 slaughtered more German citizens each week than English who died in the entire Blitz. 'Bomber' Harris is on record as saying that if Germany had won the war, he would have been considered a war criminal for the Hamburg and Dresden raids, if not others as well. Curtis leMay is also known to have said the same about his own bombing of Japan. 3. I don't know too many who would consider Truman a 'war hero'. He did what had to be done, that's all. 4. It's by no means undisputed that the two bombs ended the war. Records of the Japanese Government show that they considered these to be the equivalent of the 'thousand bomber raids' over Germany; very damaging, but nothing more than could have been done conventionally. What really grabbed Japanese attention was the Soviet campaign in Manchuria, which began on August 9 and stunned the Japs for it's overwhelming strength, effectiveness and rate of advance. But Americans prefer to think the Soviets had no part in defeating Japan, and pretend it was an entirely American effort. |
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Yes. I quake in my boots in fear of the little nine year old boy mercenaries courageously shot through the back of his head, and the other thirteen peaceful, unarmed citizens slain that day in the Blackwater massacre. Almost as glorious as the hundreds of women and children slain by US Cavalry at Wounded Knee. So very brave. |
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Thumper 23:31 I wouldn't mock Churchill. I would pour contempt over him! He was the genius who sent four 'Queen Elizabeth'-class battleships up the Dardanelles a couple of months before landing Australian troops in Gallipoli. What's Turkish for 'Thanks for the warning, Winnie!' Australians have every reason to hiss and spit whenever his name is spoken. And not just Australians. Guess who told the Lusitania to sail at quarter-speed, supposedly to save coal? And hard up against the Irish coast, where they couldn't turn away if a torpedo track was seen? All this after he had been warned that German U-boats had been sighted in the area? Yes, Americans have every reason to curse him too! |
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stalhandske 31-Dec-20, 01:11 |
bob and thumper |
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i agree with stalh |
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