Blackwater role in hit squad unconstitutional: expert

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Published: August 21, 2009

The revelation that a secret CIA program to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives was not merely concealed from Congressional oversight committees from 2004 until this year but was partly outsourced to the mercenary firm Blackwater has raised serious issues regarding the balance of powers under the US Constitution.

Author Jeremy Scahill told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Thursday, “What this was, effectively, was a hit squad that responded to one branch of government, the executive branch, at the expense of any oversight or involvement of the other two. I would say that this was unconstitutional.”

“The epicenter of this scandal,” noted Scahill, “is that Dick Cheney is alleged to have ordered the CIA to conceal from the Congress, which has oversight authority, the existence of a secret CIA assassination plan. … Blackwater, we now know, served as a buffer between the executive branch of the government and accountability.”

Blackwater’s involvement in the program was first reported by the New York Times on Wednesday. The Washington Post added the next day that the outsourcing took place when “key officials from the [CIA's counterrerrorism] center retired from the CIA and went to work for the private contractor.”

According to Scahill, the intimate relationship between Blackwater and the CIA began after 9/11, when then-CIA Executive Director Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard brought the private mercenary firm into counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. It intensified a few years later when Krongard and others left the CIA and went to work for Blackwater themselves.

“Prince hires [former CIA counterrorism director] Cofer Black,” explained Scahill, “Buzzy Krongard, Robert Richard — former deputy director of the CIA — Enrique Rick Prado — a veteran of the CIA paramilitary division — to run his own private CIA, called Total Intelligence Solutions, which works simultaneously for the US government and foreign governments.”

According to the Times,, the CIA came to doubt the wisdom of the assassination program and shut it down, but Scahill is skeptical of that claim. “I’m not so sure that the program has even ended to this day,” he told Olbermann. “Blackwater continues to be paid by the United States government for work in both Afghanistan and Iraq.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Aug. 20, 2009.

Download video via RawReplay.com