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four years pass...
Scahill:
A federal jury in Washington DC returned guilty verdicts against four Blackwater operatives charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians and wounding scores of others in Baghdad in 2007....
The incident for which the men were tried was the single largest known massacre of Iraqi civilians at the hands of private US security contractors. Known as “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday,” operatives from Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians at a crowded intersection at Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. The company, founded by secretive right wing Christian supremacist Erik Prince, had deep ties to the Bush administration and served as a sort of neoconservative Praetorian Guard for a borderless war launched in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
While President Barack Obama pledged to reign in mercenary forces when he was a US senator, once he became president he continued to employ a massive shadow army of private contractors. Blackwater — despite numerous scandals, Congressional investigations, FBI probes and documented killings of civilians in both Iraq and Afghanistan — remained a central part of the Obama administration’s global war machine throughout his first term in office.
Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries. Prince now has a new company, Frontier Services Group, which he founded with substantial investment from Chinese enterprises. Among its areas of focus is the African continent. Prince recently suggested that his forces at Blackwater could have confronted Ebola and ISIS. “If the Administration cannot rally the political nerve or funding to send adequate active duty ground forces to answer the call, let the private sector finish the job,” Prince recently wrote....
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/10/22/blackwater-guilty-verdicts/
five months pass...
eleven months pass...
Erik Prince, founder of the now-defunct mercenary firm Blackwater and current chairman of Frontier Services Group, is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies for attempting to broker military services to foreign governments and possible money laundering, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the case.
What began as an investigation into Prince’s attempts to sell defense services in Libya and other countries in Africa has widened to a probe of allegations that Prince received assistance from Chinese intelligence to set up an account for his Libya operations through the Bank of China. The Justice Department, which declined to comment for this article, is also seeking to uncover the precise nature of Prince’s relationship with Chinese intelligence.
https://theintercept.com/2016/03/24/blackwater-founder-erik-prince-under-federal-investigation/
three years pass...
one year passes...