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The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit
- runjake 14y agoI read Wright's book, How To Get Away With Murder. It's a quick read. It's not very focused and doesn't answer many questions. Ironically, there's very little focus on Ric Prado, who's the most interesting of the bunch.
- mcantelon 14y agoHaving NGOs conduct killing on behalf of the government is a tried-and-true method of counterinsurgence (South American paramilitary death squads for example). The plausible deniability introduced by working through a proxy allows the government to conduct more politically risky operations (including false flag attacks if public support is waning). Criticizing the government becomes riskier. And, if not held in check, the paramilitary elements will inevitably use their power for their own objectives.
- fpp 14y agoWell said - similar happened in Europe during the 1970s with people being classified as (left-wing) terrorists (and a few might have certainly been) and being "transported" between countries by so-called freelancers - TMK quite a few did not survive the travel and definitely no obituaries in the press.
- ra 14y agoThere's a great movie set in this context, "Munich"
- cmdkeen 14y agoIt was also in the context of some European countries not co-operating with other countries to arrest/extradite terrorist suspects because they wanted a quiet life where terrorist groups didn't attack their interests.
- toomuchcoffee 14y agoCan you enumerate a few examples, please?
- lusr 14y agoWhat puzzles me is why the person delegating authority is not considered responsible for the actions of those whom authority has been delegated to. Authority was delegated, not responsibility.
- runjake 14y agoBecause these actions are normally clandestine. Hence the plausible deniability.
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoPlausible deniability is a velvety layer of insulation between the people who carry out the acts and the person elected or appointed to take responsibility. By the time the denials, obfuscations, delays, hand-wiping, shoulder-shrugging and tied-hands miming is done, the guilty parties are gone and the trail is so convoluted that it becomes very difficult to prove that the leader was anything more than ignorant of what went on. That feigned ignorance, in turn, provides lots of grist for righteous indignation about unauthorized overreach by lone rogue actors, partisan charges that the opposition is trying to muckrake and blah blah blah. Political abstractions may be leaky, but they hold water long enough to get the job done.
- lusr 14y agoRight but if you create a layer of plausible deniability you are still responsible for the consequences. If the head honcho says "Yeah you can kill the people on the list I haven't seen" I don't understand why seeing the list is a requirement for them to be responsible. Otherwise, what is the point of them authorising the act? May as well not bother.
- RyanMcGreal 14y agoIt's the difference between being held responsible (politically, maybe, eventually) for a botched policy execution and being held responsible legally for a criminal act. Plausible deniability shields you from the former for long enough that the political news cycle has stopped caring and shields you almost absolutely from the latter.
- anupj 14y agoMaybe I've missed something here but how is this question relevent to hacker news?
- johnohara 14y agoTypo. Belongs on whacker news.
- fooandbarify 14y agoSee the guidelines [1]. One could argue that it "gratifies intellectual curiosity", and it is certainly "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" (for varying values of new; it is nevertheless interesting new evidence). [1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mcantelon 14y ago>"evidence of some interesting new phenomenon" Accountability hacking perhaps.
- JonnieCache 14y agoDispatches from the twilight zone twixt sectors public and private. Highly relevant to hackers everywhere.
- thisischris 14y agoBelongs on Reddit along with the comments here... (including this one)
- accountswu 14y agoIf a dozen Americans killed by a whacko deserves to be on hacker news, the mass murder of Afghans and Iraqis also deserves to be mentioned. There have been no minutes of silence for the million+ Iraqis and Afghans, no American media outlet has run hours long stories about the victims, the survivors or their families.
- mekwall 14y agoSo, we should all stop outsourcing and do our own dirty-work.
- theorique 14y agoThe book on Blackwater written by the journalist Jeremy Scahill has a lot of interesting background on Prado. Also, "American Desperado" (great book, also by Evan Wright) talks about some of Prado's interesting involvement in drug importation into Florida in the 1980s. Sounds like an interesting guy, but probably not someone you want to meet in a dark alley. Edit: The Scahill book is http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-Updated/dp/156858394X http://www.amazon.com/Blackwater-Powerful-Mercenary-Revised-... The Wright book is http://www.amazon.com/American-Desperado-Life---Soldier-Government/dp/0307450422/ http://www.amazon.com/American-Desperado-Life---Soldier-Gove... I've read both and highly recommend them.
- smashing 14y agoThat's an interesting expression. What kind of people would you LIKE to meet in a dark alley?
- pessimizer 14y agoice cream vendors, flower salesmen, flashlight dealers...
- daveying99 14y agoYum, eating ice cream in a dark alley
- smallhands 14y agopusher men
- gph 14y agoWell, prostitutes and drug dealers if you're into that kind of thing.
- theorique 14y agoPeople who are much smaller and/or less threatening than me, I suppose. (But even a mouse can spook a grown man when he's tense and anticipating bad things happening.)
- reinhardt 14y ago"The administration then awarded Blackwater (which is now called Academi) a $250 million contract to perform unspecified services for the CIA." Your tax dollars at work.
- daveying99 14y agoI thought they had changed their name to Xe services. What sort of name is Academi for a private mercenary company?
- cpeterso 14y agoThat's probably the point.
- knowtheory 14y agoHonestly, that's probably why they changed it again. Blackwater was a comically villainous name to begin with.
- autodidakto 14y agoNot only is it comically villainous, it's the technical term for waste water from toilets. That is, sewage. Whoever is picking their names needs to be, uhm, shot.
- chubbard 14y agoIt has nothing to do with sewage. Blackwater got it names from the swamps surrounding the area: "the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast swamp on the North Carolina/Virginia border, now mostly a National Wildlife Refuge...There, he created his state-of-the-art private training facility and his contracting company, Blackwater, which he named for the peat-colored water of the swamp.[10]" But apparently if Blackwater wanted to shot the person that named it they can do that.
- rdl 14y agoFor a long time, they did run a lot of training as their primary business, too. (US Training Centers, in NC, is one of the best firearms/combat training centers in the world. They also make excellent reactive target systems.)
- kiba 14y agoNever mind conspiracy theory, we have evidence openly showing how our government is doing bad things for the "right reason".
- mtgx 14y agoThe road to hell is paved with good intentions. I'm sure the Spanish Inquisition had "good intentions" as well when they tortured the "heretics". Governments can easily get out of hand if not vigilantly watched and stopped when necessary, or they will create situations where they can punish whoever they want for whatever reason they say.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jakeonthemove 14y agoWell, to be fair, every government uses or at least has plans for these kind of tactics. KGB/FSB, Mossad, MI6, DGSE, otehr variations of a DSS agency - you've got to be very naive to believe they don't conduct covert operations and planned assassinations themselves or through third parties. It's only shocking when it comes to light (or maybe because it comes to light, when it shouldn't?)...
- knowtheory 14y agoThere is an Epic Level difference between a government agency who is ultimately responsible for their conduct to their citizens, one way or another having a secret assassination program, and a government paying a 3rd party to carry out assassinations. One particular way in which this is different, is that the CIA can't go out and decide that it (as an organization) wants to freelance for other nations or organizations. Blackwater, once set up as a paramilitary organization who specializes in covert assassinations... who's to say they're not moonlighting for Zetas or the Russian mob? What's the ethical block stopping them? They're already secretly killing people for money.
- Zakharov 14y agoThey're not moonlighting for the Zetas or the Russian mob because if they were, they'd lose billions of dollars of CIA money.
- Someone 14y agoIf you were the government looking to hire a third party to do this kind of things for you, wouldn't you prefer someone with experience? Yes, you could only hire people that went through your own training program, but hiring ones that went through other training programs would give more plausible deniability. It also could be an excellent Way to sow seeds of distrust between otherwise friendly parties.
- knowtheory 14y agoReally. And do you think the CIA is auditing Blackwater's books, and tracking all of its operatives? Or are we just taking their word for it?
- chernevik 14y agoThat's quite a headline. But the article is mostly about delegations of authority (and that not in any real detail), a story of US contractors conducting assassinations, and one (1) corroborating opinion -- that corroboration in no detail, and almost certainly second-hand. There's a paragraph about the "terrifying background", in absolutely no detail whatsoever. This sort of thing has become a subgenre of its own, one where the documentation almost always falls well short of the promise. People should think about what the cries of "Wolf!" are doing to our ability to spot truly documented and disturbing problems.
- knowaveragejoe 14y agoI fully agree. I got to the bottom and thought, "This is it?". There's absolutely no story about the guy. This article just serves to become more noise.
- pemulis 14y agoWhat do you mean? The "terrifying background" seemed pretty clear to me -- a federal organized crime task force believed that he was involved in seven murders as a drug enforcer in Miami before becoming a contractor for the CIA.
- justindocanto 14y agoThis. The title for this article is misleading.
- KaoruAoiShiho 14y agoThe article says Obama approves the targets. So right there, accountability, Obama is 'owning' it.
- baconner 14y agoBetter maybe, but when the kill list is secret and the reasons are secret that's not exactly "accountability"
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 14y agoI like to think of the current structures that define and drive of our 'civilization' as a legacy design that is very difficult to replace, sort of like PC and Von Neumann-ish architecture, or a giant Perl codebase. I think that in this technological era, secret government (or private) killings, war, domination of resources by force, etc., is completely inexcusable. I think that the structures are unfortunately supported by primitive Social Darwinist belief systems. I am actually optimistic that when violence and violence suppression really becomes an information technology (i.e., a non-wealthy person can run a program/device that fabricates and launches his own swarm of protective robots) that will lead to a more equal distribution of resources and generally less violence and coercion. May sound far-fetched, and maybe it is.. but things are so fucked up, I have to hope for some science-fictiony sounding solutions.
- r0s 14y agoJust another reason that withdrawing "official" military from Iraq is a farce of the same level as declaring victory. We don't officially torture prisoners (anymore), but unaccountable private contractors can run wild, hidden from all that pesky human rights oversight.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- briandear 14y agoIt's almost ridiculous how some people get so indignant about CIA; I can almost feel their spittle as they shout at their computer screens. At the same time, people get equally outraged when terrorists kill people and then want to blame CIA for their failings. It's a bad world. I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists (even if they themselves haven't committed a terrorist act) and find themselves it Gitmo or dead. Are mistakes made? Of course, CIA has a long history of public f'ups, however their degree of success is noteworthy, though often unheralded. Bin Laden was found because of CIA, the Iranian and North K nuke programs have been slowed and countless people AREN'T dead because of CIA. The Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc was hastened due to CIA and Reagan forcing the issue by spending the Soviets into insolvency because of the arms race. Kennedy, Johnson and Clinton were avid weilders of covert action -- it's not a political party issue. On the British side, MI6 is right there with CIA. The old Deuxiéme Bureau as well as German Intelligence is highly active in the black operations side of geopolitical affairs. This isn't peculiar to America, though in America, we have a (mostly) free press and a scandal-hungry populace that tends to sensationalize missteps or failures. Let's not through the baby out with the bathwater. I'm far more worried about getting blown up on the PATH train than ending up in CIA (or their proxy's) crosshairs.
- Volpe 14y ago> I am not sympathetic to the plight of those who associate with terrorists (even if they themselves haven't committed a terrorist act) and find themselves it Gitmo or dead. I see, you've fallen for the pro-U.S propaganda. Where random groups are designated 'terrorists' and thus deserving of your hatred. > Iranian and North K nuke programs have been slowed and countless people AREN'T dead because of CIA. 100% pure speculation. Other countries getting Nukes (or nuclear energy) is non of the USes business, unless you accept other countries making attempts to disable american power as well. The US flat out lied about iraq, and was proved to have lied. Yet you believe them on North Korea and Iran... how about reflecting on facts, rather than propaganda?
- gareim 14y agoThere's nothing "random" about picking on Al-Qaeda. Also, the facts are that NK has nuclear capabilities. So yes, we believe the CIA about that.
- mmaunder 14y ago"Your sources seem to have been correct. Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA." If you want to have a debate, lets talk about ending the various wars the USA is fighting in various forms around the world. Not whether a particular covert surgical tactic is being carried out by the correct kind of soldier.
- AYBABTME 14y ago[quote] So there you have it: A former Air Force lieutenant colonel, speaking on the record and using the present tense, said in 2011 that "private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA." [/quote] A journalist looking for any reference that would support his article. I'm not saying the US Gov. isn't contracting private security firms to carry some of their dirty work. But saying "Huh a former lt-col from the Air Force confirmed <whatever>" isn't worth anything. In fact, all it does, in my opinion, is uncover and expose how naive is the reporter. A former Air Force lieutenant-colonel... is it supposed to mean anything? It's a claim to Authority, with a weak authority to bring forward.
- joering2 14y agoJesus Christ, think about it! a Blackwater employee killed your six year old son, but he turned out to be a wrong person. You have all the evidence in the world for justice to be served, and yet you get this: "oh, sorry, but this company and their employees have unofficially issued government license to kill. Neither your local sherrif office, nor police, nor your congressmen, people in congress, DOJ or Supreme Court alone can do shit about it". And this happens on the soil of the United States of America!
- joering2 14y agoalso from the article: "At the time, the CIA declared him unavailable for questioning; the investigation was shut down before he was arrested or tried." If this is not rotten corruption and MOB in its pures form, then what is?
- EternalFury 14y agoAnd then people ask: Why do they hate us? Nothing stays covert everywhere and forever.
- vernon 14y agoThe privatization of assassinations is even scarier than illegal operations from the CIA.