Late last month, Erik Prince, the founder of the Bush Administration’s mercenary army in Iraq—also known as Blackwater—expressed admiration for the State of Israel’s “pager attacks.” The attacks, which killed at least two children and critically injured many others, employed explosives in crowded civilian areas.
Even a lose application of just war theory would force us to conclude such attacks are war crimes. Detonating bombs without any knowledge of where the bombs might be, or who will be affected, fits no definition of “just war.” It’s unclear the targets were even Hezbollah agents. We’re just expected to trust the opinions of Israeli technocrats.
Nonetheless, Prince praised the operation declaring it to be “magnificent.” He went on to say he is “jealous” of Israeli intelligence agents and encouraged the US’s Central intelligence agency to employ similar tactics.
It should not surprise us that Prince has no problem with war crimes. During the US occupation of Iraq, Prince’s mercenaries opened fire on civilians at the Nisour Square massacre. Four blackwater agents were later convicted of various homicide charges in relation to the massacre. (Trump later pardoned the convicts in an effort to pander to pro-military constituents.)
Prince’s whooping it up for more deadly tactics from the CIA is thus what we have to come to expect from him. Prince has long been a close ally of the American deep state and for decades has made a nice living from ripping off Americans through taxpayer funded government contracts and cushy consulting positions with three-letter agencies like the CIA.
In spite of it all, Prince is described by his supporters as some kind of capitalist or entrepreneur. He has even claimed to be a libertarian sympathetic to Austrian-School economics. This is clearly nonsense. Real capitalists and entrepreneurs don’t base their business models on exploiting the taxpayers via lucrative government contracts. Real libertarians don’t help their governments carry out pointless wars of conquest.
Prince is hardly alone in this faux, parasitic “capitalism.” Indeed, working with the CIA seems to be a favorite past time among many wealthy businessmen posing as advocates of free markets.
Another example of this breed of “libertarian” advocates for the CIA is Peter Thiel. Thiel was one of the founders of Palantir, a tech platform with close ties to the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the CDC, and other agencies. Thiel is, in the words of the great independent journalist Whitney Webb, “the CIA-linked architect of key aspects of the technocratic surveillance state.”
As Webb has shown, Thiel’s connections to the deep state’s “total informational awareness” (TIA) programs are deep and lasting, and Palantir has evolved into a TIA equivalent providing the American state with valuable AI and related services.
Thiel, of course, is on board with all the usual war initiatives of the US regime, and has been busy assisting the State of Israel in killing the civilians of Gaza and southern Lebanon.
When asked in public about his active support for the Israeli regime, Thiels’ nearly incoherent rambling answer stated that “my bias is to support Israel,” that it is a bad thing to “second guess” the decisions of the Israeli state, and that government experts know best.
When asked about Israel using Artificial Intelligence AI to bomb & kill Palestinian civilians in #Gaza, Peter Thiel @peterthiel co-founder of PayPal and early Facebook investor, melts down, says:
“My bias is to defer to Israel ‼️” pic.twitter.com/P5Wk8UPO6a— Nour Naim| نُور (@NourNaim88) July 24, 2024
This is what we get from so-called libertarian “entrepreneurs” skimming off the top of the warfare state.
