The Knights Templar, Knights of Malta and Blackwater’s Erik Prince
By Mitch Cumstein
In a declaration under the penalty of purjury, a former employee of Erik Prince’s Blackwater defense contracting firm said Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.”
The accuser, only known as John Doe #2 in court documents because he claims he has been threatened with “death and violence” by managers of Prince’s company, wrote that “Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Chrisian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.”
This mention of the Knights Templar is an interesting one because it shifts the focus of Iraq from a quest for oil to that of a holy war. Remember when Pres. Bush got laughs for referring to the “war on terror” as a “crusade.” And this isn’t the only time Prince and his company Blackwater have been linked, albeit tenuously, with these shadow elements of the Catholic church and Christian fundamentalists.
The European Parliament published a report by Giovanni Claudio Fava, a Socialist Group legislator, claiming that there are connections between Blackwater and Malta. Malta is where the Knights of Malta, another right-wing element of the Catholic Church similar to the Knights Templar, once lived and still maintain control of Fort St. Angelo.
The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill has also written about connections between Prince, Malta and Pres. Bush’s rendition program in which terrorist suspects were sent to other countries for the purpose of torture. The program, according to Scahill was run by Cofer Black, who is allegedly a Knight of Malta himself and used Malta in the rendition program.
Black is the current vice chairman for Blackwater. At the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, Black was director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center.
According to a referenced Wikipedia entry:
[Black] was the United States Department of State coordinator for counterterrorism with the rank of ambassador at large from December 2002 to November 2004. After leaving public service, Black became chairman of the privately owned intelligence gathering company Total Intelligence Solutions, Inc., as well as vice chairman for Xe.
Xe is the current name of Blackwater and Total Intelligence Solutions has been dubbed as Prince’s private CIA.
But all of this “evidence” is largely hearsay and circumstantial at best. The reason for this could be that a common thread between the Knights Templare, the Knights of Malta and Blackwater is that there appears to be a concerted effort to confuse and obfiscate exactly what these groups are doing, or whether they’re even separate entities.
One tactic Prince employs to confuse people is setting up several supposedly different corporate entities. According John Doe #2, “[T]he various Price companies did not observe any corporate formalities or otherwise operate any of the Prince companies as independent entities. Instead, the Prince companies all operated as a single company.”
One of those companies is Greystone Limited headquartered in Barbados where Prince can avoid paying taxes and government scrutiny. The Virginia Pilot published a story last month stating that Greystone was operating in Iraq working for the International Republican Institute. The IRI is funded by the US government. After the slaughter of innocent Iraqis on Sept. 16, 2007 in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square by Blackwater employees, according to a court case filed against Blackwater, Blackwater was banned from operating in Iraq by the Iraqi government. And when Blackwater’s contract expired earlier this year, it was not renewed by the US State department, yet, Blackwater, under the name of Greystone Limited still operates in Iraq today.
There’s no definitive proof that Prince, Bush, Knights Templar or the Knights of Malta are conspiring to wage a modern-day crusade, but there’s something going on here, and it’s certainly worth an intensive investigation by the Dept. of Justice. This might be happening, as court documents trickle out of the US District Court in Virginia indicate. However, it’s illegal for the Dept. of Justice to speak about whether there even is an investigation, so I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
The US District court has consolidated five cases against Prince and his various companies into one. The cases accuse Prince of murder, conspiracy, gun smuggling, child prostitution, war crimes and waging a crusade against Islam for the purpose of global Christian supremacy. Tomorrow there’s a court date scheduled, so stay tuned, this could get really interesting really quick.
More information
I’ve created a page containing an archive of court documents relating to the cases against Prince here.
You can purchase Jeremy Scahill’s book “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” here from Amazon.
An interesting tidbit about the Knights of Malta is that they’ve have been given observer status by the United Nations under the entity called the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta is based in Rome, Italy and has diplomat relations with about 100 countries, but not the US.
Blackwater Wiki
Knights Templar Wiki
Knights of Malta Wiki
Photos of Erik Price. Source: Wikipedia.org
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