Erik Prince, all-time champion douchebag, makes the news again

There are three levels of douchebagness.
Level I is the douchebag at work. He cuts people off in traffic, he eats other people's food out of the fridge, he stabs his fellow worker in the back to get ahead. This is the douchebag everybody knows.
Level II is the douchebag in the news. Wall Street CEOs, Washington politicians, and the occasional rich celebrity. These are people that do real damage.
Level III is the rare, cartoonish, James Bond villain that seems so outlandish that it's hard to believe someone like that actually exists. This is Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater.

You may be thinking, "I know about Eric Prince and how big of a douchebag he is," but the fact is he's a much bigger douchebag that you realize.
Today's news is a good example.
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The confidential report to the Security Council, obtained by The New York Times and The Washington Post, and partly seen by Al Jazeera, said on Friday that Prince deployed a force of foreign mercenaries and weapons to renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar, who has fought to overthrow the UN-recognised Libyan government, in 2019.
The $80m operation included plans to form a hit squad to track and kill Libyan commanders opposed to Haftar – including some who were also European Union citizens, The New York Times said.

This is not the first time in the past year that Prince has done something illegal.

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Only three months before that, Prince was involved in another scandal.
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None of this is new. Prince has been getting away with lawbreaking, and murder, for a couple decades. Five years after he left Blackwater, and five years before today, this was the headline.
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Since 2014, Prince has traveled to at least half a dozen countries to offer various versions of a private military force, secretly meeting with a string of African officials. Among the countries where Prince pitched a plan to deploy paramilitary assets is Libya, which is currently subject to an array of U.S. and United Nations financial and defense restrictions.

Prince engaged in these activities over the objections of his own firm’s corporate leadership. Several FSG colleagues accused him of using his role as chairman to offer Blackwater-like services to foreign governments that could not have been provided by the company, which lacks the capacity, expertise, or even the legal authority to do so.
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By then, the U.S. government was already investigating Prince for possible weapons deals in Africa, according to the former senior U.S. intelligence official and the former intelligence official briefed on the matter. In the course of the surveillance operation for that investigation, U.S. intercepts revealed Prince appearing to discuss efforts to open bank accounts in China to help his Libyan associates.

“Money laundering for Libyan officials using a Chinese bank — that is the issue that pushed it over the edge” for the Justice Department, said the second former intelligence official.

so how is this douchebag not in jail?
This is only a modest listing of Prince's crimes. I could go on and on.
This SOB is an evil fuck and he deserves to be put down.

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But I might add that Obama also used his services. That tells me a lot.

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mimi's picture

what a disappointment, the translations into German are quite lame. I thought it had much more meaning than simply being a "Dummkopf". I am a "Dummkopf" once in a while, so I reject to have the word douchebag used for evil-doing wicked criminals of the dark side applied to me.

The frequency with which I censor my own words makes me dizzy.

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mimi's picture

@mimi
can't deal with more dark thingies. Need some light at the end of the tunnel. Smile

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janis b's picture

@mimi

I think its more like Arschloch, not like you at all.

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mimi's picture

@janis b
but you can be an Arschloch without being a war criminal. So we have to look for another German term.

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janis b's picture

@mimi

whichever, as long as they are silent ; ). I'll ask my German friends what word they would use.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@mimi It IS a slippery term; it sounds like you are being confused by its sheer breadth. It's more or less a neologism that I don't recall hearing before the mid-'000s. It doesn't HAVE a formal meaning. It's just kind of a generic insult for ANYBODY characterized by behavior you don't like. One thing I will say is it isn't normally applied to complete monsters; gjohnsit's extending it far beyond its normal use.

Martin Schkreli is who comes to mind when I think "douchebag" (not habitually, just under the circumstances); it doesn't really fit war criminals, or anyone else so profoundly evil that they manage to be above the law.

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat
Spot on!

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Liberal Moonbat . Prince is an evil monster.
I probably could've used a stronger term.

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mimi's picture

@gjohnsit

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@The Liberal Moonbat

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They say that there's a broken light for every heart on Broadway
They say that life's a game and then they take the board away
They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story
And leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret-- A. Moore

mimi's picture

@Johnny Q
it simply doesn't fit.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@mimi As indicated by the watermark, that's Saturday Night Live, a signature New York production (as a matter of fact, this skit clearly doesn't quite understand British noble culture; whether that's by design or not is not clear in this case).

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

mimi's picture

@The Liberal Moonbat
for all the explanations.

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@mimi

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@mimi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_the_Re-Election_of_the_Presi...

My Father (K-12-age under Nixon): "I know, it sounds funny now, doesn't it...?"
My Mother (college-age under Nixon): "...Hell, it was funny at the time, I remember!"

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

Lily O Lady's picture

the embargo on Iraq by selling computers to them between the two Iraq wars. The people couldn’t get food, but they could get computers. This kind of cr@p is probably more common than we could even know.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

@Lily O Lady Prince is not offering to sell computers. He's is offering mercenaries and hit squads. And other times crop dusters modified into bombing planes.

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Lily O Lady's picture

@gjohnsit

we’re not the kind people surfed the net with, but we’re something to do with defense being from Halliburton and all. Not quite as openly murder-y, but still. . ..

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

is well worth exposing and focusing on. I'm very interested in how the arms glut in Libya has fueled ISIS and Al Qaeda throughout the region and who has profited from fueling them.

I also hope we will focus on Cofer Black, who went from being the CIA point man on terrorism, allowed Al Qaeda into the U.S. leading to 9/11, and went on to partner with Prince at Blackwater. Reportedly on the board of Burisma with Biden's son, how may he be connected to our arming and training Nazi forces in Ukraine, seeing as he is a mercenary industrialist? What is his involvement with energy issues in Ukraine?

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and her DeVos family contract with her brother's company to spy on MI teachers' union with the goal of taking it down?

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yes, it can get worse

As well as furthering China’s aims abroad, a Frontier Services Group press release suggests that it may be helping the Chinese Communist Party’s domestic repression. In 2018, Frontier Services Group announced it was building “training facilities” and related “security equipment” in Xinjiang province, home to 11 million Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority that has been brutally repressed by the Chinese state. Nearly 1 million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim minority groups are held in extrajudicial detention in camps in Xinjiang, according to a group of experts cited by the United Nations.
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Prince was helping Stone with a project that aimed at dampening black voter turnout during the 2016 election. In an email sent in late October 2016 and obtained by Rolling Stone, Prince encouraged his contacts to donate to the voter outreach and suppression project, which he openly acknowledged was “targeted at the black community to help them think twice about supporting Hillary and her deadbeat husband.”
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Prince was a member of the advisory board of a charity Bannon was promoting to raise private funds to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. Bannon was indicted in August on charges he defrauded donors to the “We Build a Wall” campaign.
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someone(s) a is protecting him, because this same someone(s) finds him useful.

I wonder about the ID of the American Israeli dual citizen lawyer referred to in the intercept article.

It would seem that "patriot" Prince is willing to cooperate with anyone who will finance his fantasy life.

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Mary Bennett

just know, that they are all World Historical Figures and starting wars is what WHFs do. Killary is their Alexander and they, of course, are the Greatest General Staff in History. I believe the operative phrase, and most accurate description here is invincible ignorance. 'Delusion' doesn't quite cover it. 'Arrogance', while accurate and applicable, doesn't go far enough. 'Superbia' perhaps, the sin that made Lucifer think he could be God. If it were simple greed, as in, we want the best jobs for ourselves, they might be reading the national mood, not to mention economic reports, and realize that the country won't support and can't afford yet more military interventionism.

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Mary Bennett