The first mission he described took place in 2008. There's a lot more to the story - Wright's e-book is almost 50 pages long - but this bit is of particular note:Īccording to the "trigger puller," he and a partner were selected for one such operation because they were Mexican Americans, whose darker skin enabled them to blend in as Afghan civilians. At the time, the CIA declared him unavailable for questioning the investigation was shut down before he was arrested or tried. To whom was this awesome responsibility entrusted? According to Wright's investigation, a federal organized crime squad run out of the Miami-Dade Police Department produced an investigation allegedly tying Prado to seven murders carried out while he worked as a bodyguard for a narco crime boss. The bulk of Wright's e-book (full disclosure: I help edit the website of Byliner, publisher of the e-book) tells the story of Enrique Prado, a high-ranking CIA-officer-turned-Blackwater-employee who oversaw assassination units for both the CIA and the contractor. Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible." None of this is new information, though I imagine that many people reading this item are hearing about it for the first time. If it practiced any oversight at all, the CIA would rely on Blackwater's self-reporting about missions it conducted. CIA officers would no longer participate in the agency's most violent operations, or witness them. When the CIA transferred the assassination unit to Blackwater, it continued the trend. By removing himself from the decision-making cycle, the president shielded himself - and all elected authority - from responsibility should a mission go wrong or be found illegal. The quote is from his e-book How to Get Away With Murder in America, which goes on to note that "in the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however tenuous, from the president and Congress," but that "President Bush's 2001 executive order severed this line by transferring to the CIA his unique authority to approve assassinations. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise." "It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. "The move was historic," says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives.
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