“We need to view this sober reality,” Scahill told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday. “The war is in Pakistan right now. There’s no question about it. The question, though, is how much it’s going to expand. … These are actions that are going to destabilize Pakistan and are going to create new enemies for the United States because of the high civilian casualties. … Here you have military operations inside a country that we don’t have a declaration of war against.”

Scahill emphasized that the most destabilizing actions come not from the CIA but from Blackwater mercenaries, whom he recently described in The Nation as working for US special forces to “plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.”

via Scahill: ‘The war is in Pakistan right now’ | Raw Story.

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Jeremy Scahill talks with Keith Olbermann about Erik Prince and Xe Services / Blackwater.

There are far more non-Christians than there are Christians in the world, and the kind of atrocity these people commit only alienates people from Christianity. I would consider Blackwater to be a terrorist organization, the Christian equivalent of Al Qaeda, except that these are for-profit mercenary neo-crusaders. There is nothing Christ-like about what these people do.

The consequences of the acknowledgment of these alleged crimes by officials in Washington would be an unacceptable threat to the military industrial complex and the entrenched power structure that benefits from it.

This will not get its day in court, and we should all expect this story to vanish down the memory hole shortly. I’ll await the official denials and cries of left-wing conspiracy theory by the “liberal” Washington Post and NY Times editors before the story vanishes.

At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The Nationon condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

via Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan.

In a Democracy Now! exclusive, Scahill joins Amy Goodman for his first interview since the story broke. [Full transcript.]

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