[WSJ] Blackwater's [now XE]
Founder Blames U.S. for Its Troubles Erik Prince Releases Memoir as He Writes His Next Chapter as Investor.
MIDDLEBURG, Va.--Blackwater founder Erik Prince personifies the hidden hand in America's terror wars. His company secretly armed and maintained drones in Pakistan, trained CIA hit teams, and collected $2billion as a government security contractor. Mr. Prince said he looks back on that adventure as "13 lost years." The billions of dollars are gone now, and he blames the U.S. government. Lay down with the dog, wake up with the....
After a series of federal investigations, government contract battles and critical congressional hearings, Mr. Prince sold Blackwater in 2010. Following continued controversy over his most recent pursuits while based in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Prince has returned to Virginia to write a new chapter of his life--as an entrepreneur buying oil, land and minerals in Africa. On Monday, he is also releasing a memoir, "Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror." It is his attempt to defend his work, challenge public perceptions of Blackwater and settle scores with a government he says made him a scapegoat when things went badly overseas. We should all be so lucky as to return to Middleburg, VA.
After years of controversy, Erik Prince feels betrayed by the Obama administration -- and he's looking to start a new chapter. Join the club. Continued on Page 49
[WASHINGTONTIMES] Twenty hours after Mr. Obama's depressing presser, 39 Democrats joined Republicans to support the "Keep Your Health Plan Act of 2013." And just like that, No. 44 became a lame duck, eviscerated and emasculated. The shutdown? Ancient history. The fractured Republican Party? Gone with the wind.
Instead, the headlines are suddenly focused on dissension in the Democratic Party, in Mr. Obama's Cabinet, and in Congress, where lawmakers are running for cover over Obamacare, abandoning the party's standard-bearer to save their own political skins. In the blink of an eye, Mr. Obama's approval rating plunged to 39 percent -- exactly where George W. Bush found himself after weeks of dire Katrina coverage.
"When you take a look at history, when presidents in their second terms drop on credibility, trust and approval, they never come back from that," former Bush campaign strategist Matthew Dowd said last week. "When we look back three years from now at the end of his presidency, we're going to all say this was the tipping point of his relevancy."
And the president knows it. In his funereal news conference, he sought to once again sow division and dissension -- his go-to M.O. In a desperate gambit, he suggested that insurers re-offer the plans they have been canceling because of Obamacare. The intent: If Americans pay more for health care under his program now, it's not his fault -- it's those heartless insurance companies! He hopes the discord will help in 2014.
But deep down, he knows it won't. And by Sunday, the president was back on the golf course, in a thick fog, on a cold and drizzly day. This time, though, the outing didn't have the aura of a powerful man taking a break from his powerful post.
Instead, it felt more like a newly retired guy just looking to get out of the house for a bit.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/19/2013 00:00 ||
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#2
And by Sunday, the president was back on the golf course, in a thick fog, on a cold and drizzly day.>
As we have instructed here on the Burg. For best taxpayer results, a daily regimen. Nine before noon, a two hour lunch & nap, then another 9 following. Lots of smoke breaks in between.
#4
...and the difference between that an Biden being in the seat is? Joe's smart enough to know not to touch a third rail. Reid has about as much power that the rules of the Senate allow and yet not too much to tempt a coup by some other Senator (its an old Roman tradition).
#9
His failure to go to Gettysburg indicates that he is afraid of the reception he will receive. Look for more and more of his "public" appearances to be before controlled audiences. He may become known as the education president because the only group he could speak to was union teachers.
#11
His reading of the Gettysburg Address was horrible. It reminded me of some of the readers at church haven't bothered to read the material beforehand, seemingly emphasizing words at random. I thought he was supposed to be a great orator. Not so much.
#12
I woke up in the middle of the night with a Captain Obvious moment. Perhaps on the anniversary of the Kennedy Assassination, my conspiracy theorist credentials are working in high gear.
Various agencies of the federal government, not normally connected with law enforcement, guns, bullets and bombs have been purchasing weapons, ammunition, and equipment by the truck load.
Obama has been purging the ranks of our General Officer corps of anyone not a true believer
While I believe in Heinlein's Law ("Never attribute to malice that which could be more easily explained by stupidity"), no one in the inner circle of true believers surrounding Obama is THAT stupid and our foreign policy is just BEGGING for some catastrophic event to occur.
NSA is tracking everyone of us in email, websites, bank transactions, cell phones, heck I think they even have my fleet of stealth carrier pigeons wired.
Taken in isolation, all of this odd and near keystone cop behavior by our government is symptomatic of an administration in self destruct sequence and counting.
Taken together, and my intelligence analyst/conspiracy theorist tendencies, I can see a scenario being played out for an enormous coup d'état. An enormous catastrophe or vast civil disobedience uprising gives the ONE the excuse to declare martial law, he issues a series of executive orders to suspend most civil rights, hits the kill switch on the internet, orders his sycophant generals out into the streets with their troops and he thinks he could have 1917 all over again with a newer and greater communist paradise.
Of course all of the useful idiots in the media and academia would be herded into confinement or shot as traitors....
Am I nuts or have I just been reading this stuff too much and I should law off Del Taco at midnight?
Posted by: Bill Clinton ||
11/19/2013 13:01 Comments ||
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#14
I have to admit having thoughts along the same line as Bill's; but mine switch gears when you get to the part about where Obama "...orders his sycophant generals out into the streets with their troops ..." At that point, my thoughts go more to ; the general may order but the trops will not act; and in fact may turn their weapons into another direction.
But I do not rule out Barry doing something world class stupid to (tyr to) save his own sorry ass.
#16
I donno - I just finished re-reading Red Storm Rising last night and the coup d'état the Ruskies pulled off at the end seemed pretty easy. "Less than 200 people really knew what was going on." But I 'spose our troops would not so blindly follow world-class-stoopid orders.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/19/2013 16:06 Comments ||
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#17
Don't sweat it Bill, he's been revealed as just another 2nd rate populist president lame duck. Democrats are heading for the high grass.
#18
Bill, USN Ret. and Bobby, do not assume that US troops will not fire on US Citizens. It has happened before (and no, I don't mean the Kent State shootings).
On the other hand, there are reports that Obama has been asking the military brass if they are willing to shoot US citizens if ordered.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
11/19/2013 17:47 Comments ||
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#19
Gettuysburg is not a haooy memory for the Democrats
#20
Iff one believes that the Bammer is an anti-US Marxist-Anarchist-Globalists whom sees only opportunity in a deadlocked US Congress to continually wreak Systemic, anti-Establishment + anti-Sovereign-Constitutional-Electoral National, Geopol havoc wid his POTUS-led EXECUTIVE PRIVELEGE/ACTION AUTHORITY, THEN ONE SHOULD BELIEVE THAT OBAMA HAS A VERY LONG WAY TO GO YET BEFORE HE'S ACTUALLY FINISHED.
Lest we fergit, OWG "GLOBALISM" = Smaller or lessor Nation-States are risen up to share International or Global burdens or obligations, etc. IN [imperfect = rough?] PARITY WID GREAT POWERS, NOT FROM THEIR HISTORICAL OR TRADITIONAL POSITION(S) OF INFERIORITY = WEAKNESS.
The scope of the above means or infers that the US must voluntarily or forcibly lose something(s) that it normally wouldn't iff it had a choice.
AS A GOOD POLITICIAN, THE JOB OF THE BAMMER + OTHER ALIGNED, ETAL. IS SEE THAT THE US "LOSES" OR "GIVES UP" ITS "SOLE" SUPERPOWER POWER-N-INFLUENCE/AUTHORITY WID THE FULL SUPPORT + BACKING OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION.
* E.g. CHINA-VS-JAPAN/PHIL/INDIA, ETC. = the Bad Econ, Sequester, Shutdown + post-Shutdown,
....@etc. US can't intervene in moral or treaty obligation to its overseas Allies because it can no longer econ or $$$ afford to do so. In addition, its not in the US interest to risk fighting either a major Conventional War andor a major Nuclear War in East Asia-Pacific agz China.
OBAMA US of AMERIKA = 1945 PRE-SURRENDER EMPEROR HIROHITO = AMERIKA [Post-Hiroshima, Nagasaki Japan] "MUST ACCEPT THE UNACCEPTABLE, BEAR THE UNBEARABLE, TOLERATE THE INTOLERABLE" ... ... IN THE NAME OF PEACE + COUNTRY'S FUTURE.
POTUS BAMMER = ONE HELLUVA LOUSY PRO-US NATIONALIST, SOVEREIGNTYIST, + AMERICAN, BUT ONE HELLUVA OUTSTANDING ANTI-AMERICAN, ANTI-SOVEREIGNTY, GLOBALIST AMERIKAN!
D *** NG IT, ... AND DON'T YOUSE EVER E-V-A-R! FORGET WHAT WE NEVER TOLD YOU!
[Pak Daily Times] Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali pulled another rabbit out of his hat of 'tricks' to announce in a presser on Sunday that ex-president General (retd) Pervez Perv Musharraf ... former dictator of Pakistain, who was less dictatorial and corrupt than any Pak civilian government to date ... would be tried for treason under Article 6 for the Emergency he clamped on the country on November 3, 2007. For this purpose, the government would have recourse to the Supreme Court (SC) with a request to set up a trial court (not a 'commission' as the minister erroneously said) comprising judges of the high courts. The government also committed to appointing a special prosecutor to conduct the trial. On Monday, the Ministry of Interior reportedly sent a letter to the Ministry of Law to implement the government's decision. These moves followed the receipt by the government of the investigation by the FIA into the matter, a report Chaudhry Nisar said would be submitted to the SC along with its application.
The announcement set off a virtual storm of comment and speculation as to the procedure adopted by the government and its intent. Some rejected the path being taken as unconstitutional, unnecessary, an attempted distraction from the fraught sectarian situation in Rawalpindi and elsewhere in the country, and an attempt to shift the responsibility from the executive (where it belongs) to the judiciary to avoid any adverse fallout from the military.
There were also questions raised about why only the November 3, 2007 Emergency charge was to be pursued and not the (arguably more serious) October 12, 1999 coup in which an elected government was tossed. To the response to this by some circles that the coup was endorsed by parliament and therefore was a closed matter, the objection could legitimately be raised that a parliament packed with the King's Party and Musharraf's political collaborators lacked the inherent legitimacy to provide immunity on the treason charge to the coup maker, apart from such an endorsement falling foul of the constitution.
While Musharraf's front man expectedly trashed the move as vengeful (denied at some length by Chaudhry Nisar earlier), a distraction, and likely to annoy the military, at the time of writing these lines an interesting development was expected in the Sindh High Court (SHC), which had ordered the institution of a treason charge on Musharraf, and where the latter's application for his name to be taken off the Exit Control List (ECL) was up for hearing on Monday. A contempt of court petition had also been filed against the prime minister and the government for their failure to implement the SHC's order to file a treason case against the ex-dictator.
Posted by: Fred ||
11/19/2013 00:00 ||
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Speechless I am. On yesterday's news, however... disregard this evil verse, for I was surely possessed by a Shaitan.
Forty-eight million Pakistanis do without a loo
Allah's mercy provides a spot for every one to poo
A modest shepherdess of Swat whose years were very few
When nature called in random spots would duck behind a ewe.
Outside the imambargha gate, the imam took his cue:
"Inshallah, some Sunni dog will wear this on his shoe!"
On a Karachi cricket pitch, the ball the bowler threw
Escaped the bat, which struck a turd -- good heavens, how it flew!
The Generals at the big parade, as troops passed in review,
Upheld their salutes, undid their belts, and squatted in situ.
The soldiers, not to be outdone, and all to the drums' tattoo,
With stony faces, halted, shat, and wiped their mates' wazoo.
The President asked, "Ambassador, however do you do?"
"Does protocol permit a shit right here in public view?"
His Exellency didn't know, but one thing's not at issue:
Though short of loos, these Muslims pure don't lack for toilet tissue.
[Pak Daily Times] After the killing of Hakeemullah Mehsud in a drone strike, a council of Taliban leaders belonging to different tribal agencies and parts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa ... formerly NWFP, still Terrorism Central... (KP) selected Mullah Fazlullah ...son-in-law of holy man Sufi Mohammad. Known as Mullah FM, Fazlullah had the habit of grabbing his FM mike when the mood struck him and bellowing forth sermons. Sufi suckered the Pak govt into imposing Shariah on the Swat Valley and then stepped aside whilst Fazlullah and his Talibs imposed a reign of terror on the populace like they hadn't seen before, at least not for a thousand years or so. For some reason the Pak intel services were never able to locate his transmitter, much less bomb it. After ruling the place like a conquered province for a year or so, Fazlullah's Talibs began gobbling up more territory as they pushed toward Islamabad, at which point as a matter of self-preservation the Mighty Pak Army threw them out and chased them into Afghanistan... as the head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistain (TTP). By elevating Fazlullah to the top position, the TTP has not only marked a break with its past but it has also sent signals that bode ill for peace in Pakistain and beyond its borders too.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
11/19/2013 00:00 ||
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The constrained defense budgets, ending of the Iraq war and forthcoming troop withdrawal from Afghanistan have led to soul searching among senior defense leaders about what missions and capabilities the U.S. military should pursue. The Pentagon has tried to do this in a structured way with the Defense Strategic Guidance of January 2012, the Strategic Choices and Management Review of August 2013, and the Quadrennial Defense Review process currently underway.
Defense planning for a relative peacetime environment is difficult enough, but doing so with uncertain budget scenarios is especially challenging. As Jamie Morin, the nominee to become director of the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, told a Senate hearing last month, the military is doing future years defense planning "with absolutely no idea what we're going to be doing in 2014." And yet, senior defense leaders seem to have few problems articulating a vision for what sort of military the United States requires for the future.
A careful review of their recent comments reveals five particular assumptions that are rarely questioned by Congress, the media or many defense analysts. These assumptions about the military's future are worth bearing in mind during upcoming congressional hearings, and as Congress and the White House agree upon the latest overdue defense budget.
The Earth has reached peak uncertainty. Earlier this year, chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey declared "the fact that (the world is) more dangerous than it has ever been." Dempsey has since tweaked this absolutist characterization to a world of an "even more uncertain and dangerous security landscape." Last week, General Ray Odierno (b. 1954) further declared: "I believe that this is the most uncertain I've ever seen the international security environment."
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has even gone so far as to claim: "We are living in a world of complete uncertainty." This goes too far, for if there is really no ground truth or predictability in the world, how can the Pentagon begin to develop the concepts, scenarios or force planning constructs that defense planning is based upon?
The military's future is in the Asia-Pacific. Although military leaders recognize they have a terrible record at predicting future instability and conflicts, they are gambling that they will get it right this time. During his confirmation hearings, Hagel forecasted: "as we look at future threats and challenges . . . that's why DOD is rebalancing its resources toward the Asia-Pacific region."
The secretary recently elaborated that the rebalance "was exactly the right thing for all the reasons that anybody who knows anything about Asia -- the demographics, the people, the markets, the economies." Hagel's deputy Ashton Carter has described that region as "so obviously a part of the world that will be central to America's future," and "the part of the world that is going to more than any other define the American future."
The Asia pivot or rebalance has become the preeminent rhetorical feature of the Obama administration's foreign policy, even as its specific lines of effort remain underdeveloped.
Future fights will be cyber, drone and special operations-centric. Defense planning documents and senior civilian or military officials emphasize that warfighting will primarily be conducted by packets of data and robots, or by special operators when humans are absolutely necessary. In his farewell address in February, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta stressed: "Cybersecurity is something we've got to really be concerned about, because it is the weapon of the future."
Hagel has similarly termed cyber as "probably the most insidious, dangerous threat to this country," which "will require that we continue to place the highest priority on cyber defense and cyber capabilities." Likewise, Carter described this suite of stand-off capabilities as "so important to our future operations." It is remarkable that defense leaders, who acknowledge an inability to forecast future conflicts, claim to hold a remarkable prescience about what weapons will be required to fight unidentifiable foes.
The military is largely done with land wars. Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. James Winnefeld asserted that while the military will need ground forces, "if nothing more than as a deterrent . . . we don't see (land wars) as being a long fight. We can't afford it." Another senior defense official stated at a Pentagon briefing: "We don't envision doing large-scale, multi-year stability operations."
Meanwhile, Gen. Odierno has repeatedly emphasized that those claiming land wars are obsolete are fooling themselves: "I see nothing on the horizon yet that tells me that we don't need ground forces."
Given that every president since Ronald Reagan has deployed several thousand ground troops for regime change or multi-year stability operations, it would be accepting tremendous risk to discount Odierno's prescient warning.
Partners and allies will pick up the slack. It has become a matter of faith that reductions in U.S. defense commitments abroad will be met by allies willing to "share the responsibilities of global leadership," as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict Michael Sheehan put it. Through the rotational presence of U.S. troops and joint exercises, and the military's "building partnership capacity" activities, there is an assumption that U.S. allies will shoulder more of the burden for their own security and that of their regions.
This, of course, assumes that U.S. partners will remain partners, and continue to act in alignment with U.S. national interests. Moreover, it assumes that they will foot the bill for collective security, when in reality the percentage of American and its allies' military spending is projected to continue falling.
What is perhaps most unsettling the Pentagon's defense planning process is not only the absence of budget predictability from Congress, but also the lack of an updated National Security Strategy from the White House. That document serves as the reference point for national security priorities for all U.S. government agencies.
Spend time with military officials and their staffs and they can all quote from memory those sections that guide the offices where they work. The five assumptions detailed above require further scrutiny from interested citizens, but they also deserve clarifying guidance from the Hill and White House.
The present confusion in the civilian mind and the true military mind respecting the purposes of armies and limits of warfare is attributable to many circumstances. Among them, no doubt, is the character of military history as it has commonly been written. Ordinary citizens are lacking in the raw experience of combat, or deficient in technical knowledge, and inclined to leave the compilation of military records to experts in such affairs. Writers on general history have tended to neglect the broader aspects of military issues; confining themselves to accounts of campaigns and battles, handled often in a cursory fashion, they have usually written on the wars of their respective countries in order to glorify their prowess, with little or no reference to the question whether these wars were conducted in the military way of high efficiency or in the militaristic way, which wastes blood and treasure.
Even more often, in recent times, general historians have neglected military affairs and restricted their reflections to what they are pleased to call the causes and consequences of wars; or they have even omitted them altogether. This neglect may be ascribed to many sources. The first is, perhaps, a recognition of the brutal fact that the old descriptions of campaigns are actually of so little value civilian and military alike. Another has been the growing emphasis on economic and social fields deemed normal and the distaste of economic and social historians for war, which appears so disturbing to the normal course of events. Although Adam Smith included a chapter on the subject of military defense in his Wealth of Nations as a regular part of the subject, modern economists concentrate on capital, wages, interest, rent, and other features of peaceful pursuits, largely forgetting war as a phase of all economy, ancient or modern. When the mention the subject of armies and military defense, these are commonly referred to as institutions and actions which interrupt the regular balance of economic life. And the third source of indifference is the effort of pacifists and peace advocates to exclude wars and military affairs from general histories, with the view to uprooting any military or militaristic tendencies from the public mind, on the curious assumption that by ignoring realties the realties themselves will disappear.
This lack of a general fund of widely disseminated military information is perilous to the maintenance of civilian power in government. The civilian mind, presumably concerned with the maintenance of peace and the shaping of policies by the limits of efficient military defense, can derive no instruction from acrimonious disputes between militarists, limitless in their demands, and pacifists, lost in utopian visions. Where the civilians fail to comprehend and guide military policy, the true military men, distinguished from the militarists, are also imperiled. For these the executioners of civilian will, dedicated to the preparation of defense and war with the utmost regard for efficiency, are dependent upon the former.
Again, and again, the military men have seen themselves hurled into war by ambitions, passions, and blunders of civilian governments, almost wholly uninformed as to the limits of their military potentials and almost recklessly indifferent to the military requirements of the wars they let loose. Aware that they may again be thrown by civilians into an unforeseen conflict, perhaps with a foe they have not envisaged, these realistic military men find themselves unable to do anything save demand all the men, guns, and supplies they can possibly wring from the civilians, in the hope that they may be prepared or half prepared for whatever may befall them. In so doing they inevitably find themselves associated with militaristic military men who demand all they can get merely for the sake of having it without reference to ends.
Vagts, Alfred, History of Militarism, rev. 1959, Free Press, NY, pp 33-34.
#2
Hagel has similarly termed cyber as "probably the most insidious, dangerous threat to this country," which "will require that we continue to place the highest priority on cyber defense and cyber capabilities."
And yet we buy all of our computers from the enemy.
1) Win wars.
2) Win battles. It is possible to win a war while losing battles, but it cost a lot of blood and material.
3) Win battles with as few casualties as possible.
Everything else is superfluous.
Future fights will be cyber, drone and special operations-centric.
Future fights will be whatever the enemy thinks gives the best chance of victory.
I remember pilots stopped training for dogfights in the 1950's. Then came Vietnam. We need to make sure we don't lose the skills we developed to win wars.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
11/19/2013 12:11 Comments ||
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#4
* "Partners and Allies will pick up the slack" > that's what the US thought before WW1 + WW2 + Cold War.
Just sayin.
* "The Military is largely done wid Land Wars" > thusly, CHINA-VS-JAPAN,PHIL/ASEAN SEA WAR(S).
China + short war.
VERSUS
* "We [USA] can't afford it" > thusly, CHINA-VS-INDIA LIMITED OR FULL CONVENTIONAL = NUCLEAR? WAR.
PROTRACTIVE = MUTUALLY DESTRUCTIVE???
China + long war.
In case thingys don't go smoothly initially for China + PLA agz the US-Allies over in NE Asia/ECS + SCS.
THe ABOVE IS CALLED BEING MILPOL "DIALECTIC/
DIALECTICAL", + is why the US is wrong to presume that no more major or protractive wars will ever be fought again.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Pervez 
