The Colonels Corner The Invisible Soldiers Part 5

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Transcript

0:00 Good afternoon, Colonel. I hate it when they kick me out of my space. It's because you're speaking so much fire and truth that they can't handle it. So it's kind of a backhanded compliment. Yeah, kind of backhanded. Okay, so Bridget and I obviously spend way too much time together because today I had just...

0:45 Like 10 minutes ago, finished listening to Tucker's recent interview with Margaret Roberts. If you guys haven't listened. I don't want to interrupt you, but you sound very quiet to me. I just wanted to make sure it's just me. If anybody else can give me a thumbs up. If she's quiet. Turn your volume up. I already did that. Sounds fine to me, Bridget. No, it's me. Never mind. Sorry. Thank you.

1:18 Keep going. The other button. Okay. So let me get this going live over here. And I'm not going to be on Rumble live. I had to do this today through StreamYard and stream it to Rumble and YouTube because for some reason, and no one can tell me why, when I go on Rumble and use their studio,

1:50 my camera won't work. Works fine on StreamYard for some reason. So whatever that problem is, I've got to figure out how to fix that because I like using Rumble so I can see the chat. But anyway. And yes, we share the same brain, by the way. LOL. Kidding. So interestingly,

2:19 I was just finishing up listening to the Tucker interview, which is about Oklahoma bombing, which we've done a lot of research into. And I literally hit the stop button and a text comes in from Bridget with the attached link for the Tucker interview. And I'm like, I just finished it.

2:49 So I would highly suggest everyone listen to that between now and Wednesday night. Because what I'm going to tell you Wednesday night on the Alpha Warrior show is going to blow your mind. Just in the last couple of weeks, researching something completely different, I came across some things that listening to

3:21 This woman who basically brings up a lot of the same points that we discovered when we looked into Oklahoma bombing found as well. But since none of these people know anything about Operation Gladio, they they lose the context of what they're talking about.

3:50 So I just I had went on and that woman has an account on X and I asked her to DM me. So if you guys wouldn't mind her, she's her X handle is at blowback. That's the name of her book about the Oklahoma. Excuse me, bombing. And if you guys wouldn't mind going over to her page.

4:20 Finding that post that I tagged her in and highlighting the fact that she really, really needs to DM me because I think I can help them put everything that they found in context so that they see that it's part of a much bigger picture. And again, you're going to want to watch the Wednesday night show. It's crazy.

4:51 All right. Not that you guys wouldn't anyway. I see you guys in the live chat over there. Okay. So let's get to the book, The Invisible Soldier. We're on chapter seven, but we're part five because some of these chapters, I got the hiccup, sorry. Some of these chapters are relatively small. So we got a couple of interesting things in this chapter coming.

5:25 And I will probably only I don't know that again, the chapters are not that big, but the next one coming up is a little bigger. And I don't really know if I can get both of these done. So anyway. OK. Few Americans would ever know the names of the men, women and children that died in Nassau Square, which we talked about in part four.

5:54 17 dead and 24 wounded. The tragedy, the latest atrocity of war, drew more attention than ever before to the consequences of privatizing war. While the incident at Fallujah in 2004 had earned Blackwater the label Bush Private Army, what happened at Nizor Square made urgent the need to control these companies operating out of Iraq, especially Blackwater.

6:24 This was war, some would say, but was this really what the coalition of the willing went to Iraq to do? No, it was not. Had the U.S. government enabled the fiasco and had Congress allowed it to happen? Well, they were certainly funding it. In the weeks ahead, meetings to discuss Nizor Square massacre was held at the U.N. Amnesty International, the International Red Cross, Human Rights First.

6:53 and at the top levels of the governments of Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United States. One such meeting convened on October 2nd at the Rayburn Building in Washington, D.C. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform met to interrogate Blackwater's CEO, Eric Prince, and discuss the burning issue of oversight. If there was ever a time when Congress could have stopped or at least tamed and controlled new mercenaries, it was then.

7:23 That was the autumn of 2007. And of course, we all know that it exploded even after this. For a while, it appeared that privatizing defense and security, once inherently governmental functions, was an issue of such deep significance in a democratic nation that it might bring together parties on both sides. At various sessions of the 110th Congress, that fall,

7:51 there was hopeful signs that that would happen. The October 2nd hearing lasted five hours. In attendance were 40 members of the committee, 22 Democrats and 18 Republicans. Other legislators concerned, one of the legislators was Illinois Representative Jan, and I'm not sure how you pronounce her last name, Stokowski, who was not a member of the committee.

8:21 But she was present. Also, there were widows, children and siblings and parents of the four Blackwater employees murdered in Fallujah in 2004 and the families of soldiers who died in November 2004 when a Blackwater aviation plane took an unauthorized route through a mountain valley in Afghanistan and crashed into a wall. Committee Chair Henry Waxman made his opening statement, and I'm just going to read a little bit of it.

8:50 Over the past 25 years, a sophisticated campaign had been waged to privatize government services. The theory is that corporations can deliver government services better and at a lower cost. Over the last six years, this theory has been put into practice. The result is the privatization has exploded. For every taxpayer dollars spent on federal programs, over 40 cent now goes to private contractors. And again,

9:20 Those private contractors are all owned by the same oligarchs that start the wars. Our government now outsources even the oversight of outsourcing. Today, we will examine the impact of privatization on our military forces. We will focus on a specific example, the outsourcing of military function to Blackwater, a private military contractor providing protective services to U.S. officials in Iraq.

9:50 Waxman noted. That's the end of his statement. Waxman noted had been founded in 1997 by its current CEO, former Navy SEAL Eric Prince, whom Waxman, alluding to the Prince family portion, commented, we thank you for your service. As a general rule, children from wealthy and politically connected families no longer serve. Waxman then quoted Prince's own explanation for the creation of Blackwater, which was, quote,

10:19 We are trying to do for national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service, unquote. And then he went on to quote the amount of money Blackwater was making. Since the year 2000, he said, its government contracts had grown from 200,000 to over 1 billion with a B. More than half of them awarded without any competition, i.e. sole source.

10:50 And he noted that privatizing was working exceptionally well for Blackwater. The question was, Waxman said, whether it was working well for the American military, for the security of the American people, and for the American counterinsurgency policy in Iraq to win the hearts and minds of citizens and thus discourage Iraqis from joining forces against the American enemy. Is Blackwater helping or hurting those efforts in Iraq?

11:17 Is the government doing enough to hold Blackwater accountable for alleged misconduct? And again, as I stated before, these quote unquote incidents of killing civilians prolonged the problem in Iraq, which made them more money. And that is the critical bottom line to this. People need to understand that. The very people profiting

11:48 are the ones responsible for galvanizing resistance that prolongs the occupation. Waxman went on to say, in recent days, military leaders have said that Blackwater's missteps in Iraq has hurt us badly. One senior U.S. military official said Blackwater's actions are creating resentment among Iraqis. If such observations are true, they mean that our reliance on private military contractors are backfiring.

12:21 He then listed incidents that most committee members were not aware of, including the shooting of the guard of an Iraqi vice president by a drunken Blackwater contractor on Christmas Eve in 2006. Waxman said this didn't happen out on a mission protecting diplomats. And this is a quote. It occurred inside the protected green zone.

12:49 And if this had happened in the United States, the contractor would have been arrested and a criminal investigation launched. If a drunken U.S. soldier had killed an Iraqi guard, the soldier would have faced court martial. But all that happened to the Blackwater contractor is that he lost his job. And I'm going to stop here for a second. Chances are he didn't lose his job. He just went to work for a different company. Back to the quote. And the State Department advised Blackwater how much to pay the family of the murdered guard.

13:19 to make the problem go away, and then allowed the contractor to leave Iraq just 36 hours after the shooting. Incredibly, internal emails document a debate over the size of the payment. The charge d'affaires recommended a payment of $250,000, but this was cut to $15,000 because the Diplomatic Security Service said Iraqis would try to get themselves killed for a large payout.

13:49 Well, it is hard to read these emails and not come to the conclusion that the State Department is acting as Blackwater's enabler. If Blackwater and other companies in this industry are really providing better service at a lower cost, the experiment of privatizing is working. But if the costs are higher and performance is worse, then I don't understand why we're even doing this, unquote. Before opening the floor,

14:17 Waxman issued two caveats, that facts and not ideology should guide any judgment of Blackwater and the industry on the part of Congress, and that there should be no question directly related to nicer square incident, which the FBI was currently investigating. Not really, because they weren't really investigating it.

14:41 Then beginning with ranking member Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia, the hearing would slowly develop into a battle between those who firmly believed in the importance of private military contractors and had no intentions of regulating them and those who thought the opposite. By the end of the day, it would be evident that there was very little middle ground. Liberals wanted to rid the world of private military contractors and conservatives wanted to bolster them.

15:08 Although Democrats and Republicans were equally responsible for the privatization of American defense and security, a political divide had opened. In his opening statement, Representative Davis said this, quote, Private military security companies become an inescapable fact of modern life. They provide everything from logistics, engineering services to food prep, laundry, housing, construction, and of course, security.

15:39 They offer invaluable surge capability and contingent capability federal agencies can't afford to keep in-house. To paraphrase the title of one recent study of the phenomenon, Iraqis fear they can't live with private security contractors. U.S. personnel believe they can't live without them. However, however you define the success in Iraq, from stay the course to immediate withdrawal,

16:05 In every scenario in between, security contractors are going to play a role. The inevitable redeployment of U.S. military units out of the current urban battle space will only increase the need for well-trained and well-managed private security forces to build a vacuum and protect diplomatic and reconstruction efforts, period, unquote. How about we just don't do that? How about we just come home? Davis then stated his objection to the hearing and

16:37 praised the work of Blackwater. Quote, Blackwater has protected dozens, if not hundreds of members of Congress, including myself and members of the committee when they traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq. I'm sorry, I got to say this. Stay your ass at home. I, for one, am grateful for their service. Not one single member of Congress has been injured or killed under Blackwater protection. And for that, I am grateful. They're not going to let you die. You're feeding them.

17:07 Holy shit. Republican John Micah of Florida also spoke for his party when he declared that the hearing was a political ploy to discredit the Bush administration. You see, they do this dance all the time. He moved that the committee adjourn within the first hour of testimony. Micah's colleague, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, called the issue of contracting and oversight the liberal cause du jour.

17:33 And Ohio Republican Mike Turner was concerned that the hearing looked like our team, their team scenario, and that by quizzing Prince, Blackwater appeared to be an adversary on the other team. However, Blackwater is on our team, he said. They're our team working in the trenches in a war zone. They're on your team because you're on the team of the International Syndicate.

18:04 They're not on the American team. The Americans don't want to be doing any of that crap. The Democrats seemed less inclined to respond to the Republicans' accusations than to shake some truce out of print and to identify the reasons that more congressional oversight of private military companies was necessary.

18:27 Blackwater was not the only problem. It was simply the proof that privatization of defense and security was growing faster than the government could handle it. While the Republicans stressed that there were over 3,000 missions by private military in the previous nine months alone and that the ratio of bad incidents to missions was low, the Democrats were guided by the old adage that one unnecessary death is enough to raise concerns. Elijah Cummings from Maryland.

18:55 told his colleagues that Blackwater had been involved in at least 195 escalation of forced incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 shootings per week. He said that such behavior was not only undermining the U.S. mission in Iraq, but also affecting U.S. foreign relations in the Middle East.

19:20 percentage of Ohio agreed, calling Blackwater's behavior nothing less than outrageous. 84% of the shooting incidents involving Blackwater were from the fact that they fired first and not in defense. Percentage told the committee, and Blackwater did not remain on the scene. So Blackwater shoots first, don't ask questions, and

19:49 That definitely undermines the U.S. position in Iraq and jeopardizes the safety of our soldiers. Krasinich also lamb blasted the State Department for attempting to cover up Blackwater's killings rather than seek appropriate remedies. And then he concluded his two-minute statement by saying, quote, if war is privatized and private contractors have a vested interest in keeping the war going, the longer the war goes on, the more money they make, unquote.

20:17 nothing could be truer. It's like all wars are banker wars because the bankers make money off of war. Throughout the hearing, Democrats asked Prince about a number of these incidents. On June 25, 2005, for example, Blackwater guards shot and killed an innocent man who was standing by the side of the street in Baghdad. The incident orphaned six children and was never officially reported by Blackwater. In fact, the State Department described the death

20:47 as the random death of an innocent Iraqi. Other such incidents were cited by other committee members. Perhaps the most moving was the story of November 27, 2004, crash of Blackwater Flight 61, in which three U.S. military members were killed, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Mahan, Chief Warrant Officer Travis Gogan, and Specialist Harley Miller.

21:18 as well as the Blackwater co-pilots and mechanic. When Waxman told the story, the room was silent and held their breath. The crash into the wall of a canyon in Afghanistan was investigated by a joint Army Air Force task force and by the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB report, Waxman said, found that the Blackwater co-pilots behaved unprofessionally and were deliberately flying in a non-standard route low through the valley just for fun.

21:48 The pilots were unfamiliar with the route, deviated almost immediately after takeoff, and failed to maintain adequate terrain clearance. Obviously, they hit the mountain. Waxman read the cockpit voice recording of the plane's crew out loud. You are an X-wing fighter Star Wars man, and you are, swear word, right. This is fun, said one crew member.

22:20 They knew how much fun we were having. Investigators, according to Waxman, later found that Blackwater failed to follow standard precautions to track flights, failed to file a flight plan, and failed to maintain emergency communications in case of an accident. Worse still, there was a sole survivor of the crash. One of the three military men who the U.S. government was paying Blackwater to escort survived the crash.

22:49 He was alive for at least 10 hours. He suffered internal injuries. He was able to leave the plane, roll out a sleeping bag, and died from exposure sometime during the first night. Because of the flight path with no record of where they were going, it took rescuers too long to locate the plane and save him. Equally startling was the fact that 16 days before the crash,

23:20 Blackwater's Afghanistan site manager sent an email to the VP of operations at Blackwater Aviation saying that the initial group of Blackwater pilots hired to support the Afghan operation had background and experience shortfalls. They were overlooked in favor of getting the requisite number of people on board to start the contract. As Waxman pointed out, one of the greatest tragedies and ironies of the crash.

23:50 was that while Blackwater pilot was inexperienced, one of the passengers, Lieutenant Colonel McMahon, was a skilled military pilot with an exemplary safety record. That's the key difference between hiring private military people and allowing military to perform the military mission. Waxman then read to the committee a note he had received from Colonel Jeanette.

24:22 McMahon, the pilot's widow. She was also on active duty. Mike, like Mr. Prince, was the CEO of sorts in the military as an aviation commander and as such had amassed a great safety record. It is ironic and unfortunate they had to be a passenger on this plane versus one of the people responsible for its safe mission.

24:52 Some would say it is simply a tragic accident, but this accident was due to gross lack of judgment in managing this company, unquote. Waxman again grilled Prince. Mr. Prince, Colonel McMahon, is asking why the taxpayers should be paying your company millions to conduct military transport missions over dangerous terrain when the military's own pilots are better trained and less expensive. How do you respond? Prince answered.

25:23 that his company was hired by the U.S. government to fill a void. The American air fleet used by U.S. troops was designed to support large conventional battles, but was not suitable to the terrain and the demands of the missions in Afghanistan. What the absolute fuck? Do you know how many military pilots flew in Afghanistan? Are you kidding me? He just, whatever it takes.

25:56 You know, he'll lie right through his teeth. What was needed were air transport. It's almost like saying they're not qualified. Yeah, we don't have enough pilots. Well, our pilots were sitting at home because their job had been contracted out. Right. He goes on to say what was needed were air transports capable of quick takeoff and landings on short strips. Again, I'm sorry, but what the fuck?

26:24 Do you not know that we have the Osprey? Do you not know that we have the C-130s? Whose entire mission is to take off in short landing. They have afterburners. I flew on them on war, spiraling down, landing on a very small, which I thought we were going to run off the end of, airstrip in the middle of two mountains in northern Iraq. Give me a break. This, after all.

26:55 was what private military companies were doing, filling gaps between the American military, what the military was trained and equipped to do, fight conventional wars, and what was needed in current unconventional war. Now, that's the end of his quote. Let me just say this. We in the military have been fighting unconventional wars. We have an entire wing called AFSOC, a command in the Air Force.

27:26 and wings of specially equipped aircraft to do this exact mission. So no, you do not have any unique skills that are not inside. As a matter of fact, most of the people that fly for these companies come from the Air Force and the Army and the Marines doing these exact same missions. He's a lying scumbag. Prince's calm and confidence response is,

27:58 to an agitated Waxman who wanted answers and was most concerned about accountability. Quote, were any sanctions placed on the company after the investigative report came back so critical of Blackwater? He asked. Prince responds, anytime there is an accident, a company also should be introspective and look back and see what can be done to make sure it doesn't happen again. Waxman then says, aside from your introspection,

28:28 Were you ever penalized in any way? Were you ever fined or suspended or reprimanded or placed on probation? Prince says, I believe the Air Force investigated the incident and they found that it was the pilot error. It was not due to corporate error that caused the mistake or that crashed the aircraft, unquote. Yes, it was. Because you condone these exact things. These are the people that you hired, your aviation.

28:59 company as part of Blackwater did not do due diligence in hiring qualified people. So yes, you can blame it on your pilot, but how dare you? Waxman commented, the corporate hired inexperienced pilots. They sent them on a route they didn't know about. They didn't even follow your own rules. It seems to me that it is more than pilot error. There ought to be corporate responsibility and Blackwater was the corporation involved.

29:30 Aside from your introspection, have you just been awarded a new contract for $92 million? I want to see whether or not you are getting a stick as well as all the carrots. But Prince was unflappable. When Representative Diane Watson from California asked him why the military couldn't do the jobs outsourced to private military, he said the U.S. military can't be all things to all people at all times. Then we shouldn't be doing the mission.

30:01 She asked, why not? And then he responds, the tyranny of shortage of time and distance. I mean, you can't have an anti-air missile guy also doing armed security and knowing how to be an aviation mechanic, too. It is too broad a base of skill requirements, which, again, is complete bullshit. As I have been armed security because we had to have there was this program where when you're.

30:31 Station stateside, everyone on base that is the support officer, you have to be dual trained to stand guard on that base in case there was an attack. So, yes, we have more than one skill. Watson responded, we need more people then. And then Eric says, okay, we'll reinstate the draft. You see how they go to the extreme? We don't need a draft.

31:04 The military is already capable of doing these missions. Congress doesn't have the stomach to give the military these missions and have the military coming home in body bags. Contractors, they can sweep under the rug. Prince observed that the percentage of bad incidents compared to the large number of missions was low. He likes to cite the figure of 6,500 missions for the year 2006.

31:35 and said that weapons were discharged in less than 1% of those missions. But most Americans didn't know that. Years later, in his book, Civilian Warriors, Prince would blame the U.S. government for Blackwater's skewed public image. Yeah, everything Blackwater's men, this is the quote, everything Blackwater's men did in Iraq was by State Department direct command.

32:00 The State Department got its 100 percent survival rate. And yet somehow by doing exactly what the department demanded, regardless of how miscalculated the strategy was, Blackwater got a PR nightmare. Yeah, that's not exactly how that happened. And when the hell did the American people tell the State Department they were able to do military operations via contract in foreign lands?

32:30 I don't remember anybody voting on that. At the hearing, Prince argued that Blackwater operated in dangerous, high-risk areas and that shootings were sometimes unavoidable. His personnel, he said, were subject to regular attacks by terrorists and other nefarious forces in Iraq. Yeah, and you created more of them by killing civilians. He said, we are the targets of the same ruthless enemies that have killed more than 3,800 military personnel.

33:00 Any incident where Americans are attacked serves as a reminder that we're in hostile environments. At least twice, Prince reminded his audience that there were other markets for private military than the U.S. government, despite the fact that his company had just won more than a billion dollars in contracts from the government. He was a lucrative business that could now survive without its help. If the U.S. government doesn't want us to do this, we'll do it somewhere else. Guns for hire.

33:32 The Republicans agreed with Prince, and the Democrats did not. In Congress, there was clearly no consensus about the privatization of American security, and there was no analysis about the larger picture. Yeah, and this is why you know both of these people. They put on these pony shows in these hearings. Not one, and I went back and looked through the hearing, not one time did anybody bring up

34:00 Why the hell is the State Department hiring private military contractors to run military missions? Not once. And yes, they were guarding dignitaries, but they were also doing military missions. Let's see. Their constituents knew little or to nothing on the topic of private military security companies. And it was pointed out by the Republicans that it's immensely complicated.

34:39 No, they're mercenaries. There's nothing complicated about it at all. As the testimony of Blackwater's CEO showed and the response of some committee members, private military companies were successfully cultivating relationships with lawmakers. For only a few legislators in either party would private military security companies become a cause. Among them was Jan Sikowsky.

35:10 the guest legislator that day. Schakowsky had come to the hearing that day to proclaim her opposition to Prince and his company, as well as all other companies like his. She wanted to meet the man whom she considered a modern-day mercenary and whose methods represented a trend that she believed was destructive to the democracy. She would be a legislative nemesis to private military contractors, especially Prince, and she would

35:39 be the only one who had come to the hearing with a plan of action. Her idea for oversight was simple, ban them. In her opening statement, she said, I want to let everyone know that I am shortly going to be introducing legislation to carefully phase out the use of private security contractors. These are for-profit companies that carry out sensitive missions that have repeatedly and dramatically affected our missions.

36:07 I want now to recognize the mother of Jerry Sopko, who is here today. Jerry was an Army Ranger before becoming a Blackwater employee. He died in Fallujah in an infamous mission, fraught with mistakes on the part of Blackwater supervisors. That was over three and a half years ago and led to the Battle of Fallujah, during which many of our U.S. forces lost their lives.

36:32 We need a conversation in this Congress, and I am hoping my legislation will provide that. When she unveiled her plan to end America's new dependence on private military corporations, she had been in politics for 15 years, eight in the Illinois General Assembly and seven representing Illinois' 9th Congressional District. This was a career she began when she was nearly 50 years old and had raised her kids. She led a national campaign.

37:03 to put expiration dates on food products. And as a Congresswoman, her causes range from all kinds of different things. She was a petite woman of Russian Jewish descent who was considered one of the most progressive politicians in Congress. And she was unstoppable. Her encounter with private military companies came in February of 2001 when she and Jim McGovern, a Democrat representative from Massachusetts,

37:34 spent six days in Colombia investigating a $1.3 billion U.S. operation called Plan Colombia. We've talked about this before. This was supposed to be a counter-narcotics program focusing on killing drug crops. But because a large plan of this operation was conducted by former military men working for DynCorp, Plan Colombia was effectively free from public scrutiny.

38:03 though paid for by the American taxpayers. That was what most concerned Stokowski and McGovern. Estimates at the time was that there were 200 U.S. military personnel in Columbia, mostly working as trainers, and 170 American contractors, many of whom were on the front lines. Few of Congress were aware of Plain Columbia, and those who were

38:33 believe that the U.S., by way of DynCorp, was engaged in a counterinsurgency on behalf of Colombians' government, as well as a counter-narcotic program, effectively funding a private war with private soldiers. At the time, a reporter covering the drug war called DynCorp one of the new privateer mercenaries engaged in U.S. policy of outsourcing wars, like the old English privateer pirates of the Caribbean 500 years ago.

39:02 Washington now employs hundreds of contract employees through U.S. corporations to carry out its policy in Colombia and other countries, while the new privateers are underwritten by U.S. taxpayer dollars. Like the 16th century pirates, if they get caught in an embarrassing crime or killed, the U.S. government can deny responsibility. She worried about what she had discovered on the trip, and after returning home, she told the same reporter,

39:34 American taxpayers already pay $300 billion per year to fund the world's most powerful military. Why should they pay a second time in order to privatize out military operations? How is the public to know what their taxpayer dollars are being used for? If there's the potential for privatizing the Gulf of Tonkin incident, then the American people deserve to have a full and open debate about this policy.

40:04 Are we outsourcing in order to avoid public scrutiny, controversy, or embarrassment? Is it to hide body bags from the media and thus shield them from public opinion? Or is it to provide deniability because these private contractors are not covered by the same rules that pertain to active duty military? Then in April, a private contractor working for the CIA in Peru identified a group of U.S. missionaries flying a plane as suspected drug dealers,

40:34 and the Peruvian Air Force shot the plane down, killing everyone, including a woman and her seven-month-old daughter. The February visit and the Peruvian tragedy inspired her to introduce House Bill 1591, intended to prohibit U.S. from funding contracts with private military companies in the Andrea region of South America. So the CIA...

41:04 provided intelligence, and the aircraft was shot down. H.R. 1591 never emerged from committee, a fact that soon typified a pattern. A shocking event spawns media attention and legislative action, but no legislative action ever happened. Then a few years later, another shocking event draws the public's attention to the fact that the same companies and strategies are still active, though out of sight.

41:35 and accountability issues have not been resolved, followed by legislative proposals, no result. This is the pattern prior to Nassau Square. In May 2004, following the tortures at Abu Ghraib and the Fallujah disaster, she wrote a letter to President Bush to demand the suspension of any private contractor involved in the supervision and interrogation of prisoners. Also that summer,

42:02 She, like many of her colleagues, viewed the matrix contract as an unsettling step to the ever-evolving relationship between the U.S. government and the private military contractors, handing over the job of coordination and oversight of the private contractors to another private contractor. She believed this privatization of defense and security seemed to be an ongoing process that no one was trying to stop.

42:30 There were wake-up calls before NYSERF Square, especially Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, but the gap between the companies and oversight was never closed. In 2004, everyone informed about it was certain there would be another incident, and unfortunately there was. One major obstacle to closing the gap was that the laws that existed in the autumn of 2007 did not detour.

42:59 bad contractor behavior, nor did they protect victims. Civilians employed for defense and security jobs in Iraq who committed crimes could not be brought to justice. Typically, if an American civilian committed that same crime, they would have jurisdiction. But the decree granting private militaries immunity from Iraqi law that Paul Brimmer had signed as his

43:30 decrees that we talked about them earlier, was still in place. And although the UCMJ was applicable to civilians in combat areas outside U.S. borders at the time, it could be applied only to wars declared by Congress. The last time Congress declared war, of course, was in 1941. So again, no accountability. In an attempt to resolve the problem, Congress passed military extra

44:00 Territorial Jurisdictional Act in 2000 in the aftermath of sex scandals in Bosnia. That was DynCorp basically kidnapping people, raping them, and trafficking women all over. This act authorized U.S. law to apply to military contractors living abroad. Thus, an employee of a military contractor could be charged with a felony offense and be brought back to the U.S. for trial.

44:30 However, it applied only to Department of Defense contractors, not State Department. For example, the civilian interrogators implicated in several of the cases at Abu Ghraib were on contract for the CIA, not the Department of Defense, and they were not covered. To fill the hole, two congressional members, David Price, a Democrat, and Chris Shays, a Republican,

45:01 introduced Contractor Accountability Bill in May of 2004, which would expand the previous act to include all private contractors in support of DOD missions, including non-U.S. citizens contracted for work with the U.S. government. Although that bill failed to pass, the Department of Defense Authorization Act that year would include a new provision that extended its reach, the previous act's reach.

45:28 as Price and Shea had proposed. Once again, however, there was a problem. The new DOD provision did not define what constitutes support of a U.S. of a mission from the Department of Defense. Thus, if private contractors opened fire on Iraqi civilians and were under the contract with the State Department, they could be legally accountable only if their work for that agency could be defined as in support of a DOD mission. The accountability changed.

45:57 challenge was never ending. And by the way, this is on purpose, guys. This is not an oversight. They had had hearings. They know what they're doing. That's why they pay PR people and lobbyists to ensure the laws are written to exclude them. Sikowsky worked with Price on a bill called the Iraq and Afghanistan Contractor Sunshine Act, which required the Secretaries of Defense, State, and Interior and the Administrator of USAID.

46:33 to provide Congress copies of all contracts and task orders in excess of $5 million. This bill would die in committee as well. But months later, after the Nazor Square, she thought the prospects had improved for such legislation. Thus, at the October 2nd Oversight Committee hearing, she announced the Stop Outsourcing Security Act, co-sponsored with Price and co-sponsored in the Senate.

47:01 The law would restore the responsibility of the American military to train troops and police to guard convoys, to repair weapons, to administer police prisons, and to perform military intelligence. Sikowsky told the media it would require that only employees of the U.S. government could guard diplomats, and by January 1, 2009, the U.S. president must report to Congress on the status of planning the use of government and military personnel instead of private contractors.

47:30 If they were critical missions, they should be done by the military. The bill demanded that government agencies with military and security contractors on payroll files report the cost of each contract, as well as the number of contractors employed. Stokowski saw no reason to accommodate military private security.

47:52 was not an ordinary industry acquiring power. These were companies often employing men with guns without any strong legal authority to answer to anyone. And from her point of view, to appease them would be regrettable. Although industry leaders often referred to Blackwater as an aberration, she believed that Blackwater was a warning that one day they would all be too big. From her point of view, the risk

48:18 to a democracy and hiring private contractors for U.S. defense and security was too great and that they needed to be phased out. Representing a more centrist view was Representative Price, who acknowledged the possible permanence of the private military companies and thus wanted to shape laws to enhance the nation's ability to control them. At the end of the spectrum from Sikowsky was the ardent defenders of the mercenaries.

48:48 who promoted the view that the industry played a crucial role in American and international security. This was the leave everything alone approach. Leave the private military companies alone and let them do whatever the government and corporate America needed them to do. At the October 2nd committee hearing, Sikowsky questioned for Prince, focused on one of her gravest concerns. To whom did America's private security

49:18 contractors outsource their own work. Who was really providing the armed security for America? In other words, who were the subcontractors? If Blackwater saved money by hiring people from third world nations where the military had conducted assassination and genocide, did the U.S. have any knowledge of this or any control over it? What did that mean for American security? So she asked Prince directly.

49:44 In your testimony, you stated Blackwater personnel supporting our country's overseas missions are all military and law enforcement veterans. You did not state that they were all Americans, all American military and law enforcement veterans. Is this true that Blackwater hires foreign security personnel? Prince's answer. One of your colleagues previously asked that question. Yes.

50:09 Some of the camp guards, gate guards, static locations are indeed third country national soldiers. She responded. And in 2004, Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater USA, admitted that your company had hired former commandos from Chile to work in Iraq. Many of them served under General Penashe, the former dictator of Chile. As you must know, his forces.

50:35 perpetrated widespread human rights abuses, including torture and murder of over 3,000 people. Did Blackwater or any of its affiliate companies at that time or at any time use any Chilean contractors with ties to Pinochet? Prince's response, well, I can say Mr. Jackson did not admit to hiring some commandos. Yes, we did hire some Chileans. Any foreign national soldier that works for us, for the State Department,

51:05 has to have a high public trust clearance. It's basically a security clearance from a third country national soldier where you take their name, it goes back through the U.S. Embassy in the country, and their name is run. Kind of like a national agency check here, which is what someone does for a security clearance. That way we can ensure that we have no criminal records. She responds, I understand that one of your business associates

51:33 was indicted in Chile for his role in supplying commandos to serve Blackwater. Is that correct? Prince responds, he was not an associate. He might have been a vendor for us. In other words, I'm going to outsource my recruitment of these CIA-trained, Office of Public Safety-trained torturers, kidnaps, and assassins, and that I can say Blackwater didn't do it directly. It just happened.

52:03 She responds, in your written statement today, you state that Blackwater mandates that its security professionals have a security clearance of at least secret level. Did any Chilean contractors who work for Blackwater ever get a security clearance? He responds, I believe what I said is that worldwide protective service contracts out of the State Department. The Americans.

52:28 working on that, doing the private security company's mission, are required to have a security clearance. She responds, did any Chilean contractor get a security clearance? And he finally says, I don't know. She then says, because if yes, they were provided with classified information. If no, then it is not true that all Blackwater personnel in Iraqi has security clearances. On your website, I don't know if it is still there.

52:58 There was a recent one. There was a jobs fair advertised in Bucharest. And we have heard allegations that Blackwater recruited Serbians and former Yugoslavs with combat experience from the Balkan wars. Some linked to atrocities committed in Croatia and Kosovo and in Bosnia and associates of Malevich. I was wondering if you could talk to me about that.

53:26 He responds, to my knowledge, we have never employed anyone out of those countries. And she asked him, would you even know? He says, there are some Romanians that were on contract that we took over from a previous vendor, competitor, but we phased them out and we use guys out of Latin America now. Where primarily Colombia, where they have 20,000 trained mercenaries, thanks to South Com and the CIA.

53:57 She would then ask him, would you know if people have been associated with Pinochet or Milosevic before you hired them? Is that part of your inquiry? He said again, as I said before, for the State Department, for the static guards that were utilized, third country national soldiers, a high public trust clearance is required. And she finally said, I heard you say that. So he won't answer the question.

54:28 She was the last of the legislators to question Prince. When she was done, Chairman Waxman closed the questioning by expressing gratitude to Prince and his patients. Then he said, in closing, let me just say that we really have had a remarkable unprecedented experiment going on in the United States today by having private military contractors. It raises a lot of issues. It raises issues about cost and it raises issues about whether it interferes with our military objectives.

54:56 I think this hearing will help us continue to sort through the means and the future for our country. We have never had anything of this magnitude before where we have turned so much of our military activity over to private entities. Prince ended the hearing in his own way with a gesture that apparently went unnoticed. He grabbed the Mr. Prince nameplate from in front of him and stuffed him in his pocket. He would later write, I'm no hero. The world knows all too well about my mistakes.

55:26 but I was never meant to play the villain. I take some solace knowing that, in the end, history will judge me and all that we accomplished at Blackwater. Perhaps children someday will read about us that way, about the way I read about cowboys. Yeah, the crazy ones. Undoubtedly, the hearing caused a surge of interest in the topic, both in the media and Congress. There would be more hearings and at least seven other congressional committees, though none would interrogate Prince.

55:57 And on October 4th, the House passed legislation that required the Department of Justice to report to Congress all charges against contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan that the extended congressional law that was passed with oversight of all contractors in war zones. This meant that employees of companies contracted by the U.S. government to work in Iraq and any other combat zone would be under the jurisdiction of U.S. law.

56:26 David Price sponsored it, and the vote was 389 to 30. All 30 nays was from Republicans. When the bill went to the Senate, the Bush administration officials expressed grave concern. They said that the amended, expanded accountability law would complicate national security activities for while it broadened the scope of U.S. law.

56:52 and thus assisted victims from violent acts of private contractors, it also opened courtroom doors to those who wanted to stop the work of some American contractors abroad. Imagine that. The Bush administration said it feared a potential barrage of litigation, especially regarding the current methods of what is called harsh interrogation and others called torture. The bill did not pass in the Senate. In subsequent years, another

57:21 expansion called the Civilian Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, sponsored by Representative Price in the House and Leahy in the Senate with I as well. In December 2007, there would be more legal attempted oversight, and that was the expansion of the UCNJ. The National Defense Authorization Act took the code beyond the limits of a declared war.

57:47 to a contingency operation, defining a military operation as designated by the Secretary of Defense as an operation in which members of the armed forces are and may be involved in military actions, operations, or hostilities against an enemy of the U.S. or against opposing military forces. And by the end of the year, the State Department and DOD would issue a document called a Memorandum of Agreement.

58:12 defining operating procedures, oversight, and monitoring on an interagency level. It was, however, limited to Iraq. Nothing was ever said about Afghanistan. Then in January 2008, there was another action prompted by the October hearing and the Nisan Square Massacre, the launch of a commission on wartime contracting, a congressional investigation of federal contracting in the reconstruction and security of Iraq and Afghanistan.

58:40 Authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act that year, the commission would be composed of eight members, two appointed by the president, two by the Senate majority leader, and two by the Speaker of House, one by the House minority leader and one by the Senate minority leader. Their immense mission was for the next three years to assess the scope of government's reliance on private military contractors and war zones. But despite the massacre and the investigative

59:10 There was no determination to regulate the industry. Regulation was costly and complicated, especially for the international business. This would not be a cause taken on by Congress. It was, however, a matter of deep concern to the government of Switzerland and to the International Red Cross. They launched in 2006 a joint initiative to explore strategies for international control of private military and security sectors.

59:38 The Swiss initiative, as it was called, was motivated by the industry's bad track record for human rights abuses and by the belief in the industry had already provided through the portal of permanence. If indeed there was to be no turning back, certain realities had to be faced, and one that the nations would be slow to regulate.

1:00:06 Thus, from 2006 to 2008, experts in these humanitarian law, international treaties, armed security and unconventional warfare convened in Switzerland. And in the spring of 2008, meetings representatives from the industry itself were invited to attend. By this time, industry leaders were beginning to agree to work on, quote unquote, self-regulation. This meant offering their own suggestions on a way to regulate.

1:00:36 presence in these wars. Now, that's the end of the chapter. What I want to say in conclusion, when you get to this point, this is the exact same thing as trade associations in the United States. They get the people from these large companies in the United States that are members of the international syndicate to develop

1:01:06 trade associations, and the trade associations are filled with them. So they always do what's best for the oligarch, the international syndicate, and not what's best for the trade. And I can give you tons of examples of that. This is how, when they did all of the breakup of the antitrust back in the day,

1:01:35 we saw the birth of labor unions, trade associations, and the oligarchs. And then the oligarchs controlled the trade associations and the labor unions. So you basically had the exact same apparatus, just a shield to protect the oligarchs. Oh, that wasn't us. That was the trade association. Oh, that wasn't us. That was the labor unions. When in fact, they control all of them. And the next...

1:02:04 chapter goes into a bunch of details. So tomorrow what I'm going to do is just pull out the highlights of who sat in on this trade association. I'm not going to go through in detail because it ends up being the exact same thing. The bottom line was there was still no accountability because it's the fox in charge of the hen house. And that concludes today. And like the paramilitary monitoring the paramilitary? That's exactly what it is.

1:02:36 Oh, my God. That's exactly what it is. And for years, for decades, they've gotten away with it. Yep. Yep. That's a fact. You got anything for us, S.R.? Yes, ma'am. I was looking into House Bill 1591 that was introduced by Jan, whatever her last name is. Satowski, that's what I'm calling her. Yeah.

1:03:10 Whatever. In the military, folks, we call them all Ski. That's true. So anyway, she introduced a bill. This bill actually passed the House. It passed the Senate. And President Bush vetoed it. Yeah. That's how that bill died. Yeah. That's telling. The other thing I was looking at was...

1:03:43 So wait a minute. Hold on a second. So you're telling me the son of the CIA guy didn't want the CIA paramilitary guys checked? Correct. Go ahead. The other one that I was looking into was General Howard Crongard. General Howard Crongard had a lot to do with what was going on with Blackwater and his testimony and some of the things he did.

1:04:15 And it just so happens that one of his relations that Henry Waxman brought out was, I want to say his brother, that was working with Blackwater. So all of this that was going on with Blackwater concerning how the committee was being steered.

1:04:46 was a setup right from the word go i can see it coming that along with henry waxman now henry waxman surprised the stew out of me for a democrat that would do something like this and bring all of this forward to me is sort of unbelievable at the time so i don't know what was going on in henry waxman's world at that point in time that made him so adamant

1:05:15 to bring this together. But he did. Thank you, Colonel. Sure. Well, let me explain what you're watching. Waxman just happened to be sitting in the chair. This is a kabuki dance. So if you have an insistent representative that you do something and you can't avoid doing it, you put on a show trial. Waxman was the orchestra.

1:05:45 um conductor they're not going to do anything um because they're all paid from the same people so he just happened to have the conductor baton at the time i don't think at any time because he didn't ask any of the real pertinent questions um that he was enthusiastic about even having it but they have to put these kabuki dances on to keep us all placated

1:06:19 Yeah. OK, so now I'm going to have to go down through the kabuki dance rabbit hole. OK. Is it it's essentially the same thing as the committee and all the other committees, correct? That are just pretending to investigate. Yeah, they hide. They remember because what was the one where they found all of the real incriminating stuff? They had they had it.

1:06:50 Which book was that? I've read so many books. They're all running together. One of the I don't know if it was BCCI or one of those that had a big congressional hearing. And like 15 years later, one of the researchers happened to know a staffer and the staffer said, hey, I found in the basement in an abandoned bathroom, all of these boxes of crap.

1:07:20 That is from that time period. Do you want to go look at them? And they escorted them down into this basement and there were boxes and boxes of stuff related to it that they had gotten through the committee prep for the hearing. What that was never discussed. It was never exposed. It was filed away in a box. It was never talked about in any of the congressional hearings. And so.

1:07:49 It's all a kabuki dance. It was even weird to me. At least now, because of private people and cameras and stuff like that, it's really hard to hide stuff. Back then, when nobody was walking around with a camera, it was very easy to do.

1:08:22 it was so easy to subpoena or gather through whistleblowers or whatever, shit, put it in a file, put it in a box and put it in the basement in an abandoned bathroom and it never see the light of day. Totally agree. And that was one of the things that I think has been the biggest sabotage of the mainstream media narrative is everyone has a phone. Everyone has a phone and every,

1:08:57 Phone has a camera and it totally burst the control over 90% of the population. As far as the mock and murder media. Yeah. Um, well, even the January 6th show trial, um, because there were too many people that were there that were videotaping that were live streaming it while it was happening. My opinion, but yeah, no, I agree. Stellar. How are you today?

1:09:36 I caught her by surprise. Yep. She must be away from her phone or can't talk. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's all we got for today. And we'll get through a couple chapters tomorrow just because I'm not going to go into detail about the whole setting up of this association. I'm just going to tell you who the main players were because we know how it ends up. It's the fox guarding the hen house. Go ahead, Renee.

1:10:04 Hey, everyone. Hey, Colonel. So I was just curious because I think it was like a year ago, Eric Prince met with Nayib Bukele in Mexico. So that said, he's still in the game. I mean, in your personal opinion, what do you think he made a deal or capitulated or what's your opinion? I don't know.

1:10:29 I've listened to many interviews with him. I think it's very telling that he doesn't live in the United States anymore. I think that's very telling. So I don't know. I could make an honest argument either way. But there's no getting around the fact that what Blackwater was doing.

1:11:00 Made and the way they did it made things worse for the U.S. military and for the United States, but not for the oligarchs. I have a friend who worked intelligence inside of Blackwater and their reliance on the CIA for almost everything makes them an appendage.

1:11:31 of the CIA. It's hard to see them as anything other than a CIA front company. Go ahead, SR71. Thank you, Colonel. Just so everyone knows, Blackwater, even though it was founded in 97 by Eric Prince, it has gone through several name changes.

1:12:01 It was rebranded as Z Services LLC, XE Services LLC in 2009. Yeah. And then as Academy. Yeah. Right. And then as Academy LLC in 2011. In 2014, Academy merged with Triple Canopy to form Constellus Holdings. Correct. And that's currently the parent company of Blackwater.

1:12:29 They're still in business. Yeah, and I did a wiring diagram of Kinsella's. That research project for me is what made me realize my new epiphany of how all of the old oligarchs that manipulate everything were profiting off of the outsourcing. Because if you go and you look at who owns Kinsella's and all of these other

1:12:59 where over time they have bought up all of the smaller ones. And I think that's like a cash out payment to if they lure a special forces Green Beret Delta guy out of the military to set up one of these private contractors, then he bids on contracts. He becomes a subcontractor to the bigger guys.

1:13:26 And then eventually his company gets bought out. That's his nest egg for the rest of his life. And they just get bigger and bigger and bigger. And they all end up with the same boards of directors. There's crossover between all of them. And now significant parts of them are owned by the oligarchs themselves. And so this has been a 50-year plan.

1:13:56 a 70-year plan, if you want to go back to post-World War II, to get us involved in these operations and quote-unquote exceed the military capability for them and hire out the contracting of what used to be considered only a military's job to do. And then they're getting rich, but we're paying

1:14:23 the military piece and were paying the contractors, but they're all owned by the original oligarchs. So now they're getting rich over twice because they outsourced it to the government and created the military and the CIA. And then they take our taxpayer dollars and fund these contractors. So they got it off their books, which was a payment to themselves in profit.

1:14:51 And now they're profiting off of creating the wars and the instability all over the war by the private military contractors, which they now all own an interest in. Renee, did you want to say something? Yeah, I will. I have another question, please, if you don't mind. So what is the sovereign immunity with these private mercenary groups? Do they have what is the immunity clause or do they have one?

1:15:31 I recall you mentioning something like that. Well, it depends on which contractor and what mission they're doing. So out of several interviews that I've watched, many of them that are contracted from the State Department actually have State Department IDs, which does give them the same immunity that an embassy employee has. Some of those contractors, depending on who you talk to,

1:16:00 abused that and had that taken away. But the bottom line is, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, they were given basically blanket immunity. And I don't know if you guys are aware of this. Any of the veterans can attest to this. There's many, many war stories that the U.S. military, like loadmasters, flight engineers, pilots,

1:16:28 on missions in foreign countries would be caught in a compromising situation. And instead of the military member in some countries that we don't have a status of forces agreement with, they just load them up and fly them out of the country in the middle of the night. They had ends if they were arrested by a local jurisdiction.

1:16:56 that they would escort them out the back of the jail, they'd put them on an airplane, and off they go. And that's oftentimes what happens with the private military with their own equipment. They just get them out of country, and they're never held accountable, regardless of what it is they're charged with. Even if they don't have immunity, they're not held accountable. Okay, thank you for that. One more question, please. So, for example,

1:17:30 Executive Order 13818 and Brazilian Supreme Court judge or whatever, Alexandra de Moraes, just had the Magnitsky Act slapped on him, which is apparently a global kind of order that Trump put down. It's not global. It only pertains to his assets in the United States. Ah, okay.

1:18:01 So to go after these, the international syndicate, could we not use EO13818 or like start the process that way for accountability? I'm not assuming that we're not already doing that. But again, it only applies to assets in the United States. I mean, that's how we froze all of Russia's assets. And that.

1:18:28 Freezing of assets, it has some blowback because people will be less likely to invest in the United States if they think at the whim of the U.S. government, their assets can be frozen. Now, we do strong arm other countries using the.

1:18:54 And that may be why you think it's a global thing. We do use the World Bank, the IMF and everything else to strong arm other countries into freezing assets. That's what happened with the Iranian assets that had been frozen that Biden released. They were not in the United States. If I'm not mistaken, they were in South Korea. But they because of their.

1:19:24 like sole dependency on us, did that as a quote unquote partner. And then Biden got them to unfreeze those assets. So it's to me, it's not a very effective way of controlling people if it's at the whim of whoever's sitting in the White House. But that is, in fact, what we that is.

1:19:53 Basically, what we've been using the Magnitsky Act to freeze all of Russia's and their, you know, whoever they are. And there's a list of the people that it applies to freezing of their assets. It's a form of and I don't mean this in a negative way, but it is a form of coercion to get people.

1:20:17 to do what you want them to do, especially people who have large buckets of assets in the United States, which because of the stability of the US market, a lot of the criminal syndicate has assets in the United States because they money launder their money through US real estate and stuff like that. So it's definitely very effective. And I do think if you go back and look in Trump's first term,

1:20:46 some of the actions he took in freezing assets, I do believe it had an element of that in it. So I think it's an ongoing operation that they are using that for. Thank you. Thank you for that. And I read a post, I did not look into it, but I read a post that that judge in

1:21:17 Brazil's daughter lived here and he did have a boatload of assets here. So, again, it can be a very effective tool. Anybody else got anything? Colonel, I see EG 651 asked for a mic and speaker. Maybe he's got something to say. Not sure. He hadn't raised his hand. Hi, everybody. I don't want to take up a lot of time. You know what? The only thing.

1:21:55 I just kind of came in here and saw, you know, it's kind of an offshoot of, you know, kind of what I personally have been on a mission for. It's this Epstein thing, and I don't want to get into a lot of it. I'm going to be very short and sweet. I just wanted everybody, if they could see, if they could at least retweet what Juliet has been saying. We can't stay silent about this. Okay?

1:22:25 There's a lot of it on my page. I've been retweeting what she's been saying, and that's it, okay? I'm not trying to post any lies, no nothing, whatever it is. Just help me repost what she's saying so it doesn't get buried in the ashes. Sure. Thank you very much. Travis, go ahead. SR, can you give him a mic? Travis, did you have something you wanted to ask?

1:23:06 Yeah, I just wanted to say that in 1993, the United States, UK, the EU, and Canada signed an agreement to give diplomatic immunity to all personnel who work at any of the joint bio labs worldwide. All of these bio labs use these same PMCs.

1:23:36 to do security, which gives all the PMCs diplomatic immunity. For that particular contract, you're right. That doesn't mean that they have immunity when they go on other missions for other contracts, though. Yes, you're right. And that's where we found Battelle when we did that research project into them. They have a lot of contracts for.

1:24:04 the maintenance on those facilities. And you're absolutely right. As a result of those contracts and those agreements dealing with those labs all over the world, they are basically treated as if they're State Department personnel, even the people that are sweeping the floors. So, yeah, that's absolutely true. But those contracts are separate from a contract

1:24:33 that is let through the State Department to a guy on the ground in Iraq. They were covered by the Bremer executive, whatever you call it, the law for the coalition authority. And originally, when the guys went into Afghanistan, the private military contractors, those are the ones that had initially

1:25:02 actual State Department passes or identification cards that cleared them through the airport so they didn't even have to go through normal security. But some of the contracts did not carry that same issuing of a State Department ID. It really is contract by contract because, again, you're not just dealing with

1:25:30 the one entity in the federal government. The CIA contractors, even if they contract Blackwater, they get no identification at all because the CIA does not want anyone tying them to their mission area. Now, they will go through the same effort to try to get them immediately out of the country if they get into an incident. But if they're killed,

1:26:01 There's no one that even according to people that have been on those missions, there's nobody that deals with their dead body. The way it gets home, everything about it is messed up. And if you're from a third country, i.e. Colombia, you're literally on your own because that is a separate subcontract that carries no immunity, no nothing with it.

1:26:29 And those people are even worse off when they go into like in this scenario, in this book, into Iraq and Afghanistan. They were treated not only were they paid pennies on the dollar compared to an American on the same contract, but they they were treated even worse because they weren't they were a sub to a sub.

1:26:54 So they didn't want anybody affiliated with them because, again, that's how Congress would know or Americans would know that they're paying for literal mercenaries. And in the case that they just brought up, some of Penashe's evildoers that the Office of Public Safety trained to be assassins. And they're not going to let that happen. So they get sub to subs and the accountability.

1:27:22 there is almost zero so okay we're done for the day thank you for being here i appreciate it and i will see you tomorrow again make sure you put on your calendar to watch the alpha warrior show at 9 30 eastern time on wednesday night you're not going to want to miss it take care everybody

Entities here

Blackwater25 Erik Prince25 Jan Schakowsky21 U.S. State Department21 Henry Waxman19 Iran19 United States15 Afghanistan11 Nisour Square massacre7 U.S. Congress7 Blackwater Flight 61 crash7 House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform6 David Price6 Colombia6 Fallujah5 Michael Mahan4 Jane Watson3 Chile3 Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse3 Switzerland3 DynCorp3 U.S. Air Force3 Tom Davis3 Augusto Pinochet3 Jeanette McMahon2 U.S. Army2 Chris Shays2 Gary Jackson2 Slobodan Milosevic2 House Bill 15912 International Committee of the Red Cross2 James McGovern2 Plan Colombia2 Elijah Cummings2 Harley Miller1 Washington, D.C.1 United Kingdom1 Battelle1 Patrick Leahy1 Peru1

Claims made here

Blackwater carried_out_attack Nisour Square massacre documented ▶ 5:54

“17 dead and 24 wounded. The tragedy, the latest atrocity of war, drew more attention than ever before to the consequences of privatizing war. While the incident at Fallujah in 2004 had earned Blackwat…”

Henry Waxman member_of House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform documented ▶ 8:21

“But she was present. Also, there were widows, children and siblings and parents of the four Blackwater employees murdered in Fallujah in 2004 and the families of soldiers who died in November 2004 whe…”

Blackwater recruited Erik Prince documented ▶ 9:50

“Waxman noted. That's the end of his statement. Waxman noted had been founded in 1997 by its current CEO, former Navy SEAL Eric Prince, whom Waxman, alluding to the Prince family portion, commented, we…”

Erik Prince founded Blackwater documented ▶ 9:50

Erik Prince headed Blackwater documented ▶ 9:50

Blackwater financed_via U.S. Congress documented ▶ 10:19

“We are trying to do for national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service, unquote. And then he went on to quote the amount of money Blackwater was making. Since the year 2000, he said…”

U.S. State Department paid Blackwater documented ▶ 12:49

“And if this had happened in the United States, the contractor would have been arrested and a criminal investigation launched. If a drunken U.S. soldier had killed an Iraqi guard, the soldier would hav…”

Tom Davis member_of House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform documented ▶ 14:41

“Then beginning with ranking member Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia, the hearing would slowly develop into a battle between those who firmly believed in the importance of private military contrac…”

Blackwater supplied_arms_to U.S. Congress guest_asserted ▶ 16:37

“praised the work of Blackwater. Quote, Blackwater has protected dozens, if not hundreds of members of Congress, including myself and members of the committee when they traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq…”

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform covered_up Blackwater host_asserted ▶ 19:49

“That definitely undermines the U.S. position in Iraq and jeopardizes the safety of our soldiers. Krasinich also lamb blasted the State Department for attempting to cover up Blackwater's killings rathe…”

U.S. State Department covered_up Blackwater host_asserted ▶ 19:49

Blackwater carried_out_attack Iran documented ▶ 20:17

“nothing could be truer. It's like all wars are banker wars because the bankers make money off of war. Throughout the hearing, Democrats asked Prince about a number of these incidents. On June 25, 2005…”

Blackwater recruited Travis Gogan documented ▶ 20:47

“as the random death of an innocent Iraqi. Other such incidents were cited by other committee members. Perhaps the most moving was the story of November 27, 2004, crash of Blackwater Flight 61, in whic…”

Blackwater carried_out_attack Blackwater Flight 61 crash documented ▶ 20:47

Blackwater recruited Harley Miller documented ▶ 20:47

Blackwater recruited Michael Mahan documented ▶ 20:47

U.S. Air Force exposed Blackwater Flight 61 crash documented ▶ 21:18

“as well as the Blackwater co-pilots and mechanic. When Waxman told the story, the room was silent and held their breath. The crash into the wall of a canyon in Afghanistan was investigated by a joint …”

National Transportation Safety Board exposed Blackwater Flight 61 crash documented ▶ 21:18

U.S. State Department funded Blackwater host_asserted ▶ 31:35

“and said that weapons were discharged in less than 1% of those missions. But most Americans didn't know that. Years later, in his book, Civilian Warriors, Prince would blame the U.S. government for Bl…”

Erik Prince headed Blackwater documented ▶ 31:35

Jan Schakowsky opposed Blackwater documented ▶ 35:10

“the guest legislator that day. Schakowsky had come to the hearing that day to proclaim her opposition to Prince and his company, as well as all other companies like his. She wanted to meet the man who…”

Jan Schakowsky investigated Plan Colombia documented ▶ 37:34

“spent six days in Colombia investigating a $1.3 billion U.S. operation called Plan Colombia. We've talked about this before. This was supposed to be a counter-narcotics program focusing on killing dru…”

DynCorp carried_out_attack Plan Colombia documented ▶ 37:34

Henry Waxman exposed Blackwater documented ▶ 1:04:15

“And it just so happens that one of his relations that Henry Waxman brought out was, I want to say his brother, that was working with Blackwater. So all of this that was going on with Blackwater concer…”

Erik Prince founded Blackwater documented ▶ 1:11:31

“of the CIA. It's hard to see them as anything other than a CIA front company. Go ahead, SR71. Thank you, Colonel. Just so everyone knows, Blackwater, even though it was founded in 97 by Eric Prince, i…”

Battelle member_of U.S. State Department host_asserted ▶ 1:23:36

“to do security, which gives all the PMCs diplomatic immunity. For that particular contract, you're right. That doesn't mean that they have immunity when they go on other missions for other contracts, …”