TimB

by Sydney Brownstone

On Tuesday, Uber released its first transparency report. Like a slew of other tech companies that have begun to publish reports on the requests that they get from law enforcement, Uber made note of how often the company shared its data with government agencies.

But as NPR noted, Uber's transparency report was also different from other tech companies' publications in one major respect: it used the opportunity to gripe about the data it shares with regulators.

Uber's report highlighted, underlined, and put a million exclamation points around how they really feel when cities make rules about the so-called "sharing economy."

For example, Uber's transparency report included a list of cities that asked for Uber's data. Next to those cities, in columns showing how many drivers and riders the request affected, Uber noted how often the company tried to limit the scope of the compliance. In a follow-up FAQ, Uber characterized these requests from city regulators—and the existence of freedom of information laws which allow the public to access those requests—as a liability for customers' and drivers' privacy.

"We hope our Transparency Report will lead to a public debate about the types and amounts of information regulated services should be required to provide to their regulators, and under what circumstances," the company wrote in another statement published on Medium.

Uber's concern about customer and driver privacy is interesting, but hypocritical, given how the company already shares customer and driver data with third parties.

Uber's presentation of its regulatory data is also revealing. Look at its section on Seattle. In one row, Uber writes that Seattle made a request for data that affected 642,000 riders and 10,000 drivers. The company also writes that Uber tried unsuccessfully to narrow the scope of the request.

This row likely refers to the legislation passed by the Seattle City Council that would allow drivers to collectively bargain with transportation network companies like Lyft and Uber. Right before a big City Council vote on the legislation, Uber attempted to halt a public records request simply asking for the number of Uber drivers that operate in Seattle, even after Uber spokesperson David Plouffe shared that information publicly. The company is sharing that number once again in this report.

If anything, this just goes to show that Uber isn't actually that concerned about who knows what about its riders or drivers. But in 2016, data is money. Controlling data means controlling a significant source of money for Uber, and Uber doesn't want anyone else with access to the data safe. If there's one thing Uber's transparency report is transparent about, it's that.

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Government grants Turkish request to allow having Jan Boehmermann charged for allegedly insulting President Erdogan.

Satirical poem read on TV by Boehmermann erupts into a diplomatic incident that catches Angela Merkel in a conundrum.

ON A CRISP SATURDAY in November 2014, a black Mercedes SUV pulled onto the tarmac of an Austrian specialty aviation company 30 miles south of Vienna. Employees of the firm, Airborne Technologies, which specialized in designing and equipping small aircraft with wireless surveillance platforms, had been ordered to work that weekend because one of the company’s investors was scheduled to inspect their latest project.

For four months, Airborne’s team had worked nearly nonstop to modify an American-made Thrush 510G crop duster to the exact specifications of an unnamed client. Everything about the project was cloaked in secrecy. The company’s executives would refer to the client only as “Echo Papa,” and instructed employees to use code words to discuss certain modifications made to the plane. Now the employees would learn that Echo Papa also owned more than a quarter of their company.

A fit, handsome man with blond hair and blue eyes got out of the Mercedes and entered Airborne’s hanger. Echo Papa, who was often just called EP, shook hands with a dozen Airborne employees and looked over the plane. “He was the sun, and all the management were planets rotating around him,” said one person present that day.

One of the mechanics soon recognized Echo Papa from news photos — he was Erik Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater. Several of the Airborne staff whispered among themselves, astonished that they had been working for America’s best-known mercenary. The secrecy and strange modification requests of the past four months began to make sense. In addition to surveillance and laser-targeting equipment, Airborne had outfitted the plane with bulletproof cockpit windows, an armored engine block, anti-explosive mesh for the fuel tank, and specialized wiring that could control rockets and bombs. The company also installed pods for mounting two high-powered 23 mm machine guns. By this point, the engineers and mechanics were concerned that they had broken several Austrian laws but were advised that everything would be fine as long as they all kept the secret.

Prince congratulated everyone for making the plane “rugged” and then left. The plane was due in South Sudan, where it was urgently needed to salvage Prince’s first official contract with his new company, Frontier Services Group. Prince was eager to get the Thrush 510G in the air.

The conversion of crop dusters into light attack aircraft had long been part of Prince’s vision for defeating terrorists and insurgencies in Africa and the Middle East. In Prince’s view, these single-engine fixed-wing planes, retrofitted for war zones, would revolutionize the way small wars were fought. They would also turn a substantial profit. The Thrush in Airborne’s hangar, one of two crop dusters he intended to weaponize, was Prince’s initial step in achieving what one colleague called his “obsession” with building his own private air force.

The story of how Prince secretly plotted to transform the two aircraft for his arsenal of mercenary services is based on interviews with nearly a dozen people who have worked with Prince over the years, including current and former business partners, as well as internal documents, memos, and emails. Over a two-year period, Prince exploited front companies and cutouts, hidden corporate ownership, a meeting with Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout’s weapons supplier, and at least one civil war in an effort to manufacture and ultimately sell his customized armed counterinsurgency aircraft. If he succeeded, Prince would possess two prototypes that would lay the foundation for a low-cost, high-powered air force capable of generating healthy profits while fulfilling his dream of privatized warfare.

FROM THE EARLY DAYS of the war on terror, Prince aggressively built up an aviation wing at Blackwater and supplied aircraft to the CIA and other government agencies. His “little bird” helicopters — with armed commandos hanging from their frames — became a notorious symbol of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. By 2013, after scandals, investigations, and a $42 million settlement with the Justice Department, Blackwater had been broken up, with its pieces renamed and Prince largely excluded from their operations. But his vision of creating a private air force endured.

In early 2014, Prince and Citic Group, China’s largest state-owned investment firm, founded Frontier Services Group, a publicly traded logistics and aviation company based in Hong Kong. FSG offered services such as shipping minerals, chartering flights for executives, and occasional medevacs from remote African locations. Over the past two years, Prince has given interviews and speeches describing his vision of FSG. “This is not a patriotic endeavor of ours,” Prince said of his new company. “We’re here to build a great business and make some money doing it.” China, he said, “has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen.” But while he burnished his new image as chairman of a public company, he was secretly overseeing the clandestine attack aircraft program.

Prince exploited front companies, a connection with Viktor Bout’s weapons supplier, and at least one civil war in an effort to sell his customized armed aircraft.

Prince, together with a small group of loyal deputies, hid this effort from the corporate leadership at FSG by means of non-company encrypted email, aliases, and outright deception. When Prince pitched logistics contracts to African governments on behalf of FSG, he and his team simultaneously developed plans for paramilitary contracts with those same governments.

In 2013, when FSG was being created, Prince and his team were already developing a secret blueprint for weaponized crop dusters to target terrorists and assist counterinsurgency operations in Africa. Originally drafted in late 2013, the plan was updated more than 100 times through the end of 2015. The goal was to offer affordable, high-powered air superiority to Prince’s clients that could “break the paradigm of attrition warfare in low intensity conflict.” Prince’s plan predicted strong “global marketability” for the small attack planes.

The aircraft, which the blueprint suggested could be produced in a manner that would bypass export “restraints,” would be modified to carry both precision-guided munitions as well as simpler weapons systems. But, the plan noted, “Guns, Rockets and Dumb Bombs offer the most cost effective weapon load for the target set/threat environment.” The planes would contain armored cockpits, engines, and airframes, sophisticated reconnaissance equipment similar to that used on drones, as well as night-vision capabilities. The blueprint envisioned targeting groups of insurgents, boats, vehicles, and static positions. According to the plan, the aircraft would have 12 hours of endurance to conduct operations.

The modified light attack aircraft “offers affordable ability [to] raise, train and sustain the capability for the ‘long war’ necessary in Counter Insurgency,” according to the blueprint. But this aspiration was not one that Prince would openly share with the people he was recruiting to build his new public company.

BY THE SUMMER of 2013, Prince was already putting together a team to run FSG. Among the recruits was Gregg Smith, an old friend and former Marine, who would eventually become the company’s CEO. Smith was an investment banker who had helped guide Prince through the sale of Blackwater and other entities after the U.S. government began investigating his companies. That July, as they discussed their new venture, Prince and Smith took a trip to the border of Burkina Faso and Niger in West Africa, where Prince was considering investing in a magnesium mine, according to Smith. The men landed at an airstrip controlled by French forces. Niger was a dangerous country with civil unrest and a regional al Qaeda affiliate.

As they surveyed the mine, the two discussed the advantages of adding surveillance cameras to small civilian planes to fly over mining operations or oil fields. Such planes would be useful for alerting mining companies and government forces of a possible attack by insurgents or bandits. “If you’re in a conflict zone and you have an extractive mine, or even oil and gas, you want to know what’s going on around you and that’s not always easy in those types of areas,” said Smith in an interview. “Having the ability to put an aircraft in the sky that has good ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] capabilities and monitor the radius around you, that’s good stuff.”

Prince used non-company encrypted email, aliases, and outright deception.

Such surveillance aircraft would be relatively inexpensive to operate and could provide what Smith and Prince both believed would be nice profits for their fledgling company, which they agreed should have a fleet of aircraft crisscrossing the African continent. “When we set up the company and had discussions about what FSG would and would not be, we were very clear it would not be a security company, it would not have armed people,” Smith told The Intercept. However, Prince and FSG did contemplate offering intelligence and surveillance services, as well as non-lethal logistical support, in war zones.

Prince was legendary for pushing the risk envelope, particularly when defining what legally constituted military or security services. Those contracts could require licenses and authorization from the U.S. government, and FSG’s new executives strongly doubted they could obtain them with Prince as the company’s chairman.

In February 2014, a month after Prince became chairman of FSG, he authorized the purchase of two Thrush 510G crop dusters made in Albany, Georgia. Each aircraft cost approximately $1 million. Prince told officials at FSG that the purchase was urgent because he had received a green light for a project to support the government of Mali in its battle against a regional al Qaeda affiliate. The plan was to have the planes fitted with aerial surveillance gear with a data link to a ground station, so that the aircraft could provide reconnaissance for forces operating on the ground. Prince claimed that Project Mike, as it was called internally, “was a go and as part of that we were going to be providing the ISR support and we would need those ASAP,” according to a source with direct knowledge of FSG’s inner workings.

Prince arranged for the planes to be equipped with cameras and other surveillance gear at Airborne Technologies in Austria. Airborne, founded in 2008, is best-known for producing a proprietary device, known as a SCAR Pod, that mounts on small aircraft and enables aerial surveillance cameras to wirelessly deliver live video and other data. In promotional material, Airborne calls it “surveillance out of the box.”

What FSG’s executives did not know at the time was that Prince, through one of his veiled corporate entities, owned 25 percent of Airborne. Dorian Barak, Prince’s personal attorney who handled his investments, brokered Prince’s ownership stake in Airborne in early 2013 and represented Prince on the company’s board. In preparing the deal, Barak suggested that Airborne was open to expanding into the security business with Prince providing “strategic guidance,” contacts, and sales, according to a memo prepared for Prince.

Barak did not respond to a request for comment. Prince did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Prince and his team made plans for the aircraft to be flown from the U.S. directly to Airborne’s hangar at Wiener Neustadt East airport, south of Vienna. The official contract with Airborne was to modify the planes with surveillance equipment, including a Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera similar to those used on U.S. attack and spy drones.

In May 2014, both Thrush planes were flown from the U.S. across the Atlantic Ocean to Airborne’s hangar. Once they arrived in Austria, Prince asserted effective control over the modifications and an ability to make decisions for both FSG and Airborne. The Thrush project was managed by Prince’s longtime associate Christiaan “Serge” Durrant. Prince had enlisted Durrant, a former Australian special forces pilot, to run FSG’s “specialty aviation division.” By that point, Prince was brokering a secret arrangement with executives at Airborne to turn the planes into paramilitary aircraft.

THE IDEA OF arming agricultural planes for attack did not originate with Prince. In the early 2000s, a classified program run by the CIA in Colombia employed a different U.S. crop duster, the Air Tractor. During the day, on a State Department contract, the planes would spray coca fields with herbicide. But the aircraft had been modified with ISR equipment and hardware for mounting weapons, according to a former U.S. official familiar with the program, so that the planes could be used for night bombing missions against FARC rebels and cocaine cartels.

Prince was not involved with that program, but in 2008, he did purchase a Super Tucano, a Brazilian-made light attack aircraft. Prince then leased that plane to the Pentagon as a prototype, and nearly a decade later, the U.S. began providing armed Super Tucanos to Afghanistan’s air force. He also tried pitching a light attack plane to the CIA for close air support in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to two former colleagues of Prince who were involved in the offer.

The planes were cheap, durable, and relatively discreet.

In Prince’s view, according to several sources who worked closely with him for years, his idea had been stolen by the U.S. government and his competitors, one of which has a licensed contract with the government to sell weaponized Thrush planes. But Prince did not abandon his ambitions, and the Thrush modifications he was now coordinating held great promise. The planes were cheap, durable, and relatively discreet.

Months before embarking on the secret work at the Austrian hangar, Prince and his allies at Airborne began strategizing about how to confront a potentially project-ending obstacle: Austrian defense export regulations. They knew the government would view the customized Thrush planes for what they were: militarized aircraft. Austria, which played a central role in starting two world wars, has a firm policy of neutrality and stringent regulations that would apply to the export of an Austrian-manufactured paramilitary aircraft for use in a civil war.

This was not a new challenge for Prince. Through his former Blackwater enterprise, he had acquired extensive experience defying or sidestepping U.S. defense export regulations. In an effort to avoid Austrian and European export laws, Prince looked south to Bulgaria, a nation known for its lax defense export regulations and role as a hub for international arms traffickers. “It’s very difficult to manufacture [such aircraft] in Austria and keep everything quiet,” said a former Airborne employee who worked on the plane. “It’s too risky for them. So the idea was to go to Bulgaria.”

In May 2014, Kristof Nagl, Airborne’s chief financial officer, wrote to Prince explicitly discussing the creation of a front company in Bulgaria to disguise the production of weapons-readied aircraft. Nagl cited earlier discussions with Prince and Dorian Barak and confirmed for Prince that they were moving forward with “the foundation of” a Bulgarian company named LASA Engineering Ltd. “LASA shall mean light armed surveillance aircraft,” Nagl wrote. In the memo, Nagl described a structure for LASA in which Prince “provides customers and know how.” Airborne, according to Nagl, would acquire Thrush aircraft and do the reconnaissance and surveillance modifications. LASA, however, would “be used for marketing” and “selling of light armed airborne solutions,” though its promotional materials would not directly mention the word Thrush. This omission, Nagl wrote Prince, would be done “according to your wish.”

Under the proposed arrangement, LASA would purchase the Thrush aircraft modified by Airborne directly from the company at its standard price “so all margin will stay as always with” Airborne. The transformation of the planes to light attack aircraft would be laundered in Sofia. LASA would get the necessary export licenses from the Bulgarian government so that the planes could be sold or deployed abroad.

“LASA shall mean light armed surveillance aircraft,” Nagl wrote.

The advantage of the corporate front, according to Nagl, was that they could get “indirect access to potential clients which we have to refuse now and the ‘export risk’ is covered by” the newly formed Bulgarian entity. He also proposed that the partners involved in the deal put up a percentage of the cost of creating LASA, which “will not need any significant investment.”

In response to detailed questions from The Intercept, a lawyer representing Nagl and Airborne claimed that the assertions in this article are “incorrect except for the fact that our client is offering to the market ISR modifications on various aircraft, including Thrush.” He added: “Our client obtained all required export licenses in all past transactions and will keep doing so also in the future.” The lawyer asserted that Nagl and Airborne “strictly follow all relevant and applicable export control laws and regulations.” The firm that sent the letter, Specht & Partner, has also represented Prince in Austria. After the deadline for this article, Airborne’s lawyer sent further comment, writing that the company never manufactured or sold an armed aircraft and “does not hold (directly or indirectly) shares in a company” that did so.

Prince made arrangements to visit Bulgaria in May 2014 for an Airborne meeting and a tour of the Arsenal factory in Kazanlak. Arsenal is the largest arms manufacturer in Bulgaria, and Prince was interested in viewing its line of “aerial weaponry,” including guns, rockets, bombs, and weapons management systems for aircraft, according to an internal document reviewed by The Intercept.

The next month, according to internal documents, Shawn Matthews, an FSG contractor and former Australian special forces pilot who served as Durrant’s deputy on the Thrush program, went to Bulgaria to meet with Peter Mirchev, a Bulgarian arms dealer who supplied Viktor Bout. (Bout is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence in the U.S. for attempting to sell weapons to the FARC in Colombia.) When an FSG official learned that Matthews had met with Mirchev, he instructed Matthews and Durrant to cease all contact with him. It is not known what Matthews and Mirchev discussed, but the FSG official warned Prince’s men not to pursue arming the Thrush aircraft, saying that it would be a clear violation of U.S. law. Matthews declined to comment on the record. Durrant declined to comment.

According to the former Airborne employee and a second company whistleblower, almost all of the modifications would actually be performed in Austria. By the time the aircraft reached Bulgaria, an engineer could complete a simple installation of hardware. “The final installation of the weapons would be done in Bulgaria,” said the former employee.

FOR NEARLY TWO decades, Prince has steadily built a labyrinthine network of entities and supply-chain businesses in his quest to provide full-spectrum, “turn-key” military “solutions.” With an ownership stake in Airborne, and a front company in Bulgaria, Prince, aided by his lawyer Dorian Barak, was buying in to and expanding an entire ecosystem of paramilitary services: surveillance, weapons, engineering, and a clandestine apparatus for bypassing national and international defense regulations.

Two common threads emerge when examining many of Prince’s recent military proposals and offshore companies: He owns multiple parts of the supply chains for the deployment of private armed forces to foreign countries; and, since at least 2012, he has failed to implement them.

The plan that Prince and his team devised to weaponize the Thrush crop dusters was an engineering nightmare. Prince’s men treated Airborne’s hangar as their private Frankenstein laboratory where they directed engineers and mechanics in a perilous experiment to transform an agricultural airplane into a jerry-rigged flying tank. And Prince wanted it done fast.

The Intercept has reviewed dozens of documents relating to the modifications of the Thrush aircraft in Austria. The former Airborne employee, who played a central role in the modifications performed on the Thrush, agreed to speak with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the program and fears of retaliation by Prince and Airborne.

It was clear almost as soon as the Thrush planes arrived at the hangar outside Vienna that the goal was to create military-grade attack aircraft, according to the former employee. He said that Nagl, Airborne’s chief financial officer, and Wolfgang Grumeth, the firm’s CEO, must have known that the modifications they were performing would likely be prohibited under Austrian regulations. Airborne’s employees, who had worked on sensitive projects for various governments, were led to believe they were engaged in a secret but legitimate contract.

Grumeth did not respond to a request for comment, but Airborne’s attorney stated that the company is “strictly following all Austrian as well as international applicable laws and regulations in connection with their business.”

Work began in Austria on one of the Thrush planes in July 2014. Durrant’s deputy, Shawn Matthews, embedded at the Austrian hangar to oversee the modifications, which Airborne’s employees were instructed to describe using code words such as “aeromagnetic” and “sensor” to replace discussion of weapons.

The initial modifications involved attaching the SCAR Pod and surveillance camera. In addition to the cameras and other reconnaissance systems, according to the former employee, they installed heavy armor on the plane, replaced the Thrush’s windows with 19 mm thick ballistic glass, and lined the cockpit with Kevlar. They placed special meshing in the fuel tank so that it would not explode if struck by bullets or shrapnel, and attached a camera mount that allowed the surveillance package to be lowered once the plane was aloft so it could be used as a laser platform to assist targeting.

It was already apparent to most of the staff working on the plane that the modifications, requested by a company they knew only as Frontier, were deeply problematic. “It was clear they didn’t care about certification,” the former Airborne employee said, describing the attitude of Prince’s team. “If you make a modification to an aircraft and you do not certify it, then the operation of the aircraft is completely illegal. In Europe, it is very illegal. You are breaking a lot of laws.” He recalled one of Prince’s deputies saying that the aircraft would be used for surveillance operations in Africa and “no one there cares about certifications.” The former employee said he and other personnel working on the Thrush project were told that certification and licensing were the aircraft owner’s problem. The message was: “We do not have a risk as long as everyone keeps quiet.”

IN AUGUST 2014, a month after Nagl’s communication with Prince about establishing LASA, the company was officially open for business in Sofia — or rather, an entity named LASA filed papers with the Bulgarian government. Prince’s man in Bulgaria was Zachary Botchev, a U.S.-educated businessman whose professional biography states that he created the largest ceramic tile producer in the Balkans and started a jet airline company.

Botchev was an initial investor in Airborne and at one point controlled a third of the company’s stock. Botchev and Nagl had worked together before the founding of Airborne, according to the former employee. “The idea,” he said, was that Botchev would eventually “buy an airfield in Bulgaria and they would weaponize the planes there.”

Botchev did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In the memo Nagl sent to Prince outlining the plan for establishing LASA, he stated that Botchev would provide local contacts in Bulgaria for export licenses and “products.” He was also tasked with selecting LASA’s managing director. It was Botchev who arranged Prince’s tour of the weapons factory in Bulgaria.

Botchev is a convicted felon with a warrant out for his arrest in the U.S., according to court files. He was found guilty of felony burglary for stealing trade files from an employer in Texas while living in Dallas in the 1990s. Botchev violated the terms of his probation and fled the U.S.

According to LASA’s corporate filings with the Bulgarian government, its official address and phone number are the same as a Bulgarian aviation company, controlled by Botchev, that claims a “close partnership” with Airborne. On LASA’s sparse website, the contact email goes to a sales address for Botchev’s company. LASA’s founding documents and other forms filed with the Bulgarian government do not mention Prince, Airborne, FSG, or the Thrush aircraft. On paper, LASA was established by a consortium of Botchev-linked businesses that shared a handful of common addresses and phone numbers.

In an email, a lawyer for LASA wrote that the company was “in full compliance to all respective” laws and could not comment on “commercial arrangements.”

Botchev’s associates, who populate a murky network of Bulgarian companies, constitute 100 percent of LASA’s ownership and management. Among the addresses provided to the Bulgarian government by LASA and other Botchev-affiliated companies is a graffiti-covered building in Sofia and an office in a blighted strip mall. In its filings, LASA described its business as engineering in Bulgaria and abroad, obtaining licenses, technology brokering, domestic and foreign trade, “as well as any other commercial activity not prohibited by law.” There was no mention of weaponizing or modifying aircraft.

In September 2014, Durrant told FSG that some of the modifications and testing of the Thrush would need to be performed in Bulgaria, and that he had a deal for LASA to be the vendor. When FSG began vetting LASA, it found almost no publicly available information that would indicate LASA had ever done any business of any kind. The company did not appear to have previous contracts to modify aircraft, nor did it have a factory or staff to perform such work. According to its 2014 financial filings in Bulgaria, LASA paid less than $5,000 in salaries. One FSG officer involved with the review said LASA looked like a “paper company.” Prince and his deputies were “deliberately vague,” the officer said, in explaining the nature of the additional modifications and testing and why it was necessary to hire LASA.

KRISTOF NAGL INFORMED Airborne’s Thrush team in Austria that September that they would have to work substantial overtime to finish the modifications, according to the former employee and the other whistleblower. People who worked for FSG on the project with Prince described him as running the Thrush program as though FSG were not a public company with a CEO or shareholders, but rather his private enterprise. One described Prince directing Airborne to equip the Thrush with “more toys” without alerting anyone at FSG. “We were very busy with this aircraft,” the former Airborne employee said. “There was no time for thinking, just for work because we had to make a lot of modifications on these aircraft. We were working day and night, Saturday and Sunday nights.”

Prince’s team told Airborne’s engineers they wanted the ability to mount 23 mm Russian machine guns on both sides of the plane. Those guns create a powerful recoil that Airborne’s engineers struggled to offset with complex, additional modifications. They worked around the clock and replaced the airplane’s entire electrical system. As the deadline for the Thrush’s deployment grew near, Prince’s men faced a new challenge: They were unable to purchase pylons, the hardware necessary for mounting bombs and rockets on planes.

After failed attempts to acquire them through multiple countries, they conceded defeat. The plane would have to deploy without the pylons. But they instructed Airborne to begin building customized pylons capable of carrying both Russian and NATO munitions that could be added later. According to Prince’s original Thrush blueprint, the aim was to patent a new pylon. Creating such a device was a challenge, but Airborne’s engineers would eventually succeed in building it, according to the former Airborne employee. “It was really an impressive engineering accomplishment,” he said, pointing out that Western and Russian bombs required different mounts. “You could arm those aircraft with any weapons — NATO or Warsaw pact — with the pylons we built. It was kind of incredible.”

In October 2014, Prince finally prevailed in getting FSG to sign a contract to have one of the Thrush aircraft further modified and tested by LASA in Bulgaria, with work set to commence the following spring. “The boss wants this,” one of the people involved with the deal said he was told by Serge Durrant. The boss was Prince, though the exact nature of the additional modifications remained vague.

By that point, Airborne had already attached more than 1,500 pounds of equipment to one of the Thrush planes. The engineers were told that the plane needed to be sent to Africa right away — they had been led to believe the destination was Kenya. Under pressure from Airborne’s management and Prince’s men, the former Airborne employee said they hastily organized a 30-minute test flight in Austria. It was a disaster. “After all these modifications, we had only one test flight. We had no maintenance guy who signed off on it, no paper, just jumping in and flying,” he said. “We found 30 problems and we only had two days to fix the problems because they needed to ferry it to Africa.”

“We are not just doing something risky, we are doing something completely illegal,” said a former Airborne employee.

Despite a range of safety concerns from Airborne’s technicians, a few days later, the heavily modified Thrush took off for Africa. But the pilot had to abort the journey and make a premature landing because of a damaged fuel pump. After the plane was repaired, it was flown to Malta, where a plane spotter snapped a picture of the aircraft. The Thrush, according to its tail number, had been registered in the European mini-state of San Marino. The photo the plane spotter posted on a hobbyist website showed an armored aircraft with a distinctly military appearance and clearly visible drone-style surveillance gear. Eventually the aircraft was flown back to Austria, where Airborne workers would spend three weeks repairing it.

As staff worked on the aircraft one Saturday that November, according to the former Airborne employee, Nagl announced they were expecting a special visitor on-site. Nagl did not name the visitor, the former employee said, but described him as “something like an owner of our company” who was “very important.” The visitor, arriving in the black Mercedes SUV, was the mysterious Echo Papa. “We had no idea who this guy was. When he entered the hangar, I knew his face, but I couldn’t recall his name.” One of his colleagues told him the man was Erik Prince of Blackwater.

The former employee had read about Prince years earlier in the local paper, and he immediately Googled him at a computer in the hangar. “Erik Prince is the co-owner of our company?” he recalled thinking in disgust. That was the moment he realized that the Thrush he helped to modify was not intended for what he and his colleagues considered a legitimate client, “but had been built for Erik Prince stuff.”

The former employee said that learning of Prince’s ownership stake and role in the Thrush program led him to conclude, “We are not just doing something risky, we are doing something completely illegal.” Several Airborne employees would eventually quit over concerns about the project and Prince.

“A private armored plane? It’s for me completely unthinkable to do that.”

By the time Prince toured the hangar that Saturday, the first Thrush was almost completely ready for full weaponization. “Ninety-nine percent of the horrible work had already been done,” said the former Airborne employee. The plane had a retractable camera that could be lowered below the propeller for lasers to support the targeting of bombs and rockets, as well as a wireless data link system that could enable firing munitions remotely, similar to how an armed drone functions. “If I make a military aircraft and it’s delivered to the Swiss or to Germany, I have no problems with that,” the former employee said. “But a private armored plane? It’s for me completely unthinkable to do that.”

FOR SIX MONTHS, FSG’s executives had heard almost nothing about Project Mike, the Mali job to support a campaign against al Qaeda that Prince cited as the reason to expedite the purchase of the Thrush aircraft in early 2014. That did not surprise the executives. They knew, from his history, that Prince was always looking for the next deal and often merged his aspirational plans with concrete ones. “All these projects that Erik talked about where FSG would participate in them never happened,” said the source with direct knowledge of the company’s inner workings. “Erik was always running around talking about things that could happen, but none of them were happening.”

Then, in the summer of 2014, Prince brought a project to FSG that he believed could serve as a test run for the newly modified Thrush planes and help get the infant company on its feet. It involved South Sudan, where Prince had a long track record dating back to the Blackwater era. Prior to South Sudan’s independence in 2011, Blackwater was fined by the U.S. government for brokering defense services to southern Christian rebels without a State Department license. In 2006, ignoring explicit U.S. government instructions, Blackwater proposed a security contract with forces loyal to rebel leader Salva Kiir, a devout Christian and the future president of an independent South Sudan.

Nearly a decade later, when Prince brokered FSG’s deal, South Sudan was ruled by Kiir, whose trademark cowboy hat was a gift from President George W. Bush. In the summer of 2014, the young, oil-rich country was several months into a civil war that had reduced oil production by a third, and Kiir needed Prince’s support. But, as was the case with many of Prince’s proposals, the services he claimed he was offering stood in stark contrast to his real plan.

FSG, according to the proposal Prince presented to the company, would provide South Sudan’s Ministry of Petroleum and Mining with logistical services to help get the country’s oil fields and refineries back online. The 12-month contract, which company officials said was worth $150 million, called for FSG to operate overflight surveillance of several oil fields in South Sudan, build and supply camps next to the fields, and ferry workers and engineers by helicopter and plane.

Willingness to operate in a civil war reflected the new company’s appetite for risk; FSG recognized an opportunity for profit in parts of the African continent where competitors were afraid to venture. Prince, as chairman and founder of the company, saw himself as opening the door for business on the African “frontier.” But, according to multiple sources, the services FSG understood it would provide to South Sudan never included defense assistance. The company had not applied for, nor did it possess, the required defense export licenses from the U.S. government.

“This is not supporting the army,” Gregg Smith told Bloomberg News in December 2014. “The contract is clearly with the Ministry of Petroleum and Mining to support the oil field services and to make sure the production of oil keeps flowing.”

In Austria, Airborne had already drawn up blueprints detailing how different weapons configurations would affect the Thrush’s fuel consumption and flight times, according to a copy of the plans. The blueprints offered three configuration options: mixed-attack mission, ISR mission, and bomb mission. All of them involved arming the planes with a combination of machine guns, bombs, or rockets.

CONTRARY TO WHAT the Airborne employees had been told, the Thrush was not intended for a Kenyan operation. The plane was ultimately flown from Austria to Juba, South Sudan. In the meantime, San Marino aviation authorities had seen the picture of the Thrush posted by the plane spotter and canceled the aircraft’s registration. They informed FSG that the plane did not appear to be the civilian aircraft for which they had issued an operating certificate. Within a few weeks, the Thrush was transported from Juba to an air hangar in another East African nation, where it remains to this day.

By the end of 2014, the South Sudanese government had stopped paying FSG. When FSG executives inquired with the oil ministry, the South Sudanese were evasive, saying they would only speak directly to Prince. “They quit paying and they wouldn’t talk to anyone and they said, ‘You need to have Erik Prince come up here,’” recalled the source with direct knowledge of the company’s operations. “They wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t pay us, wouldn’t do anything.”

“They said, ‘You need to have Erik Prince come up here.’”

FSG dispatched personnel to Juba to determine why the contract was falling apart. Although the government wouldn’t tell FSG what the problem was, one South Sudanese official told an FSG employee in the country that Prince had promised to provide the government with attack aircraft. The South Sudanese, according to a person with knowledge of the encounter, were initially confused, and then angry, when the militarized planes never arrived.

“[The South Sudanese] thought they were buying attack aircraft that could go after the rebels in a very serious manner,” said the source knowledgable about FSG’s internal affairs. “Erik had promised things to these guys, capabilities that we didn’t have and that we were never going to have.”

Prince had promised the South Sudan government a foreign mercenary force if it hired FSG to provide logistics and aerial surveillance. Prince did not inform FSG executives of this side deal, claiming he had offered only “monitoring the oil fields, monitoring any activity in and around them, to give the government line of sight so they could keep the oil flowing,” according to the source familiar with internal FSG matters.

“Erik promised them ISR, planes that drop bombs, attack helicopters, medical evacuation capabilities, a strike team, and training for 4,000 soldiers,” said the second person with knowledge of the plan. “The contract was for logistical support and camp building, things to support the oil fields. [Prince] verbally promised the rest.”

In the meantime, one of Prince’s lieutenants, a retired South African special forces officer, began building a proposal for Prince that could be pitched to President Kiir. Code-named Project Iron Fist, the proposal stated that Prince and his colleagues had been “invited” by South Sudan to “design a proposal” for “oil field security training, security intervention and protection support services to the government of South Sudan.”

Prince’s associates explicitly plotted a business structure for the contract that would expose no traceable connection to them, according to a document reviewed by The Intercept. They believed this would enable them to hide violations of U.S. and international defense regulations.

At the time the plan was being prepared, the United Nations Security Council was considering a set of sanctions and an arms embargo against Salva Kiir and his political rival’s armed faction.

Prince’s $300 million proposal to aid Kiir’s forces explicitly called for ground and air assaults, initially to be conducted by a 341-person foreign combat unit. Prince’s forces would conduct “deliberate attacks, raids, [and] ambushes” against “rebel objectives,” to be followed by “continuous medium to high intensity rapid intervention,” which would include “search [and] destroy missions.” Various drafts of the proposal, obtained by The Intercept, reveal meticulous planning, down to the exact number of munitions and specific hand-held radios that would be purchased. Iron Fist called for the acquisition of at least 600 bombs, 3,500 rockets, 7,500 mortars, and more than 30 million rounds of ammunition.

Among the aircraft offered in the plan were two weaponized and surveillance-equipped Thrush planes.

Iron Fist represents — more than any other known document — Erik Prince’s vision of contemporary warfare on the African continent, where the mere presence of an armed crop duster offers an opportunity to defeat a rebellion, terror group, or insurgency. While the proposal’s overt focus was on protecting South Sudan’s oil industry, two people with direct knowledge of Prince’s efforts said his actual intent was to provide a foreign force, loyal to President Kiir, to be used in a civil war fought largely on ethnic and religious lines. Iron Fist promised that the rebels would be “neutralized.” According to one of the people with knowledge of the project, Prince and his team then planned to establish and train a force to defend President Kiir’s agenda. They would also offer “spin-offs” of the original foreign mercenary unit, according to the Iron Fist proposal.

After FSG’s logistics contract fell apart and the government halted its payments to the company, Prince traveled alone to South Sudan several times in early 2015 in an effort to salvage the deal. FSG officials said that Prince never briefed the company on his meetings and they were never given a formal explanation of what they had failed to provide the South Sudanese government. “We never got paid and I made the decision to shut it down,” said Smith.

IN MARCH 2015, Prince traveled to a Central Asian nation where he was pursuing a contract. He floated the idea of using the Thrush for that job, a suggestion shot down by FSG executives concerned about possible violations of U.S. defense export regulations.

By then, the company had already begun exploring the sale of the two Thrush aircraft. After the failure in South Sudan, FSG’s leadership had decided that providing surveillance aircraft would not be part of the company’s future business model. In an effort to assess the value of the planes, in April 2015, FSG began reviewing the costs of the modifications made to its aircraft. In June, Prince told FSG that Airborne was interested in purchasing the aircraft.

From the perspective of FSG’s leadership, the two Thrush aircraft — one stuck in East Africa, the other housed in Airborne’s hangar in Austria — were becoming a nuisance and they wanted to get them off the company’s books. FSG had a preliminary inspection performed on the plane in Africa in an effort to determine its value. Following that inspection, FSG executives were informed that it had been modified beyond the surveillance capabilities they had been briefed on. “We said, ‘Holy crap, maybe we don’t know what we have.’ We never laid eyes on these aircraft physically,” said the source with direct knowledge of FSG’s operations. “Nobody had, except Erik and Serge and the guys” who did the modifications, he added.

“Holy crap, maybe we don’t know what we have.”

When the inspectors reported their findings to FSG, the company understood it had a potentially serious problem with U.S. defense export regulations. The first Thrush, according to the inspection, had hard points on the wing, an armored cockpit, nose armor, ballistic glass, night-vision capabilities, and other paramilitary enhancements.

Afraid that FSG could be in violation of U.S. government regulations, the company turned to legal counsel. They were advised that, to be cautious, FSG should view the plane as a “foreign defense article” — a flying weapon that the company had no license to sell. The lawyers also concluded that even if FSG rightfully owned the modified plane, any U.S. citizen attempting to broker its sale or use by a foreign power could be violating U.S. law. Their legal opinion was that there was a “material risk” that the government would determine that Prince and other FSG staff had engaged in unauthorized brokering. The lawyers were so concerned that they advised the company to consider self-reporting the issue to the government.

FSG began an internal review. Its auditors soon discovered a series of orders and other arrangements that Prince and Durrant had pushed through without fully informing the company of their true purpose. By then, Prince was pressuring FSG to sell the Thrush planes to LASA in Bulgaria. LASA, in turn, would sell them to Prince’s buyer in Central Asia. Documents show Prince wanted to sell the two planes for $16 million. Smith said he became concerned that selling the planes to a company they could find almost no information about in a country renowned for arms trafficking could end badly. Behind the scenes, Prince attempted to pressure an FSG officer reviewing the potential deal to rubber stamp it. He was rebuffed.

Despite FSG’s stated desire to sell the aircraft, Prince, Airborne, and LASA forged ahead with their efforts to complete the weaponization of the second Thrush. Earlier in 2015, Airborne had sent two employees to Ukraine and Bulgaria to visit weapons manufacturers in an effort to assess the hardware that would be necessary to finish the job, according to the former Airborne employee. The Thrush at Airborne’s hangar in Austria, which had been modified in an almost identical manner to the one stranded in Africa, was flown to Bulgaria. “All of the modifications were done in Austria except the mounting of the pylons, which was intended to be done in Bulgaria,” the former employee said.

Behind the scenes, Prince’s men were panicking.

In September 2015, FSG’s board was notified that its plane grounded in East Africa had been modified for weapons and would likely be considered a foreign defense article in the eyes of the U.S. government. A second inspection was ordered, this time to assess the FSG aircraft in Bulgaria. When Prince’s inner circle caught wind of the imminent inspection, they engaged in a conspiracy to thwart the investigators’ efforts and to conceal the true extent of the modifications. According to two inside sources, Prince and his deputies hid the fact that they were preparing the Thrush to be weaponized, with one charging they had “deliberately concealed” the effort.

Behind the scenes, Prince’s men were panicking. Matthews, the Thrush pilot, privately expressed concerns to a colleague that the company’s CEO didn’t seem to understand what was going on, and asked whether the company understood the extent of the modifications. He advocated postponing the inspection of the plane in Bulgaria so they could surreptitiously remove the military equipment. At the time they learned of the inspection, the Thrush had already been equipped for weapons testing. The plane had been retrofitted to a state where “in one week you could have turned this aircraft into a weaponized plane,” according to the former Airborne employee. In advance of the inspection, one of Prince’s deputies described taping over a weapons control panel that had been installed in the cockpit.

When FSG’s inspectors arrived in Bulgaria in late September to examine the Thrush, according to two sources briefed on the report, they found armor on the plane’s frame and nose, laser-targeting equipment, ballistic glass, and an anti-explosive mechanism built in to the fuel tank. They also discovered modifications inside the cockpit for controlling weapons systems and hardware for arming the aircraft with bombs, rockets, and machine guns. The inspectors noted that the Bulgarian facility where the modifications had allegedly taken place did not appear to have the equipment or personnel capable of doing the work.

The discovery sparked an internal battle within FSG. Senior executives accused Prince of placing the company’s executives and officers — including a retired four-star admiral — in legal jeopardy with the U.S. government, with one senior executive alleging that Prince ran “a secret program deep within our organization.”

Smith ordered a full review of the company’s internal communications and computer network to document how and why the planes had been modified, according to three people with direct knowledge of the events. FSG officials found records, including invoices that did not match signed contracts, indicating that Prince and Durrant had secretly authorized approximately $2 million in additional modifications. “There was a concerted effort to downplay the modifications. There’s a difference between modification and weaponization,” said an FSG insider. “Did Gregg Smith know they were being modified? Of course he did. Whether they were weaponized is a different question. That was deliberately kept from senior management.”

LAST OCTOBER, FRONTIER Services Group held its biannual board meeting in Hong Kong. Gregg Smith delivered the results of the internal investigation, which left little doubt that Prince, FSG’s chairman and founder, had used his position in the company to pay for and build the prototype for a private air force.

Prince already knew what he’d face at the meeting. FSG executives had forced his close lieutenant Serge Durrant into an administrative leave based on evidence Durrant had helped direct the unauthorized effort to weaponize the Thrush and then conceal it from the company’s leadership. Prince formally disclosed his partial ownership of Airborne but denied he had any connection to LASA Engineering. The board also learned from Prince for the first time that another of his companies had been paid for construction equipment used to build one of the oil field camps in South Sudan. In addition, Prince disclosed four other entities that he owned or controlled, all of which had received payments from FSG for services.

Smith and the board voted to shut down the specialty aviation division entirely and fired Durrant, Matthews, and several other Prince hires. In all, more than 20 employees were pushed out. The board formally decided to write off the $8 million expenditure of the two Thrush crop dusters and their modifications. The planes would either have the militarized components uninstalled, in an effort to sell them, or the aircraft would be sold for scrap.

The board stripped Prince of any authority over the day-to-day operations of the company.

The board also stripped Prince of any authority over the day-to-day operations of the company. “The Company reiterates its policy not to acquire or modify controlled items” under U.S. defense export regulations, stated a board resolution reviewed by The Intercept. It added that FSG would not “engage in activities that require” U.S. government licenses.

FSG’s growth projections for 2016 were strong, and the company’s executives believed they had successfully put their chairman’s trouble behind them. A final resolution reiterated that FSG’s business was in transportation and logistics — and that any business outside that description required approval from a “high risk” committee headed by FSG’s most prominent board member, retired four-star Adm. William Fallon.

But Prince persisted with unsanctioned activities, including a secret meeting with Chinese intelligence in Beijing and the establishment of a bank account at Bank of China in Macau. By January 2016, executives at FSG had grown increasingly alarmed, and Prince’s efforts in China had become part of an investigation by the U.S. government into his defense-brokering activities. Victoria Toensing, one of Prince’s lawyers, told The Intercept that her client’s Chinese bank account complied with U.S. regulations.

In February, according to multiple people with direct knowledge of the events, FSG representatives traveled to Washington to meet with officials from the Department of Justice. At the meeting, they disclosed evidence pertaining to the modifications of the Thrush aircraft and the attempt to broker a sale in Central Asia, as well as Prince’s meetings in China. Among the officials with whom FSG representatives met were the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division and a senior prosecutor for export control in its counterespionage section.

None of this seems to have slowed the modified Thrush program. Airborne’s prized American co-owner had indicated that there was great interest from buyers in the Middle East and Africa for the modified Thrush, according to a source with direct knowledge of Airborne’s internal meetings. The future production of 100 to 150 of the planes was mentioned.

In February, Airborne showcased the customized planes at a defense trade show in Singapore. The company also posted on its website an essay written from the perspective of the Thrush aircraft. “I’m characterized by a rugged design in combination with long-range endurance, this makes me reliable and robust during challenging times,” read the essay. “I come along with a steeled body, so I am used to carrying heavy loads without effort. I am able to work under pressure and I stand my ground when others fly at me. All in all I am the perfect workhorse anywhere and in any situation.” A note after the essay referred to the Thrush’s “tank” armor and “ruggedized” frame. “Due to its incredibly robust, durable and reliable design features the Thrush aircraft is ready to use when others reach their limit,” said Wolfgang Grumeth, Airborne’s CEO. On its website, Airborne began actively promoting the sale of modified Thrush aircraft. It featured a photo of one of FSG’s modified planes.

An Austrian lawmaker, who has investigated arms trafficking for years, is in the preliminary stages of what he believes will become a criminal investigation into Prince and Airborne Technologies. Peter Pilz, a member of the Austrian Parliament, says he plans to present a public prosecutor with documentary evidence on the Thrush modifications and the plans to weaponize the aircraft. “We are definitely sure that it is against our laws of neutrality,” Pilz told The Intercept. He said the investigation would also examine possible violations of Austrian defense export regulations. “Prince and all the others are not guilty until there’s been a case and a trial. But this case is strong enough. It’s going to be a criminal case definitely.” Citing Blackwater’s history in Iraq and the “soldier of fortune business,” Pilz said, “It is unacceptable for us to have people like Erik Prince in Austria. We have to make that very clear.”

Airborne’s hangar is a stone’s throw from what was once the Wiener Neustadt aircraft factory, which the Nazis used to manufacture warplanes during World War II. Allied bombers repeatedly targeted the factory and ultimately reduced the entire city of Wiener Neustadt to rubble. “The crucial thing is that a company in Wiener Neustadt is once again building fighter airplanes, while combat airplanes were once the reason why this city was completely destroyed,” said the former Airborne employee. This fact, according to Pilz, will not be lost on the city’s residents. “I think that when people in Wiener Neustadt are informed [about] what’s going on in the area of their city, it will be a major political scandal,” Pilz said.

Airborne does not appear concerned. In early March, its executives broke ground on a new facility at Wiener Neustadt airport in Austria. The local mayor was on hand to celebrate, along with Nagl and Grumeth. An Airborne press release announced that the company had recently won “a number of significant orders from international Police and Military forces.” The company predicted unprecedented growth and a substantial expansion of its workforce. Among the structures it intends to build by September is a large hangar to house sensitive projects.

A recent LASA business proposal delivered to a foreign government, reviewed by The Intercept, offered to provide heavily modified, weapons-readied Thrush aircraft. It advertised the capability to equip the planes with missiles, bombs, and machine guns, though it noted that the weapons were not included as part of the specific package. The sales pitch contained multiple photos of a modified Thrush in flight. Its tail number matched the FSG plane grounded in East Africa.

IN THE WEEKS preceding FSG’s board meeting in March in Hong Kong, a civil war was raging within the company. On one side stood Smith and Adm. Fallon, on the other, Erik Prince, backed by the board members representing the Chinese government’s stake in the company. As the U.S. leadership of FSG met with government officials and others, several of them had been encouraged to sever business ties with Prince. The government investigation was expanding, they were told, and it could affect FSG’s business.

From the perspective of Smith’s faction, the board meeting in Hong Kong would decide whether the company they had built could be salvaged. In their view, FSG was never intended to venture into the security business. A publicly traded company run by the best-known American mercenary, in their estimation, would not be able to obtain the licenses and permissions from the U.S. government necessary to operate in the private military industry servicing foreign governments. In Hong Kong, there would be a moment of truth: Either Prince would declare a new direction for the company, or Smith and the other Americans Prince had recruited three years earlier would solidify the original FSG mission.

In the last days of March, the board gathered at FSG’s offices on the 39th floor of an office building overlooking Kowloon Bay in Hong Kong. FSG’s Chinese board members wasted no time in declaring their allegiance to Prince and a new vision for the company. Prince’s experience and reputation, they said, would assist the company in offering security and training services as well as anti-terrorism consulting for Chinese businesses, according to a former U.S. intelligence official briefed after the meeting.

FSG’s Chinese board members wasted no time in declaring their allegiance to Prince.

The board didn’t even need to vote. Prince, the Chinese government investors, and his allies on the board controlled enough of the company to call the shots. FSG, the Americans were told, had been created to support China’s global economic plan. Logistics and aviation, it seemed, had been a sideshow. The decision was a complete rebuke of the U.S. leadership of FSG, specifically Smith and Adm. Fallon.

Prince had won the battle.

But, with an expanding U.S. government investigation into his activities and a business landscape riddled with burned bridges, a significant question continues to haunt Prince: Will he win the war?

“Brilliant idea — logistics in Africa — Prince has been talking about that for ten years,” said the former U.S. intelligence official, who has worked extensively with Prince. “He could have made money with FSG with his eyes shut. Everybody agrees and he didn’t do it. Why? Because it was going to be boring.”

Update: April 11, 2016
This article has been updated with an additional comment from Airborne’s attorney.

Additional Research: Janis Kreilis.
Top photo: Portrait of Erik Prince by Mark Peckmezian. Collage: The Intercept.

Related:
Erik Prince in the Hot Seat

The post Inside Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force appeared first on The Intercept.

Our next issue, “Between the Risings,” is out this month. To celebrate its release, international subscriptions are $25 off.

Early each New Year’s Day I head for Lake Michigan with a handful of friends. We look for a quiet stretch of what, only six months earlier, was warm Chicago beach. Then we trudge through knee-deep snow in bathing suits and boots, fighting wind gusts and hangovers. Sooner or later, we arrive where the snowpack meets the shore and boot through a thick crust of lake ice, yelling and swearing as we dive into near-freezing water.

It took me a while to begin to understand why I do this every year, or for that matter why for the last decade since I left the military I’ve continued to inflict other types of pain on myself with such unnerving regularity. Most days, for instance, I lift weights at the gym to the point of crippling exhaustion. On summer nights, I sometimes swim out alone as far as I can through mats of hairy algae into the black water of Lake Michigan in search of what I can only describe as a feeling of falling.

A few years ago, I walked across the United States with fifty pounds on my back for the Pat Tillman Foundation in an obsessive attempt to rid myself of “my” war. On the weekends, I clean my house similarly obsessively. And it’s true, sometimes I drink too much.

In part, it seems, I’ve been in search of creative ways to frighten myself, apparently to relive the moments in the military I said I never wanted to go through again — or so a psychiatrist told me anyway. According to that doctor (and often I think I’d be the last to know), I’m desperately trying to recreate adrenalizing moments like the one when, as an Army Ranger, I jumped out of an airplane at night into an area I had never before seen, not sure if I was going to be shot at as I hit the ground. Or I’m trying to recreate the energy I felt leaping from a Blackhawk helicopter, night vision goggles on, and storming my way into some nameless Afghan family’s home, where I would proceed to throw a sandbag over someone’s head and lead him off to an American-controlled, Guantánamo-like prison in his own country.

This doctor says it’s common enough for my unconscious to want to relive the feeling of learning that my friend had just been blown up by a roadside bomb while on patrol at two in the morning, a time most normal people are sleeping. Somehow, at the oddest hours, my mind considers it perfectly appropriate to replay the times when rockets landed near my tent at night in a remote valley in Afghanistan. Or when I was arrested by the military after going AWOL as one of the first Army Rangers to try to say no to participation in George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror.

I’m aware now, as I wasn’t some years back, that my post-war urge for limits-testing is not atypical of the home-front experiences of many who went to war in Afghanistan or Iraq in these years and, for some of them, judging by the soaring suicide rates among Global War on Terror vets, the urge has proven so much more extreme than mine.

But more than a decade after leaving the army as a conscientious objector, I can at least finally own up to and testify to the eeriness of what we all brought home from America’s twenty-first-century wars, even those of us who weren’t physically maimed or torn up by them.

And here’s the good news at a purely personal level: the older I get the less I’m inclined towards such acts of masochism, of self-inflicted pain. Part of the change undoubtedly involves age — I hesitate to use the word “maturity” yet — but there’s another reason, too. I found a far better place to begin to put all that stored up, jumpy energy.

I began speaking to high school students heavily propagandized by the US military on the charms, delights, and positives of war, American-style, about my own experiences and that, in turn, has been changing my life. I’d like to tell you about it.

Filling in the Blanks

The first time I went to speak to high school students about my life with the Rangers in Afghanistan, I was surprised to realize that the same nervous energy I felt before jumping into Lake Michigan or lacing up my gym shoes for a bone-shaking workout was coursing through my body. But here was the strangest thing: when I had said my piece (or perhaps I really mean “my peace”) with as much honesty as I could muster, I felt the very sense of calmness and resolution that I’d been striving for with my other rituals and could never quite hang onto — and it stayed with me for days.

That first time, I was one of the few white people in a deteriorating Chicago public high school on the far south side of the city. A teacher is escorting me down multiple broad, shabby hallways to the classroom where I was to speak. We pass a room decorated with a total of eight American flags, four posted on each side of its door. “The recruiting office,” the teacher says, gesturing toward it, and then asks, “Do they have recruiting offices in the suburban schools you talk to?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t spoken to any on this topic yet,” I reply. “They certainly didn’t have an obvious one at the public high school I went to, but I do know that there are ten thousand recruiters across the country working with a $700 million-a-year advertising budget. And I think you’re more likely to see the recruiters in schools where kids have less options after graduation.”

At that moment, we arrive at the appointed classroom and I’m greeted warmly by the social studies teacher who invited me. Photos of Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr, Malcom X, and other revolutionary black leaders hang neatly on a wall. He first heard about my desire to talk to students about my wartime experiences through Veterans for Peace, an organization I belong to.

“There is no counter-narrative to what the kids are being taught by the instructors in Junior ROTC, as far as I can tell,” he says, obviously bothered, as we wait for the students to arrive. “It would be great if you could provide more of a complete picture to these kids.” He then went on to describe the frustration he felt with a Chicago school system in which schools in the poorest neighborhoods in the city were being shut down at a record pace, and yet, somehow, his school district always had the money to supplement the Pentagon’s funding of the JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training) program.

The kids are just beginning to filter in, laughing and acting like the teenagers they are. I’m not encouraged.

“Okay, everyone, settle down, we have a guest speaker today,” the teacher says. He oozes confidence of a sort I only wish I possessed. The volume in the room dies down to something approaching a hush. They clearly respect him. I only hope a little of that will spill over in my direction.

I hesitate a moment and then start, and here’s a little report from memory on at least part of what I said and what happened:

“Thanks,” I begin, “for having me in today. My name is Rory Fanning and I’m here to tell you why I joined the military. I’ll also talk about what I saw while I was in that military, and why I left before my contract was up.” The silence in the classroom stretches out, which encourages me and I plunge on.

“I signed up for the Army Rangers to have my student loans paid for and to do my part to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11 . . . My training was sometimes difficult and usually boring . . . A lot of food and sleep deprivation. Mostly, I think my chain of command was training me in how to say yes to their orders. The military and critical thinking don’t mix too well . . . ”

As I talk on about the almost indescribable poverty and desperation I witnessed in Afghanistan, a country that has known nothing but occupation and civil war for decades and that, before I arrived, I knew less than nothing about, I could feel my nervousness abating. “The buildings in Kabul,” I was telling them, “have gaping holes in them and broken-down Russian tanks and jets litter the countryside.”

I can hardly restrain my amazement. The kids are still with me.

I’m now explaining how the US military handed out thousands of dollars to anyone willing to identify alleged members of the Taliban and how we would raid houses based on this information. “I later came to find out that this intelligence, if you could call it that, was rooted in a kind of desperation.”

I explain why an Afghan in abject poverty, looking for ways to support his family, might be ready to finger almost anyone in return for access to the deep wells of cash the US military could call on. In a world where factories are few, and office jobs scarce indeed, people will do anything to survive. They have to.

I point out the almost unbearable alien quality of Afghan life to American military officials. Few spoke a local language. No one I ever ran into knew anything about the culture of the people we were trying to bribe. Too often we broke down doors and snatched Afghans from their homes not because of their ties with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but because a neighbor had a grudge against them.

“Most of the people we targeted had no connection to the Taliban at all. Some even pledged allegiance to the US occupation, but that didn’t matter.” They still ended up with hoods over their heads and in some godforsaken prison.

By now, I can tell that the kids are truly paying attention, so I let it all out. “The Taliban had surrendered a few months before I arrived in Afghanistan in late 2002, but that wasn’t good enough for our politicians back home and the generals giving the orders. Our job was to draw people back into the fight.”

Two or three students let out genuine soft gasps as I describe how my company of Rangers occupied a village school and our commander cancelled classes there indefinitely because it made an excellent staging point for the troops — and there wasn’t much a village headmaster in rural Afghanistan could say to dissuade history’s most technologically advanced and powerful military from doing just what it wanted to.

“I remember,” I tell them, “watching two fighting-age men walk by the school we were occupying. One of them didn’t show an acceptable level of deference to my first sergeant, so we grabbed them. We threw the overly confident guy in one room and his friend in another, and the guy who didn’t smile at us properly heard a gunshot and thought, just as he was meant to, that we had just killed his friend for not telling us what we wanted to hear and that he might be next.”

“That’s like torture,” one kid half-whispers.

I then talk about why I’m more proud of leaving the military than of anything I did while in it.

I signed up to prevent another 9/11, but my two tours in Afghanistan made me realize that I was making the world less safe. We know now that a majority of the million or so people who have been killed since 9/11 have been innocent civilians, people with no stake in the game and no reason to fight until, often enough, the US military baited them into it by killing or injuring a family member who more often than not was an innocent bystander.

“Did you know,” I continue, quoting a statistic cited from University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape, “that from 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired. Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against US and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries. I didn’t want to be part of this so I left.”

Full Disclosure

Chicago-area high school students aren’t used to hearing such talk. The public school system here has the largest number of Junior ROTC students — nearly ten thousand of them, 45 percent African American and 50 percent Latino — of any school district in the country. And maybe so many of these kids are attentive exactly because the last thing JROTC instructors are likely to be discussing is the realities of war, including, for instance, the staggering number of homeless Iraq and Afghanistan veterans unable to assimilate back into society after their experience overseas.

When I urge the students to join me in a conversation about war and their lives, I hear stories about older siblings deluged by telemarketer-style calls from recruiters. “It’s so annoying,” one says. “My brother doesn’t even know how the recruiter got his information.”

“Recruiters have contact information for every junior and senior in this school,” I say. “And that’s the law. The No Child Left Behind act, signed soon after 9/11, insists that your school hand over your information to the Department of Defense if it wants to receive federal funds.”

Soon enough, it becomes clear that these students have very little context for their encounters with the US military and its promises of an uplifting future. They know next to nothing, for instance, about our recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan, or our permanent state of war in the Greater Middle East and increasingly in Africa.

When I ask why so many of them signed up for the JROTC program, they talk about “leadership” opportunities and “structure” for their lives. They are focused, as I was, on having college paid for or “seeing the world.” Some say they are in JROTC because they didn’t want to take gym class. One offers this honest assessment: “I don’t know, I just am. I haven’t given it much thought.”

As I grill them, so they grill me. “What does your family think about your leaving the military?” one asks.

“Well,” I respond, “we don’t talk about it too much. I come from a very pro-military family and they prefer not to think of what we are doing overseas as wrong. I think this is why it took me so long to speak honestly in public about my time in the military.”

“Did other factors weigh on your decision to talk openly about your military experience, or was it just fear of your family’s response?” an astute student asks.

And I answer as honestly as I can:

Even though, as far as I know, I did something no one in the Rangers had yet done in the post–9/11 era — the psychological and physical vetting process for admission to the Ranger Regiment makes the likelihood of a Ranger questioning the mission and leaving the unit early unlikely — I was intimidated. I shouldn’t have been, but my chain of command had me leaving the military looking over my shoulder. They made it seem as if they could drag me off to jail or send me back into the military to be a bullet stopper in the big Army at any time if I ever talked about my service in the Rangers. I did after all, like all Rangers, have a secret security clearance.

Heads shake. “The military and paranoia go hand in hand. So I kept quiet,” I tell the kids. “I also started reading books like Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living, a reporter’s brilliant story of our invasion of Afghanistan as told from the perspective of actual Afghans. And I began meeting veterans who had experiences similar to mine and were speaking out. This helped boost my confidence.”

“Is the military like Call of Duty?” one of the students asks, referring to a popular single-shooter video game.

“I’ve never played,” I respond. “Does it include kids who scream when their mothers and fathers are killed? Do a lot of civilians die?”

“Not really,” he says uncomfortably.

“Well, then it’s not realistic. Besides, you can turn off a video game. You can’t turn off war.”

A quiet settles over the room that even a lame joke of mine can’t break. Finally, after a silence, one of the kids suddenly says, “I’ve never heard anything like this before.”

What I feel is the other side of that response. That first experience of mine talking to America’s future cannon fodder confirms my assumption that, not surprisingly, the recruiters in our schools aren’t telling the young anything that might make them think twice about the glories of military life.

I leave that school with an incredible sense of calm, something I haven’t felt since my time began in Afghanistan. I tell myself I want to speak to classrooms at least once a week. I realize that it took me ten years, even while writing a book on the subject, to build up the courage to talk openly about my years in the military.

If only I had begun engaging these kids earlier instead of punishing myself for the experience George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cohorts put me through. Suddenly, some of my resident paranoia seems to melt away, and the residual guilt I still felt for leaving the Rangers early and in protest — the chain of command left me believing that there was nothing more cowardly than “deserting” your Ranger buddies — seems to evaporate, too.

My thought now is full disclosure going forward. If a teenager is going to sign up to kill and die for a cause or even the promise of a better life, then the least he or she should know is the good, the bad, and the ugly about the job. I had no illusions that plenty of kids — maybe most of them, maybe all of them — wouldn’t sign up anyway, regardless of what I said. But I swear to myself: no moralism, no regrets, no judgments. That’s my credo now. Just the facts as I see them.

A New Mission

I am on an operation and that feels strangely familiar. Think of it as a different way to be a Ranger in a world that will never, it seems, be truly postwar. But as with all things in one’s mind: easier said than done. The world, it turns out, is in no rush to welcome me on my new mission.

I start making calls. I create a website to advertise my talk. I send out word to teacher friends that I’m available to speak in their schools. I’m prepared for my schedule to fill up within weeks, but a month passes and no one calls. The phone just doesn’t ring. I grow increasingly frustrated.

Fortunately, a friend tells me about a grant sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union and designed to expose kids to real world educational experiences they may not hear about in school. I apply, promising to speak to twelve of the forty-six schools in Chicago with JROTC programs during the 2015–2016 school year. The grant comes through in September and better yet it promises that each student I talk to will also get a free copy of my book, Worth Fighting For.

I don’t for a second doubt that this will ensure my presence in front of classrooms of kids. I have nine long months to arrange meetings with only twelve schools. I decide that I’ll even throw in some extra schools as a bonus. I create a Facebook page so that teachers and principals can learn about my talk and book me directly. Notices of both my website and that page are placed in teacher newsletters and I highlight the Chicago Teachers Union endorsement in them. I’m thinking: slam dunk! I even advertise on message boards, spend money on targeted ads on Facebook, and again reach out to all my teacher friends.

It’s now April, seven months into the school year, and only two teachers have taken me up on the offer to speak. “He was comfortable and engaging with the students and in the students’ reflections the following day he was someone that the students clearly enjoyed talking with. I will definitely ask him to come back to speak to my classes every year,” wrote Dave Stieber, one of those teachers.

It’s finally starting to dawn on me, however. In our world, life is scary and I’m not the only one heading for Lake Michigan on cold winter mornings or gloomy nights. Teachers out there in the public schools are anxious, too. It’s dark days for them. They are under attack and busy fighting back against school privatization, closures, and political assaults on their pensions. The popular JROTC program is a cash cow for their schools and they are discouraged from further rocking a boat already in choppy waters.

You’ll bring too much “tension” to our school, one teacher tells me with regret. “Most of my kids need the military if they plan on going to college,” I hear from another who says he can’t invite me to his school anyway. But most of my requests simply go out into the void unanswered. Or promises to invite me go unfulfilled. Who, after all, wants to make waves or extracurricular trouble when teachers are already under fierce attack from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his unelected school board?

I understand and yet, in a world without a draft, JROTC’s school-to-military pipeline is a lifeline for Washington’s permanent war across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa. Its unending conflicts are only possible because kids like those I’ve talked to in the few classrooms I’ve visited continue to volunteer. The politicians and the school boards, time and again, claim their school systems are broke. No money for books, teacher’s salaries and pensions, healthy lunches, etc.

And yet in 2015 the US government spent $598 billion on the military, more than half of its total discretionary budget, and nearly ten times what it spent on education. In 2015, we also learned that the Pentagon continues to pour what, it is estimated, will in the end be $1.4 trillion into a fleet of fighter planes that may never work as advertised. Imagine the school system we would have in this country if teachers were compensated as well as weapons contractors. Confronting the attacks on education in the US should also mean, in part, trying to interrupt that school-to-military pipeline in places like Chicago. It’s hard to fight endless trillion-dollar wars if kids aren’t enlisting.

Just the other day I spoke at a college in Peoria, three hours south of Chicago. “My brother hasn’t left the house since returning home from Iraq,” one of the students told me with tears in her eyes. “What you said helped me understand his situation better. I might have more to say to him now.”

It was the sort of comment that reminded me that there is an audience for what I have to say. I just need to figure out how to get past the gatekeepers. Believe me, I’ll continue to write about, pester, and advertise my willingness to talk to soon-to-be-military-age kids in Chicago. I’m not giving up, because speaking honestly about my experiences is now my therapy. At the end of the day, I need those students as much as I think they need me.

Originally published on TomDispatch.

Pakistani organisation brings affordable healthcare to remote areas, and helps female doctors balance career and family.

Traveling through India in the summer of 1998, I arrived with some friends at Varanasi’s...

The Worst Things For Sale is Drew's blog. It updates every day. Subscribe to the Worst Things For Sale RSS!

Glass is a 1958 non-verbal documentary short by Bert Haanstra that contrasts glassblowing techniques used inside the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory with more modern industrial machines. The first half shows several men at work using traditional glassblowing to create ornate objects like vases and mugs set against jazz music, while the second part shifts abruptly into the mechanized world of industrial glass production set to a whimsical score of more synthesized music. Also, there’s a ton of great smoking! It’s a really unusual little film that went on to pick up an Oscar for Documentary Short Subject in 1959.

Glass was made available by Aeon as part of their wonderfully curated selection of videos on art, design, culture, and news topics. (via Vimeo)

by Ana Sofia Knauf

In today's Things That Make Me Sick news: The American College of Pediatricians – a national anti-LGBT, anti-choice, anti-sex organization – released a statement yesterday, saying that it is harmful to accept transgender children's identities.

From ThinkProgress:

“The American College of Pediatricians urges educators and legislators to reject all policies that condition children to accept as normal a life of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex,” the statement reads. “Facts – not ideology – determine reality.” The “facts” that follow actually reflect a social conservative ideology that rejects the very reality of what transgender children experience.

For example, the statement not-so-subtly concludes that all transgender people must be mentally ill. “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking,” the statement reads. “When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.”

Let's be clear: "The ACP is not a legitimate medical organization; its name is designed to be mistaken for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is a national organization with some 60,000 members. The ACP, by contrast, is estimated to have no more than 200 members, and it has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBT positions," ThinkProgress reports. (Emphasis mine.)

And the group's rhetoric is dangerous:

Plenty of conservative publications have already promoted [the ACP's claim], taking it at face value to claim that the “transgender agenda” constitutes “child abuse.” [Trans activist Brinn] Tannehill notes, “I’m also already hearing from parents of transgender children that relatives and people hostile to them in the community are using this position statement to threaten to report them to child protective services and take their children away.”

Conservative advocacy groups are also quickly embracing the statement. For example, the group Stop Common Core in Michigan sent out an alert on Monday using the ACP’s position to rally opposition to guidelines drafted by the Michigan Department of Education that would protect transgender students. The Illinois Family Institute and Wisconsin Family Action (WFA) have also promoted the policy statement. WFA president Julaine Appling praised the statement as coming from a “medical group.”

This is horrifying – and patently untrue.

(Bolding because it's important.)

The statement not-so-subtly concludes that all transgender people must be mentally ill. “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking,” the statement reads. “When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such.”

The 36,000-member American Psychiatric Association, which defines mental illnesses through its Diagnostics and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), says the exact opposite, explaining, “It is important to note that gender nonconformity is not in itself a mental disorder.” It is only distress associated with such an identity that should be treated — and treated with affirmation. ...

A recent study found that trans kids whose parents embrace their identities are as happy and healthy as their peers.

Violence against transgender people in the United States was at a record high in 2015 with 21 homicides reported. False reports like those of the ACP only help perpetuate this kind of violence.

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We have another example of copyright and trademark laws have boldly going with no logic has gone before. The latest lawsuit is by two movie studios which contend that a crowdfunded Star Trek fan film has violated copyright law by using the Klingon language, among other alleged violations. To use the Klingon profanity (which cannot be translated on a family-oriented blog): QI’yaH!

The legal action have been taken by those ghuy’cha executives at Paramount Pictures Corp. and CBS Studios Inc. against Axanar Productions Inc. lead producer Alec Peters. They also allege violations for depicting characters with the “Vulcan appearance,” including pointed ears, and wearing gold uniform shirts. However, it is the claim to own a language that is most interesting and chilling.

We have been discussing a disturbing trend in copyright and trademark claims over things occurring in public or common phrases or terms. (For a prior column, click here). We have often discussed the abusive expansion of copyright and trademark laws. This includes common phrases, symbols, and images being claimed as private property. (here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). This included a New York artist claiming that he holds the trademark to symbol π and efforts to claim the rights to yoga poses.

The plaintiffs insist that “Klingonese or Klingon, the native language of Qo’NoS, was first spoken in Star Trek—The Motion Picture in 1979. It was used in several works moving forward, including Star Trek III The Search for Spock.” Frankly it is the type of dishonorable and cowardly lawsuit that would fill a true Klingon with rage. Indeed, I suspect that Paramount and CBS Studios is a front from a nest of Ferengi.

Indeed, this video appears to be a litigation making of studio counsel:

Filed under: Bizarre, Society

War defines the United States. Domestically, it is the country’s greatest budgetary priority: $598 billion, 54 per cent of discretionary spending, in fiscal year 2015. Globally, we have more than 800 bases in some 80 countries, and spend more than the next nine nations combined. Yet academic hist...

By Robert Neer

Read at Aeon

Over the last few years we’ve seen several series where people use toys, pets, and unwitting significant others as props to liven up their travel photos. Photographer Jorge Saenz decided to pounce on the idea with his “#dinodinaseries” that incorporates a small herd of plastic dinosaur toys turned tourists who join him on his adventures. It all began when Saenz purchased a green brachiosaurus toy at a flea market in La Paz, Bolivia and shared a few shots of it exploring the local surroundings. The miniature reptiles have since accompanied him to other South American countries like Paraguay and Peru where they’ve braved rapids, climbed mountains, and explored Incan ruins. You can see many more on Saenz’s Instagram. (via Lost at E Minor)

21-year-old gets 15-year punishment after allegedly trying to steal propaganda poster from his hotel.

by Ana Sofia Knauf

I don't know what I was hoping to find when I saw The New York Times received a butler-guided tour of Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. A MTV Cribs-style visit that revealed the racist Oompa Loompa's fridge really is stocked with bottled children's tears? That the butler, who has spent nearly 30 years working for Trump, secretly had it out for his leathery boss?

All I found was that the Trump mansion is exactly as awful as you'd imagine it to be.

Here are some choice excerpts from the NYT's visit.

“You can always tell when the king is here,” Mr. Trump’s longtime butler here, Anthony Senecal, said of the master of the house and Republican presidential candidate.

The king was returning that day to his Versailles, a 118-room snowbird’s paradise that will become a winter White House if he is elected president. Mar-a-Lago is where Mr. Trump comes to escape, entertain and luxuriate in a Mediterranean-style manse, built 90 years ago by the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.

*vomits* Glad we got that out of the way.

He understands Mr. Trump’s sleeping patterns and how he likes his steak (“It would rock on the plate, it was so well done”), and how Mr. Trump insists — despite the hair salon on the premises — on doing his own hair.

This...actually explains a few things.

The next morning, before dawn and after about four hours’ sleep, Mr. Trump would meet him at the arched entrance of his private quarters to accept a bundle of newspapers including The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and the Palm Beach papers. Mr. Trump would emerge hours later, in khakis, a white golf shirt and baseball cap. If the cap was white, the staff noticed, the boss was in a good mood. If it was red, it was best to stay away.

And this sounds like the introduction to a modern day fairytale book titled Holy Shit This Guy Is Actually Being Considered for U.S. President.

Still, Mr. Senecal said that Mr. Trump could be generous when the mood struck him, sometimes peeling $100 bills from a wad in his pocket to give to the groundskeepers, whom Mr. Senecal described as appreciative.

“You’re a Hispanic and you’re in here trimming the trees and everything, and a guy walks up and hands you a hundred dollars,” Mr. Senecal said. “And they love him, not for that, they just love him.”

And here that adorable grandpa turns out to be our stereotypical, racist grandfather.

In 1990, Mr. Senecal took a sabbatical to become the mayor of a town in West Virginia, where he gained some notoriety for a proposal requiring all panhandlers to carry begging permits. He said that Mr. Trump wrote to him, “This is so great, Tony.”

A decade later, Mr. Trump decided to put his own imprint on Mar-a-Lago by building the 20,000-square-foot Donald J. Trump Ballroom. The venue made its big debut with the 2005 wedding of Mr. Trump to Melania Trump, whom Mr. Senecal described as exceptionally compassionate. Tony Bennett, whose paintings hang in the mansion, sang. Mr. Senecal greeted guests at the door, including Hillary Clinton. (In the interview, he offered a profane description for Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential race.) ...

Mr. Senecal’s admiration for his longtime boss seems to know few limits. On March 6, as Mr. Trump made his way through the living room on his way to the golf course, Mr. Senecal called out “All rise!” to the club members and staff. They rose.

And we'll leave it there. Or rather, here:

Donald Trump makes members of his Orlando crowd raise their right hands and swear to vote in the primary. pic.twitter.com/EVenRilJrV
— Jenna Johnson (@wpjenna) March 5, 2016

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by Charles Mudede

When I visited Vancouver, BC late last month, I had a conversation with a tech worker who had recently moved to that city from Montreal. The tech worker, who's also an old friend, was actually mad about the housing situation in Vancouver, the most beautiful city in the Pacific Northwest. He was nowhere near poor but the cost of a house or apartment was way out of his reach.

"I missed making my million," he said to me rather morosely (we were eating brunch at a spot on Commercial Drive, a street that still has a thriving community of small businesses—the same can not be said about Robson or Granville). "That's the only way you can live in this city. You had to have made a million dollars somewhere, somehow. I go to parities and people can tell I did not make that million. I'm not one of them."

This is a tech worker speaking.

In Seattle, we have gotten in the habit of blaming tech workers for making the city expensive. But what Vancouver makes clear is that even that prosperous class of wage earners can be priced out of a housing market. And so it is not a surprise to learn from the Seattle Times "that young tech workers are moving out" of Vancouver and "leaving worried business leaders behind." Why? Because "the price of an average house in the beautiful city nears $1.3 million Canadian."

The standard urbanist in Seattle will read this article and say to him/herself: The problem is that they're not building enough in that city! It is all a matter of supply and demand. The vacancy rate is indeed very low, and so demand is pushing up costs. So, we are to believe that building like crazy will crash property values and, in the aftermath, make the city affordable for the working classes. This sounds like a fantasy. One should, correct, increase density (I prefer developers to NIMBYs anyday) but housing prices are not solely determined by simple economic laws like supply and demand.

To begin with, the rich are so very rich they have little to no relationship with the realities of the base, the main economy, which in Vancouver provides an average income of $70,000. In physics, the effort to bring such extreme states or realities together causes nonsense to come out of the mathematics. Supply and demand, like Newtonian laws, makes sense in certain and very specific situations but not in others. And certainly not in one where there is a very large group with a scarcity of capital and a very tiny one with a surplus of it. Vancouver will solve its housing crisis not with economic laws but political ones.

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by Charles Mudede

I was recently informed by local economist and manager of IDEAeconomics, a website that promotes post-Keynesian views (and post-Keynesian must not be confused with neo-Keynesians), Alan Harvey that a significant shift has occurred in the market for commercial property in Seattle's downtown area.

In the past, the value of a commercial property was "the capitalized value of the stream of rents from that property." In this order of things, occupancy rates (content) mattered. Now, commercial properties are not selling content and value but merely value. Meaning, they are selling a "projected increase in price." Meaning, downtown Seattle has entered the phase of Ponzi financing.

"My speculation is that this has been caused by people looking to move their money into the US," Harvey explained. Where did he get this information? From a source within the CBRE Group, a "commercial real estate company based in Los Angeles." This source confirmed that global surplus capital is behind this transition. "It's much more lucrative to build or buy with the hope of selling at an inflated value rather than actual revenue."

Again, it's really hard for many Americans to understand that we actually live in a world not with a scarcity of cash (it looks like that from the bottom) but a huge surplus of the stuff—or a "savings glut," to use the words of Martin Wolf, whose most recent book The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned-and Have Still to Learn-from the Financial Crisis explains this situation in very clear, if not repetitive, terms (I also recommend reading Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance by John Kay. These writers, Wolf and Kay, are not at all radical—for a treatment along those lines, read Costas Lapavitsas' brilliant and meaty Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All).

Nor does any of this have anything to do with the old and much-admired laws of supply and demand, which is why accelerated development will not weaken the force that's pushing property values up. Finance operates outside of those laws. For example, what motivated the European Central Bank's recent decision to expand quantitative easing (buying bonds from investment institutions in the hope that they will then invest in the real economy) from 60 billion euros a month to an astounding 80 billion euros had little to do with events in the real economy but with credit spreads, which when wide, as they have been lately, generate little or no profits for investors.

Now, what does this decision have to do with recent developments in downtown Seattle? Simply this: It's not about economics (supply and demand) but politics. The ECB is helping investors because they are the ones with political power (that's how finance always works). The problem of inflated asset values will not be solved by building more and more but by direct political action and increased construction—in short, by political economy.

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There is a curious case out of Brooklyn where William Powell, 27, fell into a habit of not charging for drinks for customers who could not afford it at his IHOP. The sodas added up to $3,000 to be specific and the owner was not pleased. Powell described himself as “the modern-day Robin Hood.” It would not be surprising if the owner fired Powell, but instead he called the police and now Powell is facing a grand larceny charge.

Store owner Akrell Cox became suspicious when he found Powell’s beverage sales were at six percent of the overall receipt compared to 17-20 percent for other employees who with the same shift and schedule. Cox then reviewed surveillance footage and saw that Powell not charging for sodas.

Powell insisted that “I am not stealing, I am serving the ones in need. I take from the rich and give to the poor.” His free soda policy lasted for six months. Police say that he was simply trying to “get bigger tips.” Perhaps, but is this really a criminal matter?

The state law defines larceny as “A person steals property and commits larceny when, with intent to deprive another of property or to appropriate the same to himself or to a third person, he wrongfully takes, obtains or withholds such property from an owner thereof.”

Despite the spin on the tip angle, Powell was not pocketing the money or consuming the sodas. Many restaurants give waiters liberty in waiving such charges. Just as the practice may have benefitted Powell in tips, it also likely benefitted the restaurants in happy and repeat customers. A defense under the state law is “that the property was appropriated under a claim of a right made in good faith.”

Should this be a larceny charge?

Filed under: Bizarre, Criminal law

by Matt Baume

One by one, all of the former Republican candidates seem to be lining up behind Donald Trump. It's almost as though they know that something's inevitable — something the rest of us don't want to admit could possibly come true.

First it was Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, neither of whom was ever seriously going to make it to the convention. Trump dragged them out on stage when he did his anti-debate, and the optics were amazing — it looked like he was their boss, giving them brief permission to speak.

Then he did it to Chris Christie, only with an added dose of humiliation: making Christie stand behind him and listen uncomfortably to his insults.

And now it's Ben Carson, who is probably too oblivious to even realize how dumb this endorsement makes him look.

True to form, Carson's endorsement was weirder than weird. "There are two different Donald Trumps," he said. "There’s the one you see on the stage and there’s the one who’s very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully."

First of all, even one Donald Trump is several Trumps too many. That there might be two sounds like some kind of terrifying Ray Bradbury future dystopia.

Trump liked the sound of that: "perhaps there are two Donald Trumps," he said — and then he did not like the sound of that: "I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps," he added.

And regarding all of the insults Trump hurled at Carson, "Well, it was part of the game," he said. As you'll recall, Trump called Carson "pathological" and compared him to a child molester. What a fun game.

Trump doesn't seem capable of delivering a speech that doesn't horrify at least some of us, and his Ben Carson endorsement party did not disappoint.

“I was most impressed with his views on education. It’s a strength. It’s a tremendous strength,” Trump said. Ben will be "involved" with the Trump campaign, somehow, on the issues health and education. Yes, sure, the guy who said that the Earth is 6,000 years old and the pyramids are grain silos, he should definitely be in charge of education.

Ben also says that the federal government needs to get out of public schools, which is a bunch of Republican blah-blah that he barely even thought through. If he had, he might've noticed that Congress already passed a new K-12 bill that eliminated a lot of federal school oversight.

Also he's conflated public schools and charter schools, and he supports voucher programs, which are really just a scam for religious people to slurp up government checks that would have gone to real education.

Anyway, best of luck to the happy couple, and may they continue to come up with terrible ideas and make millions of dollars for years to come.

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by Ansel Herz

The Huffington Post reports:

Billionaires, tech CEOs and top members of the Republican establishment flew to a private island resort off the coast of Georgia this weekend for the American Enterprise Institute's annual World Forum, according to sources familiar with the secretive gathering.

The main topic at the closed-to-the-press confab? How to stop Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, and Tesla Motors and SpaceX honcho Elon Musk all attended. So did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), political guru Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan, GOP Sens. Tom Cotton (Ark.), Cory Gardner (Colo.), Tim Scott (S.C.), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), who recently made news by saying he "cannot support Donald Trump."

What Ryan Conroy said: "Inaccessible establishment elites meet in secret on a luxurious private island. But what's behind the anger that fuels Trump???"

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by Sydney Brownstone

Geekwire has a fascinating post up today about a trip to Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rocket factory. During this trip, it appears that the notoriously elusive billionaire treated journalists to his vision for space colonization.

Here's what Bezos's vision entails:

Today, huge industrial complexes on Earth build components that are sent into space, at a cost of thousands of dollars per pound. Bezos foresees an inversion in that flow of goods. “We’ll make the microprocessors in space, and then we’ll send the little tiny bits to Earth,” Bezos said.

In the long term, Blue Origin could set the stage for moving heavy industries completely off Earth, leaving our planet zoned strictly for “residential and light industrial” use.

You should read the whole thing, which delves into some of the delicious technology of it all.

That said, let's think about what zoning the planet for "residential and light industrial" use really means.

First, Bezos's vision relies on another critical element: natural resources. Clearly, we've fucked up the planet we already live on by mercilessly exploiting ours. That's why Bezos mentioned being able to iterate new technologies in space. His plan requires the cooperation of another nascent industry: space mining.

Planetary Resources, another Seattle-area company, is on the forefront of the private space mining industry. It aims to find water in asteroids, which opens up an entirely new world of possibilities for not just traveling to outer space, but staying there.

Last year, Planetary Resources also won a significant, if not controversial, piece of legislation at the federal level. Congress unilaterally created a framework for space mining rights, presumably so companies like Planetary Resources could get to work in a more comfortable regulatory environment.*

Eric Anderson, the cofounder of Planetary Resources, characterized the US SPACE Act as "the single greatest recognition of property rights in history." The company went on to praise the passage of the SPACE Act in a press release last November:

Planetary Resources, Inc., the asteroid mining company, praises the members of Congress who promoted historic legislation (H.R. 2262) that recognizes the right of US citizens to own asteroid resources they obtain as property, and encourages the commercial exploration and recovery of resources from asteroids, free from harmful interference.

Got it. But here's more food for thought: If the process by which we over-industrialized Earth is now being exported to space, what's to keep humanity from carelessly exploiting resources outside the planet? Is climate change not the ultimate lesson in the unintended consequences of runaway, natural resource capitalism? And is continuing to artificially segregate humanity from "nature" going to help us become better stewards of our surroundings?

I could go on, but I'll leave my thoughts there for now. Interested to hear yours, too.

*Other legal experts have claimed that the US SPACE Act violates another treaty—the international Outer Space Treaty of 1967. The 1967 treaty (which was ratified by the US, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and more) states that outer space is not subject to "national appropriation by claim of sovereignty."

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The Roselle (Ill.) police released this picture from a drunk driving arrest this week. The driver failed to stop after hitting a tree. Instead, the car was pulled over about 11:10 p.m. traveling the wrong way with a 15-foot-tree lodged in the front grille of the Lincoln.

The officer also found that the airbags had been deployed in the car. The police arrested Maryann Christy, 54, of Schaumburg. The officer said that Christy smelled of alcohol and failed field sobriety tests.

When some people questioned the authenticity of the photos, the police released the videotape below.

I am not sure what the best defense would be here. You can admit that you were drunk or you can argue that you were sober while driving with a 15-foot tree embedded in your grille. Neither is likely to work particularly well. I am assuming that any effort to claim that the tree hit her would be equally unavailing. I suppose she could argue that she always wanted a vintage looking woodie like the 1939 Zephyr but Lincoln no longer makes them. This was the cheapest option.

Filed under: Bizarre, Criminal law

Below is my Sunday column yesterday in the Washington Post on reforming our political system. We are certainly, as the Chinese curse says, “living in interesting times.” We seem to be in the midst of an American revolution where citizens have arisen in collective disgust of the establishment and the status quo. For years, citizens have objected to a political system that is dysfunctional and detached. The two parties have largely ignored these objections and many have objected to this “doupoly” on power. For many, answer of the two parties to the American people seems to be the same as Henry Ford to customers of the Model T Ford: “you can have any color so long as it is black.” In the United States, you can have any party so long as it is red or blue; Republican or Democrat. Yet, in 2016, the public has responded with a deafening rejection of the establishment. The most obvious is Donald Trump who is the perfect personification of an angry electorate. On the democratic side, a 74-year-old Democratic Socialist has rocked the Democratic party, which overtly rigged a primary system to guarantee the selection of the ultimate establishment figure: Hillary Clinton. However, we seem to go this cathartic exercise every four years rather than seek some changes to break down the insularity of government. There is another way. Instead of just choosing some personality that matches our angry politics, we can really change the system . . . for the better. The Framers gave the public the power to solve our own problems, including the ability to circumvent Congress with a constitutional convention. We have the anger. The question is whether we have the answer.

Below is the column. There are a host of other changes that can be made to improve the system, including many that can be down without a constitutional amendment. However, there is a value in focusing on a few basics that could have a transformative effect on the respective branches of government.

Legal scholar says we need to change the system, not just who’s in charge

America is fuming. In Super Tuesday exit polls, as many as 95 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of Democrats said they were “angry” or “dissatisfied” with the federal government. I’ve heard the same when speaking to audiences across the country. Conservatives and liberals alike talk about their frustrations with a dysfunctional political system that is unresponsive to their needs and disconnected from their lives.

Voters say they want a revolution. But that’s going to take more than electing personalities that channel our angry politics. If we want real change, we need to look at fundamental reforms to all three branches of our government.

Executive branch

First, we need to join most of the rest of the world’s democracies in moving to direct, majority-based elections of our presidents. In a late-January Washington Post-ABC News poll, 69 percent of respondents said they were “very anxious” or “somewhat anxious” about the idea of a President Donald Trump, and 51 percent said the same about a President Hillary Clinton. Yet outside a handful of swing states, most voters don’t see themselves as having much influence on the outcome of the November election. And they’re right: It’s basically impossible for Democrats to lose deep-blue states such as California or for Republicans to lose deep-red ones such as Idaho. It doesn’t help that a president can win with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, as has happened with 15 previous presidents, or by losing the popular vote altogether, as has happened four times.

We wisely got rid of the election of senators by state legislators with the enactment of the 17th Amendment in 1913. We’re overdue to abolish the electoral college. The United States should be led by a president who can garner a simple majority of votes. And if no one reaches that threshold in the general election, we should require a runoff between the two leading candidates.

Legislative branch

Despite the best efforts of the tea party and other insurgent movements, congressional incumbents maintain a death grip on their seats. Ninety-five percent of sitting congressmen and 82 percent of senators up for reelection won in 2014. They have an enormous fundraising advantage , but even more important, they are protected by how district lines are drawn.

To give voters real choices, we need a constitutional amendment barring gerrymandering of congressional districts and requiring that districts be based solely on population numbers and geographic continuity. Then we should alter our elections to allow the top two vote-getters in the primaries to run against each other in the general election, even if they’re from the same party, from a third party or are independent. While voters in Sugar Land, Tex., still might elect Republicans and voters in Chicago still might elect Democrats, they might elect different Republicans or Democrats. Moreover, in choosing between candidates of an opposing party, voters from the minority party in that district might favor a more moderate and ultimately more representative choice.

Judicial branch

We need to finally end the absurd politics of the Supreme Court, which concentrates too much power in the hands of too few justices. With such a small court, one justice can have enormous influence on rulings. That’s why the arguments in so many cases, including the Texas abortion case heard this past week, are pitched to a single swing justice. It’s why confirmations have become so traumatic, as the deadlock over the replacement of Justice Antonin Scalia vividly shows.

A larger Supreme Court would diminish the power of individual justices and increase the chances that the best legal minds could get confirmed. I’ve advocated for the expansion of the court to 19 members. That’s about the average size of a U.S. circuit court and in line with other major democracies. (Germany’s high court has 16 members, Japan’s has 15, and Britain’s has 12.)

The current size of the U.S. Supreme Court is arbitrary, related to the number of federal circuits in the late 1800s. The Constitution leaves it to Congress to determine how many justices the court needs. So we could expand through legislation rather than constitutional amendment. I’d propose ramping up gradually, preventing any president from appointing more than two justices to the new seats. And while we’re at it, we should pass legislation that allows cameras in the Supreme Court, so citizens can watch how the justices address cases that affect their lives and monitor the justices’ competence. (Advancing incapacity due to age or illness is a recurring problem on the court.)

Americans are neither irrational nor apathetic. They’re alienated, because all the branches of the U.S. government have insulated themselves from the public to a dangerous degree. Rather than treating voters like barbarians at the gate, the government should let them in and allow them a more direct and meaningful role. Now that would be a revolution worth watching.

Twitter: @JonathanTurley

Washington Post March 6, 2016

Filed under: Columns, Congress, Constitutional Law, Courts, Justice, Media, Politics, Society

Science may be impartial, but scientific culture is not. Ask a female scientist about unwanted advances, jokes that aren't funny, grabbing that isn't an accident

by Heidi Groover

Claiming the law could "burden innovation, increase prices, and reduce quality and services for consumers," the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is suing Seattle over its landmark law allowing app-based drivers to unionize. The suit claims the city law violates federal labor laws and will hurt "the sharing economy."

"Technology companies are leading the charge when it comes to empowering people with the flexibility and choice that comes with being your own boss, and that is something to be championed, not stifled," Amanda Eversole, president of the Chamber’s Center for Advanced Technology & Innovation, said in a statement.

The question of whether services like Uber really "empower" their drivers is, of course, up for debate. Drivers on these platforms are subject to sudden changes in pay and can be kicked of the platforms with little advance notice. Because they are considered "independent contractors" instead of employees, drivers have no rights under federal law to organize and bargain with the companies that act as their bosses.

The Chamber's suit, which you can read in full here, was filed today in District Court and names the city, its Department of Finance and Administrative Services, and that department's director, Fred Podesta. Kimberly Mills, a spokesperson for City Attorney Pete Holmes, said the City Attorney's Office will "definitely" defend the city's ordinance, but had no other comment to offer.

"Our response will come in the answer filed with the court," Mills said in an email.

In a statement, Mayor Ed Murray doubled down on his noncommittal stance from when the law passed and he refused to either sign or veto it:

As I said when the legislation was passed last year, I strongly support the right of workers to organize to ensure a fair and just workplace.

I stated at the time—and still believe—that the administration would likely need to seek clarifying legislation from the Council before full implementation of this law. Today’s lawsuit will now inject a level of uncertainty for the City on how best to proceed with any future legislation and implementation.

Neither Lyft nor Uber are named as parties to the suit. A Lyft spokesperson said the company continues to "share concerns" about the law.

An Uber spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “The Chamber of Commerce’s challenge to the Seattle ordinance raises serious questions not only about whether the city has run afoul of federal laws, but also about the impact on drivers who rely on ridesharing to earn flexible income.” (Meanwhile, the company has been calling drivers trying to discourage them from unionizing.)

This lawsuit is a big deal that will cost the city money and time and—if the U.S. Chamber loses—could set a precedent that has ripple effects across the modern tech economy. But it's not a surprise. Seattle was the first city ever to pass a law allowing app-based drivers to unionize and it's a massive disruption to the so-called gig economy. A lawsuit was all but guaranteed. When the Seattle City Council approved the law, council members openly acknowledged the possibility of the city getting sued.

"My attitude about [a legal challenge] is that this is the work we’ve chosen to do," Council Member Bruce Harrell said ahead of the vote. "None of this kind of work is easy."

UPDATE: In a statement, Teamsters Local 117, which supported the legislation, called the lawsuit a “cynical ploy to deprive workers of a fundamental human right."

Uber driver Peter Kuel said in that statement, “The drivers decided to have a union, so nothing is going to stop the union. The union will stay. We’re not going to stop organizing."

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by Charles Mudede

An empty house that has been slowly crumbling in Point Grey, Vancouver, is now up for sale, and it is going for $7.2 million. It was bought in 2011 for $4.6 million and sold in 2010 for $3.35 million. The current owners of the property are Chinese investors who have never been seen by their neighbors. The only thing residing in this place is money.

Something similar is happening in London, and it's transforming sections of upscale neighborhoods into ghost towns. The 1 percent of the world (Russia, Greece, China) need places to put their money, and homes in cities are often the best such places.

Vancouver, one of the most expensive cities in the world (in terms of property values), has become a city not for people but for surplus cash. The median income there is $71,000, but a single-family home costs $1 million or more.

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Let’s play a game. I’ll show you a picture and a couple videos—just watch the first five seconds or so—and you figure out what they have in common. Ready? Here we go:

Microsoft Windows “Pipes” screensaver.Daniel Kufer/Youtube

Did you spot it? Each of them depicts the exact same object: a shiny, slightly squashed-looking teapot.

You may not have thought much of it if you saw it in that episode of The Simpsons, in Toy Story, in your old PC screensaver, or in any of the other films and games it’s crept into over the years. Yet this unassuming object—the “Utah teapot,” as it’s affectionately known—has had an enormous influence on the history of computing, dating back to 1974, when computer scientist Martin Newell was a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah.

The U of U was a powerhouse of computer graphics research then, and Newell had some novel ideas for algorithms that could realistically display 3D shapes—rendering complex effects like shadows, reflective textures, or rotations that reveal obscured surfaces. But, to his chagrin, he struggled to find a digitized object worthy of his methods. Objects that were typically used for simulating reflections, like a chess pawn, a donut, and an urn, were…
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i hope to some day meet someone who has even 1/10th of the enthusiasm for the weird song choices in the chipmunks rock band game that i have

I believe this to be the best news Tweet I have ever seen. It is as confounding and magnificent as this painting.

And if you agree with me that the Tweet is impressive (in so. many. ways.), just wait until you read the story. I am pretty sure that the story is fairly clear on who did what to whom and who shall pay, but I was laughing too hard to actually register those facts. Instead, I am still picturing various animals and humans chasing each other around. Oh, and a wine glass is involved.

You are so welcome.

Achewood strip for Friday, February 19, 2016