Mr. CIA - more on Erik Prince and Blackwater

hoo-boy... surprising but not surprising if you know what i mean...

[T]he truth about [Erik] Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.

no question about it... you couldn't make this shit up...

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1,245 CIA-operated flights flew over European airspace or stopped over at airports in Europe after 9/11

i posted the other day on marie brenner's vanity fair article about charles swift in which he said that the purpose of guantánamo is torture... i think it's abundantly clear that is also the purpose of extraordinary rendition...

European Union lawmakers on Wednesday approved a final report which slams EU governments for tolerating or assisting the United States' practice of secret detentions of terrorist suspects.

More than 10 European states, including Britain, Poland, Italy and Germany aided or knew about the US secret service CIA's clandestine programme of taking terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation, Euro MPs said in their report.

At least 1,245 CIA-operated flights flew over European airspace or stopped over at airports in Europe after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the US, Euro MPs concluded.

i'm not surprised about the uk or poland... and, even tho' we've know about it for a while, i'm still surprised about germany and italy...

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The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture

in a lengthy, blockbuster article, vanity fair provides a detailed examination of guantánamo in the context of former military attorney charles swift and the case of hamdan vs. rumsfeld...

The whole purpose of setting up Guantánamo Bay is for torture. Why do this? Because you want to escape the rule of law. There is only one thing that you want to escape the rule of law to do, and that is to question people coercively—what some people call torture. Guantánamo and the military commissions are implements for breaking the law. Why build a prison here when there are plenty of prisons in Nebraska? Why is it, when we see photos of Abu Ghraib, we think that it is "exporting Guantánamo"? That it is the "Guantánamo method"?

[...]

[W]hy a military commission? Because if you torture someone, it is the only way you can get their statements in and not have to admit it in public.

—Lieutenant Commander Charles Swift, January 2007, to the author, Marie Brenner, in the article, Taking on Guantánamo, Vanity Fair, March 2007.

escaping the rule of law... the motto of and, hopefully, the epitaph of the bush administration...

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An impassioned plea to remove George and Dick

when you've got a bad case of iraq deja-vu going on...

craig unger in vanity fair...

Whatever the administration's master plan may be, parts of it are already under way. In mid-January, the U.S. sent a second aircraft-carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf. According to Gardiner, by the end of February the United States will have enough forces in place to mount an assault on Iran. That, in the words of former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, would be "an act of political folly" so severe that "the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end."

The Bush White House has already built the fire. Whether it will light the match remains to be seen.

and congress is debating less critical issues as the u.s. swirls the drain...

kidneystones in daily kos...

Forget peace, international coalitions, global warming and universal healthcare. If Dems don't start screaming now about the need to remove Cheney from power now, it's going to be too late. In December, a few of us pooh-poohed all the cheering and predicted an Iran attack in March. Looks like Craig Unger and a few other folks figure March is about when it happens, too.

Cheney doesn't give a rat's ass about the law, the will of the American voters or any force of nature beyond his own rapacious greed and belief that he and only he understands what's right for America.

Cheney and his sock-puppet are moving all the pieces into place for an attack on Iran. Dems will not have much time to act, surely no more than 30 days.

what options do we have left...?

Will the IMPEACHMENT debate provide every Dem with the opportunity to speak up on another invasion, some feel is guaranteed to turn the world against America once and for all? Yes!

Will the IMPEACHMENT debate FOCUS America's attention on the illegal war on Iran just about everyone seems to believe is unfolding before our eyes?

Will Americans forgive Dems for doing nothing again to stop the attack, when folks come forward with Tehran and America's reputation in ashes with the sorry-ass excuse?

bush and his criminal posse have to go...

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