This article is a good one, but it is also kind of sad. Erik has given his all, and the political will just wasn’t there anymore to support him and his company. Although I think he will probably remain relevant to the war effort in one capacity or another, it’s just he has been effectively ‘thrown under the bus’. The company will keep pushing forward, no doubt. But as for the man who started the company? Done.
His case is also starting to look like Valerie Plame’s in my view, and maybe this is payback in some twisted political sense. I guess politics is more important than winning a war?
I would like to think of our industry as a tool for all parties in the U.S., but hey, what the king and his merry men want, they get I guess. The irony is that Obama and company has definitely attached ownership to this war, and I just don’t see how he will be able to prosecute the thing without men like Erik Prince and private industry.
It is also very telling that Obama’s strategy for Afghanistan really doesn’t look any different than the one his predecessor had for Iraq. I also don’t see a decline in the use of security contractors under this administration either. Actually, I have seen an increase, and that should give the reader of this article below a pause. If in fact the services of my industry are so despicable, so unethical, so wrong, then why are we still being used, and to such a high degree? I think we all know the answer to that, and yet we nail men like Erik Prince to the cross? Our enemies are laughing at us. Pffft.
By the way, Erik if you are reading this, I invite you to sit down and talk with Jake over at PMH radio, or start a blog and get connected. If in fact you are out of the game, there is no better place for a guy like yourself to get online and start squaring away the record by filling the information void. You would be surprised how many supporters would pop up, and your input about the industry and the war effort would be invaluable. –Matt
Edit: 12/5/2009 I highly suggest reading this post from the Jawa Report Blog in regards to Blackwater and EP. They hit it on the nail as far as the big picture.
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Tycoon, Contractor, Soldier, Spy
By Adam Ciralsky
January 2010
Vanity Fair
Erik Prince, recently outed as a participant in a C.I.A. assassination program, has gained notoriety as head of the military-contracting juggernaut Blackwater, a company dogged by a grand-jury investigation, bribery accusations, and the voluntary-manslaughter trial of five ex-employees, set for next month. Lashing back at his critics, the wealthy former navy seal takes the author inside his operation in the U.S. and Afghanistan, revealing the role he’s been playing in America’s war on terror.
I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions,” says Erik Prince as he surveys his heavily fortified, 7,000-acre compound in rural Moyock, North Carolina. “But when it became politically expedient to do so, someone threw me under the bus.” Prince—the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military contractor—is royally steamed. He wants to vent. And he wants you to hear him vent.
Erik Prince has an image problem—the kind that’s impervious to a Madison Avenue makeover. The 40-year-old heir to a Michigan auto-parts fortune, and a former navy seal, he has had the distinction of being vilified recently both in life and in art. In Washington, Prince has become a scapegoat for some of the Bush administration’s misadventures in Iraq—though Blackwater’s own deeds have also come in for withering criticism. Congressmen and lawyers, human-rights groups and pundits, have described Prince as a war profiteer, one who has assembled a rogue fighting force capable of toppling governments. His employees have been repeatedly accused of using excessive, even deadly force in Iraq; many Iraqis, in fact, have died during encounters with Blackwater. And in November, as a North Carolina grand jury was considering a raft of charges against the company, as a half-dozen civil suits were brewing in Virginia, and as five former Blackwater staffers were preparing for trial for their roles in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, The New York Times reported in a page-one story that Prince’s firm, in the aftermath of the tragedy, had sought to bribe Iraqi officials for their compliance, charges which Prince calls “lies … undocumented, unsubstantiated [and] anonymous.” (So infamous is the Blackwater brand that even the Taliban have floated far-fetched conspiracy theories, accusing the company of engaging in suicide bombings in Pakistan.)