Blackwater: Guns for Hire or Trojan Horsemen?

A couple of years ago, a fellow blogger wrote to me,

"Speaking of Gary North, I just finished reading a book called “Blackwater”. BW is a private security company here in US that receives gov’t contracts to provide protection in war torn areas -essentially they are mercenaries.
Anyway Gary North’s name is spoken of there in many places along with other key players that are known in republican conservative christian circles. Scary stuff ethically . .. as it seems to be getting their ( BW ) stamp of approval.
You have to read the book to get what I’m talking about.
I mention it because it helps give you a profile of the man and others like him."


Sure does.... Blackwater, Inc (the company, not the book), is one group that bears watching, and our government knows it. The question is, who’s watching whom…

The group’s founder, Erik Prince, also is on the board of Christian Freedom International, “a nonprofit group with a mission of helping Christians who are persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ.”

According to Wikipedia, the organization’s board members include a wide cross section of conservative notables, from Michael P. Farris, former President of the Home School Legal Defense Association and founder of Patrick Henry College in Virginia, to former Swiss Ambassador Faith Whittlesey.

But to understand more about Blackwater and the climate in which it was created, one needs to also understand the family of its founder. Eric Prince is the brother in-law to Dick DeVos Jr, heir to the Amway fortune.

In 1975 the elder Richard DeVos (then president of Amway Corporation), together with a group of conservative businessmen (including John Talcott of Ocean Spray Cranberries and Art De Moss, board chairman of the National Liberty Insurance Corporation), took control of the tax-exempt Christian Freedom Foundation. Their purpose, apparently, was to use the foundation's tax-exempt status to further religious right organizing efforts and to channel funds into Third Century Publishers, who produced "One Nation Under God", which provides a political rationale for the religious right. According to journalist Russ Bellant, DeVos and friends funded the publication not to merely increase church attendance, but to create a movement whereby authoritarian church structures would come to govern the United States, as do the mullahs in the Islamic states in other regions of the world.
Richard Sr. and Jr. have been the most generous benefactors of this movement, along with Dick Jr.’s late father-in-law; in 1976, Art De Moss admitted publicly that the purpose of CFF was to elect Christian conservatives to Congress :"The vision is to rebuild the foundations of the Republic as it was when first founded--a 'Christian Republic.' We must return to the faith of our fathers."

DeVos is also a member of the Council for National Policy ( CNP ). The Council was created in 1981 by leaders of the extremist John Birch Society to move the United States in a very rightward direction. The Birchers explicitly reject democracy, as do many of the allies they recruited for the CNP. For years they organized White Citizens Council to fight the civil rights movement and later melded into the militia movement.

The CNP has included such notables as the late Dr. Jerry Falwell, the Reverends Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and D. James Kennedy; Richard Shoff (a former leader of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan); members of the Coors brewery family, and Texas oilman Nelson Bunker Hunt. Ex-lobbyist and confessed felon Jack Abramoff lobbied on behalf of Blackwater; he and his cohort in crime, former Amway distributor Tom Delay, are also in the CNP.

Another group supported by the DeVos family is the Foundation for Traditional Values, affiliated with D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministry, who assert that the United States was created as a “Christian Nation” that was subsequently subverted. They claim that the subversion of Christianity began with the constitutional amendment to abolish slavery in the 1860’s.

SOUND FAMILIAR???

Russ Bellant, in his article, "Profile of a Christian Right Candidate: Dick DeVos", writes that "... the FTV teaches that citizens must create a “Christian Republic” and thereby purge secularism from America." Bellant writes that they conduct annual political action youth training programs on government property - in some cases, using the very state capitol buildings themselves! -- and hold large fundraising events where the DeVoses are prominent sponsors.

I could go on…. but isn’t it CHARMING, that these seditious, anti-American billlionaire whackos have their own private army – Blackwater Inc. — an army which has received the approbation of our government in the form of our tax dollars — the Bush administration hired Blackwater to “help us out” both in New Orleans, after Katrina, and in the war in Iraq, in the latter case by flying prisoners to various international locations to be "interrogated" !

This is has a huge potential to bite us in the butt, make no mistake. Private armies with private agendas are never trustworthy. Rome fell, in part, due to her dependence upon foreign mercenaries, but in this case, the rot is housed and funded from within our very own borders.

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