by Noel Grima
The [Malta] Inde­pen­dent Online

A Euro­pean Par­lia­ment work­ing doc­u­ment drawn up by Gio­vanni Clau­dio Fava has claimed “Malta is the oper­a­tional base of Black­wa­ter, the organ­iser of pri­vate mil­i­tary mili­tia which are increas­ingly tak­ing on more and more roles which used to be under­taken by US forces in Iraq and elsewhere”.

Amer­i­can left-wing and anti-war media are in full cry about the under­hand and sub­tle changes, which have made Black­wa­ter the new sym­bol of Amer­i­can claimed supremacy, car­ried out by forces other than the reg­u­lar military.

Cal­i­for­nia Demo­c­ra­tic Sen­a­tor Henry Wax­man has been hold­ing a num­ber of hear­ings on the spread of Black­wa­ter but even they, the more anti-war media claims, have held back from see­ing the whole wide picture.

Thus the four-hour inter­ro­ga­tion of Black­wa­ter direc­tor Eric Prince got lost in details, even dis­cov­er­ing for instance a Decem­ber 2006 “arrange­ment” nego­ti­ated by the State Depart­ment as com­pen­sa­tion for an Iraqi police­man killed by a Black­wa­ter employee.

But it was only Repub­li­can Dar­rell Issa from Cal­i­for­nia who doc­u­mented the inti­mate links between Prince and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. On the eve of the hear­ings, Oliver North, the for­mer colonel who had been con­demned for exchang­ing arms with cocaine in the fight against com­mu­nism in Nicaragua, accused Sen­a­tor Wax­man of a huge “witch-hunt”.

Den­nis Kucinich, a Demo­c­rat from Ohio, argued that since the mil­i­tary func­tions had been pri­va­tised, it was in Blackwater’s inter­est to pro­long the war, rather than end it.

An arti­cle on Salon.com car­ried the charges by Jeremy Scahill that the Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists behind Black­wa­ter were the hard core in favour of the war of George Bush and Dick Cheney and their “patron”, for­mer Sec­re­tary of State George Schultz.

Eric Prince’s par­ents, Edgar Prince and his wife Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, through their foun­da­tion finance the Coun­cil for National Pol­icy, an ultra-secret soci­ety which met in Salt Lake City on 28 Sep­tem­ber to hear Dick Cjheney argue the case for an attack on Iran.

Prince Senior is one of the pil­lars of Chris­t­ian Coali­tion of Gary Bauer and of the Fam­ily Research Coun­cil of James Dobson.

Eric Prince, through his own foun­da­tion, the Frei­heit Foun­da­tion, finances Chris­ten­dom Col­lege, the Insti­tute for World Pol­i­tics, Cri­sis Mag­a­zine and the Prison Fel­low­ship of Chuck Col­son. Prince also finances the Legion­naires du Christ and Chris­t­ian Free­dom International.

When still 27 years old, Eric Prince founded Black­wa­ter USA. He and those who soon joined him have prof­ited from the more than $1,000 mil­lion they have taken as con­tracts from 2000 to 2006.

In 2004, Cofer Black passed from CIA to the State Depart­ment and thence became Blackwater’s vice-president. While still in the CIA, Black was in charge of the “spe­cial extra­di­tions” organ­is­ing the secret trans­fer of pris­on­ers from Iraq or Afghanistan to coun­tries less rigid against the prac­tice of tor­ture, such as Poland, Roma­nia, Egypt, and so on.

These planes, which trav­elled between Abu Ghraib, Guan­tanamo and Afghanistan often made stopovers in many Euro­pean coun­tries such as the UK, Italy, France, Ger­many and Malta many times with­out the coun­tries them­selves being informed what was going on.

Now the Swiss procu­ra­tor Dick Marty has sent doc­u­ments regard­ing the “CIA’s fly­ing pris­ons” to the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment and names two Black­wa­ter sub­sidiaries – Pres­i­den­tial Air­ways and Avi­a­tion World­wide Services.

The Gio­vanni Clau­dio Fava doc­u­ment on behalf of the Euro­pean Par­lia­ment says the two com­pa­nies used CASA C-212 planes, usu­ally used to trans­port para­troops and big car­goes and also able to land on impro­vised land­ing spots.