Woo vs. Harmon - Witness Erik Prince

David C. Farmer, Successor-Trustee vs. Harmon

(Formerly Woo vs. Harmon & Nicholson vs. Harmon)

CV05-00030 DAE KSC

U.S. District Court For the District of Hawaii

Judges: David A. Ezra; Kevin S. Chang

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DEFENDANT’S WITNESS

ERIK PRINCE

From wikipedia:

Erik Prince (born June 6, 1969 in Holland, Michigan) is the founder and owner of the military support contractor Blackwater USA. A millionaire and former US Navy SEAL, after high school he briefly attended the United States Naval Academy before attending and graduating from Hillsdale College. After college, he earned a commission in the United States Navy after joining in 1992, and served as a Navy SEAL officer on deployments to Haiti, the Middle East and the Mediterranean, including Bosnia.

When his father Edgar Prince unexpectedly died in 1995, he ended his Navy service prematurely. After Erik's mother, Elsa Prince, sold the family's automobile parts company, Prince Corporation, for $1.3 billion to Johnson Controls, Inc., Erik moved to Virginia Beach and personally financed the formation of Blackwater USA at the age of 27.

Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, a former chairman of the Republican Party of Michigan and wife of former Alticor (Amway) president and Gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos.

Prince's first wife, Joan Nicole Prince, died of cancer in 2003, and he has since remarried and has six children. He now runs Prince Group, Blackwater's parent company, from an office in McLean, Virginia and also serves as a board member of Christian Freedom International, a nonprofit group with a mission of helping "Christians who are persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Prince

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"America's Holy Warriors"

SourceWatch

Erik Prince is "the secretive, mega-millionaire, right-wing Christian founder of Blackwater, the private security firm that has built a formidable mercenary force in Iraq," Chris Hedges wrote December 31, 2006, in Truthdig

Prince "champions his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military. His employees, in an act as cynical as it is deceitful, take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution. These mercenary units in Iraq, including Blackwater, contain some 20,000 fighters. They unleash indiscriminate and wanton violence against unarmed Iraqis, have no accountability and are beyond the reach of legitimate authority. The appearance of these paramilitary fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gave us a grim taste of the future. It was a stark reminder that the tyranny we impose on others we will one day impose on ourselves," Hedges wrote.

Starr defense

"The new 'counsel of record' for the North Carolina-based company is none other than former Whitewater investigator Kenneth Starr — the independent counsel in the 1999 impeachment of President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal," Jeremy Scahill and Garrett Ordower reported online October 26, 2006, in The Nation.

"Starr was brought in last week by Blackwater to filemotions in front of the US Supreme Court in a case stemming from the killing of four Blackwater contractors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah on March 31, 2004."

"There are undeniable benefits to having Starr, the US Solicitor General under President George H.W. Bush, represent Blackwater—a highly partisan GOP company—in front of a Supreme Court stacked with Bush appointees.

Starr also has a personal connection to Blackwater. Starr and Joseph Schmitz, the general counsel and chief operating officer of Blackwater's parent company, the Prince Group, have both worked closely with the arch-conservative Washington Legal Foundation. Since 1993 Starr has served on the legal policy advisory board of the organization for which Schmitz has frequently acted as a spokesperson and attorney," Scahill and Ordower wrote.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Blackwater_USA

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NEW DISCOVERY (02-13-09): More undisclosed conflicts of interest between witnesses Erik Prince, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Paul Bremer, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, Kenneth Starr, Ron Rewald, Larry Mehau, Dan Inouye, Daniel Akaka, John Waihee, Ben Cayetano, David Farmer, Paul Alston, Judith Neustadter Fuqua, others...:

February 13, 2009

In shift, Blackwater dumps
tarnished brand name

By MIKE BAKER, Associated Press Writer Mike Baker

RALEIGH, N.C. – Blackwater Worldwide is still protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq, but executives at the beleaguered security firm are taking their biggest step yet to put that work and the ugly reputation it earned the company behind them.

Blackwater said Friday it will no longer operate under the name that came to be known worldwide as a caustic moniker for private security, dropping the tarnished brand for a disarming and simple identity: Xe, which is pronounced like the letter "z."

It's a rare surrender for a company that cherished a brand name inspired by the dark-water swamps of northeastern North Carolina, one that survived another rebranding effort about a year ago, following a deadly shooting in Baghdad's Nisoor Square. The decision to give it up underscores how badly the Moyock-based company's brand was damaged by that incident and other security work in Iraq.

"They have established themselves as the bad guys," said Katy Helvenston, who sued the company following her son's death during a mission in Fallujah while working for Blackwater in 2004. "They've established such a horrible reputation. Why else would they change their name?"

Blackwater acknowledged last year in an interview with the The Associated Press the damage to its reputation had persuaded the company to focus on lines of business other than private security contracting.

The issue came to a head last month, when the State Department said it would not rehire Blackwater to protect its diplomats in Iraq after its current contract with the company expires in May. The company has one other major security contract, details of which are classified.

"It's not a direct result of a loss of (that) contract, but certainly that is an aspect of our work that we feel we were defined by," said spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell.

The company is also replacing its bear paw logo with a sleeker black-and-white graphic based on letters that make up the company's new name. In a note to employees, president Gary Jackson said the name change reflects the company's new focus, and he indicated Xe would not actively pursue new security business.

"This company will continue to provide personnel protective services for high-threat environments when needed by the U.S. government, but its primary mission will be operating our training facilities around the world," Jackson said.

It has expanded other businesses such as aviation support, recently building a fleet of 76 aircraft that it has deployed to such hotspots as West Africa and Afghanistan. The company got its start in training and continues to build up that business. Last year, some 25,000 civilians, law enforcement and military personnel attended a Blackwater class.

The company's changes aren't entirely voluntary. The 2007 shooting in Nisoor Square involving Blackwater guards left at least a dozen Iraqi civilians dead, infuriated politicians in Baghdad and Washington, triggered congressional hearings and increased calls that the company be banned from Iraq.

Late last year, prosecutors charged five of the company's contractors — but not Blackwater itself — with manslaughter and weapons violations. In January, Iraqi officials said they would not give the company a license to operate. The State Department responded by informing Blackwater it would not renew a contract that comprises a third of the company's nearly $1 billion in annual revenue.

"It would hurt us," company CEO Erik Prince said in an interview before losing the State Department deal. "It would not be a mortal blow, but it would hurt us."

Blackwater has rebranded before, introducing a new name — Blackwater Worldwide — and slight changes to its logo about a year ago. But Friday's announcement cuts ties entirely with a name created in 1997 when Prince and some of his former Navy SEAL colleagues launched the company.

Xe will cover the parent brand for the two-dozen subsidiaries, and none of those subsidiaries will retain the word "Blackwater" in their names.

Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Intelligence Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and a longtime Blackwater critic, said the new name won't change the fact that its actions have resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians.

"Blackwater's notorious reputation will outlast its name," she said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090213/ap_on_bi_ge/blackwater_name_change

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October 4, 2007

Grilled Blackwater chairman
a major GOP donor

by Andrew Malcolm, Swamp Politics

You saw a lot of Erik Prince on TV the last couple of days, spending considerable time calmly fending off inquiries from agitated Democratic congressmen about his security company's suddenly controversial activities in Iraq. One explanation may be that Prince, the head of Blackwater, U.S.A., has a lengthy political pedigree as a Republican.

Members of the House Oversight Committee, which is chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills), accused Blackwater employees of being "cowboys" who acted recklessly during their contracted security duties for the State Department in Iraq. It also came out that Blackwater, which has lost some three dozen employees in Iraq hostilities, has a 100 percent success rate in protecting VIPs under its contract.

This may shock some, but it also turns out that the target of the committee's angry questions was a 38-year-old former Navy SEAL who has donated $230,000 to federal campaigns and causes in the last decade. Almost all of that money has gone to Republicans, according to a check of Federal Election Commission records by The Times' campaign finance expert, Dan Morain.

Prince's latest donation was in July, when he gave $20,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee. California recipients of Prince’s $1,000 checks include Reps. Jerry Lewis and Duncan Hunter, a current GOP presidential candidate, and former Rep. Richard Pombo....

So far, Prince has stayed out of presidential campaign donations. However, his family members have given to former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Prince’s lineage includes his late father, Edgar, who owned a large auto parts company in Michigan and was a major donor and advisor to Christian conservative Gary Bauer, a past GOP presidential candidate.

Prince’s mother, Elsa Prince, has donated $140,000 to federal Republican causes and candidates in the last decade. His sister, Betsy, is a former chair of the Michigan Republican Party who has given at least $61,000 to Republican campaigns on the federal level since 1997.

Betsy’s husband is Richard DeVos, who hails from the family that founded Amway. He ran unsuccessfully for Michigan governor in 2006. The Republican stalwart has given more than $2 million to federal causes and candidates in the last 10 years, FEC records show....

Andrew Malcolm writes for Top of the Ticket, the Los Angeles Times' political blog.

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From wikipedia:

Iraq involvement

In 2003, Blackwater landed its first truly high-profile contract: guarding civilian Administrator L. Paul Bremer in Iraq, at the cost of $21 million for 11 months. Since June 2004, Blackwater has been paid more than $320 million out of a $1 billion, five-year State Department budget for the Worldwide Personal Protective Service, which protects U.S. officials and some foreign officials in conflict zones.

In 2006, Blackwater won the remunerative contract to protect the U.S. embassy in Iraq, which is the largest American embassy in the world. It is estimated by the Pentagon and company representatives that there are 20,000 to 30,000 armed security contractors working in Iraq, and some estimates are as much as 100,000, though no official figures exist. Of the State Department's dependence on private contractors like Blackwater for security purposes, U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, told the U.S. Senate: "There is simply no way at all that the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts."

For work in Iraq, Blackwater has drawn contractors from their international pool of professionals, a database containing "21,000 former Special Forces troops, soldiers, and retired law enforcement agents," overall. For instance, Gary Jackson, the firm's president, has confirmed that Bosnians, Filipinos, and Chileans, "have been hired for tasks ranging from airport security to protecting Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_USA

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From GNN: Grail News Now:

THE BUSH HARD DRUG EMPIRE EVIDENCE II

Kenneth Starr - Former special assistant to Reagan Attorney General William French-Smith who knew about, and helped author, the infamous memorandum removing CIA's responsibility for reporting drug trafficking by its agents and contract employees.