Potential Blackwater buyer has questionable track record in Iraq

The owner of Xe Services, the company formerly known as Blackwater, is writing a book that will allege officials in the Clinton and Obama administrations “approved of his most sensitive and controversial operations,” says a report in the Washington Post.

The Post‘s Jeff Stein cites two unnamed sources who say Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, is hurrying to sell his company before he can go public with a book that takes aim at the Democratic Party.

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One of the sources told Stein that Prince and his friends “think this will destroy the Democratic Party in the elections.”

The source, who is described as having a “business relationship with Xe,” said Prince had “given his people three weeks to complete the sale of the company and the book will be released then,” in time for the November elections.

But the other source told Stein that Prince likely only has parts of the book written, and has only shopped individual chapters to publishers.

Jeremy Scahill, a reporter at The Nation and author Blackwater, Tweeted on Friday that “there are definitely some nervous Democrats re: Erik Prince’s book. They include leading members of Congress.”

Commenting on the allegations at FireDogLake, blogger Marcy Wheeler wonders whether Prince’s revelations would actually cast Democrats in a negative light.

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“If Prince were to reveal that Clinton asked Blackwater to assassinate Osama bin Laden before 9/11 … Wouldn’t that suggest, first of all, that Blackwater failed to accomplish the task? And wouldn’t it suggest, secondly, that Clinton was more of a bad-ass about bin Laden than the Bushies up until the time when it was too late?”

Wheeler argues that revelations about the Obama administration’s use of Blackwater’s services would have little political impact, since “the response to Obama’s targeting of an American citizen for assassination has been a giant, collective yawn,” and the public already knows Obama continues to use Blackwater.

Prince reportedly moved to the United Arab Emirates last month, a move many observers attributed to the political and legal pressures dogging Blackwater in the US. Last month, Xe Services was ordered to pay $42 million for violating US export rules.

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And the company has been dogged for three years by the legacy of the Nisour Square massacre, in which Blackwater guards are said to have shot 17 civilians in a Baghdad square in 2007. Charges against five Blackwater guards in that incident were dropped by a US federal court late last year. But two Blackwater guards have been indicted for murder over an incident in Afghanistan that left two civilians dead.

Stein’s article asserts that the likely buyer of Xe Services will be Parsons Corporation, a California-based engineering and business management company.

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Wheeler points out that Parsons has had its own questionable track record as a government contractor. She links to a Washington Post report about a Parsons-built police academy in Iraq whose construction was so poor it rained feces from the ceiling in the student barracks.