CIA Assasins

panduranghari

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the-terrifying-background-of-the-man-who-ran-a-cia-assassination-unit

The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. "The move was historic," says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. "It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise."

The quote is from his e-book How to Get Away With Murder in America, which goes on to note that "in the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however tenuous, from the president and Congress," but that "President Bush's 2001 executive order severed this line by transferring to the CIA his unique authority to approve assassinations. By removing himself from the decision-making cycle, the president shielded himself — and all elected authority — from responsibility should a mission go wrong or be found illegal. When the CIA transferred the assassination unit to Blackwater, it continued the trend. CIA officers would no longer participate in the agency's most violent operations, or witness them. If it practiced any oversight at all, the CIA would rely on Blackwater's self-reporting about missions it conducted. Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible." None of this is new information, though I imagine that many people reading this item are hearing about it for the first time.

Isn't that bizarre?

The bulk of Wright's e-book (full disclosure: I help edit the website of Byliner, publisher of the e-book) tells the story of Enrique Prado, a high-ranking CIA-officer-turned-Blackwater-employee who oversaw assassination units for both the CIA and the contractor. To whom was this awesome responsibility entrusted? According to Wright's investigation, a federal organized crime squad run out of the Miami-Dade Police Department produced an investigation allegedly tying Prado to seven murders carried out while he worked as a bodyguard for a narco crime boss. At the time, the CIA declared him unavailable for questioning; the investigation was shut down before he was arrested or tried.

There's a lot more to the story — Wright's e-book is almost 50 pages long — but this bit is of particular note:

The reporting on Prado's activities at Blackwater produced no evidence that the firm's employees had ever killed anyone on behalf of the CIA. But I spoke to Blackwater employees who insisted that they had. Two Blackwater contractors told me that their firm began conducting assassinations in Afghanistan as early as 2008. They claimed to have participated in such operations — one in a support role, the other as a "trigger puller." The contractors, to whom I spoke in 2009 and 2010, were both ex-Special Forces soldiers who were not particularly bothered by assassination work, although they did question the legality of Blackwater's involvement in it.

According to the "trigger puller," he and a partner were selected for one such operation because they were Mexican Americans, whose darker skin enabled them to blend in as Afghan civilians. The first mission he described took place in 2008. He and his partner spent three weeks training outside Kabul, becoming accustomed to walking barefoot like Afghans while toting weapons underneath their jackets. Their mission centered on walking into a market and killing the occupant of a pickup truck, whose identity a CIA case worker had provided to them. They succeeded in their mission, he told me, and moved on to another. This contractor's story didn't completely fit with other accounts about Prado's unit at Blackwater. The e-mail written by Prado and later obtained by the Times seemed to indicate that the unit wouldn't use Americans to carry out actual assassinations. Moreover, two CIA sources insisted that the contractors I spoke to were lying. As one put it, "These guys are security guards who want to look like Rambo."

When I asked Ed O'Connell, a former Air Force colonel and RAND analyst with robust intelligence experience in Afghanistan, to evaluate these contractors' claims, he first told me they were almost certainly a "fantastical crock of shit." But a year later, in 2011, after a research trip in Afghanistan under contract to CENTCOM, O'Connell had changed his assessment. He told me, "Your sources seem to have been correct. Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA."

So there you have it: A former Air Force colonel, speaking on the record and using the present tense, said in 2011 that "private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA."

Says Wright:

While Blackwater's covert unit began as a Bush administration story, President Obama now owns it. In 2010, his administration intervened on behalf of the Blackwater executives indicted for weapons trafficking, filing motions to suppress evidence on the grounds that it could compromise national security. The administration then awarded Blackwater (which is now called Academi) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA. At the same time, Obama has publicly taken responsibility for some lethal operations — the Navy SEALs' sniper attack on Somali pirates, the raid on bin Laden. His aides have also said that he reviews target lists for drone strikes. The president's actions give him the appearance of a man who wants the best of both worlds. He appears as a tough, resolute leader when he announces his role in killings that will likely be popular — a pirate, a terrorist. But the apparatus for less accountable killings grinds on.

Needless to say, this ought to spark an investigation, but more than that, it should cause Americans to step back and reflect on how vulnerable we've made ourselves to bad actors in the post-9/11 era. We're giving C.I.A. agents and even private security contractors the sort of power no individual should wield. And apparently our screening apparatus turns out to be lacking.
 

spikey360

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And people still look up to the United States. They'd sell their souls to the Devil if such were possible.
One fails to understand why a 'warlord' like Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize.
Now coming back to the topic, it comes as little surprise that US contractors are actually the ones running the show with CIA blessings. It is all business, it is all economics, it is all profiteering when it comes to war for the United States. If a country can go as far as fabricating lies about 'huge cache of chemical weapons' in Iraq and invade it subsequently, anything is possible for such country. This country simply doesn't know how to make friends, does it? Only slaves.
 
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panduranghari

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And people still look up to the United States. They'd sell their souls to the Devil if such were possible.
One fails to understand why a 'warlord' like Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize.
Now coming back to the topic, it comes as little surprise that US contractors are actually the ones running the show with CIA blessings. It is all business, it is all economics, it is all profiteering when it comes to war for the United States. If a country can go as far as fabricating lies about 'huge cache of chemical weapons' in Iraq and invade it subsequently, anything is possible for such country. This country simply doesn't know how to make friends, does it? Only slaves.
On Sky 2 I am following the series called 'The Newsroom' Its awesome. Its on HBO in the US.

Please watch this. Its good.

 
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spikey360

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^ Very correct assessment of the state of the United States. The moral decline of America is a greater tragedy than its economic decline. One may not be the richest person in the world, but one can always have magnanimity and volubility. That was the America the world respected, all is not lost, they still have a chance to set things right. Thanks for the share.
 

Ray

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Nothing unusual about it.

Superpowers past and present have such organisations.

Without them, it would not be able to enforce the aims of the superpower.

Osama would never have been found and would have thus never have been killed. (remember the chaos caused by the Defence Contractor (read CIA) who killed two Pak ISI men?)

Even Mossad is said to be having such units.

To catch a thief, set a thief.

To catch a guerrilla, act a guerrilla.

If India had such units, it would have made the terror organisations like Hafiz Saeed's redundant and Dawood meeting his Maker!

But then, India is Gandhian!
 
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sayareakd

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private contractor is hire gun, with ni legal protection, plus it is illegal as per International law.
 

Ray

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private contractor is hire gun, with ni legal protection, plus it is illegal as per International law.
But what difference has it made to these private hired guns.

They went scot free in Iraq.

They went scot free in Pakistan.

Mossad which has no clout as the CIA also goes scot free.

So does Qaddafi's hired guns and Osama's!

So does Dawood's and Chota Ranjan's!

Morality is Immorality!

Have Gun, Will Travel!
 
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Abhijeet Dey

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Does India have any PMCs or Private Sub Contractors like Academi or Executive Outcomes?
 

Abhijeet Dey

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I wish U.S. could send private contractors to help in Sindh/Balauchistan freedom struggle. It will ultimately help US and ensure safety & security of Afghanistan.
Or they could hire local baluchis, sindhis, pashtuns etc......
 

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