Military contractors linked to controversial Blackwater want civilian army and detention camps to run Trump’s deportation plans

(Gestapo? Pinkertons? SAVOK? Tonton Macute? Praetorian Guard? Take your pick. It all spells the same thing.)

from the Independent

A group of private military contractors have pitched an army of private citizens to arrest immigrants and camps to detain them, according to a proposal provided to Donald Trump's administration and reviewed by Politico.

The group, which includes former Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former military and law enforcement officials, submitted a 26-page blueprint to Trump advisers before his inauguration, estimating a $25 billion price tag to support the president’s “mass deportation operation” to swiftly remove 12 million people from the United States by 2026.

Prince was also joined by Bill Mathews, another former chief operating officer at Blackwater, the private military contractor tied to the 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians, including two children, which also wounded 20 others. The four men convicted of crimes surrounding the killings were pardoned by Trump in 2020...

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Mattis is out, and Blackwater is back: ‘We are coming’

from Military Times

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is out. 

Mattis' resignation comes amid news that President Donald Trump has directed the drawdown of 2,000 U.S. forces in Syria, and 7,000 U.S. forces from Afghanistan, a U.S. official confirmed to Military Times, a story first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

This month, in the January/February print issue of the gun and hunting magazine “Recoil," the former contractor security firm Blackwater USA published a full-page ad, in all black with a simple message: “We are coming.”

Is the war in Afghanistan — and possibly elsewhere ― about to be privatized?

If Blackwater returns, it would be the return of a private security contractor that was banned from Iraq, but re-branded and never really went away. By 2016 Blackwater had been re-named and restructured several times, and was known at the time as Constellis Group, when it was purchased by the Apollo Holdings Group. Reuters reported earlier this year that Apollo had put Constellis up for sale, but in June the sale was put on hold.

A representative for Constellis told Military Times late Friday that while it had acquired the former Blackwater training center in the 2016 purchase, it has no affiliation with the former security firm. It did not retain Blackwater’s founder and former CEO Erik Prince and has no current connection to him, or the firm’s former management structure.

The Recoil ad suggests Blackwater is making a resurgence on its own, but it was not clear in what form. The public affairs firm that handles Prince’s media engagements told Military Times Friday that he would not be able to speak beyond what was in the media “at this stage.”

Prince has courted President Donald Trump’s administration since he took office with the idea that the now 17-year Afghan War will never be won by a traditional military campaign. Prince has also argued that the logistical footprint required to support that now multi-trillion dollar endeavor has become too burdensome. Over the summer and into this fall Prince has engaged heavily with the media to promote the privatization; particularly as the Trump administration’s new South Asia Strategy, which was crafted with Mattis, passed the one-year mark.

Constellis, which had maintained a footprint at Camp Integrity by the Kabul Airport through its previous iteration as “Academi." The firm no longer trains there, the Constellis spokesman said...

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