Ranting about how messed up the world is, espcially Oklahoma.
Author Archives: Curtiswselby
They say not to write a blog from a tired space, but I suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, so frankly, everything I do is from a tired space. Likely I'm not doing the greatest job of search engine optimization. But I know there are others like me. Passionate about life.
Erik Prince after the al-Nisoor Square massacre, testifying about the incident. He defended his company better than he defended our country.
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.
After we get our portraits painted I thought we could fly to the Hamptons and play some Tennis what what!
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?”
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.
Batman, after all, has been in the Middle East too.
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.”
Erik Prince has been recorded on Steve Bannon’s Breitbart openly pitching a return to the Vietnam era Phoenix program of assassination.
“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…?
Oh yeah…the general who endorsed Bennett…
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.”
Does anyone else remember this? The mysterious, unmarked paramilitary types that were basically running amok in the Portland Oregon riots? The retired Navy veteran that confronted them, asking why they were breaking their oaths? Does this ring any bells?
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.”
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!
I know Prince is kind of a boring character. In my next post I’ll share with you someone tied to him that is far more fascinating. Here we have Roger Stone with a supportive Republican voter. Maybe I am still a conservative after all…stay tuned for more Tired Blogging.
Before you think Erik Prince is pro America, watch this. For money, he is happy to assist the Chinese extend Chinese power across the globe. We hear so much about the Chinese oppressing their people in the covid-19 quarantine, is his private army helping oppress them?
He is a well spoken man. If I knew just a little less, I would actually like this guy.
So…1) we know he has had operations in the US, meaning it is not impossible it was Blackwater people in Portland. 2) They were hired by Wal-Mart and Bill Gates to enforce order in New Orleans during Katrina. Just let that sink in. 3) Why were they there for 3 years? I have such mixed emotions. On one hand, this guy frankly scares me, on the other hand, he sounds more effective than George W. Bush….
An Iraqi official inspecting the car that was destroyed during the inspects a car destroyed four days earlier by a Blackwater security detail in al-Nisoor Square in Baghdad. As terrible as the event was, I fear the aftermath may hit closer to home.
I’ve been writing a series of posts about Erik Prince and the Blackwater controversies. I’ll post the links for reference.
In this post I intend to share the immediate result of the Al-Nisoor massacre, and share other instances where Blackwater hurt American interests.
An Iraqi woman looking inside the bloody wreck of a car shot up by Blackwater employees during the Nissour Square Massacre. I wonder what her daughter is thinking about. That little girl would be grown up now, if she has survived the chaos. I wonder did we help her and her mother? Or were they better off before?
Al-Nisoor Massacre
I’ll post the links to the sites I’ll be drawing my information from.
The image from the website silentprofessionals.org. I think I see some of my old school buddies in this photo…I might need to update my rolodex…
The immediate upshot of the massacre was confusion, and a deepening of the rift between the never-very-sturdy post Hussein government of Iraq, and the evidently-not-bright government of the US. Let’s start with what Brookings Institution has to say about it all.
The first aspect of the aftermath was that Blackwater was exposed to the public. Very few new of its existence before the massacre (frankly, I just learned about it recently).
Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution indicates that there have been private contractors working with the military for decades, and many of them have been both helpful to America and professional toward the soldiers they support. Blackwater is pointed out for having a very different attitude. While he does not imply that Blackwater was utterly alone in their cavalier attitude, he states that “They use military training and weaponry to carry out mission-critical functions that would have been done by soldiers in the past, in the midst of a combat zone against fellow combatants.”
Another consequence of the massacre was that Americans were given a more accurate picture of what was going on over there. We had (and still have) a minimized image of how many American casualties there were because Private Contractors were not counted as casualties. Singer continues:
“That is, there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. By one count, as of July 2007, more than 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq, and another 13,000 wounded. (Again, the data is patchy here, with the only reliable source being insurance claims made by contractors’ employers and then reported to the U.S. Department of Labor.) Since the troop “surge” started in January 2007, these numbers have accelerated — contractors have been killed at a rate of nine per week. These figures mean that the private military industry has suffered more losses in Iraq than the rest of the coalition of allied nations combined. The losses are also far more than any single U.S. Army division has experienced.” To put this into perspective for us civilian types, a division is typically somewhere between 6000 (a large Roman legion) and 25,000 people.
An injured Blackwater employee in Iraq. His injury though did not count towards the tally of casualties.
Another consequence of the massacre was that it increased the hostility of the Iraqis. Singer relates:
“They seal off the roads and drive on the wrong side. They simply kill,” Um Omar, a Baghdad housewife, told Agence France Press about Blackwater in a report in mid-September. A traffic policeman at Al-Wathba square in central Baghdad concurred: “They are impolite and do not respect people, they bump other people’s cars to frighten them and shout at anyone who approaches them … Two weeks ago, guards of a convoy opened fire randomly that led to the killing of two policemen … I swear they are Mossad,” he said, referring to the Israeli spy service, which is a catch-all for anything perceived as evil in the Arab world.
“It is also important to note that Iraqi civilians do not differentiate the acts of the private military contractors from the overall U.S. military effort, just because they are outside the chain of command.
“The point here is not that all contractors are “cowboys,” “unprofessional” or “killers,” as Blackwater…contractors are often described. Most are highly talented ex-soldiers. However, their private mission is different from the overall public operation. Those, for example, doing escort duty are going to be judged by their corporate bosses solely on whether they get their client from point A to B, not whether they win Iraqi hearts and minds along the way. Ann Exline Starr, a former Coalition Provisional Authority advisor, described the difference between when she traveled with a U.S. military escort and with guards from Blackwater and another State Department-contracted security firm, DynCorp. While the uniformed soldiers kept her safe, they also did such things as playing cards and drinking tea with local Iraqis. The private contractors had a different focus. “What they told me was, ‘Our mission is to protect the principal at all costs. If that means pissing off the Iraqis, too bad.’”
The US military honestly does have flaws, having said that, they are still one of the most honest, capable, and compassionate armies of all time, IMHO.Likely there were a lot of honest, decent, and capable people with Blackwater, but at the end of the day, was Blackwater helping America, or just helping themselves?
Singer goes on to share at length other atrocities performed by other companies (though there are other companies that I notice are not mentioned, I bring this up to point out that you can’t paint the contractors with a broad brush. Many of them served with as much professionalism as the soldiers themselves, there was a camaraderie, after all, since the firms and the military often recruited from and relied on each other). I won’t share those stories here, my point is not to trash contractors, or the troops that were in the front lines battling to keep us free. I’m trying to force my ADD to stay focused on a specific man, his specific company, and there is a specific reason I’m sharing all this that hopefully will be plain before all is over. By all means though, this article gives a brutal (though I fear deserved) criticism of some bad apples in the industry and makes me doubt many of the things I had been told about what happened in Iraq.
He points out that in the critical War on Terror, where we were claiming to have the moral high ground and to be the good guys, this massacre was one more incident that the Muslims felt gave them justification to hate us. “The Blackwater episode resonated negatively not merely inside Iraq, but throughout the Muslim world. Every single media source led with the episode in the days that followed, focusing on how the U.S. could hire such “arrogant trigger-happy guns for hire, mercenaries by any other name,” as UAE-based Gulf News put it. The Al-Jazeera satellite news channel reported on the U.S. hired contractors as “An army that seeks fame, fortune, and thrill, away from all considerations and ethics of military honour … The employees are…famous for shooting indiscriminately at vehicles or pedestrians who get close to their convoys.” In the leading newspaper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Fahmy Howeydi, one of the most influential commentators in the entire Arab world, compared Blackwater “mercenaries” to al-Qaida, coming to Iraq’s chaos to seek their fortunes. Even the Daily Star, which is a regional English-language newspaper considered the most moderate voice in the region, wrote how “At least irregular formations like the Mehdi Army [Sadr’s militia] can plausibly claim to be defending their communities. No foreign mercenary can plead similar motivation, so all of them should go.”
Are they wrong to feel this way?
Former Blackwater security contractor Nicholas Slatten was sentenced to life in federal prison for the al-Nisoor Square massacre in Baghdad.
Was there any justice for the massacre? According to justice.gov “Nicholas Slatten, 35, a former security guard for Blackwater USA, was sentenced…to life in prison without parole for committing first-degree murder in the killing of Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y, one of 14 unarmed civilians who were killed in a shooting by Blackwater guards that took place at Nisur Square in Bagdhad on Sept. 16, 2007.”
“Slatten was among 19 Blackwater security contractors assigned to a convoy of four heavily-armed trucks known as a Tactical Support Team, using the call sign “Raven 23.” Shortly before noon, Raven 23 learned that a car bomb had detonated in central Baghdad near a location where a U.S official was being escorted by a Blackwater personal security detail team. Raven 23 team members promptly reported to their convoy vehicles, and the convoy drove to a secured checkpoint between the Green Zone and Red Zone.
“Once there, in disregard of an order from Blackwater’s command, the team’s shift leader directed Raven 23 to leave the Green Zone and establish a blockade in Nisur Square, a busy traffic circle that was immediately adjacent to the Green Zone. All told, seven of the 19 members of Raven 23 fired their weapons.”
Slatten was the first to fire.
In my next post, I intend to share what happened to Prince, and possibly share more about why this stuff matters to Oklahoma. Stay tuned for more tired blogging.
In my last post I introduced you to Erik Prince. He attended the Naval Acadamy for three semesters, got his degree at Hillsdale, joined the military, became a Navy SEAL, founded a security company named Blackwater that made him a billionaire and a CIA asset, only to be forced to sell his company when the government decided that we didn’t like the way he was conducting business after all. I’ll leave the link for those who want a refresher.
In this post I intend to dig deeper into the controversy surrounding Erik Prince. I intend to share what happened during the Nisour Square Massacre, the aftermath of Prince losing his company, and the more recent efforts of Prince to convince Trump that we needed a mercenary war in Afghanistan. Then in the next post I’m hoping to share with you why this affects you.
I swear to preserve, protect, and defend my companies’ profits.
Nisour Square Massacre
I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t remember this incident. The things I’m sharing are mostly things I’m learning, sometimes right before typing this. Here are the sites I’m quoting for the Massacre.
Here we have a map of the incident. I honestly have no idea what I would have done if I had been involved and someone refused to stop when I (assuming I’m a guard here) order them to.
In 2008, BBC reported that “The Iraqi government has accused Blackwater security guards of killing the civilians on the morning of 16 September 2007, while they were escorting an American diplomatic envoy in Baghdad.
“The company said the civilians were killed during a shootout after one of their convoys came under attack in Nisoor Square, in an affluent neighbourhood of the capital. They said the guards reacted lawfully to gunfire deliberately aimed at them.
“The Iraqi government, citing eyewitness reports, concluded that the Blackwater guards fired on civilians without provocation.”
Details had been sketchy at the time, but the Washington Post reported from the embassy report “dated the day of the attacks.
“According to those accounts, Blackwater teams encountered a car bomb, a shootout and a standoff between Blackwater guards and Iraqi security forces. Each Blackwater team usually consists of three or four armoured vehicles.
“The report said the incident began when a car bomb exploded at 11.53 near a financial compound in Baghdad, while a US official was visiting. It also said:
Two Blackwater teams transported the official back to the fortified Green Zone
Another Blackwater unit was dispatched to the scene of the car bomb to deal with the aftermath of the blast.
This unit, however, was then ambushed and “engaged with small arms fire” from “multiple nearby locations” in Nisoor Square.
One of the Blackwater teams that had transported the official back to the Green Zone was re-dispatched to help out in Nisoor Square.
The re-deployed unit found itself stuck at an intersection in Nisoor Square and was confronted by Iraqi police and army. A US forces quick reaction team was sent to help rescue the unit.
“Separately, The Washington Post quoted a US official familiar with the investigation as saying that at least one Blackwater guard drew a weapon on his colleagues and shouted at him to “stop shooting”.
Reading this article is definitely trying my patience. It sounds almost like one side says there was a car bomb, while the other side says there was a rocket or grenade launched. Either way, a car exploded, and Blackwater guards opened fire into a crowd of civilians. Honestly, I find myself doubting both sides of the story.
Grunge.com shares this: “Blackwater Security Consulting, also known as Blackwater Worldwide, was founded in 1997 by Al Clark and Erik Prince as a private security firm. Initially, they worked providing training support to law enforcement and the justice department, but as Prince once stated, their “corporate goal [was] to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service.” Essentially, Prince wanted a “free-market version” of military training.”
“In 2002, Blackwater received its first contract from the United States government. NPR reports that sometime after the Al-Qaeda bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, where 17 sailors were killed, Blackwater won a $46 million contract from the U.S government for “training sailors in counterterrorism.” After the September 11th attacks, Blackwater expanded their security-related work and followed the U.S. military into Afghanistan. And after the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, Blackwater won a $25 million contract to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, an American diplomat who led the transitional government following the invasion. Blackwater was even hired by the Department of Homeland Security during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and according to PBS, collected “more than $70 million in hurricane-related contracts.”
“With the contract to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, Blackwater essentially “cement[ed] its presence at the center of conflict in Iraq,” per PBS. Between 2004 and 2008, the State Department [awarded] Blackwater more than $1 billion in contracts.”
Evidently the State Department was run with a cavalier attitude toward spending that reminds me of Ryan Walters ovesight of Oklahoma covid relief spent on Christmas trees and Pac Man machines. An audit was eventually run, and it was proven that Blackwater essentially pocketed $55 million and change too much, but as of the writing of the Grunge article, there had been no efforts to collect. “Blackwater’s contracts for protecting American diplomats also weren’t limited to Iraq. They were also contracted for personal protective services in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Israel, and Palestine.” Finally, some drunk guards crashed $180,000 armored vehicle into a concrete barrier, and even the State Department had had enough.
Tired Blogger side note…politicians don’t care about how much of our money is wasted, but bad pr is unforgivable.
A dump site in Iraq for damaged military vehicles. I think these are mostly Iraqi, but it tells a story. How many people could have been fed with all the work that went into building and destroying these vehicles? How many cars could have been built to drive family members to work. Make no mistake, one of the modern purposes of war is to ensure the poor stay poor. We have the ability to build a better world, but as long as wars continue, that won’t happen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no pacifist, but I hate waste. And this looks pretty wasteful to me.
“The New York Times reports that when Richter [State Department investigator] confronted Daniel Carroll, Blackwater’s Iraq project manager, about this on August 21, 2007, Carroll became incredibly aggressive and told Richter “that he [Carroll] could kill me [Richter] at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.”
“According to the memo Richter wrote to State Department officials in Washington after the incident, “Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone of voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on mine. I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.” Two days after the meeting with Carroll, Richter and Thomas were told by an embassy official to “leave Iraq immediately.”
American mercenaries in Iraq. They don’t look like bad guys. I have no idea if these fellows had anything to do with any of this stuff, the article I took the image from just says they are “individual mercenaries.”
Wired.com tells a pretty damning tale. “More than any other private military firm in Iraq, Blackwater had a reputation for recklessness and violence. Think about the drunken Blackwater contractor, who killed a bodyguard of Iraq’s vice president on Christmas Eve, 2007. Or the car full of people a Blackwater detail ran off the road, in September 2006. Or the Nisour Square shooting that left 17 dead, in September 2007. ” They discuss how, after Iraq banished Blackwater from the chaos, the other companies simply hired most of the Blackwater employees to fill State Department edicts. It must be good to run the State Department. Though it sounds like being an investigator for them sucks.
Long and the short, people were threatened with assassination (we were only kidding….) innocent people were slaughtered, and mistakes were made. Some of them are likely more understandable than I know, but having said that…
I wonder how much mercy I would be shown if I had been the one to pull the trigger?
This one is getting a bit long winded. I’m going to call this good for now, and will continue in Wednesday’s post with the aftermath of the Nisour Square shooting, and if I take care of that in fewer words, I may explain how Prince attempts to return to glory.
Not that I really blame him. I suppose this blog is my effort at restoring my former glories. Till next time, make mine Marvel!
Check out the sharp dressed James Bond guy! Look at those hands. So elegant, yet you can tell they have done hard work. While a girl will go crazy ’bout a sharp dressed man, this particular man is Erik Prince, the brother of former Secretary of Education Betsy Devos.
This has been the most difficult and painful of all the subjects I’ve yet written about. I’m still not 100% sure where all of this is going, but I’m trying to connect some dots that I think desperately need connecting. What I’m about to say is going to sound really melodramatic, but I think that, just in case, it needs to be said.
While I struggle with severe chronic depression, and the loss of my son is so painful I feel like the entire world is crushing me down, I want/need to reassure everyone that in no way am I suicidal (though writing these next posts may cause some to wonder if I know what I’m talking about…would a man with no suicidal bent have the daring to write about these things, knowing that the consequences could be grave?). If I were going to commit suicide to avoid pain, its too late for that. I know the pain of seeing my son lying without a heartbeat on a hospital bed while a nurse pounded his too young chest, and drank in the horrible sight because I feared this would be my last moment with him, and to turn away my eyes to spare myself the pain would rob me of one more moment of seeing him while there was hope he would live. Suicide has little left to spare me from. Not even honor would be restored to me, the Great Daimyo of this world has turned their back on my disgrace. Whatever comes next, I must face, and I cannot die until the allotted time.
So no matter what you might hear later, know that IN NO WAY would I commit suicide. If you hear this of me, know that they found me. Know that they silenced me. And do with this information what you will.
Don’t believe it for a second.
The subject of this series is a man named Erik Prince. I’m going to do a two or more likely three part series on him, and that may extend further as I attempt to connect the dots. In this post I intend to share who he is and what his company does. Afterward, in the next post I intend to share the controversy surrounding him and his company. I don’t intend to hurt anyone I care about, but it is possible some of the dots I connect may hit closer to home than some are comfortable with. And afterward I intend to explain why this matters to you, the reader, especially if you are an Oklahoman and hope to change this state so our children have hope of a better life than we had.
This is an image from the website for the company he founded, Blackwater. While my bias is to be anti Blackwater, I will attempt to be semi-objective. His perspective counts as much as mine. Especially if he is paying for the bullet with my name on it.
We learn this from his alma mater, Hillsdale College: “Prince began his higher education with a brief tri-semester stint at the Naval Academy, but after his freshman year, he was already considering other options. He decided to transfer to Hillsdale College, and he attributes much of his business and personal success to what he learned after transferring to Hillsdale.
“The economic and business education, even the politics side, gave me the ability to analyze economies, trends, and societies, to figure out what makes people upset, and what people will fight for,” Prince said.
“The College’s celebration of free-market principles appealed to Prince, culminating in an Economics major and Political Science minor. He enjoyed reading about the Austrians and their passion for limited government intervention.”
Frankly, he did better than I did here. Rather than going to West Point, I decided to take a scholarship to OSU. Honestly, I likely made the right decision (in the end it wouldn’t have mattered), but this guy actually attended the Naval Academy, and I don’t read that he did badly (though I also don’t read that he excelled at the Academy). And he evidently excelled at Hillsdale, whereas I ended up contracting mono, washing out, and contracting a chronic fatigue that would haunt the rest of my life. “There but for the grace of God go I.”
Man, I don’t know, Hillsdale seemed to change the man quite a bit. What? Oh, my overpaid assistants tell me this is the wrong Prince. My bad.
Hillsdale continues the tribute: “Prince’s economics education also helped him take what he had learned growing up in Holland, Michigan, and apply it to the global scene.
“As an entrepreneur, Prince gained much of his knowledge of how to run a successful business from his father, Edgar Prince, who founded Prince Machine Corporation in 1965. PMC became a vastly successful firm in the auto industry and employed more workers than any other business in Holland at the time.
“His message to future entrepreneurs coming out of Hillsdale is simple: “You have to love what you’re going to try.”
Ya know, in a previous post I said I was looking for a mentor. This guy actually seems to be someone I could really follow!
Hillsdale ends with this: “I learned to be a leader by first learning to be a follower,” Prince said. “To convince them that I wanted to join the fire department, I had to earn their confidence. I was always the last one rolling up hoses while the other volunteers would sit back and crack open a drink after a call. I learned to relate to those guys better, which helped me to better relate to enlisted guys going through BUD/S and the SEAL Teams.”
“What final worldly advice did Prince have for Hillsdale students? It’s simple: “fall down two times, get up three.” Not surprising coming from a former Navy SEAL.”
A young Erik Prince as a fire fighter. If I didn’t know better I would think I was reading about Jack Reacher.
Erik Prince founded a company called Blackwater. Rather than resting on the laurels of his wealthy father, he became a billionaire in his own right. Let’s take a look at what we can learn about him from his own website: “Erik D. Prince is a US-born entrepreneur, philanthropist, Navy SEAL veteran and private equity investor with business interests in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and North America. A strong supporter of economic development in emerging markets, he is the founder and chairman of Frontier Resource Group, a private equity firm that invests in transformative natural resource projects. Prior to establishing the Frontier Group of companies, Mr. Prince founded and ultimately sold Blackwater USA, a provider of global security, training and logistics solutions to the US Government and others, which he sold in 2010 and Presidential Airways, a global transportation company with over 70 aircraft operating in emerging markets. Mr. Prince is married and between himself and his wife Stacy enjoy raising 12 children. He was educated at Hillsdale College in Michigan and upon graduation joined the US Navy, where he served as a Navy SEAL officer until 1996. Mr. Prince’s philanthropic endeavors are focused on refugees, humanitarian relief and economic development. Mr. Prince’s career of extensive professional engagements throughout the world give him a unique perspective on developing economic trends, opportunities and risks to consider.”
If I hadn’t already read some other things, and talked to a current member of the military about their thoughts about Blackwater, I honestly would start idolizing this guy right here. This sounds exactly like what non messed up Curtis would have ended up being if things had gone just the tiniest bit different. A warrior with compassion and vision. Someone with the skills to kill but with the compassion to make the world a better place. Then why, after doing some research, would I absolutely NOT trade places with the man? If God gave me the choice of being the burnt out shell who wasted almost every opportunity, or being Erik Prince, I would choose to be me. Why?
Perhaps you will not find Curtis so “common” now. I present to you…Prince Erik!
Rolling Stone paints a very dark picture of this heroic gentleman. They build up a damning story (basically, their strategy is the reverse of mine, damn him first and then tell you about him. I’ll admit, I am attempting to influence your thinking, but I don’t feel it is my job to tell you how or what to think, so I am presenting it bass-awkard).
“Prince’s father, Edgar, had made a fortune selling General Motors the lighted mirror on cars’ sun visors. Erik Prince, Edgar’s youngest child, flitted between career tracks in his early years. He enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy after high school, but he quit in a fit of pique after three semesters when he was written up for tardiness, according to Master of War, a biography of Prince by Suzanne Simons. In his senior year at Hillsdale College, he scored a coveted White House internship during the first Bush administration. But he left six months later, upset, among other reasons, that “homosexual groups” had been invited in, according to an article printed at the time in The Grand Rapids Press. He later became an intern at the office of former California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who sent him on fact-finding missions around the globe, according to Erik Prince’s own 2013 book, Civilian Warriors.”
Erik dropped out of politics (damn shame) and joined the Navy Seals. But when he inherited a fortune from his father after Edgar suffered a fatal heart attack (Absalom my son…Absalom) Erik took resigned from the Navy and invested a hefty chunk of his inheritance to form the company Blackwater.
No, I haven’t read it. I’m trying to read both One Minute Millionaire and Around the World in 80 Days. But if any of you have, comments are very welcome.
Rolling Stone continues: Blackwater USA…began life as a cross between a shooting range and training facility for special-operations personnel near North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp. After 9/11, the company grew rapidly as it filled the government’s need to protect its personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater would go on to bill the U.S. government for more than $1 billion over its lifetime.
“Early on, Blackwater earned high marks by providing highly trained ex-Special Ops personnel to protect Department of State and CIA officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. “They were lifesavers,” said Doug Wise, a former CIA officer who served in Afghanistan in the early days of the U.S.-led war there. Prince’s men won plaudits for going above and beyond the call to rescue diplomats and civilians in distress.
Fallujah Terrorism
“After the invasion of Iraq, however, Blackwater grew far faster than Prince’s ability to manage it. The firm became, in Prince’s words, “something resembling its own branch of the military”
If I’m going to be fair to this guy, the situation in Iraq was a sh-t show. I’ve talked a little with soldiers and civilian contractors that worked there, and I guarantee, the PTSD that I honest to god have would have skyrocketed to dangerous levels if I had to attempt to survive that fiasco.
Four Blackwater employees were murdered in Fallujah, Iraq. I only dimly remember this story, I never saw the images till recently. All I really recall were rumors I heard from the Sean Hannity radio program about American soldiers being killed and their bodies hung from a bridge in triumph as Iraqi’s who we had set free celebrated.
After the horror that was Fallujah, things went south hard and fast. Rolling Stone does not mention this terrorist atrocity, but combined with that knowledge we can still use the article to gain some perspective:
“Prince’s rising stock in post-9/11 America was also driven by his work with the CIA. According to Prince, he became an official asset, putting himself and his company’s resources at the spy agency’s disposal. Rolling Stone obtained an unpublished chapter of Prince’s book, which the CIA has blocked from release because it delves into Prince’s classified work. In the chapter, Prince describes how, in addition to training CIA operatives and maintaining the agency’s drone fleet, he helped set up a program to train a terrorist hit squad at the behest of the spy agency. Prince writes that over three years beginning in 2004, he spent a “few million” recruiting and organizing a team of about a dozen foreign mercenaries. The CIA gave him a codename: “Hans.”
“Prince says the off-the-books program had support at the West Wing of the White House and with then-Vice President Dick Cheney. “The program was so secret, I was told that Cheney instructed the agency not to even brief Congress about it,” Prince wrote in the unpublished chapter…
Nisour Square Massacre
“This was the apex of Blackwater, but it soon fell apart — with deadly consequences. On September 16th, 2007, Blackwater personnel shot and killed 14 unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, a traffic circle in Baghdad, and wounded 18 more. The next day, the Iraqi government announced that it would revoke Blackwater’s license to operate and demanded to prosecute the Blackwater guards. TheNew York Times reported that Blackwater continued to operate in Iraq after Blackwater’s president authorized bribes of about $1 million to Iraqi officials, a charge Prince later dismissed as “false.” But the uproar over the Nisour Square massacre pushed the Bush administration and Congress to investigate the company.”
Erik Prince, then the chairman and CEO of the Prince Group and Blackwater USA, holds up a picture showing the effect of a car bomb as he testifies to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in October 2007. The committee was hearing testimony from officials regarding private-security contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES
Rolling Stone continues: “The United States promised to handle the case, which has dragged on for years. Last year, one of the guards convicted in the massacre, Nicholas Slatten, was sentenced to life in prison, and three others were resentenced to lengthy terms behind bars. Lawyers representing victims and their families in the Nisour Square massacre obtained a confidential settlement with Blackwater.
“While the Nisour Square case was slowly working its way through the legal system, Prince’s off-the-books CIA work met a swift, unceremonious end at the hands of the incoming Obama administration. New CIA director Leon Panetta shut down Prince’s anti-terrorist hit squad. The company, Panetta found, was “free-wheeling” and doing stuff on their own. “It had gotten to the point where they really felt that because of what they were doing, they were somehow entitled to do it their way. That’s kind of what really concerned me,” Panetta tells Rolling Stone.”
Prince fell out of favor with the CIA (who, after all, are paragons of virtue and would NEVER think to do anything unethical).
“For Prince, the final indignity came when he lost Blackwater, selling off the company in 2010 after the firm settled a host of federal investigations by agreeing to pay a $42 million fine to the U.S. government.”
In spite of my bias, I’m gonna admit, I can actually empathize a bit with the man.
While I’ve already made a beginning on the topic, the next post will outline the controversy (yeah, I’m just getting started). Stay tuned for more Tired Blogging. If CIA operatives or Blackwater mercenaries don’t get me first.
This one is going to be little more than short and bitter railing, so be warned. I may share a little worth knowing, and hopefully it is more entertaining than not. My lame excuse is that the chronic fatigue is hitting hard. That, and the things I am learning while attempting to write a worthy and informative post about Betsy DeVos brother are frankly sickening my heart. I need to write a post to fulfill my commitment to my readers, and to assuage the pain in my heart.
I wasn’t going to write a Valentine’s post. Last year I had love, and honestly thought maybe this one was “the one.” That fell through, and now I am alone. I don’t wish to write anything about what happened, I just want to share the pain of outliving something we are taught is forever.
I am going to post links to last years Valentines post, and to the post I wrote when my last relationship ended. Those who wish may get some perspective about what I am railing about from those. For bonus points I’ll throw in the one about Modern Romance. You may find some wisdom or foolishness there as well.
How can something so lovely end in such bitterness?
In last years Valentine’s post I wrote about how past abuses scar us, make it difficult to be vulnerable with the opposite sex. We feel as though the foibles of our own gender are reasonable and easy to be overcome and forgiven, but the sins of the Other are monstrous, wicked, unforgivable. We demand vulnerability from our partners without reservation, but we insist that we only owe them the tiniest portions of our already empty hearts. Men forgive other men, and women forgive other women, “any cowardly, rude, vindictive, insulting” behavior, but we won’t give the Other even the slightest flaw. She/He had it coming.
I wrote my post about “Modern Romance” during a time of argument with my ex girlfriend. Right or wrong, I felt I was being shamed by my ex. So I attempted to write through those feelings. I think the best thing I had written in that post about the topic was a quote (yeah, not even my writing really) from a feminist author that resonated then, and still does. She wrote about her dislike of the feminine strategy of shaming men. She equated it with 1) simply doing the work of the Hegemony (we have a woman in every home willing to help break down the man, an angry wife who feels cheated by a man who is not good enough will wear him down faster than almost any torture the Shadow governments can devise), and 2) she felt it was hypocritical that women are complaining about having been shamed for thousands of years just for being women, and now they are simply using the same execrable tactics in reverse.
Centuries of mindless persecution of women for being “witches,” when often, they were just different. What men are going through now is nowhere near as bad, and all too often we forget that. Having said that…shaming, persecution, and so called sh-t tests will never bring the sexes together in harmony.
And then it was over. Likely she is still reading these, and I don’t want an angry comment to delete, deserved or not. The pain is gone, but now I endure the ache of wondering if that was my last chance. Am I too old? Was she right to cast me away? Have I learned anything from the mistakes of the past? If I am lucky enough to attract someone again, will I just repeat the same mistakes? And, knowing that very rarely is one side 100% in the right, have I accurately evaluated the mistakes I made?
I know this “op-ed” was not a great piece, but I feel a bit better for railing to my friends here. I will leave you with a couple of quotes for you to do what you wish with.
In Gone With the Wind Rhett and Scarlett have quite a long talk that has burned its way into the annals of romance literary history. The fact that a woman wrote these words amazes me, somehow she captures so well the very struggles of a man wrestling with a doomed love. I won’t quote the whole thing, just some lines that echo what I have thought and felt, and some of which I feel now.
“Scarlett, did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?”
“Mine wore out,” he went on, “against…your insane obstinacy that makes you hold on like a bulldog to anything you think you want. . . . Mine wore out.”
Later he says “I wanted to take care of you, to pet you, to give you everything you wanted. I wanted to marry you and protect you and give you a free rein in anything that would make you happy…You’d had such a struggle, Scarlett. No one knew better than I what you’d gone through and I wanted you to stop fighting and let me fight for you. I wanted you to play, like a child–for you were a child, a brave, frightened, bullheaded child. I think you are still a child. No one but a child could be so headstrong and so insensitive.”
Later still: “I tried everything I knew and nothing worked. And I loved you so, Scarlett. If you had only let me, I could have loved you as gently and as tenderly as ever a man loved a woman. But I couldn’t let you know, for I knew you’d think me weak and try to use my love against me.”
Well, I’m truly tired. I’m going to feed my dog Cassie, maybe eat a snack, and go to bed. I hope to publish a post Saturday about something that I think if one of the worst evils of our time. And it is something I knew nothing about just a few short months ago. Good night all. Happy belated Valentines.
The title comes from these lines from my favorite poem In Memoriam. I may yet post those lines being read by yours truly on YouTube. I suppose I should share that channel sooner or later.
This song best explains in its refrain how I feel about quite a lot of things.
One of the most underrated songs of the nineties. We lost Eddy Money some while back. “There will come a day when I can open up my heart again. Till then I’ll get by. Some how I’ll get by. I know I’ll get by.”
Tired Midnight Blogger (What Blogs at Midnight) 