Jeremy Scahill Interview Re: Trump Administration

Elucidation of Erik Prince, Falluja and Blackwater in the Trump administration, among other things.

"This is going to be a very intense ride with this administration because it really is a kind of cabal of legitimized criminals, religious extremists, radical privatization advocates, and then a smattering of truly despicable racist, bigot white supremicists."

Tear It All Down

In keeping with his appointments of people who would like to gut the government and privatize everything:

President-elect Donald Trump selected a charter school advocate and GOP donor from Michigan on Wednesday to be education secretary.

Betsy DeVos becomes the second woman chosen to fill a spot in Trump's Cabinet. Earlier Wednesday, Trump named South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations earlier in the day. Both Cabinet-level positions require Senate confirmation.

[...]

The DeVos family has been active in Republican politics for decades, especially as donors to GOP candidates and the Republican Party. DeVos' husband, Dick, is an heir to the Amway fortune and a former president of the company.

[...]


Hours before the DeVos pick was announced, conservative policy leader Frank Cannon, president of American Principles Project, called her "an establishment, pro-Common Core secretary of education."

"This would not qualify as 'draining the swamp,'" Cannon said, referencing Trump's campaign trail slogan.
  Fox News

Wow. The Republicans don't even want her?

In a statement to Fox News, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said DeVos "has no meaningful experience in the classroom or in our schools."

Like her new boss the president-elect, you mean, who has no experience, meaningful or not, in government?

“In nominating DeVos, Trump makes it loud and clear that his education policy will focus on privatizing, defunding and destroying public education in America."

I would have expected nothing less.

[Neurosurgeon] Ben Carson [...] has been offered the job of secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to a person familiar with the offer who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the deliberations publicly.

Ben Carson. He tried to run for president. And when the speculation was about Health and Human Services (a post he, a doctor, presumably was not offered) said he wouldn't want to "take a position [in the Trump administration] that would cripple the presidency" because he "feels he has no government experience."  So, I guess Housing and Urban Development is where he's going to get experience.

Carson has not yet accepted the offer, but he tweeted on Wednesday that "an announcement is forthcoming about my role in helping to make America great again."

"The people of South Carolina are embarrassed by Nikki Haley!" Trump wrote on Twitter in March.

  USA Today

So now, he wants to make her the UN ambassador.

 Lunatics. One and all.

P.S.  DeVos is Erik Prince's sister.

....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Don't Forget Somalia

American officials said the White House had quietly broadened the president’s authority for the use of force in Somalia by allowing airstrikes to protect American and African troops as they combat fighters from the Shabab, a Somali-based militant group that has proclaimed allegiance to Al Qaeda.

In its public announcements, the Pentagon sometimes characterizes the operations as “self-defense strikes,” though some analysts have said this rationale has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is only because American forces are now being deployed on the front lines in Somalia that they face imminent threats from the Shabab.

  NYT

Works every time.

About 200 to 300 American Special Operations troops work with soldiers from Somalia and other African nations like Kenya and Uganda to carry out more than a half-dozen raids per month, according to senior American military officials. The operations are a combination of ground raids and drone strikes.

The Navy’s classified SEAL Team 6 has been heavily involved in many of these operations.

[...]

The strikes have had a mixed record. In March, an American airstrike killed more than 150 Shabab fighters at what military officials called a “graduation ceremony,” one of the single deadliest American airstrikes in any country in recent years. But an airstrike last month killed more than a dozen Somali government soldiers, who were American allies against the Shabab.

Outraged Somali officials said the Americans had been duped by clan rivals and fed bad intelligence, laying bare the complexities of waging a shadow war in Somalia.

[...]

In January, Shabab fighters killed more than 100 Kenyan troops and drove off with their trucks and weapons.

[...]

More recently it has branched into more sophisticated forms of terrorism, including nearly downing a Somali airliner in February with a bomb hidden in a laptop computer.

[...]

Once ground operations are complete, American troops working with Somali forces often interrogate prisoners at temporary screening facilities.

Enhanced?

And, hey, there's a big private component. That always works out well, too.

Soldiers for the military unit, called Danab, which means lightning in Somali, are recruited by employees of Bancroft Global Development, a Washington-based company that for years has worked with the State Department to train African Union troops and embed with them on military operations inside Somalia.

Michael Stock, the company’s founder, said the Danab recruits received initial training at a facility in Mogadishu before they were sent to Baledogle, where they go through months of training by the Marines. Bancroft advisers then accompany the Somali fighters on missions.

[...]

Mr. Stock said the goal was to create a small Somali military unit capable of battling the Shabab without repeating the mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the United States spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to build up large armies.

So Blackwater wasn't a mistake?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Blackwater Sentencing

Four former Blackwater employees were given long sentences yesterday for killing 14 unarmed Iraqis [...] and wounding many others, when in 2007 they shot at a crowd in Baghdad’s Nisour Square with machine guns and grenade launchers.

[...]

Nicholas Slatten, who fired the first shot and was convicted of murder, received a life sentence. Paul Slough, Dustin Heard and Evan Liberty, who were convicted of voluntary manslaughter, received 30 years each.

One other guard, Jeremy Ridgeway, testified for the prosecution and pleaded guilty to lesser charges. He has not yet been sentenced.

[...]

In handing down the sentences, the judge called the defendants “fine young men” who “panicked,” but rejected claims that they were acting in self-defense in a war zone. “The overall, wild, thing that went on here can just not be condoned by a court,” said Royce Lamberth, of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

  The Intercept

Fine young men I’m sorry. They give me the willies. All four of them.  (Pictures below.)

The defendants all maintain their innocence and have vowed to appeal, which will likely drag out an already protracted case. The long prosecution was derailed several times by the Justice Department’s mistakes, and dismissed once over accusations of prosecutorial misconduct. Last year, prosecutors missed a deadline for statute of limitations for certain charges against Slatten.

Intentionally mishandled?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.  (Especially you four.)

A Blackwater Verdict

A federal jury in Washington, D.C., returned guilty verdicts against four Blackwater operatives charged with killing more than a dozen Iraqi civilians and wounding scores of others in Baghdad in 2007.

The jury found one guard, Nicholas Slatten, guilty of first-degree murder, while three other guards were found guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

[...]

A fifth Blackwater guard [...] had already pleaded guilty to lesser charges and cooperated with prosecutors in the case against his former colleagues. The trial lasted ten weeks and the jury has been in deliberations for 28 days.

[...]

Known as “Baghdad’s bloody Sunday,” operatives from Blackwater gunned down 17 Iraqi civilians at a crowded intersection at Nisour Square on September 16, 2007. The company, founded by secretive right-wing Christian supremacist Erik Prince [...] had deep ties to the Bush Administration and served as a sort of neoconservative Praetorian Guard for a borderless war launched in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

[...]

Just as with the systematic torture at Abu Ghraib, it is only the low level foot-soldiers of Blackwater that are being held accountable. Prince and other top Blackwater executives continue to reap profits from the mercenary and private intelligence industries. Prince now has a new company, Frontier Services Group, which he founded with substantial investment from Chinese enterprises and which focuses on opportunities in Africa. Prince recently suggested that his forces at Blackwater could have confronted Ebola and ISIS.

  Jeremy Scahill

Camouflage hazmat suits?

While the Blackwater verdict is an important and rare moment of accountability in an overwhelmingly unaccountable private war industry, it does not erase the fact that those in power—the CEOs, the senior officials, the war profiteers—walk freely and will likely do so for the rest of their lives.

It’s the way of the world. Or the code of the west.

You really should read that article which gives the account of a survivor of the massacre. Or you could listen to his interview there in a video, which is heart-rending and amazing at the same time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.