The Bush administration's ties to Blackwater (and BW's ties to the Xtian Right)

Oct. 02, 2007 | When Blackwater contractors guarding a U.S. State Department convoy allegedly killed 11 unarmed Iraqi civilians on September 16, it was only the latest in a series of controversial shooting incidents associated with the private security firm. Blackwater has a reputation for being quick on the draw. Since 2005, the North Carolina-based company, which has about 1,000 contractors in Iraq, has reported 195 "escalation of force incidents"; in 156 of those cases Blackwater guns fired first. According to the New York Times, Blackwater guards were twice as likely as employees of two other firms protecting State Department personnel in Iraq to be involved in shooting incidents.

On Tuesday morning, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, will be holding a hearing on the U.S. military's use of private contractors. When Waxman announced plans for the hearing last week, the State Department directed Blackwater not to give any information or testimony without its sign-off. After a public spat between Rep. Waxman and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department relented. Blackwater CEO and founder Erik Prince is now scheduled to testify at 10 a.m. Tuesday.

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Prince, who founded Blackwater in 1996 but reportedly took a behind-the-scenes role in the company until after 9/11, has connections to the Republican Party in his blood. His late father, auto-parts magnate Edgar Prince, was instrumental in the creation of the Family Research Council, one of the right-wing Christian groups most influential with the George W. Bush administration. At his funeral in 1995, he was eulogized by two stalwarts of the Christian conservative movement, James Dobson and Gary Bauer. Edgar Prince's widow Elsa, who remarried after her husband's death, has served on the boards of the FRC and another influential Christian right organization, Dobson's Focus on the Family. She currently runs the Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation, where, according to IRS filings, her son Erik is a vice-president. The foundation has given lavishly to some of the marquee names of the Christian right. Between July 2003 and July 2006, the foundation gave at least $670,000 to the FRC and $531,000 to Focus on the Family.

Both Edgar and Elsa have been affiliated with the Council for National Policy, the secretive Christian conservative organization whose meetings have been attended by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer, and whose membership is rumored to include Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Dobson. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation gave the CNP $80,000 between July 2003 and July 2006.

The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister -- married into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. ("I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican party," Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 op-ed in Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband Dick ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006.

...more...

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/print.html

All of this information has been available for a very long time. Being from Michigan, I did quite a bit of researching prior to the Gubernatorial election in '06, and began spreading this information about DeVos and his ties to Erik Prince/Blackwater, the religious right, etc., as much as I could. I'm sure some people I talked to thought I was just a nut-case.

So here is Salon, two years later publishing the information, that the American public should have been informed about as soon as Blackwater entered the Iraqi scene, or when they made their appearance in NO after Katrina.
And Salon is a leftish leaning publication.

Ok, so now it's beginning to hit some of the MSM news, but this is old news to anyone that pays attention. Meanwhile, how many people have suffered from their presence, and how many have profited handsomely because of it?

Whatever happened to investigative reporting? I know, this is a rhetorical question, because we know the answer, but it really ticks me off!

I'm not a reporter, and I shouldn't have to be. I am really getting tired of this. The MSM needs to start doing their jobs, and in order to do this, these huge media conglomerates owned by the few and controlled by the "evil-doers" need to be dissolved.
It is a sad state of affairs when it takes 2 or more years for important information to reach the general public. How can the People be expected to fulfill their duties as citizens when they don't have the facts?

Grrrr...end of rant. :mad:

I know to many of us this seems like "old" news and they are counting on using that as an excuse to never ever ever publish most of it.

:(