13 April 20
Erik Prince Offered Lethal Services to Sanctioned Russian Mercenary Firm Wagner
Matthew Cole and Alex Emmons, The Intercept
Matthew Cole and Alex Emmons, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater and a Trump administration adviser, has sought in recent months to provide military services to a sanctioned Russian mercenary firm in at least two African conflicts, according to three people with knowledge of the efforts."
Prince, who is the brother of Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, met earlier this year with a top official of Russia’s Wagner Group and offered his mercenary forces to support the firm’s operations in Libya and Mozambique, according to two people familiar with Prince’s offer.
Wagner officials said they are not interested in working with Prince, three people familiar with their decision told The Intercept.
A lawyer for Prince denied that his client met anyone from Wagner.
The Wagner Group is a semi-private military force that operates in countries or conflicts where the Russian government seeks plausible deniability for its activities. It is often equipped and supported directly by the Russian Ministry of Defense, according to reports and experts who track Wagner’s activities. The U.S. State Department website also lists Wagner as an entity connected to the “Defense Sector of the Government of the Russian Federation.” Any business relationship between Prince and Wagner would, in effect, make the influential Trump administration adviser a subcontractor to the Russian military.
In recent years, the Russian government has deployed Wagner to several African countries, Ukraine, and Syria, where the U.S. military killed dozens of Wagner fighters in 2018 after the Russians and their Syrian allies attacked an oil facility that the United States was defending.
“Wagner Group is an instrument of Russian policy. It works under the GRU, which is the Russian military intelligence,” said Sean McFate, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former military contractor who has written about mercenaries.
In attempting to do business with Wagner, Prince may also have exposed himself to legal liability. In 2017, the Trump administration sanctioned Wagner, as well as its founder and head Dmitry Utkin, for having “recruited and sent soldiers to fight alongside [Russian-backed] separatists in eastern Ukraine” during the 2014 Russian invasion. The Russian government denied involvement in the invasion, even as its forces occupied and took control of Crimea, also in Ukrainian territory, in violation of international law.
The sanctions prohibit individuals or companies from providing “financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of, any person whose property and interests in property are blocked pursuant to this order.” They also forbid anyone “to have acted or purported to act for or on behalf” of Wagner. The 2017 addition of Wagner to the sanctions list builds on a 2014 executive order signed by President Barack Obama.
“In my experience, the act of soliciting from a sanctioned party would indeed be an apparent violation,” said Brian O’Toole, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council and former senior sanctions official at the Treasury Department. “Whether you make that [legal] case is an entirely separate matter,” he said, adding that pitching business to Wagner “would seem to be a fairly egregious thing to do.”
When Prince met with Wagner leadership, he was already under federal investigation for violating arms trafficking regulations. The proposal to the Russian firm also raises questions about whether Trump administration officials authorized the meeting or were aware of Prince’s efforts to work with the group.
A former Navy SEAL who rose to prominence and notoriety as head of the private security firm Blackwater, Prince has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, serving as an unofficial adviser on military and foreign policy issues in Africa, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Prince was a Trump donor in 2016 and has worked to support the president politically while proposing private military solutions that would benefit his companies financially.
Early in the Trump administration, Prince proposed privatizing the war in Afghanistan and supplying Trump with a private spy service intended to circumvent the U.S. intelligence community. Neither proposal succeeded, despite having support for some of his ideas from senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
For years, Prince has tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to win military contracts with governments in Africa and the Middle East. Wagner has become an increasingly visible player in the region as Russia’s influence there has grown, allowing the country to operate under the radar at a time when “plausible deniability is more powerful than firepower,” according to McFate, the mercenary expert.
“The reason why groups like Wagner exist, and the reason why people like Erik Prince [are] succeeding, is that modern war is getting sneakier and mercenaries and groups like Wagner are a great way to get things done in the shadows,” McFate said.
Libya has been divided and in conflict since the U.S. and NATO allies removed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. The United Nations and most of the international community, including the U.S, recognize the Government of National Accord in the Libyan capital Tripoli as the country’s official leaders. But the eastern portion of the country is led by strongman Khalifa Hifter, who tried last year to take Tripoli. Both sides are backed by foreign powers that have continually violated a U.N. embargo on military support. Turkey and Qatar have supported the GNA, while Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt have backed Hifter.
Last spring, Hifter’s forces, the Libyan National Army, moved to take Tripoli, but were thwarted within days. Hifter turned to Moscow and Wagner. Americans are prohibited from aiding either side of the conflict without U.S. government authorization.
At the same time, Prince sought to provide a force in Mozambique, where the government has been fighting a small insurgency over the past two years. President Filipe Nyusi of Mozambique flew to Moscow to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in August 2019. The countries signed several trade pacts, and Russia agreed to send military aid. Russian military hardware and Russian nationals working for Wagner arrived in Mozambique in September, according to news reports.
After Wagner lost more than a dozen fighters in Mozambique, Prince sent a proposal to the Russian firm offering to supply a ground force as well as aviation-based surveillance, according to documents viewed by The Intercept and a person familiar with Prince’s proposal.
Prince has also served as an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, known as MBZ, for more than a decade. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE, a close regional ally of the U.S., has intervened militarily in several regional wars in the Middle East and Africa. A pariah during the Obama administration, Prince was taken in by the Emirati crown prince and awarded a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to create and train a presidential guard for the royal family. He was later removed for mismanagement, among other reasons.
Prince also has ties to China. He is co-chair of Frontier Services Group, a Hong-Kong based logistics company he founded and whose largest investor is the Chinese government. The Intercept has previously reported that the U.S. government has investigated Prince for his ties to China’s intelligence service. The conflicts between Prince’s commercial interests and the goals of the many governments that retain his services have piled up as Prince has tried to sell military and mercenary capabilities around the world. FSG, for example, signed a contract for fishing rights in Mozambique around the same time Prince began exploring defense contracts there. The fishing contract has since been dissolved, according to the company.
“The conflicts of interest are deep and threaten democracy when you have a free agent going between the U.S. and its main power rivals,” said McFate. “It would never clear an intelligence community background check. This is a dangerous thing for any democracy.”
People wait for the San Antonio Food Bank to begin food distribution as need soars. (photo: William Luther/AP)
With Working Americans' Survival at Stake, the US Is Bailing Out the Richest
Morris Pearl and William Lazonick, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives."
Morris Pearl and William Lazonick, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Amid a humanitarian crisis compounded by mass layoffs and collapsing economic activity, the last course our legislators should be following is the one they appear to be on right now: bailing out shareholders and executives."
EXCERPT:
Over the past five years alone, airline executives – who were first in line clamoring for a bailout – spent $52bn in corporate cash on buybacks, at the expense of employee wage increases, capital expenditures and investments in innovation. Now that these businesses are being handed government funds, we need to make sure that top executives and wealthy shareholders don’t do this again: channel money into their own bank accounts while leaving employees wondering how they are going to pay their bills.
If not properly managed, this economic disaster has the potential to be the worst in American history. Our country cannot allow a small number of executives and shareholders to profit from taxpayer funds that we have injected into these corporations for reasons of pure emergency. We need to stop this rot at the core of our economic system and realign the priorities of government with those of workers and consumers.
Even in normal times, America’s extreme economic inequality was a festering sore. Now, this previously unimaginable public-health disaster is pulling back the curtain to reveal how this inequality can make victims of all of us. As we join together in the struggle to defeat the coronavirus, it is vital that we protect vulnerable Americans against further harm.
This syringe was used Wednesday to inject 250 micrograms of a vaccine researchers hope may be effective against the coronavirus. (photo: Ian Haydon)
I Just Got a Shot of a Coronavirus Vaccine. I Hope It Works!
Ian Haydon, The Washington Post
Haydon writes: "At 10:16 Pacific time Wednesday morning, I received an injection in my left shoulder. It contained 250 micrograms of an experimental coronavirus vaccine, the first to be tested in humans."
Ian Haydon, The Washington Post
Haydon writes: "At 10:16 Pacific time Wednesday morning, I received an injection in my left shoulder. It contained 250 micrograms of an experimental coronavirus vaccine, the first to be tested in humans."
EXCERPT:
This vaccine involves a relatively new strategy. All vaccines attempt to train the immune system to respond to an invader before it has breached the gates. Usually, that means injecting a weakened pathogen or part of one into a healthy person.
Instead of injecting me with protein derived from the virus, the researchers jabbed me with genetic material encoding such a protein. If my body absorbs this code and carries out its instructions, some of my cells will temporarily produce a single protein from the virus. That should prompt my immune system to create antibodies against the viral molecule. The idea is that those antibodies would protect against the real virus.
Moderna, the company that produced the candidate I’m trying, has tested this vaccine technology before for other diseases, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus. It has not yet resulted in a licensed vaccine, and it may never. When it comes to experimenting with the immune system, nothing is guaranteed.
There are risks, and no one knows what they are yet — that’s why there is a trial. Every drug or vaccine vying for regulatory approval eventually must be put into people for the first time. Subjects in other mRNA vaccine studies have reported good health overall, though many experience redness and pain at the site of injection, muscle fatigue, and headaches — all of which can be severe.
There are other risks, too. No one knows how the human immune system reacts to seeing just this one viral protein. It could produce antibodies that exacerbate infection, as happened with candidate vaccines meant for other infectious diseases. This risk is low but part of the reason careful studies are needed before vaccination ramps up.
Virginia gov. Ralph Northam (D) made marijuana decriminalization a top priority for 2020. (photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images)
Virginia Just Decriminalized Marijuana
German Lopez, Vox
Lopez writes: "The state is the 27th to decriminalize or legalize marijuana."
READ MORE
German Lopez, Vox
Lopez writes: "The state is the 27th to decriminalize or legalize marijuana."
READ MORE
A city worker hands out unemployment applications to people lined up in their cars on April 8, 2020 in Hialeah, Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Turns Out, if You Like Your Private Insurance, You Still Can't Keep It
Luke Savage, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Amid spiraling unemployment, a new study finds that 35 million Americans are about to lose their health insurance. Tragically, the coronavirus is making the case for Medicare for All better than any policy paper ever could."
READ MORE
Luke Savage, Jacobin
Excerpt: "Amid spiraling unemployment, a new study finds that 35 million Americans are about to lose their health insurance. Tragically, the coronavirus is making the case for Medicare for All better than any policy paper ever could."
READ MORE
Ayotzinapa. (photo: Alvaro Sánchez/Flickr)
The Search for the Disappeared in Mexico
Madeleine Wattenbarger, NACLA
Wattenbarger writes: "As Mexico's 5th National Search Brigade for Disappeared Persons continues its work, the main obstacle is the state."
Madeleine Wattenbarger, NACLA
Wattenbarger writes: "As Mexico's 5th National Search Brigade for Disappeared Persons continues its work, the main obstacle is the state."
EXCERPT:
Mexico’s crisis of forced disappearance is a forensic crisis. The official count of disappeared people, since the beginning of the drug war in 2006, is just over 61,000. Given the low rate of reporting, the real number could be 10 times that amount. The pervasive negligence around forced disappearance extends to medical forensic institutions. Currently, around 37,000 unidentified bodies lie in government institutions across the country. Family members of the disappeared have taken on the task of searching for their loved ones. This year’s 5th National Search Brigade brought together nearly 300 family members from collectives all over Mexico. In addition to conducting field searches for human remains, the brigade led workshops in schools, churches, and government institutions.
Scientists testing water in the Arctic for ecology research. (photo: Arnulf Husmo/Getty Images)
Coronavirus Halts Arctic Climate Change Research
Alex Matthews, Deutsche Welle
Matthews writes: "The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year their drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured."
Alex Matthews, Deutsche Welle
Matthews writes: "The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year their drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured."
very year 150 climate scientists fly far into the wilderness and bore deep into Greenland's largest glacier. Their work is complicated and important. The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year the drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured.
The reason is the coronavirus. The fallout from measures to contain the outbreak have made the research impossible. Greenland is closed to foreigners. Its government is worried any outbreak could be particularly dangerous to its indigenous population and rapidly overwhelm its health services.
Even if the country were open, it just isn't practical to bring an international team of scientists together, 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away from the nearest airport, in case one of them is sick. The transport planes that normally fly in the teams and resupply them have also been grounded. Nobody wants to be responsible for bringing small, isolated communities into contact with the virus.
Going Without Results
The scientists are missing out on a lot. They were hoping to complete the 2,660-meter (8,727-feet) hole they have been drilling for the past five years, and finally access the ice streams they've been hunting for.
"We were actually hoping to reach the bedrock this year, which is super exciting, as we are down where the ice stream flow really is important," explains Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Professor of Ice, Climate and Earth at the University of Copenhagen and chairperson for EastGRIP's steering committee.
"How does this ice actually flow? That really is what we have been waiting for for five years, what was going to happen this year. All of that has now been put back. We will have to live without the results."
Damaged Equipment
When the team returns next year, it's data and understanding they will have lost. Another year of snow will have buried trenches and covered equipment, meaning they will spend more time repairing and replacing buildings and hardware.
It's a problem faced by Dr Ken Mankoff and the team he works with at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. They are examining the health of the ice sheets in Greenland and monitoring snowfall. They also have monitoring equipment in the field that could fail if they cannot reach it, leaving gaps in data that has been collected for decades.
"In the worst-case scenario there will be a 12-month gap," he says. "Some of that data can be filled in with satellites and remote sensing, other parts are unique and will be lost."
Junior Scientists' Careers Affected
Dahl-Jensen and Mankoff will have to wait until they can return to their respective sites and hope the loss of data won't upset their research too much. For now, both say they are happier remaining at home and keeping themselves, their teams and everyone else they would otherwise encounter safe.
But for younger scientists, those working on research with short-term funding, and those working towards academic qualifications on a timescale, the lack of results is a much bigger problem. The next generation of climate scientists will be affected.
"There are junior colleagues, and this will have a significant impact on their career if they cannot get the data for the project that they need to do their work," says Mankoff. "My attitude will not be shared by everybody else, and I doubt it is."
Most Productive Time of the Year
Someone who can relate is Dr Joran Moen, director of the University Center in Svalbard (UCIS) in Norway, the world's northernmost higher education institution. The school was shutdown and fieldwork cancelled, following orders from the Norwegian government. Around 70 students in Svalbard alone will be unable to complete fieldwork contributing to masters degrees or PhDs.
"The transition from March to June is a very important time for operations and for monitoring climate change in the area," he says. "We are in a part of the Arctic with a very dramatic change due to the temperature rapidly changing. It's a very good place to be to see how mankind can influence the climate and the effects of it."
"As for data gaps, the entire international community on Svalbard will have that problem, and of course that will also impact on our research. For students to be missing something like this in their research is a problem."
Waiting Game
Moen and the UCIS have made provisions for as much education as possible to continue. Classes have moved online and small, risk-free research trips are still being planned. Dahl-Jensen and Mankoff are waiting to see when they can reach their equipment, and planning how much extra work they may have to do in the snow.
Climate science is also waiting, to see when it will continue, and just how vital the missing data will be.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.