Kiss a Prince and Love a Frog

I’ve been writing about Erik Prince, and the controversy surrounding his company and the way they hurt our war efforts in Iraq. I’ll leave the links here.

https://tiredmidnightblogger.com/2023/02/18/some-day-your-prince-will-come/

https://tiredmidnightblogger.com/2023/02/20/the-sound-of-doves-crying-is-the-sound-of-money-for-elites/

https://tiredmidnightblogger.com/2023/02/24/all-quiet-on-the-blackwater-front-aftermath-of-a-massacre/

The question du jour is, what happened to Erik Prince after the massacre? For this post I’m going to be quoting from these sites:

https://theintercept.com/2014/10/22/blackwater-guilty-verdicts/

https://theintercept.com/2019/11/05/erik-prince-trump-ukraine-china/

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/19/1058243/erik-prince-wants-to-sell-you-a-secure-smartphone-thats-too-good-to-be-true/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prince

Let’s dig in.

Massacre Details

The incident was a terrible thing, and looking at some of the sources I had not yet dug up in my previous posts, I feel I should share some of the left out details before continuing. The Intercept shares this:

“After the Nisour Square massacre, I met with Mohammed Kinani, whose 9-year-old son, Ali, was the youngest person killed by Blackwater operatives that day. As he and his family approached the square in their car:

“[T]hey saw one armored vehicle and then another, with men brandishing machine guns atop each one,” Mohammed recalls. The armored cars swiftly blocked off traffic. One of the gunners held both fists in the air, which Mohammed took as a gesture to stop. “Myself and all the cars before and behind me stopped,” Mohammed says. “We followed their orders. I thought they were some sort of unit belonging to the American military, or maybe just a military police unit. Any authority giving you an order to stop, you follow the order.” It turns out the men in the armored cars were neither U.S. military nor MPs. They were members of a Blackwater team code-named Raven 23.

As the family waited in traffic, two more Blackwater vehicles became visible. Mohammed noticed a family in a car next to his—a man, woman and child…“I think they shot the driver in the car in front of you,” the man told him.

Mohammed scanned the area and noticed that the back windshield of the white Kia sedan in front of him was shattered…

At that point, an Iraqi police officer, Ali Khalaf Salman, approached the Kia sedan, and it started to slowly drift. The driver had been shot, and the car was gliding in neutral toward a Blackwater armored car. Salman, in an interview, described how he tried to stop it by pushing backward. He saw a panicked woman inside the car; she was clutching a young man covered in blood who had been shot in the head. She was shrieking, “My son! My son! Help me, help me!” Salman remembered looking toward the Blackwater shooters. “I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting.” He said he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer.

“As the officer was waving, the men on the armored cars started shooting at that car,” Mohammed says. “And it wasn’t warning shots; they were shooting as in a battle. It was as though they were in a fighting field. I thought the police officer was killed. It was insane.” Officer Salman managed to dive out of the way as the bullets rained down. “I saw parts of the woman’s head flying in front of me,” recalled his colleague, Officer Sarhan Thiab. “They immediately opened heavy fire at us.”

Mohammed would later learn that the first victims that day, in the white Kia, were a young Iraqi medical student, Ahmed Haithem Al Rubia’y, and his mother, Mahassin, a physician. Mohammed is crystal clear that the car posed no threat. “There was absolutely no shooting at the Blackwater men,” he says. “All of a sudden, they started shooting in all directions, and they shot at everyone in front of them. There was nothing left in that street that wasn’t shot: the ground, cars, poles, sidewalks; they shot everything in front of them.” As the Blackwater gunners shot up the Rubia’ys’ vehicle, Mohammed said, it soon looked like a sieve “due to how many bullet holes it had.” A Blackwater shooter later admitted that they also fired a grenade at the car, causing the car to explode. Mohammed says the Blackwater men then started firing across the square. “They were shooting in all directions,” he remembers. He describes the shooting as “random yet still concentrated. It was concentrated and focused on what they aimed at and still random as they shot in all directions.”

One of the Blackwater shooters was on top of an armored vehicle firing an automatic weapon, he says. “Every time he would finish his clip, he would throw it on the ground and would load another one in and would start shooting again, and finish the new one and replace it with another.” One young Iraqi man got out of his car to run, and as he fled, the Blackwater shooter gunned him down and continued firing into his body as it lay on the pavement, Mohammed says. “He was on the ground bleeding, and they’re shooting nonstop, and it wasn’t single bullets.” The Blackwater shooter, he says, would fire at other Iraqis and cars and then return to pump more bullets into the dead man on the ground. “He sank in his own blood, and every minute the [Blackwater shooter] would shoot left and right and then go back to shoot the dead man, and I could see that his body would shake with every bullet. He was already dead, but his body was still reacting to the bullets. [The shooter] would fire at someone else and then go back to shoot at this dead man.” Shaking his head slowly, Mohammed says somberly, “The guy is dead in a pool of blood. Why would you continue shooting him?”

https://theintercept.com/2014/10/22/blackwater-guilty-verdicts/

Wikipedia has this about the aftermath: “The criticism continued after president Barack Obama took office in 2009. Prince said he believes that much of this criticism stems from politics. “I put myself and my company at the CIA’s disposal for some very risky missions”, Prince told Vanity Fair for its January 2010 issue. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.”^[24] Blackwater lost a $1 billion contract with the State Department to protect American diplomatic personnel in 2009, after the Iraqi government refused to renew the company’s operating license.^[25] Nevertheless, in 2010 the Obama administration awarded the company a $120 million United States Department of State security contract and about $100 million in new CIA work.^[19]

“Prince resigned as CEO of Blackwater on March 2, 2009, and remained chairman of the board until he sold the company in late 2010 to a group of investors.^[31]“

So what did he do with all his time and money? If it were me I’d likely retire as a millionaire playboy and see if I could become Batman. And maybe in his own way, that is what Prince has been doing.

Politics as Usual

One thing Erik Prince has been doing has been to dabble a bit in politics, most likely to support his sister, but his families money has had some sweeping impacts on our time, and I was never aware.

The Intercept has a conversation on the topic: “Just by way of context, Erik Prince, of course, comes from a really powerful family in the state of Michigan. His sister, Betsy DeVos, is married to Dick DeVos, the heir to the Amway Corp. fortune…And those two families merged together and were the premier bank rollers of the radical religious right, as well as the Republican revolution that swept Newt Gingrich and the Contract With America to power in the early and mid-1990s.

“Fast-forward past the Blackwater years, and Erik Prince running a mercenary company, to the end of Obama and the 2016 campaign kicking into gear. Erik Prince originally was in the Ted Cruz camp and then started to transition over to Donald Trump. This latest batch of documents that we have been able to read through because of Jason Leopold and BuzzFeed contains some pretty extensive notes and documents from interviews with Steve Bannon about Erik Prince’s role in the Trump campaign, and then ultimately during the transition period.

“And what’s interesting, I think, to note is that Erik Prince’s connection to Trump world is multifaceted. You have the fact that Erik Prince and his family were close to Vice President Mike Pence when he was a member of Congress, and Prince and his mother had raised money for him.”

“Let’s also remember that the Trump brothers like going and killing exotic animals or endangered species. Erik Prince and the Trump brothers: hunting buddies. But that doesn’t seem to be the primary connection for Erik Prince at Trump Tower, it may have helped him get in, but he was wandering around talking to the likes of Mike Flynn and Kellyanne Conway and [Sebastian] Gorka and maybe even Mike Pompeo.”

Mike Flynn…Mike Flynn…where have I heard that name before…?

His wife Stacy was evidently buddies with Rebecca Mercer, of the Mercer family that was one of the largest contributors to Trump’s campaign, along with the Prince’s and the DeVos clan.

The podcast goes on to share how Prince was a hunting partner to Donald Jr, and through the money and his friendship with the son, they say he was a “shadow advisor of the President. I find this paragraph especially salient, and possibly, this may explain some of the things that have confused me so much about the Trump administration:

“these [FBI] Bannon interviews show is that Erik’s involvement with, first, the campaign and, then, with the transition were quite extensive. What influence he had, that’s a debatable question. But two years ago, you and I reported the story of Erik trying to pitch Trump and the Trump administration on a private CIA that would work only for the director of the CIA and for Donald Trump, the president. And that original plan really snuck through.”

He’s stirred quite a few espionage pots, and it likely depends on which side of the debates you are whether you see him as a villain or a hero. But I for one, while I do believe we need a CIA, I also believe that the CIA has had far too much power and influence, and has caused incredible, irreparable harm over the last seventy years.

But he has also been involved in less clandestine entrepreneurial endeavors. He has dabbled with, of all things, the cell phone business. According to MIT’s technologyreview.com Prince “was pushing Unplugged, a smartphone startup promising “free speech, privacy, and security” untethered from dominant tech giants like Apple and Google. 

“In June, Prince publicly revealed the new phone, priced at $850. But before that, beginning in 2021, he was privately hawking the device to investors—using a previously unreported pitch deck that has been obtained by MIT Technology Review. It boldly claims that the phone and its operating system are “impenetrable” to surveillance, interception, and tampering, and its messenger service is marketed as “impossible to intercept or decrypt.” 

Why is this ringing a bell?

https://www.facebook.com/TheConservativeContinuum/videos/820498845670129

Fast forward to 55:25, and you will understand why I am sharing this.

If I haven’t made this all plain yet, I will explain in the next post why this is important to Oklahoma politics. Stay tuned Wednesday night for more tired blogging!