Blackwater Founder Is Said to Back African Mercenaries - NYTimes.com

An American mercenary living in the Arab emirates with the wealthy. Hmmmmmmm!

Saracen International is based in South Africa, with corporate offshoots in Uganda and other countries. The company, which declined to comment, was formed with the remnants of Executive Outcomes, a private mercenary firm composed largely of former South African special operations troops who worked throughout Africa in the 1990s.

The company makes little public about its operations and personnel, but it appears to be run by Lafras Luitingh, a former officer in South Africa’s Civil Cooperation Bureau, an apartheid-era internal security force notorious for killing opponents of the government.

One of the more unpleasant fall-outs from the end of Apartheid has been a number of disenfranchised, highly trained and vicious members of the security forces who now ply their trade as mercenaries. It's interesting to see that Executive Outcomes changed its name just as Blackwater did.

Two former American officials are helping broker the delicate negotiations between the Somali government, Saracen and the Emirates.

The officials, Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former United States ambassador at large for war crimes, and Michael Shanklin, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Mogadishu, are both serving as advisers to the Somali government, according to people involved in the project. Both Mr. Prosper and Mr. Shanklin are apparently being paid by the United Arab Emirates.

Why does this not surprise me? Other recent customers of South African mercenaries include such 3rd world citizens as Mark Thatcher, son of ex-British PM Margaret Thatcher. They're all unscrupulous and greedy bastards.

Mr. Prince, who said moving to Abu Dhabi would “make it harder for the jackals to get my money,” said he intended to find opportunities in “the energy field.”

Presumably those "jackals" are the IRS, whose money he quite happily took to fund his murderous games in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thanks for seeding this, I might not otherwise have known about it.

Blackwater, now call Xi, is still doing business with the US Government, which I feel repugnant. These mercenaries cheated the tax payers out of millions of dollars because of collusion, and lack of oversight by our Government.