Also see below:  Did the CIA Deploy a Blackwater Hit Team in Germany?

Source: The Nation

by Jeremy Scahill
January 6, 2010

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. “The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence,” said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. “Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?”

But Schakowsky said the fact that two Blackwater personnel were in such close proximity to the December 30 suicide bomber–an alleged double agent, who was reportedly meeting with CIA agents including the agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan when he blew himself up–shows how “deeply enmeshed” Blackwater remains in sensitive CIA operations, including those CIA officials claim it no longer participates in, such as intelligence gathering and briefings with valuable agency assets. The two Blackwater men were reportedly in the room for the expected briefing by the double agent, Humam Khalil Muhammed Abu Mulal al-Balawi, who claimed to have recently met with Aal Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri.

“It’s just astonishing that given the track record of Blackwater, which is a repeat offender endangering our mission repeatedly, endangering the lives of our military and costing the lives of innocent civilians, that there would be any relationship,” Schakowsky said. “That we would continue to contract with them or any of Blackwater’s subsidiaries is completely unacceptable.”

Under the Obama administration, Blackwater continues to work for the Department of Defense, the State Department and, as evidenced by the December 30 bombing, the CIA in Afghanistan. The company even maintains its own forward operating bases in Afghanistan, including one along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “This is the closest base to the [Pakistani] border,” Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince recently bragged to Vanity Fair. “Who else has built a fob along the main infiltration route for the Taliban and the last known location for Osama bin Laden?”

Blackwater has been working for the CIA since at least April 2002. Prince recently claimed he was personally a CIA asset, conducting clandestine black operations around the globe. In June, Leon Panetta reportedly told Congress he had canceled the CIA assassination program involving Blackwater.

While the CIA said in December that Blackwater only continues its security and support role for the CIA, NBC News reported that the Blackwater men were not doing security at the time of the blast. The two Blackwater operatives killed in the bombing have been identified as Jeremy Wise, a 35-year old ex-Navy SEAL, and 46-year-old Dane Clark Paresi.

Did the CIA Deploy a Blackwater Hit Team in Germany?

Source: The Nation

by Jeremy Scahill
January 8, 2010

German prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into allegations that the CIA deployed a team of Blackwater operatives on a clandestine operation in Hamburg, Germany, after 9/11 ultimately aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. The alleged assassination operation was revealed last month in a Vanity Fair profile of Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince.

According to Vanity Fair, one of the team’s targets was Mamoun Darkazanli, a naturalized German citizen originally from Syria. Darkazanli has been accused by Spain of being an Al Qaeda supporter with close ties to the alleged 9/11 plotters who lived in Hamburg. The Blackwater/CIA team “supposedly went in ‘dark,’ meaning they did not notify their own station–much less the German government–of their presence,” according to Vanity Fair. “[T]hey then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down.” Authorities in Washington, however, “chose not to pull the trigger.”

This week, a senior lawmaker in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union called on Washington to provide an explanation. “If this commando really existed and the U.S. government knew about it but didn’t notify our government then this would be a very grave incident,” said the lawmaker, Wolfgang Bosbach.

His concerns were echoed in the US by Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “This really is part of an ongoing investigation that I can’t talk about, but even the fact that there is that allegation, I think, gives one a picture of the degree to which Blackwater has been completely enmeshed in these secret operations,” Schahowsky said. “And, you know, at least the allegation that they are, I think is disturbing enough. And there is an investigation going on around activities like that.”

Dieter Wiefelspütz, the domestic policy spokesperson for the parliamentary group of Germany’s center-left Social Democrats, told Der Spiegel it is irrelevant that Darkazanli’s targeted assassination was never carried out. “If it can be confirmed, then this was a murder plot,” he said. The conservative Christian Democratic Union joined the Social Democrats in calling for an official inquiry.

From Der Spiegel:

Hans-Christian Ströbele, a prominent German Green Party politician, however, said he was unconvinced. “The fact is that the CIA can, for the most part, do whatever it wants here in Germany,” the member of parliament said. “The secret prisoner transports after September 11 showed that–and no one dared to do anything about it.” Try to imagine the opposite happening, he said. “Imagine if (Germany’s federal intelligence agency) the BND were to carry out a hit job via a front company, say in New Orleans. It would be a shocking occurrence,” he said…

Ströbele said he would call for the parliamentary control committee to discuss the allegations. He said one also had to ask “where the German intelligence services were.” After all, he said, “they are supposed to find out whether other services are romping about here.”

In an interview on German TV this week, Darkazanli said he was “speechless” at the story. Ströebele, the Green Party lawmaker, also asked for a probe about what the German government knew about the alleged CIA/Blackwater operation. “It can’t be true that they knew nothing,” he said.

This brewing scandal in Germany is the latest allegation to surface in what is a clear pattern of the US conducting clandestine rendition and assassination operations within the borders of allied countries. In November, an Italian judge convicted 23 US intelligence operatives in the 2003 abduction of an Egyptian imam from a Milan street as part of a CIA extraordinary rendition operation. Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, aka Abu Omar, was taken to Egypt, where he said he was tortured.