Blackwater - The Neocon Projection through Europe to Asia

After the ties in the campain for Donald Trump presidency, Erik Prince became a shadow operating to the Trump's strategy. This strategy of Neocon make the Donald Trump with one of the most great spotlights in the geopolitical projections in Eurasia borders.

Erik Prince, former Navy Seal, businessman, with Blackwater company, changed the history for the wars after the Iraq war, with the Blackwater scandal and the book of Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill, the new wars era started on the proxy conflicts between locals and mercenaries and the geopolitical projection through cities with small units.

Blackwater was the boiling point to change this methood of the conflicts. Like the Executive Outcomes, the capability of action in special operations, long range conflicts, airforces, but with the new technologies implementated, the Revolution in Military Affairs can explain the use of new technologies and the use of civilians in conflicts and also the methoods of infiltration, Blackwater became the most important company in the last 20 years, with services offered since private security to combat.

During the campain of Donald Trump was creating a chanel to keep the USA military projection and return the troops to home. The projection was the use of PMCs in the conflicts and use local rebels to the support of conflicts, and not use official military personal, to keep the image of USA clean.

After Trump wins the election, it could be the new spring for the PMCs era, because not only the neoliberal debate and the use of real-politics, but the Neocon remaining. Than Trump put as advicer John Bolton. This point summed up with the sister of Erik Prince Sister, Betsy Devos, as Trump's secretary of Education, showed that Erik Prince has a close tie to the Neocon and Trump's administration.

According to Washington Post, the Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III has gathered evidence that a secret meeting in Seychelles just before the inauguration of Donald Trump was an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin — apparently contradicting statements made to lawmakers by one of its participants, according to people familiar with the matter.

The plan was to give an upgrade to the relations with Trump and Kremlin.

In January 2017, Erik Prince, the founder of the private security company Blackwater, met with a Russian official close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and later described the meeting to congressional investigators as a chance encounter that was not a planned discussion of U.S.-Russia relations.

According to Washington Post, Prince said he went to Seychelles as a private businessman, not as an official or unofficial emissary of the Trump transition team. During the congressional interview, which became testy at times as Democratic lawmakers pressed him to be more specific in his answers, Prince repeatedly complained that he had reason to believe U.S. intelligence agencies were leaking information about his activities.

Who is Erik Prince?

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/08/politics/erik-prince-russia-seychelles-trump-transition/index.html

(CNN)Erik Prince, the latest Trump associate in the spotlight of the Russia investigations, wears many hats.

He is an international traveler, a wealthy businessman with high-profile contacts, a former Navy SEAL with overseas experience and founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Prince grew closer to Donald Trump's orbit. During the transition, he attended a controversial meeting with a Russian banker in the Seychelles, an island chain in the Indian Ocean, that has become the subject of scrutiny for Russia investigators back home.

The investigators are sure to pry for details about Prince's links to Trump's team and the purpose of the Seychelles meeting. Here is a summary of his background and his role in the investigations.

Ties to the Trump team

Prince never officially worked for the Trump campaign, transition or administration. But he was a prominent Trump supporter during the campaign, spent time around senior transition officials and has continued informally advising the Trump White House on some major foreign policy decisions.

CNN reported that Prince met with Trump and Gen. Michael Flynn during the campaign. He also gave $250,000 to pro-Trump efforts during the campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records.

"I supported him monetarily," Prince told lawmakers in November about his ties to the campaign. "I attended some fundraisers. I wrote some papers on different foreign policy positions and, you know, kicked them up into the adviser-sphere on what should be done on Middle Eastern or African counterterrorism issues."

During the transition, Prince met with members of Trump's incoming national security team and boasted to friends about his influence in the Trump orbit, CNN has reported. Prince was also spotted on a train discussing policy with soon-to-be White House counselor Kellyanne Conway and someone who joined the National Security Council, according to Bloomberg. Around that same time, Trump appointed Prince's older sister, Betsy DeVos, to lead the Department of Education.

Prince was recruited by then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, last summer to help devise a new Afghanistan strategy, according to The New York Times. He proposed replacing some US troops with private military contractors -- like the fighters employed by his former company, Blackwater, now known as Academi. His ideas were met with heavy skepticism at the Pentagon and Trump did not embrace the plan.

Rendezvous in the Seychelles

Prince is one of at least 12 Trump associates who had contacts with Russians during the campaign or transition. His role in the Russia investigation centers on the secret meeting in the Seychelles in January 2017, with a Russian banker tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Seychelles meeting was brokered by diplomats from the United Arab Emirates, weeks after an Emirati delegation met in New York with senior members of Trump's team, including Flynn, Bannon and Kushner. Middle East specialist George Nader was present in New York and the Seychelles as well, but it is unclear if he participated in the meeting at the hotel bar with Prince and the Russian.

News of Prince's activities in the Seychelles broke in April 2017 with a report from The Washington Post, which claimed that Prince was there as an informal envoy of the incoming administration. Prince has said in TV interviews and Capitol Hill testimony that he was there as a private citizen, nothing more.

It was several months before the identity of the Russian was revealed. The man, Kirill Dmitriev, is the chief executive of the state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund and is considered a Putin ally. The state-run investment fund is under US sanctions as a consequence of Russia's actions in Ukraine.

The Washington Post and The New York Times reported that the purpose of the meeting was to connect Prince with the Russian banker. Prince repeatedly described his meeting as a chance encounter that was made possible because everyone was conveniently in the same hotel at the same time.

Role in the Russia investigation

Prince's role in the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election appears to be growing.

CNN reported this week that Nader is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. As someone who was present at the New York and Seychelles meetings, Nader can provide Mueller's team of seasoned prosecutors with firsthand descriptions of what happened, who was there and what was discussed.

Bannon has also met at least twice with Mueller's investigators for private interviews. Bannon attended the New York meeting, and later mentioned it to Prince, according to Prince's testimony to lawmakers in November. Lawmakers asked Prince if he spoke with Bannon about arranging the Seychelles meeting. Prince denied that but said he couldn't remember when he'd spoken to Bannon or where their conversation took place.

It was several months before the identity of the Russian was revealed. The man, Kirill Dmitriev, is the chief executive of the state-run Russian Direct Investment Fund and is considered a Putin ally. The state-run investment fund is under US sanctions as a consequence of Russia's actions in Ukraine.

The Washington Post and The New York Times reported that the purpose of the meeting was to connect Prince with the Russian banker. Prince repeatedly described his meeting as a chance encounter that was made possible because everyone was conveniently in the same hotel at the same time.

Inside Erik Prince's Return To Power: Trump, Bolton And The Privatization Of War

https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2018/04/04/blackwater-erik-prince-trump-afghanistan-bolton/#71cf55b017d7

Amid reports that special counsel Robert Mueller had taken an interest in his activities, Erik Prince decided to host a fundraiser. On March 18, more than 100 people flocked to Prince's sprawling farm in Middleburg, Virginia, for an afternoon of pistol shooting in support of Putin's favorite congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, who the FBI reportedly found had his own Kremlin code name. As the day progressed, the group headed to the barn, where, over sandwiches and Budweiser, they heard from Oliver North, the central figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, and Matt Gaetz, a member of the House who's big on Deep State "cabal" conspiracy theories.

Even among this motley bunch, Prince has enough notoriety to trump them all. The founder of Blackwater—the military contractor infamous for the 2007 massacre in Iraq in which a convoy of his mercenaries gunned down 14 unarmed civilians—he's kept a lower profile since he sold the company in 2010. But that doesn't mean he's been idle. Since then, he's pursued projects across the globe, from the United Arab Emirates to Somalia to Hong Kong.

But as the Rohrabacher event underscores, the so-called "Merchant of Death" again feels comfortable flexing his domestic muscles. The Trump administration "inherited a world on fire," Prince says. "And I think some out-of-the-box thinking can help put those fires out."

Following a decade in the wilderness, Prince has the White House access that will allow him to spread those ideas. He spent $250,000 to help get Trump elected; his sister Betsy DeVos now serves as Trump's secretary of education; and when Prince pitched a plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan last year, the White House took him seriously. "He actually had the most cogent argument, much more than the guys who were 'stay the course,' " Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon tells Forbes.

One major impediment to his privatization concept was national security advisor H.R. McMaster, a lieutenant general and war scholar adamantly opposed to the idea of replacing American soldiers with mercenaries. Nor did the Prince plan seem to fit the worldview of then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson. But now that McMaster will be replaced by neocon favorite John Bolton, and Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo, who once ran an aerospace supplier, the dynamics have changed. Bolton's selection, particularly, is "going to take us in a really positive direction," a source close to Prince tells Forbes. "Do the math." The assumption, of course: Prince would reap a big cut of the action.

As he planned his comeback, Prince met with Forbes at length, across two interviews, in the summer and fall of 2017. He stopped speaking to us after the Washington Post reported that a grand jury in the Mueller investigation heard evidence that Prince traveled to the remote Seychelles to try to establish a back channel between Trump and Russia. But Prince, still in muscular military shape at 48, had already laid out his grand strategy and provided a window into his temperament, one that mixes a belief in destiny, rooted in religion, with a warrior's calm in the heat of battle. "My favorite miracle in the Bible is when Christ is on the Sea of Galilee and there's an enormous storm," Prince says, "and they're in the boat and they're at risk of being drowned." He pauses. "He says, 'Peace, be still.' And the sea calms. Fantastic."

The use of PMCs showed that the wars entered in a new era. Era of the conflicts by contracts, there will no more be conflicts with UN aproval nor any supra organisms, the contracts for wars in conflicts zones will be just signed. Military personel will be the core of the conflict for the diplomatic projection, but the operations and tactical units will be irregular.

This era is very well described in Syria, after the War on Terror, Syris the stage for the new war era. The experiment in Syria is being very well done, with the rebels both sided acting pro and against the government, the Russian projection through Syria, showing the sovereignty, and the fist of Russia, the Wagner Group as the most important actor, showing that Kremlin muscle is more prominent.

Irregular conflicts can be more successfully explored by the USA with these new proxies, this proxies quite better for a successful diplomacy.

The Neocon Strategy is to privitize the conflicts, make war as the business and spawn small conflicts by contract. This can make the projection of US fist a little more shocking. This can give the USA a best chance to operate in other places and make the wars not legal, but more legitimate, not in USA, but in local places.

Remembers that recently Trump droped the nuclear treaty with Iran, making not only Isreal had benefits through middle east, but Saudi Arabia, and Erik Prince has close ties to Saudi Arabia, that searches for military and religious projection through this geopolitical influence as the biggest country in Arabic World.

This Agenda must benefit not only USA, but Israel and Saudi Arabia and undermine the Russian projection and sovereignty through Arab World. 

The secret Seychelles meeting Robert Mueller is zeroing in on, explained

Why did Erik Prince meet with a Russian fund manager shortly before Trump’s inauguration?

https://www.vox.com/2018/3/7/17088908/erik-prince-trump-russia-seychelles-mueller

Special counsel Robert Mueller has gotten a cooperator in the Russia investigation. And he’s testified about what, exactly, happened at a mysterious meeting between a Trump associate and a Russian fund manager in the Seychelles, an East African archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean.

The New York Times’s Mark Mazzetti, David Kirkpatrick, and Adam Goldman reported in March that George Nader — an adviser to the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates — is cooperating with Mueller’s probe. In a sign of his importance to the investigation, Nader testified before a grand jury.

That’s big because Nader helped organize, and attended, that curious Seychelles meeting on January 11, 2017, shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The meeting brought together Erik Prince, Trump donor and founder of the private security company Blackwater, with Kirill Dmitriev, who manages a Russian sovereign wealth fund and is thought to be close to Vladimir Putin.

Anonymous sources have long claimed to reporters that the purpose of the Seychelles meeting was for Trump’s team to covertly communicate with Putin’s team. After all, it happened just weeks after Jared Kushner reportedly told the Russians that he wanted to set up a back channel through which they could communicate.

But Prince has hotly denied that that’s what happened, including in sworn testimony last year. He said he just made the Seychelles trip for business reasons, that he was in no way representing Trump, and that the meeting with Dmitriev was both entirely unplanned on his end and completely uneventful.

It appears, though, that Nader is telling the grand jury otherwise. The Washington Post’s Sari Horwitz and Devlin Barrett reported that Nader is saying the meeting was “an effort to establish a back channel between the incoming administration and the Kremlin” — and that Mueller has other evidence to that effect, as well.

We don’t yet know the specifics of what Nader is saying as part of his semi-voluntary cooperation (the FBI questioned him at Dulles Airport after a flight and seized his electronics, per the Times). But if Prince was acting on the Trump’s team behalf, it would demolish months’ worth of denials from both him and the White House that he was doing any such thing. It would would raise serious questions about why, exactly, all parties involved were so set on keeping the Seychelles meeting secret.

And on Tuesday, Erin Banco reported for NJ Advance Media that there may be yet more to the Seychelles story. According to Banco’s sources, Mueller is digging into not just one but several Seychelles meetings from 2017 that “wealthy and politically-connected individuals” were involved in. Details on the other meetings and Mueller’s interest in them remain scant for now, but here’s what we know about the January 11 meeting that Erik Prince took part in.

The cast of characters for Erik Prince’s Seychelles meeting

The people present to meet at the Seychelles on January 11, 2017, included the following:

Erik Prince is the founder of Blackwater, the private security/mercenary company that scored big contracts from George W. Bush’s administration (and some of whose employees were accused of killing Iraqi civilians). Prince has since sold Blackwater (which renamed itself) and gone out in search of new lines of mercenary business.

Prince donated about $250,000 to Trump’s campaign and to outside groups supporting Trump and was in contact with Steve Bannon during the transition. He also happens to be the brother of controversial Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

MBZ, or Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, is the crown prince and de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. MBZ did business with Erik Prince several years ago — the UAE awarded Prince a contract worth several hundred million dollars “to help assemble an internal paramilitary force,” per the Washington Post. Diplomatically, the UAE regime is close to Saudi Arabia and unfriendly to Qatar and Iran.

George Nader, a Lebanese-American business executive who has a decades-long history in international diplomacy, has lately advised MBZ. He visited the White House several times in 2017. He also at one point consulted for Blackwater.

Kirill Dmitriev manages the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a $10 billion Russian government-established sovereign wealth fund that’s under US sanctions. He’s believed to be close to Vladimir Putin. His fund was until recently part of the Russian government-owned bank Vnesheconombank, or VEB.

Finally, there’s the setting — the Seychelles Islands is a tropical archipelago nation a few hundred miles off the coast of eastern Africa. Its government brags that it is “the kind of place where you can have a good time away from the media.”

The context of the Seychelles meeting

Potentially relevant context for the main Seychelles meeting is that there were several other meetings of the various factions involved the month before, mostly happening in Trump Tower.

On December 1, 2016, Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn met secretly in Trump Tower with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak. Kislyak reported back to his bosses that at this meeting, Kushner said he wanted to set up a secret communications channel between the Trump team and Russia. (Kushner denies that this happened.)

Days later, the Washington Post received an anonymous letter revealing that this secret meeting happened and who was present (though they couldn’t confirm it for several more months). The letter also claimed that at the meeting, Kushner, Flynn, and Kislyak discussed setting up a meeting between a Trump representative and a Russian in some third country, and concluded Flynn was too high-profile to go.

On December 12, Kislyak returned to Trump Tower and met with Kushner’s deputy. Then on the following day, Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian government-owned bank VEB, stopped by to meet with Kushner. Again, these meetings remained secret for months.

Then on December 15, 2016, a little over a month after Trump won the presidential election, the United Arab Emirates crown prince, MBZ, flew to the United States. There, he met with several Trump transition officials, including Flynn, Kushner, and Bannon. What was strange about this was that MBZ did not inform the Obama administration that he was traveling to the US, as major foreign leaders usually do. Trump’s team didn’t disclose the meeting either, and it too remained secret for several months.

Erik Prince also visited Trump Tower twice during the transition, to meet with Bannon, he later testified.

What happened in the Seychelles: Erik Prince’s account

Prince’s story of how he ended up going to the Seychelles and what took place there, which he gave under oath to the House Intelligence Committee on November 30, 2017, is as follows:

One day, an aide to MBZ, the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, invited Prince to fly out to the Seychelles and meet MBZ, offering few details. Prince characterizes the invitation as: “His Highness would like to see you if you can come out to the Seychelles.” Prince says he understood this as an invitation “to talk about potential business.”

So Prince accepted and flew out there on January 11, 2017. A meeting of about an hour ensued with MBZ, “a couple of his brothers,” and others in his entourage. They discussed general issues in the field, but no specific business proposal was made.

Toward the end of the meeting, Prince testified, someone in MBZ’s party casually “mentioned a guy I should meet who was also in town to see them, a Kirill Dmitriev from Russia, who ran some sort of hedge fund.” (Prince did not name Nader in his testimony.)

Prince accepted, and met Dmitriev at the hotel bar one on one for no more than 30 minutes. They discussed general issues in the field, but no specific business proposal was made. Prince then stayed in the hotel that night and left the next morning.

Overall, the meeting with Dmitriev was so uneventful that, he claims, he couldn’t even remember the man’s name a few months later. There was no follow-up to it. And Prince certainly never claimed in any way to be acting on behalf of Donald Trump.

Was this the secret US-Russia backchannel meeting that Kushner reportedly wanted?

The Washington Post was the first to unearth the Seychelles meeting, in a report by Adam Entous, Greg Miller, Kevin Sieff, and Karen DeYoung published in April 2017, which was sourced to anonymous “U.S., European and Arab officials.” Their account of why and how the meeting happened was very different from Prince’s. They write:

Following the New York meeting between the Emiratis and Trump aides, Zayed was approached by Prince, who said he was authorized to act as an unofficial surrogate for the president-elect, according to the officials. He wanted Zayed to set up a meeting with a Putin associate. Zayed agreed and proposed the Seychelles as the meeting place because of the privacy it would afford both sides.

So, per the Post’s sources, it was Erik Prince who said he wanted the meeting, who said he was acting as a surrogate for President-elect Trump, and who asked MBZ’s team to put him in touch with a Putin confidant. The whole purpose of the meeting was to be a back channel between Trump’s team and Putin’s team.

That would sure seem to make sense, since all this happened shortly after Kushner reportedly said he wanted to establish a secret back channel with Russia, and both MBZ and Prince made their own trips to see Trump officials not long after that. However, there was no actual proof of this.

Nader — and Mueller’s investigation more generally — could be providing the proof. It does not appear that Nader has been charged with anything, but the Times reported that when he landed at Dulles Airport on January 17 of this year, the FBI was waiting for him, at Mueller’s behest. They served him with a subpoena, questioned him, and seized his electronics. They’ve questioned him several more times since and he went before a grand jury for testimony.

It’s also worth noting that Michael Flynn has been cooperating with Mueller’s investigators since early December and we haven’t seen any of the fruits of his cooperation yet. Flynn was present in the meeting in which Kushner reportedly told Kislyak he wanted a back channel. He was also present when Kushner and Bannon met MBZ. He may well have told Mueller why the Seychelles meeting happened.

And if the Seychelles meeting was a back channel, what actually came of it?

If it were to be proven that the Trump team wanted to set up the Seychelles meeting, the question would remain about what actually happened there — and why those involved wanted so badly to keep it secret.

One potential topic is, of course, the incoming administration’s foreign policy. In the first Post report on the meeting, their sources claimed that one topic of discussion was “whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria,” a topic that was very much of interest to the UAE.

But if this were merely about essentially aboveboard foreign policy discussions, it’s unclear why they would have had to happen with such secrecy, through a back channel. (Rather than just waiting nine days for Trump to be sworn in.)

Was money involved? The Russian who went to the meeting, Kirill Dmitriev, is a moneyman, after all. So is Sergey Gorkov, who met with Jared Kushner in Trump Tower weeks earlier. What’s more, Dmitriev’s fund was until 2016 actually part of the Russian government-owned bank Gorkov runs, VEB.

Furthermore, a recent Times report said that Mueller “appears to be examining the influence of foreign money on Mr. Trump’s political activities,” and has previously asked whether Nader “funneled money from the Emirates to the president’s political efforts.” So he does seem to be following some sort of money trail.

Finally, and perhaps most obviously of all, there’s the possibility that this happened so that Trump’s team and Putin’s could secretly communicate about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. So far, there’s no specific evidence that that’s the case. But we clearly haven’t heard the last of the Seychelles meeting.