Did the CIA Deploy a Blackwater Hit Team in Germany?

January 12, 2010 by Infowars Ireland

By Jeremy Scahill
www.thenation.com

German prosecutors have launched a preliminary investigation into allegations that the CIA deployed a team of Blackwater operatives on a clandestine operation in Hamburg, Germany, after 9/11 ultimately aimed at assassinating a German citizen with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. The alleged assassination operation was revealed last month in a Vanity Fair profile of Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince.

The magazine reported that after 9/11, the CIA used one of Prince’s homes in Virginia as a covert training facility for hit teams that would hunt Al Qaeda suspects globally. Their job was find, fix and finish: “Find the designated target, fix the person’s routine, and, if necessary, finish him off,” as the magazine put it.

According to Vanity Fair, one of the team’s targets was Mamoun Darkazanli, a naturalized German citizen originally from Syria. Darkazanli has been accused by Spain of being an Al Qaeda supporter with close ties to the alleged 9/11 plotters who lived in Hamburg. The Blackwater/CIA team “supposedly went in ‘dark,’ meaning they did not notify their own station–much less the German government–of their presence,” according to Vanity Fair. “They then followed Darkazanli for weeks and worked through the logistics of how and where they would take him down.” Authorities in Washington, however, “chose not to pull the trigger.”

This week, a senior lawmaker in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union called on Washington to provide an explanation. “If this commando really existed and the US government knew about it but didn’t notify our government then this would be a very grave incident,” said the lawmaker, Wolfgang Bosbach.

His concerns were echoed in the US by Representative Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “This really is part of an ongoing investigation that I can’t talk about, but even the fact that there is that allegation, I think, gives one a picture of the degree to which Blackwater has been completely enmeshed in these secret operations,” Schahowsky said. “And, you know, at least the allegation that they are, I think is disturbing enough. And there is an investigation going on around activities like that.”

Dieter Wiefelspütz, the domestic policy spokesperson for the parliamentary group of Germany’s center-left Social Democrats, told Der Spiegel it is irrelevant that Darkazanli’s targeted assassination was never carried out. “If it can be confirmed, then this was a murder plot,” he said. The conservative Christian Democratic Union joined the Social Democrats in calling for an official inquiry. Read more…