Blackwater's top brass / The Virginian-Pilot

[Demeter]

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=108028&ran=144012


ERIK PRINCE, 37, Blackwater’s founder and chairman, has deep roots in conservative Republican politics in Michigan.

His father, Edgar Prince, turned a small die-cast shop in Holland, Mich., into a major auto parts supplier with a specialty product: a windshield visor with a lighted mirror. After his death in 1995, the company was sold for $1.4 billion. Edgar Prince was a confidant and financial backer of Gary Bauer, a conservative activist and onetime presidential candidate.

Erik Prince’s sister Betsy, a former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, is married to Dick DeVos, billionaire son of the founder of marketing giant Amway and this year’s likely Republican candidate for governor of Michigan.

Erik Prince went to private schools in Michigan, earned his pilot’s license at 17 and attended the U.S. Naval Academy. He later joined the Navy and was deployed with a SEAL team.

Prince was living in Virginia Beach when he founded Blackwater in 1996. He now runs the Prince Group, Blackwater’s parent company, from an office in McLean, Va.

His first wife, Joan, died of cancer in 2003. He has since remarried, and has six children.

Prince is a board member of Christian Freedom International, a nonprofit group dedicated to helping persecuted Christians around the world.

Since 1998, he has made nearly $200,000 in contributions to Republican committees and candidates, including President Bush and indicted former House leader Tom DeLay, according to Federal Election Commission records.



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GARY JACKSON, 49, Blackwater’s president, has been with the company almost from the beginning. Like Prince, he is a former SEAL, having retired as a warrant officer after 23 years in the Navy.

He is the senior executive at Blackwater’s 7,000-acre headquarters and training compound in Moyock.

Jackson makes no secret of his political leanings. As editor of Blackwater’s weekly electronic newsletter, he posted this headline at the top of the edition after the November 2004 presidential election: BUSH WINS; FOUR MORE YEARS!! HOOYAH!

He has made $9,000 in contributions to President Bush and Republican congressional candidates since 2004, according to Federal Election Commission records. Among the recipients of his donations were DeLay; Rep. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee; and Rep. Jerry Lewis, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.



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COFER BLACK, 56, joined Blackwater in February 2005 as vice chairman after three decades in the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.

He was the CIA’s director of counterterrorism when al-Qaida hijackers struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

In congressional testimony in 2002, Black said the CIA thwarted plans by Osama bin Laden to kill Black when he was stationed in Khartoum, Sudan, in 1995.

In his book “Bush at War,” Bob Woodward said Black gave these marching orders to an undercover agent he dispatched to Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks: “Get bin Laden, find him. I want his head in a box.”

According to a United Press International report, Black was incensed when U.S. and Afghan forces failed to catch bin Laden at Tora Bora and complained about it anonymously in The Washington Post, prompting Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to derail his CIA career. Black has denied that he was forced out of the agency.

In 2002 Black moved to the State Department, where one of his duties was managing security for the 2004 Olympic Games in Greece. In 2003, Blackwater won a contract to train security teams for the games.

Company officials say there was no connection.



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JOSEPH SCHMITZ, 49, became chief operating officer and general counsel of the Prince Group in September 2005 after a stint as inspector general at the Defense Department.

Schmitz was the senior Pentagon official responsible for investigating waste, fraud and abuse. Now he faces a congressional inquiry into accusations that he quashed two criminal investigations of senior Bush administration officials. The inquiry is continuing, according to a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Schmitz was a special assistant to Attorney General Edwin Meese III in the Reagan administration. He was awarded the Defense Department Medal for Distinguished Public Service on his retirement from the Pentagon.

Schmitz’s father, John G. Schmitz, was a two-term Republican congressman from California and a prominent member of the John Birch Society, an ultra-conservative group that flowered during the Cold War. He ran for president in 1972 as the candidate of the American Independent Party after its founder, George Wallace, was paralyzed by a would-be assassin.

John Schmitz’s political career ended with the revelation that he had a mistress who bore two of his children. He then moved to Washington, where he bought a house once owned by Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Joseph Schmitz’s sister, Mary Kay LeTourneau, also became embroiled in a scandal. As a married teacher in Washington state, she went to prison after being convicted of having a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student with whom she ultimately had two children. The two have since married.




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THE BLACKWATER EMPIRE

Prince Group (Parent company)

Blackwater divisions

Blackwater Training Center -- Firearms and tactical training

Blackwater Target Systems -- Manufacturing and sales

Blackwater Security Consulting -- Security services

Blackwater Canine -- Explosives-detecting dogs

Raven Development Group -- Construction

Blackwater Armor -- Armored personnel carriers

Blackwater Airships -- Blimps


Affiliated companies

Presidential Airways -- Aviation

Greystone -- International security services

[Vanje]

1. Wow! A real live convicted pedophile connection

Mary Kay LeTourneau is Blackwater Big wheels sister.

I gotta kick this!

Pssst : If you use the words "convicted pedophile" in your subject line, your thread will generate heaps o' hits

[Maq]

2. Convicted Female pedophile meets victim in grade two

She met him when he was in Second Grade. You can't make this shit up. Female pedophilia starts young it seems.



The guy looks black in the picture but the name seems like a foriegn nationality. To profile this without getting into this racist shit, let us say he is a minority. Strangeness goes with the story. She the pedophile was also married at the time with a four year old child. The story makes no mention of her former husband and child by name.

In Accordance with Forum Rules. Here is an excerpt;

Teacher Mary Kay Letourneau and her former sixth-grade student have married in a tightly guarded ceremony, nearly a year after she was released from prison for raping (RAPING) him.

Letourneau, 43, and Vili Fualaau, 22, have been in the spotlight since she was imprisoned in 1997...

...The couple first met when Mr Fualaau was in the second grade. Their relationship became sexual when he was 12 and she was a 34-year-old married mother-of-four, a teacher at a suburban elementary school.

Mrs Letourneau was pregnant with Mr Fualaau's first child when she was arrested in 1997. She pleaded guilty to second-degree child rape and was sentenced to seven years in prison, with all but six months suspended.

Within weeks of her release, she was caught having sex with Mr Fualaau in her car and ordered to serve the remainder of her sentence. She gave birth to the couple's second daughter while serving time.

SOURCE: http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/Teacher-jailed-for-rape-marries-the-student-she-assaulted/2005/05/21/1116533582118.html

[Demeter]

3. Thanks, I Guess.....I Have to Go Take a Shower Now

after some antacids and a good slug of alcohol for medicinal purposes.

[mark414]

4. um...what does "what he looks like" have to do with anything?

and um...consensual sex isn't rape

[Maq]

5. Incident occurred when he was underage

The MSM, the main stream media is so hung up on the image of a "white Blonde Wasp Woman". I thought it of interest that she RAPED (Court definition) an underage minority. Would the outcome be different if she was to co habitate with a white boy. I don't know.

The Story was posted because of its STRANGENESS. A fascinating facet or aspect of the "Right Wing", far right political spectrum, and a Christian far right radical. With a blood alignment to the Mercenary Right Wing Army of the Republican Party.

Mark414, jump in to the thread, I want to hear your side or perspective of this event.

[Maq]

6. Mark more of the same "sending Text Messages to underage"

Richard Roberts is accused of illegal involvement in a local political campaign and lavish spending at donors' expense, including numerous home remodeling projects, use of the university jet for his daughter's senior trip to the Bahamas, and a red Mercedes convertible and a Lexus SUV for his wife, Lindsay.

She is accused of dropping tens of thousands of dollars on clothes, awarding nonacademic scholarships to friends of her children and sending scores of text messages on university-issued cell phones to people described in the lawsuit as "underage males."



Read more: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/nation/5191489.h...

Extract from: Judi Lynn (1000+posts) ri Oct-05-07 02:48 PM
Original message. Scandal brewing at Oral Roberts U.


DIFFERENT WOMAN, 2007.