October 4, 2007 (LPAC)--Blackwater is not the problem; it's much, much bigger than that. In a recent EIR expose of British mercenaries and gun-running in Africa linked to the dirty operations of the Britain's BAE, and Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Lyndon LaRouche identified this swamp as "a no-man's land .... a world in which the hand which loads the sniper's rifle denies any culpability for the eye which aims at the target, or the finger that pulls the trigger." The current round of investigations—including those in Congress—of the trigger-happy mercenaries known as Blackwater, is of the same character.
LPAC warned in the April, 2006 mass pamphlet, "Halliburton's War," mercenary death squads are the intentional policy of the Dick Cheney/Donald Rumsfeld "Revolution in Military Affairs." (see Lyndon LaRouche's "Private Armies, Captive People,")
So, on Oct. 2, Erik Prince, the founder and CEO of Blackwater, testified for four hours at the House Committee on Oversight and Government Operations, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). The same day, Salon.com magazine published reporter Ben Van Heuvelen's outline of the ties between Blackwater and the Bush-Cheney administration; including part of Jeremy Scahill's 2007 book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Both document Erik Prince's ties to the Christian fundamentalist fascists and neo-conservatives that make up the support for the Dick Cheney/George Shultz war party.
These are the same networks—the notorious International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem, and their American Enterprise Institute allies who use the phrase "Islamofascism," to justify the mass killing civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan. Could this pseudo-religious insanity be a factor in Blackwater's killings?
The Blackwater ties to the Christian Zionist fundies include: funding by Erik Prince's billionaire father Edgar Prince, of the Council for National Policy, the secretive religious-right high-command group which hosted Dick Cheney on September 28 for a bomb-Iran talk in Salt Lake City. The senior Prince was rightist guru Gary Bauer's personal sponsor and the main funder of Bauer's and James Dobson's Family Research Council. Blackwater's Erik Prince put $500,000 into Charles Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Erik Prince branched off from his father's extreme-right Calvinist sect, joining the pro-fascist Black Nobility wing of the Catholic Church. He has funded the Legionnaires of Christ, part of the neo-fascist Synarchy networks in Spain and Mexico. Blackwater got the $27.7 million contract for personal security for Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer, a fellow Catholic rightist. Erick Prince's "Freiheit Foundation" gave $30,000 to the right-wing Christendom College in Virginia; and $500,000 to Colson's Prison Fellowship.
Challenged by reports on its abuses, Blackwater employed Alexander Strategy Group to run its public relations, until that lobbying firm—the main agency of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's "K Street Project" -- closed its doors with DeLay's indictment and Jack Abramoff's imprisonment in 2006.
Joseph Schmitz, who is now Blackwater's General Counsel and chief operating officer, was the Defense Department Inspector General from 2002-2005, from where he covered up the crimes of torture in Iraq, and the corruption of Richard Perle, head of the Defense Policy Board. The Schmitz family are international leaders of the notorious Federalist Society—theorists of the "unitary executive"--along with Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia and the William F. Buckley family [see "Federalist Society Infiltrates Germany", EIR, January 19, 2007].
Blackwater has now hired as its attorney Joseph Schmitz's close political partner, Kenneth Starr, the "grand inquisitor" for this apparatus in the late-1990s attempt to purge U.S. President Bill Clinton.
LPAC will be expanding its own investigation of the Blackwater apparatus. Stay tuned.
