The secret plot to gun you down in the street

Before anything, go here, and look and the photograph of the four mercenary thugs at the topic of the article you’ll see. (I can’t reproduce the pictures in this blog because the Associated Press owns the copyright.)

If these characters look like the type of people you wouldn’t want to run into in a dark alley, you’ve got excellent instincts. They were arrested and tried for the cold-blooded murder and injury of at least 31 civilians in Iraq some years ago. 

Technical legal arguments evidently got them off from long prison sentences that were pursued under both Republican and Democratic administrations. But the key facts in the case are barely disputed. They mowed down 31 civilians. Not enemy combatants. Civilians. In the street. In broad daylight.

All of these unsavory characters worked for Eric Prince, who

Eric Prince, mercenary mastermind

contracts to send mercenaries to dangerous places with an implicit license to kill anybody who they deem to be in their way.

Prince’s so called “business reputation" keeps getting such a black eye, in part thanks to the trail of dead bodies it leaves in its wake, that he keeps trying to escape his reputation by changing the name of his shadowy corporation. It started out as Blackwater. Then it became Xe. Then it became Academi LLC. For all I know it has changed its name again. Or not. But if President Trump has his way, it may soon have no name at all.

Instead, as Newsweek has revealed:

“The Trump administration is reportedly weighing the creation of a private network of spies conjured up by former Blackwater founder Erik Prince, a former CIA officer and famous Iran-Contra scandal figure Oliver North, which would gather intelligence for CIA Director Mike Pompeo and the White House and keep the rest of the U.S. intelligence community in the dark of what it discovers, according to a report by The Intercept on Tuesday.”

The purpose of this would allegedly be to combat “the deep state.” Except there’s no such thing as a deep state. Or as the same Newsweek article put it:

“Trump has repeatedly claimed, with no evidence, that such an underground group exists and has worked against him since he took office earlier this year. 

“The proposal of a private, clandestine network appears rooted in distrust the current administration has for the intelligence community. Top political donors to Trump were reportedly asked to help finance operations before any agreement was reached.”

Wait a second, wait a second! Why the distrust? Perhaps it's caused by the inclination of the CIA rank and file to obey the law. Perhaps Trump's problem is that devoted civil servants — Americans loyal to the law and the Constitution — won’t lie about facts to fit Trump's preconceived notions, or murder Trump’s political enemies.

As Newsweek reported about the private network:

“It is a direct-action arm, totally off the books,” this person said, meaning the intelligence collected would not be shared with the rest of the CIA or the larger intelligence community. “The whole point is this is supposed to report to the president and Pompeo directly.”

What could a powerful organization do, an organization well-paid with your taxes, that somehow "doesn't exist" because it's "totally off the books" and unaccountable to anyone saved Donald Trump and Pompeo?

Well it might do what one of the people Trump admires, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, has his shadow thugs do — murder the political opposition. Just walk right up to them and shoot them dead in the street.

If you’re a journalist Putin doesn’t like, or a whistle blower, or merely a political opponent, you’ll have a hard time getting life insurance. Journalists and other critics in Russia who say things Putin doesn't like have an alarming habit of getting murdered, like this one, gunned down in the lobby of her apartment building.

In the United States, an “off-the-books” organization might extend the honor of getting murdered to anyone Trump doesn't like, a very long list that includes, among many others....

• People who have the temerity to believe that black lives matter. 
•Elizabeth Warren
•People who have the unmitigated gall to want to extend the right to vote to every adult citizen.
•Hillary Clinton 
•People with the utter nerve to demand that the Republican government not steal the Social Security income that they contributed to throughout their working lives, or their health care. 
•Bernie Sanders
•Gay people who get married 
•Colin Kaepernick
•Women who confirm that Donald Trump once tried to manhandle them
•Chuck Schumer.
•Reporters from the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, or any other publication Trump doesn't like.
•Nancy Pelosi.  
•Any member of Trump's own cabinet who momentarily displeases him. 
•Me. 
•Or you.

“Off the books” unaccountability is the beginning of total dictatorship. And at the risk of repeating a very old and very tired cliche that somehow suddenly seems to have new life: Be afraid, be very afraid.