goldiron

Source: Cryptogon

Blackwater has probably been used for U.S. Government narcotics trafficking operations before, but it looks like that is going to be a major component of their business going forward.

Note the phrase “aviation support” in the story below. Aviation support is synonymous with narcotics trafficking. If you read, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, this will all make much more sense.

Also note the mention of West Africa as a venue for increased Blackwater/Xe activity. In this context, see: Global Cocaine Trade Moves to Africa:

West Africa is an unlikely center for the international cocaine trade. It is not a producer of the drug nor is it a consumer, as the vast majority of its people are very poor.

Yet a startling 50 tons of cocaine is transported through West Africa each year, according to the latest United Nations estimates. The value of this illicit trade dwarfs entire economies and has the potential to corrupt the region’s fragile states, which are just pulling out of decades of bitter civil wars.

In the past Africa has been a treasure trove looted by covetous colonialists, voracious rebels and kleptocratic rulers — over the last 300 years think slaves, ivory, gold, diamonds, tin and coltan. Now it is a transit point and storeroom for the cocaine trade.

“Drug money is perverting the weak economies in the region,” says Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. The wholesale value in European streets of cocaine passing through West Africa is $2 billion, he says.

South American cartels used to transport cocaine to the big U.S. market via the Caribbean. But dwindling American consumption, stricter control of the West Indies drugs route, growing cocaine use in Europe and weak law enforcement in West Africa have conspired to bring the drug to the region. It is the path of least resistance.

Grown and processed in South America, the refined cocaine is transported by boat or plane across the Atlantic: The shortest line of latitude brings the cargo straight to West Africa. From there the cartels move the drugs onwards to Europe, along the way paying off West African officials in order to be able to operate freely.

So, we have Blackwater/Xe increasing “aviation support” activities in two of the hottest narcotics trafficking hubs in the world. Coincidences.

Blackwater/Xe/ or whatever those crooks are calling themselves this week, are probably going to be performing the same role as Barry and the Boys did at Mena, Arkansas in the 1980s. Running contractors and cutouts, training drug pilots, retrofitting aircraft, and actually carrying out narcotics trafficking operations. Soup to nuts.

In other words, same shit, different decade.

Via: AP:

Blackwater Worldwide is still protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq, but executives at the beleaguered security firm are taking their biggest step yet to put that work and the ugly reputation it earned the company behind them.

Blackwater said Friday it will no longer operate under the name that came to be known worldwide as a caustic moniker for private security, dropping the tarnished brand for a disarming and simple identity: Xe, which is pronounced like the letter “z.”

It’s a rare surrender for a company that cherished a brand name inspired by the dark-water swamps of northeastern North Carolina, one that survived another rebranding effort about a year ago, following a deadly shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. The decision to give it up underscores how badly the Moyock-based company’s brand was damaged by that incident and other security work in Iraq.

“They have established themselves as the bad guys,” said Katy Helvenston, who sued the company following her son’s death during a mission in Fallujah while working for Blackwater in 2004. “They’ve established such a horrible reputation. Why else would they change their name?”

Blackwater acknowledged last year in an interview with the The Associated Press the damage to its reputation had persuaded the company to focus on lines of business other than private security contracting.

The issue came to a head last month, when the State Department said it would not rehire Blackwater to protect its diplomats in Iraq after its current contract with the company expires in May. The company has one other major security contract, details of which are classified.

“It’s not a direct result of a loss of (that) contract, but certainly that is an aspect of our work that we feel we were defined by,” said spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell.

The company is also replacing its bear paw logo with a sleeker black-and-white graphic based on letters that make up the company’s new name. In a note to employees, president Gary Jackson said the name change reflects the company’s new focus, and he indicated Xe would not actively pursue new security business.

“This company will continue to provide personnel protective services for high-threat environments when needed by the U.S. government, but its primary mission will be operating our training facilities around the world,” Jackson said.

It has expanded other businesses such as aviation support, recently building a fleet of 76 aircraft that it has deployed to such hotspots as West Africa and Afghanistan. The company got its start in training and continues to build up that business. Last year, some 25,000 civilians, law enforcement and military personnel attended a Blackwater class.

The company’s changes aren’t entirely voluntary. The 2007 shooting in Nisoor Square involving Blackwater guards left at least a dozen Iraqi civilians dead, infuriated politicians in Baghdad and Washington, triggered congressional hearings and increased calls that the company be banned from Iraq.

Late last year, prosecutors charged five of the company’s contractors — but not Blackwater itself — with manslaughter and weapons violations. In January, Iraqi officials said they would not give the company a license to operate. The State Department responded by informing Blackwater it would not renew a contract that comprises a third of the company’s nearly $1 billion in annual revenue.

“It would hurt us,” company CEO Erik Prince said in an interview before losing the State Department deal. “It would not be a mortal blow, but it would hurt us.”

Blackwater has rebranded before, introducing a new name — Blackwater Worldwide — and slight changes to its logo about a year ago. But Friday’s announcement cuts ties entirely with a name created in 1997 when Prince and some of his former Navy SEAL colleagues launched the company.

Xe will cover the parent brand for the two-dozen subsidiaries, and none of those subsidiaries will retain the word “Blackwater” in their names.

Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and a longtime Blackwater critic, said the new name won’t change the fact that its actions have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians.

“Blackwater’s notorious reputation will outlast its name,” she said.

S.C. becomes focal point to track funds for gangs, narcotics

South Carolina’s political and military leaders fear that U.S. street gangs are conspiring with international terrorists, an alarming scenario they said highlights the need for a specialized unit that targets major drug runners and their bankrollers.

And they want the South Carolina National Guard to run the federally-funded pilot program.

U.S. Reps. Joe Wilson and Henry Brown, both Republicans, have asked U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to back the creation of a military unit that would bridge a perceived security gap between the international drug trade and the war on terror.

“The National Guard has the capacity and the authority to play a unique role in our nation’s counter-narcotics mission,” Wilson told The Post and Courier. “The counter-narcotics pilot program would specifically target the illicit finance generated by the narcotics industry here at home and abroad which is used to fund terrorist operations around the world.”

Proponents said a successful program in South Carolina could serve as a national model and that several factors make the state a strategic location to set up shop:

–The state boasts an abundance of major military installations and resources that already serve key national security roles, including Charleston Air Force Base and its fleet of C-17s, Charleston’s port and the Navy brig, which has housed terrorism suspects.

–Organized gangs with international ties already are operating in the state. One of these organizations, the notorious Mara Salvatrucha-13 (MS-13), has possible links to hostile groups in Afghanistan and the Middle East, according to Wilson and Brown.

–Wilson cites a new report by the Congressional Research Service on the emerging international threat posed by the MS-13 and 18th Street gangs. The report states that “alarms have been sounded in some circles that international terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda could exploit alien and narcotics smuggling networks controlled by these gangs to infiltrate the United States.”

–The state National Guard already is working in some counter-narcotics programs, and its citizen soldiers are accustomed to collaborating in drug investigations with state and local law enforcement.

But questions remain. Among them: How strong is the evidence linking terrorists, gangs and drug-trafficking? How would this new program square with existing federal, state and local drug enforcement efforts? And is South Carolina the best place for this mission?

The gang connection

Gang activity in South Carolina has increased steadily over the past decade as these criminal organizations have spilled from urban centers into rural and suburban nooks across the nation in search of new territory and customers.

In 2004, the state Law Enforcement Division had identified 84 groups in South Carolina that fit a general definition of a gang: an organized group of five or more people who adopt a common name and engage in crime. By 2007, that figure had ballooned to 325 identified gangs, authorities said.

The number of crimes attributed to gangs has mushroomed as well. In 2007, gangs were linked to more than 950 crimes in South Carolina, including drug trafficking. By comparison, 370 gang-related crimes were reported statewide in 2001, according to SLED.

Many of these groups are what police describe as “hybrid gangs,” small, independent groups connected by turf or friendship. But highly organized gangs with cross-border connections also are present — gangs such as MS-13, Surenos, 18th Street and the Mexican Mafia.

“The number of Hispanic gangs is drastically growing,” said Special Agent Nicole Bryan, SLED’s coordinator on gangs in the Midlands. “As the Hispanic community has grown, Hispanic gangs have increased as part of that growth.”

Across the country, MS-13 and other gangs increasingly have become involved in narcotic trafficking at the wholesale level. They’ve cultivated connections with Mexican drug cartels and other power criminal organizations to gain access to international suppliers and large- volume shipments, according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. These affiliations have increased the availability of illegal drugs and the profits flowing out of the country.

The revenue stream is huge, with traffickers employing myriad of methods to launder and smuggle drug money to foreign destinations. The drug intelligence center estimates that Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers generate and launder as much as $39 billion in wholesale profits annually, much of which is smuggled out of the United States along the Mexican border.

Over the years, South Carolina has emerged as a key distribution point in this narcotics pipeline, serving as a smuggling route for drugs from California, Florida, Georgia, New York, Texas and Mexico. South Carolina’s location along Interstates 95 and 85, between New York and Florida, makes it ideal for drug runners shipping marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin along the Eastern Seaboard, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“Project 9496″

The pilot program would target this stealthy underworld of drugs and money. The new unit is shrouded in secrecy, with scant details of its origin, funding and status. The Pentagon refers to the program as “Project 9496.”

Col. Pete Brooks, director of public affairs for the S.C. National Guard, said it’s too early to talk about the effort in detail. “We are not even out of the blocks yet. This whole new mission is at the ‘good idea’ stage and is not funded.”

But a Jan. 14 letter from Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard J. Douglas to the National Guard Bureau indicates the pilot program already is approved. The letter states that the South Carolina Counter Narco-Terrorism Pilot Program is to be run and funded separately from an existing network of states’ National Guard counter-drug units.

Brooks said the pilot program would expand the South Carolina Guard’s anti-drug unit, which employs 40 full-time employees and hires about a dozen temporary workers each summer to help destroy marijuana crops.

The program receives about $1.6 million in federal money each year in support of the drug eradication efforts of SLED and local police agencies. How the two agencies would partner under the pilot program is unclear because SLED considers it only “an idea at this point,” according to a statement the agency issued in response to questions from the newspaper. Exactly how much the program would cost also remains unclear.

The letters of support from Brown and Wilson suggest that Gov. Mark Sanford also is pushing for the new mission. But Sanford’s press secretary, Joel Sawyer, said the governor was unaware of the proposal until The Post and Courier inquired about it.

After discussing the plans with state Guard officials, however, Sanford thinks the program is “an intriguing idea,” Sawyer said.

Still, the program’s status and future remains unclear. The National Guard Bureau said federal seed money was set aside only to study the program’s feasibility. The agency couldn’t provide a figure.

Tracking the money

Efforts to choke off terrorist financing began in earnest after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, with then President George W. Bush announcing two weeks later a “major thrust of our war on terrorism … a strike on the financial foundation of the global terror network.”

Within months, the U.S. government froze the assets of dozens of alleged terrorists, banks and nonprofit groups.

Investigators learned that al-Qaida financiers used everything from electronic transfers to camels to move money and fund their operations. Making matters even more challenging was the existence of the hawala system, a centuries-old money loan and transfer system that is based on the honor system among brokers across the world.

Unlike traditional banking systems, which leave trails of paper and records, hawalas typically don’t keep records of individual transactions.

But financing experts and government officials have said tracking down terrorism financiers has suffered in recent years. A report last year by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force said international efforts have had limited success and that the United States and other countries need to create new counter-terrorism techniques.

Reports by the Government Accountability Office in the past two years have said the nation needs an “integrated strategy to coordinate the delivery of counter-terrorism financing training.” A Pentagon report in 2007 called for “one over-arching organization” devoted to international terrorism financing.

John Cassara, a former CIA officer and U.S. Treasury Department agent, said the military in recent years has become more focused on narco-terrorists and their paymasters. He said that this emphasis is a natural outgrowth of the military’s efforts in Afghanistan, where most of the world’s opium is produced.

“We’ve seen over the years how the Taliban has used it to bankroll their operations,” said Cassara, author of “Hide & Seek - Intelligence, Law Enforcement and the Stalled War on Terror Finance.” “The classic line is that if you take away the money, there’s no terrorism. The military realizes this.”

But Cassara said he hasn’t seen any solid evidence showing connections between Latin American gangs and Central Asian and Middle Eastern terrorism. “Could it happen? Absolutely. Does it happen? Frankly I don’t know,” he said, adding that organized criminal gangs are “opportunists, and they will naturally reach out to organizations that can facilitate their operations.”

A recent assessment from the National Drug Intelligence Center reached a similar conclusion, saying such connections are possible but not supported by evidence. The report identified U.S. prison gangs that have spread outside the bars as having the most potential for relationships with terrorists.

While government officials know of no concrete connection between gangs selling drugs in the United States and Middle East terrorist groups, authorities have long known that terrorist organizations in South America, especially in Colombia, fuel much of their activity with drug money. And authorities say they have watched with growing concern as Nigerian criminal groups increasingly have brought drugs, some of it from the Middle East, into this country, including the Southeast.

Source: IPS

NEW YORK - In what promises to be the first major test of the Barack Obama administration’s new approach to the rule of law, the Supreme Court will soon hear what could be one of the most consequential cases in U.S. history.

It will be asked to answer the question: Can a U.S. president declare a legal resident an ‘enemy combatant’ and hold him or her indefinitely without charge or trial?

The legal U.S. resident in question is Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, who has been detained in solitary confinement at a Navy brig in South Carolina since June 2003. Al-Marri is the only remaining person held in the United States as an “enemy combatant”. He is being represented by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The case, Al-Marri v. Spagone, is a habeas corpus action, challenging al-Marri’s indefinite detention. The defendant is Navy Commander Daniel Spagone, who runs the Navy brig in South Carolina where Al-Marri is being held by the military.

The central pre-Supreme Court question is what position the new Obama administration will take when it files its brief, currently due on Mar. 23. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments during the last week of April and is expected to hand down its ruling in June. The brief filed by the government in the lower courts during the George W. Bush administration defended the president’s authority to designate “enemy combatants” and to detain them indefinitely.

The ACLU says that the Al-Marri case “provides the Obama administration with an early and critical opportunity to repudiate the abuses of the past eight years and restore the rule of law.”

Jonathan Hafetz, ACLU’s lead attorney on the Al-Marri case, told IPS, “This is one of most extreme examples of the Bush administration’s abuse of executive power. It is a case where President Bush sought to push the outer limits of the Constitution. It is legally and morally indefensible.”

A separate case, Al-Marri v. Gates, is contesting al-Marri’s abusive treatment and conditions of confinement at the Navy brig.

Al-Marri, a Qatari national, came lawfully to the United States in September 2001with his wife and five children to pursue a master’s degree at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. He was arrested by the FBI at his home that December and subsequently indicted for credit card fraud and false identification.

Al-Marri asserted his innocence and prepared to contest the charges. But on Jun. 23, 2003, on the eve of a hearing to suppress illegally seized evidence and less than a month before trial, President Bush declared al-Marri an al Qaeda agent and designated him an “enemy combatant” in the “war on terrorism”. That same day, the military took custody of al-Marri and incarcerated him in the Navy brig, where he has been detained without charge ever since.

At stake in Al-Marri v. Spagone is whether the president can order the military to seize and detain indefinitely, without charge or trial, individuals lawfully residing in the United States, including U.S. citizens, based on government assertions that they planned to commit terrorist activities.

In 2007, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the government cannot hold individuals arrested in this country in military detention without charge.

But in July 2008, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in a narrowly divided decision that the president had legal authority to imprison al-Marri indefinitely without charge based on the facts alleged. As one judge noted in dissent, however, to accept the government’s claim of extraordinary detention power would have “disastrous consequences for the Constitution - and the country”.

The ACLU says Al-Marri’s detention represents “one of the gravest expansions of executive detention power since Sep. 11.” The United States was founded on the principle that “individuals living in this country cannot be imprisoned without charge and that civilian government must remain supreme over the military. Al-Marri’s detention represents a radical departure from that celebrated legal tradition - one that was never authorised by Congress and that violates the Constitution.”

According to the ACLU, documents recently obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that standard operating procedures developed for Guantánamo Bay “were secretly applied at the Navy brig in an effort to create a prison beyond the law within the United States. Today, al-Marri remains in virtual isolation at the Brig, denied even meaningful communication with his family.”

“It is clearly illegal to imprison legal residents of the United States without trial. It is also the type of false choice between our safety and our ideals that has pervaded America’s approach to fighting terrorism for the past eight years,” said the ACLU’S Hafetz. “We are confident that upon review, the Court will strike down this radical departure from our nation’s most basic values and traditions.”

Former United States Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, former FBI Director William Sessions and numerous former generals, admirals and diplomats joined the ACLU in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the president’s authority to indefinitely imprison a legal resident of the U.S. without charge or trial. These and other top military and civilian leaders have filed friend-of-the-court briefs.

“A decision upholding our government’s right to arrest and imprison anyone within its borders, without charge, will not only undercut our ability to convince dictatorial regimes to abandon similar practices, it will substantially undermine efforts to restore our international reputation and to obtain more cooperation from our allies in combating terrorism,” they said in the brief.

The second Al-Marri case, Al-Marri v. Gates, contests al-Marri’s treatment and conditions of confinement since he was declared an “enemy combatant”. During the first 16 months of his military confinement, al-Marri was held incommunicado and subjected to a range of highly coercive interrogation measures, including being held in total isolation, exposed to painful stress positions, shackled in a freezing cell for hours at a time, and threatened with violence and death.

Al-Marri is the second U.S. person to have been held as an enemy combatant within the United States. The first was José Padilla, a United States citizen. Padilla was arrested in Chicago in May 2002, and was detained as a material witness until Jun. 9 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to trial in civilian courts.

Padilla was held for three-and-a-half years as an “enemy combatant” after his arrest on suspicion of plotting a radioactive “dirty bomb” attack. That charge was dropped when his case was moved to a civilian court after pressure from civil liberties groups.

In August 2007, Padilla was found guilty by a federal jury of charges that he conspired to kill people in an overseas jihad and to fund and support overseas terrorism. He was sentenced to 17 years and four months in prison.

Rahm Emanuel: “If you are on that no fly list, your access to the right to bare arms is cancelled”

February 2nd, 2009

Tens of millions of Americans have been emptying gun stores of weapons of every description and ammunition for months.

I have no idea what PSYOP is planned to get the thought criminals to go quietly, but it’s probably going to be a doozy.

—H. R. 645: To Direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to Establish National Emergency Centers on Military Installations

Via: Prison Planet:

May 15, 2007 Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) speaking at DC’s annual Stand Up For a Safe America event sponsored by the Brady Center says if your name is on the terrorist no fly list you should not be allowed to own a gun.

Why are there so many names on the U.S. government’s terrorist list?

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.

By those numbers, the list now has over one million names on it.

Obama and the Second Amendment

Despite a huge Democratic Senate majority, Eric Holder’s confirmation hearings are going to be difficult. He has a long record to defend. Whether it is his involvement and inconsistent statements about Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich’s or his pushing Clinton’s clemency of the FALN terrorists or his failure to disclose his work for troubled Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich after Blagojevich’s legal problems surfaced, he faces tough questions.

But Holder’s nomination raises other questions about what President-elect Barack Obama claimed he believed during the campaign. Numerous times he promised that he supported an individual’s right to own guns and that he wouldn’t do anything to take away people’s guns.

Just last year in a brief to the Supreme Court, Holder argued that “the Second Amendment did not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms,” that it only protected government militias’ rights to guns. He claimed that the Second Amendment posed no obstacle to implementing gun bans.

I can’t find even one gun control law that Holder has opposed. On every gun control regulation he has discussed, he has been supportive, including: bans, raising the age that someone can possess a gun, registration and licensing, one-gun-a-month limit on purchases, and mandatory waiting periods.

Even more troubling, while Holder served in the Clinton Justice Department, he oversaw the background check system, but he has never been asked to explain why the system broke down so consistently while he ran it.

The constant breakdowns of “instant” background-check systems during the Clinton administration halted gun sales for hours or even days at a time, costing stores untold sales and additional costs. Even by the end of the Clinton administration, from September 1999 to December 2000, the system was down about one hour for every 16.7 hours of operation. The breakdowns often came in big blocks of time, the worst during a period covering 60 business hours during two weeks in the middle of May 2000. During his tenure, gun shows sometimes found that they couldn’t sell guns during the entire weekend that they were open.

Try running a business where you face random shutdowns and neither customers nor sellers are ever informed of how long outages are expected to last. In addition to the government-imposed fees on gun sellers and the regulatory harassment of gun sellers with no evidence that these policies have reduce crime, it is not surprising that the number of gun dealers has plummeted by over 80 percent since 1992.

The breakdown in background checks, which had been a problem for years under the Clinton administration, magically fixed itself within weeks of President Bush assuming office in 2001, and the problems have not recurred.

What few realize is the huge power that the attorney general has to make legitimate gun selling very difficult without any new laws or regulations having to be passed. This is even more important now than it was under the Clinton administration, as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has recently moved from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department.

I always questioned Obama’s claims and argued that up until the presidential campaign his whole career had supported gun bans, but there was no lack of politicians and advisers who attested to Obama’s sincerity on the issue. Obama and his campaign constantly tried to explain away his past support for gun control as being mistakes by subordinates who had incorrectly explained his positions.

Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, promised reporters last August about Obama: “He ain’t going to take your gun away. He ain’t ever going to take your gun away.” Joe Biden made similar statements while campaigning in places such as rural southwest Virginia. An Obama adviser, Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, said on Hugh Hewitt’s national radio show last fall that “I think that he has always been an individual rights person on the Second Amendment.” Another adviser, Professor Cass Sunstein at Harvard, told Time Magazine in June: “Obama has always expressed a belief that the Second Amendment guarantees a private right to bear arms.” The list goes on. It was a constant theme of the campaign.

Just before the November election, the Los Angeles Times questioned the honesty of those who questioned Obama’s stand on guns, because “Obama does not oppose gun rights. He has made a point of pounding this home to rural audiences, telling them he has no intention of taking their guns away: not their shotguns, not their handguns, not anything.”

There are few such issues that the Obama campaign promised over and over again during the campaign.

Holder’s nomination suggests this promise was not serious. And it also suggests that Obama won’t appoint judges who believe it either. With Appeals Courts around the country already facing Second Amendment cases and a very closely divided Supreme Court likely to rehear the issue, the judges Obama will appoint could easily reverse last year’s Supreme Court decision striking down the DC gun, a decision that he claims to support.