*The Bush Administration's Ties to Blackwater*
Blamed in the deaths of Iraqi civilians, the private security firm has long ties
to the White House and prominent Republicans, including Ken Starr.
The Bush Administration's Ties to Blackwater
By Ben Van Heuvelen
Salon, Oct. 02, 2007
When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly
killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on Sept. 16, it was only the latest in a series
of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm.
Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since 2005, the North
Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported
195 "escalation of force incidents"; in 163 of those cases Blackwater guns fired
first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely
as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to
be involved in shooting incidents.
On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight
and Government Reform Committee, will hold a hearing on the U.S. military's use
of private contractors. When Waxman announced plans for the hearing last week,
the State Department directed Blackwater not to give any information or testimony
without its signoff. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater C.E.O. and
founder, Erik Prince, is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
But the attempt to shield Prince was apparently not the first time State had
protected Blackwater. A report issued by Waxman on Monday alleges that State
helped Blackwater cover up Iraqi fatalities. In December 2006, State arranged
for the company to pay $15,000 to the family of an Iraqi guard who was shot and
killed by a drunken Blackwater employee. In another shooting death, the payment
was $5,000. As CNN reported Monday, the State Department also allowed a
Blackwater employee to write State's initial "spot report" on the Sept. 16
shooting incident -- a report that did not mention civilian casualties and
claimed contractors were responding to an insurgent attack on a convoy.
The ties between State and Blackwater are only part of a web of relationships
that Blackwater has maintained with the Bush administration and with prominent
Republicans. From 2001 to 2007, the firm has increased its annual federal
contracts from less than $1 million to more than $500 million, all while
employees passed through a turnstile between Blackwater and the administration,
several leaving important posts in the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to take jobs at
the security company. Below is a list of some of Blackwater's luminaries with
their professional -- and political -- résumés.
*Erik Prince, founder and C.E.O.*: How did Blackwater go from a small corporation
training local S.W.A.T. teams to a seemingly inseparable part of U.S. operations
in Iraq? Good timing, and the connections of its C.E.O., may be the answer.
Prince, who founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-the-scenes
role in the company until after 9/11, has connections to the Republican Party in
his blood. His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in
the creation of the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian
groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration. At his funeral
in 1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian conservative
movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince's widow, Elsa, who remarried
after her husband's death, has served on the boards of the F.R.C. and another
influential Christian-right organization, Dobson's Focus on the Family. She
currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where, according to I.R.S.
filings, her son Erik is a vice president. The foundation has given lavishly to
some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July
2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the F.R.C. and $531,000 to Focus
on the Family.
Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for National Policy,
the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been
attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Bremer, and whose membership
is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and Dobson. The Edgar and Elsa
Prince Foundation gave the C.N.P. $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006.
The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister -- married
into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to Republican and
conservative causes. ("I know a little something about soft money, as my family
is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican
Party," Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll
Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again
from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for
Michigan governor in 2006.
Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and
cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and
second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political
action committees. Through his Freiheit Foundation, he also gave $500,000 to
Prison Fellowship Ministries, run by former Nixon official Charles Colson, in
2000. In the same year, he contributed $30,000 to the American Enterprise
Institute, a conservative think tank. During college, he interned in George H.W.
Bush's White House, and also interned for Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif.
Rohrabacher and fellow California Republican Rep. John Doolittle have visited
Blackwater's Moyock, N.C., compound, on a trip arranged by the Alexander Strategy
Group, a lobbying firm founded by former aides of then House Majority Leader Tom
Delay. A.S.G. partner Paul Behrends is a longtime associate of Prince's.
Prince's connections seem to have paid off for Blackwater. Robert Young Pelton,
author of "Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror," has reported that
one of Blackwater's earliest contracts in the national arena was a no-bid $5.4
million deal to provide security guards in Afghanistan, which came after Prince
made a call to then C.I.A. executive director Buzzy Krongard. What's more,
Harper's Ken Silverstein has reported that Prince has a security pass for C.I.A.
headquarters and "meets with senior people" inside the C.I.A. But Prince's most
important benefactor was fellow conservative Roman Catholic convert L. Paul
Bremer, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American
occupation government in Iraq. In August 2003, Blackwater won a $27.7 million
contract to provide personal security for Bremer. In charge of the Blackwater
team guarding Bremer was Frank Gallagher, who had provided personal security for
former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger when Bremer was managing director of
Kissinger's consulting firm, Kissinger and Associates, in the 1990s.
By 2005, Blackwater was earning $353 million annually from federal contracts.
Blackwater's benefits from government largess haven't ended with Iraq. The
company was recently one of five awarded a Department of Defense
counter-narcoterrorism contract that could reportedly be worth as much as $15
billion. Blackwater also became involved in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,
and profited handsomely. According to Jeremy Scahill, author of "Blackwater: The
Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," Blackwater had made roughly
$73 million for Katrina-related government work by June 2006, less than a year
after the hurricane hit.
*Joseph Schmitz, chief operating officer and general counsel*: In 2002, President
Bush nominated Schmitz to oversee and police the Pentagon's military contracts as
the Defense Department's inspector general. Schmitz presided over the largest
increase of military-contracting spending in history: As of 2005, 77 companies
were awarded 149 "prime contracts" worth $42.1 billion, with hundreds of millions
going to Blackwater. Unlike previous I.G.s, Schmitz reported directly to the
secretary of defense -- a setup that both Democratic and Republican lawmakers
objected to, given Schmitz's oversight responsibility. Schmitz even carried
Rumsfeld's "12 principles" for the Pentagon in his lapel pocket. The first
principle read, "Do nothing that could raise questions about the credibility of
D.o.D."
Schmitz has many ties to the Republican Party establishment. His father, John G.
Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman and his brother, Patrick Schmitz,
served as George H.W. Bush's deputy counsel from 1985 to 1993. Joseph himself
worked as a special assistant to Reagan-era Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Schmitz resigned in 2005 under mounting pressure from both Democratic and
Republican senators, who accused him of interfering with criminal investigations
into inappropriately awarded contracts, turning a blind eye to conflicts of
interest and other failures of oversight. According to an October 2005 article
in Time magazine, Schmitz showed the White House the results of his staff's
multiyear investigation into a contract in which the Air Force leased
air-refueling tankers from Boeing for more than it would have cost to buy them,
then agreed to redact the names of senior White House staffers involved in the
decision before sending the final report to Congress. Schmitz informed his staff
on Aug. 26, 2005, that he was leaving the Pentagon; in September of that year, he
went to work for Blackwater.
*J. Cofer Black, vice chairman*: Black spent most of his 28-year C.I.A. career
running covert operations in the Directorate of Operations, where he worked with
Rob Richer (below). At the time of the 9/11 attacks, he was director of the
C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center. There he was former C.I.A. Director George
Tenet's ace in the hole when it came to convincing Bush that the C.I.A. should
lead initial U.S. combat operations in Afghanistan after 9/11. Black is,
according to published accounts, a man with a flair for the dramatic, the kind of
briefer President Bush likes. In one briefing, according to several reports,
Black told the president, "When we're through with [terrorists in Afghanistan],
they will have flies walking across their eyeballs." (Black also ordered C.I.A.
field officer Gary Schroen to bring back Osama bin Laden's head packed in dry ice
so Black could show it to Bush.) Black's Afghanistan presentation earned him
"special access" to the White House, the Washington Post's Dana Priest reported
in December 2005.
Black is also one of the more prominent faces associated with the Bush
administration's interrogation and extraordinary rendition policies. In a famous
moment, Black told Congress in 2002, "After 9/11, the gloves came off." And the
group within the C.I.A. responsible for extraordinary renditions -- operations in
which covert agents grab terror suspects and take them to secret prison
facilities for interrogations that would normally be prohibited as torture --
fell under Black at the C.T.C., Priest has reported.
Black later went to the State Department, where one of his roles was to begin
coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. In 2003, the State
Department gave Blackwater a contract to train the Olympic security teams.
In 2004, Black left the State Department to join Blackwater, part of what
Harper's Silverstein termed a "revolving door to Blackwater" from the C.I.A. In
addition to his work with Blackwater and his own company, Total Intelligence
Solutions, Black also recently joined the presidential campaign of former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, where he serves the Republican hopeful as senior
advisor for counter-terrorism and national security.
*Rob Richer, vice president for intelligence*: Richer was head of the C.I.A.'s
Near East division -- and the agency's liaison with King Abdullah of Jordan --
from 1999 to 2004. In 2003, he briefed President Bush on the nascent Iraqi
insurgency. In late 2004, he became the associate deputy director in the
C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations, making him the second-ranking official for
clandestine operations. He left the agency for Blackwater in the fall of 2005,
effectively taking the agency's relationship with Abdullah with him. The C.I.A.
had invested millions of dollars in training Jordan's intelligence services.
There was an obvious quid pro quo: In exchange for the training, Jordan would
share information. Jordan has now hired Blackwater's intelligence division --
headed by Richer -- to do its spy training instead. The C.I.A. isn't happy,
writes Silverstein: "People [at the agency] are pissed off," said Silverstein's
source. "Abdullah still speaks with Richer regularly and he thinks that's the
same thing as talking to us. He thinks Richer is still the man."
*Fred Fielding, former outside counsel*: After four Blackwater employees were
tortured and killed in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, their families brought a
wrongful-death lawsuit against Blackwater, charging that the company had not
provided adequate arms, armor and backup. B lackwater feared that if it was found
liable for its employees' deaths, a floodgate of future litigation could be
opened. To fight the suit, Blackwater hired Fielding, the consummate Republican
insider. Dan Callahan, a lawyer representing the families, told Salon he was
shocked when he learned Fielding would be representing the company. "How the
hell," Callahan says he wondered at the time, "did I draw Fred Fielding on this
case?"
Fielding has had a long career as a lawyer to prominent Republicans. From 1970
to 1972, he was an associate White House counsel in the Nixon administration;
from 1972 to 1974, he was present for the denouement of that administration as
deputy White House counsel. Under President Reagan, he served as White House
counsel from 1981 to 1986, where he was the boss of a young assistant counsel
named John Roberts, now the chief justice of the United States. After the 2000
election, he served the current administration as transition counsel, and he also
held a spot on the 9/11 Commission. In January 2007, Bush chose him as White
House counsel.
*Ken Starr, outside counsel*: According to Callahan, Fielding represented
Blackwater as outside counsel for about six months beginning in February 2005.
After Fielding left the case, the law firm Greenberg Traurig, which was once home
to Jack Abramoff and worked for George W. Bush in the Florida recount,
represented Blackwater till October 2006. Blackwater then hired another
high-profile lawyer with impeccable Republican credentials -- Ken Starr, now the
dean of Pepperdine Law School in California. Starr was appointed to the federal
bench by Reagan, was U.S. solicitor general under George H.W. Bush and was on
Bush's shortlist to replace William Brennan on the Supreme Court. He is best
known, however, as the independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton. He
revealed the intimate details of Clinton's affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in
the infamous Starr Report and set in motion Clinton's impeachment by Congress.
Blackwater continues to assert that the state of North Carolina lacks
jurisdiction in the wrongful-death lawsuit against the security firm. On Oct.
18, 2006, Starr petitioned Chief Justice Roberts on behalf of Blackwater,
asserting that the company was "constitutionally immune" to the lawsuit. "If
companies such as Blackwater must factor the defense costs of state tort lawsuits
into [their] overall costs," argued Starr, "Blackwater will suffer irreparable
harm." Roberts denied the petition on Oct. 24. In December, Starr filed a
motion to bring the matter before the entire Supreme Court. The motion was
denied in February.
(Additional reporting by Tracee Herbaugh.)
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/print.html
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