I’ll admit it. I’ve got ulterior motives for posting trash two weeks before the regular season begins.

First, I will once again be mostly away from the Toobz this weekend as I continue to experience the joys of moving. So I wanted to leave you with something more fun than CIA corruption, our failing economy, and Gitmo show trials to keep you busy. Hopefully, this will be the last weekend I’ll be entirely AWOL (though I might do something crazy next weekend and actually treat it like a holiday).

Next, I wanted to remind you that this is the most fun preseason weekend–cause you get to see things like the formerly hapless Rams, now led by Sam Bradford and his apparently healthy arm, come from behind to beat the Pats and their sieve-like defense, even with Brady playing most of the game.

Even more fun for the few of us who like the Pats but hate the Colts is seeing Aaron Rogers outplay Peyton Manning in Green Bay’s thumping of the Colts (yes, Phred, it is time to gear up for hubcap season).

Speaking of which…

The real reason I’m posting trash today is to share a terrible discovery.

As most of you know, I’m in the middle of a move to the west part of MI. I’ve been self-congratulatory as I looked forward to football for several weeks now. Not only can we be cautiously optimistic about the Lions this year (in the same way that, with MI having the best job creation last month but still being the second biggest clusterfuck state, we can be optimistic that things will improve, but not all that much). But, I thought, living on Lake Michigan I would have the right to root for any of three teams as the “local” team: the Lions, Da Bears, and even (because really Lake Michigan isn’t all THAT big), Green Bay.

Think of the fun of rooting against Old Man Geezer in every divisional game, if only to wind bmaz up.

Alas.

Last night I did the math. Using means of transport readily available to me, I would have to root for Peyton Manning before Aaron Rogers:

• Chicago (2 hours, 42 minutes)
• Detroit (2 hours, 58 minutes)
• Indy (4 hours, 23 minutes)
• Cleveland (5 hrs, 15 minutes)
• Cincinnati (6 hours, 5 minutes)
• Green Bay (6 hours, 8 minutes)

Mind you, if I suddenly came into possession of a very big boat, then Chicago would be even more local (and I’d be even more bummed about the prospect of rooting for Jay Cutler). Or, if I suddenly learned to fly and stumbled upon my own private plane, Green Bay would actually be closer than Detroit (though tickets to Lions games would still be far easier to acquire).

So if I disappear from blogging and become a bankster anytime soon, you’ll all know it’s not really that I’m an asshole who hates real people, I’m just trying to avoid rooting for Peyton Manning.

In the meantime, some other potentially interesting pre-season games: The ‘Skins discover the joy of an injured McNabb as he sits out their game against the Jets. The Gents go to Baltimore. And two of the best pre-season contests for the QB job–temporarily in Pittsburgh (at least until Big Ben’s next brush with the law) and permanently in Denver–play out in Mile High.

(Hubcap image from liza31337)

Keep in mind as you read these four paragraphs from WaPo’s follow-up on NYT’s story on Mohammed Zia Salehi that the person quoted is almost certainly from the same CIA that profiles terrorist organizations that, regardless of the charitable work they do, may not legally receive money.

U.S. officials did not dispute that Salehi was on the CIA payroll, which was first reported by The New York Times. But officials sought to draw a distinction between agency payments and corruption probes.

“The United States government had nothing to do with the activities for which this individual is being investigated,” the second U.S. official said. “It’s not news that we sometimes pay people overseas who help the United States do what it needs to get done. . . . Nor should it be surprising, in a place like Afghanistan, that some influential figures can be both helpful and – on their own, separate and apart – corrupt to some degree.”

The flow of CIA money into the region dates to the agency’s support for mujaheddin fighters who ousted Soviet forces three decades ago.

The spigot was tightened during the 1990s but reopened after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much of the money went to support warlords whose militias helped to overthrow the Taliban regime, which had provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda training camps. Salehi had served as an interpreter for one of the most prominent of those warlords, Abdurrashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek whose forces played a critical role in the campaign against the Taliban.

The unnamed “second US official” almost certainly is at the CIA or it’s close vicinity. And this person wants to claim that the money CIA pays to Salehi has absolutely nothing to do with the corruption of which he stands accused. The story elsewhere details the alleged corruption to include sheltering New Ansari (a money transfer firm used to drain aid money out of Afghanistan), doling out cash and cars to Hamid Karzai supporters, and negotiating with the Taliban. So the CIA actually wants to claim that the money it pays to Salehi is not then laundered into payments to Karzai supporters or cooperative Taliban members.

You know, the Taliban? The guys we claim to be fighting, since there are no more al Qaeda members in Afghanistan?

And you have to love the understated irony of the passage, the way Greg Miller and Joshua Partlow remind readers that the CIA has funded a lot of Islamic extremists, including some who loosely cooperated with other mujahadeen groups like those that would become al Qaeda. It’d be nice, mind you, if they also reminded readers that Rashid Dostum is the creep behind the Convoy of Death massacre, but that might just be too much irony for this short passage.

It’s bad enough that the CIA openly admits funding this guy, yet claims their payments could have nothing to do with the deep corruption of which he is accused.

But on top of that there’s this blind belief that these kind of payments never, ever, have blowback.

I would be laughing my ass off at this if I weren’t about to put my home on the market for what the house next door sold as a foreclosure several years ago. (h/t CR)

By postponing the date at which they lock in losses, banks and other investors positioned themselves to benefit from the slow mending of the real estate market. But now industry executives are questioning whether delaying foreclosures — a strategy contrary to the industry adage that “the first loss is the best loss” — is about to backfire. With home prices expected to fall as much as 10% further, the refusal to foreclose quickly on and sell distressed homes at inventory-clearing prices may be contributing to the stall of the overall market seen in July sales data. It also may increase the likelihood of more strategic defaults.

[snip]

Some servicing executives acknowledged that stalling on foreclosures will cause worse pain in the future — and that the reckoning may be almost here.

“The industry as a whole got into a panic mode and was worried about all these loans going into foreclosure and driving prices down, so they got all these programs, started Hamp and internal mods and short sales,” said John Marecki, vice president of East Coast foreclosure operations for Prommis Solutions, an Atlanta company that provides foreclosure processing services. Until recently, he was senior vice president of default administration at Flagstar Bank in Troy, Mich. “Now they’re looking at this, how they held off and they’re getting to the point where maybe they made a mistake in that realm.”

Extend and pretend always assumed that at some point things would start turning around. But since that’s not going to happen anytime soon, this is like death by a thousand cuts.

To both the banksters and homeowners.

What no one seems to be honestly accounting for is the degree to which this process contributes to weighing the economy down.

Take a look at this graphic. It’s a version of a graphic that has gotten a lot of play over the last year showing the growth in unemployment rates over time across the country. But this one adds foreclosures and bankruptcy. While it still doesn’t show what I think needs to be shown, it does at least show how foreclosures preceded unemployment in the housing bubble states (as opposed to the Mid-West, where unemployment led to foreclosures). Some of the foreclosure-driven unemployment came through the collapse of the building industry. But as more and more people get stuck in houses, particularly as foreclosures drive down the price of real estate and therefore strand even those who have kept up with their mortgages, it leads to a whole lot less mobility which in turn leads to extended unemployment.

It sucks to sell a house for foreclosure level prices. But I’m very, very grateful we can do even that, because it means we’re able to move to a new job. But I’m acutely aware we’re paying this price because of a failed policy, one which tried to make homeowners bear all the cost for the shared mistakes of the banksters and the creditors.

So, yeah, in the not too distant future banksters are going to have to unload their shadow inventory and they’ll end up taking even bigger hits on their balance sheets than if they had not been pretending to be solvent all this time. But unfortunately, all homeowners are going to feel the pain as well.

I suspect this looming problem might finally convince the MOTUs at Treasury that they have to implement a policy that works this time–for both banksters and the homeowners.

The WaPo reports that the Administration has shelved plans to try Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in military commissions.

The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the attack, which killed 17 sailors and wounded dozens when a boat packed with explosives ripped a hole in the side of the warship in the port of Aden.

In a filing this week in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the Justice Department said that “no charges are either pending or contemplated with respect to al-Nashiri in the near future.”

The statement, tucked into a motion to dismiss a petition by Nashiri’s attorneys, suggests that the prospect of further military trials for detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has all but ground to a halt, much as the administration’s plan to try the accused plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in federal court has stalled.

Only two cases are moving forward at Guantanamo Bay, and both were sworn and referred for trial by the time Obama took office. In January 2009, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates directed the Convening Authority for Military Commissions to stop referring cases for trial, an order that 20 months later has not been rescinded.

Which of course means that our government (though the article suggests this is a distinction between the Bush and Obama Administrations, since Gates–though he spans both Administrations–has not ordered the Convening Authority to start referring cases) has decided it’s okay to try Omar Khadr, who was 15 and arguably acting in self-defense for his alleged crime, in a military commission. But not to try al-Nashiri, at least allegedly a genuine terrorist.

To be fair, the WaPo suggests the Administration is holding off until it can have civilian trials for other High Value Detainees (presumably, still the 9/11 conspirators). So it may well be a supportable goal. But it all seems to add to the Kangaroo stench around the military commissions.

Federal bureaucracies which, according to the confirmation hearing questions he asked of prospective directors, Chris Dodd believes require no management experience to run:

• Securities and Exchange Commission
• Housing and Urban Development
• Federal Housing Administration
• Export-Import Bank
• National Credit Union Administration
• Federal Reserve
• Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
• Office of Thrift Supervision (which oversaw AIG and GE, among other TBTF “entities”)
• Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Federal bureaucracy which, according to his recent interviews, Chris Dodd believes can only be led by someone who has what he judges to be adequate management experience:

• Consumer Finance Protection Board

Call me crazy, but I don’t think Chris Dodd’s newfound concern about management experience stems from either the recognition that his past confirmation negligence led to failures at (in particular) SEC and OTS or his genuine concern that the CFPB wouldn’t effectively protect consumers’ interests if it were led by Elizabeth Warren.

Dexter Filkins’ story reporting that a top, corrupt, Hamid Karzai aide is on the CIA payroll is not, by itself, all that interesting.

Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Mr. Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing American views inside the presidential palace, or both.

But read it in conjunction with Filkins’ other two stories this week. His week started, after all, with the equally unsurprising story that Abdul Ghani Baradar’s capture some months ago may have been orchestrated by Pakistan’s ISI to prevent peace negotiations between Karzai’s government and the Taliban. That story relies on both Pakistani officials boasting of their ploy, Afghan officials explaining how they attempted to negotiate peace, and a Pakistani spiritual leader talking about his role in the attempted negotiations. It includes the allegation–made by a former Afghan official and a NATO official–that Ahmed Wali Karzai had met with Baradar. But perhaps most interesting for our purposes is this passage:

Some American officials still insist that Pakistan-American cooperation is improving, and deny a central Pakistani role in Mr. Baradar’s arrest. They say the Pakistanis may now be trying to rewrite history to make themselves appear more influential. It was American intellgence that led to Mr. Baradar’s capture, an American official said.

“These are self-serving fairy tales,” the official said. “The people involved in the operation on the ground didn’t know exactly who would be there when they themselves arrived. But it certainly became clear, to Pakistanis and Americans alike, who we’d gotten.”

Other American officials suspect the C.I.A. may have been unwittingly used by the Pakistanis for the larger aims of slowing the pace of any peace talks.

That is, among Filkins’ American sources, one side denies Pakistan would be so tricky with the US (read, the CIA). That person calls the entire story “self-serving fairy tales.” And the other side “suspect[s] the CIA may have been unwittingly used by the Pakistanis.”

That is, among Filkins’ American sources, this story is a debate over whether the CIA is incompetent or not.

Now move to Tuesday’s story. The headline reports another case of civilian killings by vaguely described “special forces.”

Details were sketchy, but the governor of Tala Wa Barfak, a district in Baghlan Province, said the Afghans had been killed in the village of Naik early Sunday by what appeared to have been a raid carried out by special forces.

The governor, Mohammed Ismail, said a group of tribal elders he had sent to the village had returned with details. Among the dead were two women and a child, he said. Six of the dead were found in Naik, and two more villagers were found later in a field farther away, he said.

“It was a cruel act against the civilians,” he said.

Witnesses said the raid began Sunday at 2 a.m., when a number of helicopters descended on Naik. Groups of commandos entered a pair of houses, where the gunfire began, the witnesses said.

So a story of “special forces” apparently fucking up again, along with some context on how counterproductive such fuck-ups are. Curiously, though, this Filkins story (truly, this has been a very busy week) also reports a small group of Taliban fighters turning in their arms.

Also in northern Afghanistan, a group of 21 Taliban fighters surrendered their weapons and gave up fighting last week, officials said Tuesday. The surrender offered a glimpse of what Afghan and American officials hope might one day grow into a larger movement.

The fighters, led by a Taliban commander named Mullah Obeidi, gathered Friday at a government building in Muqoor, a district in Badghis Province, and promised to fight no more. Each of the erstwhile fighters received a “re-integration certificate” and congratulations from several hundred tribal elders who had gathered to celebrate.

This balances the fuck-up of the special forces against success of the strategy the Barader capture was supposed to thwart–the formation of an Afghan peace without Pakistani involvement. Of special note, one of the fighters described giving up the fight when he realized his instructions–coming from Pakistani advisors–did not serve the interests of Afghanistan.

His commander, Mr. Obeidi — as well as Taliban advisers who had traveled from Pakistan — urged him to attack construction crews upgrading the national highway. The road runs through Badghis and links the province to the rest of Afghanistan.“‘If you see the engineers or the laborers, try your best to kill them,’ ” Mr. Karim said. “This is what our Pakistani advisers were telling us.”

So to follow-up the story on Pakistan’s apparent role in thwarting efforts to get Taliban fighters to turn over their arms, a former Taliban fighter blames the Pakistanis for anti-Afghan advice.

See how these themes keep repeating across these stories?

Which brings us back to the shocking! news that two people close to Karzai, one of them the brother alleged to have met with Barader in Filkins’ earlier story, have been getting payments from the CIA. There’s actually some very interesting details about the investigation into Afghanistan’s payment courier system, New Ansari, which has been key to the export of billions out of Afghanistan (I hope to return to this). But there is, of course, discussion of how American sources are split over how central the fight against corruption should be in our overall Afghan strategy.

The ties underscore doubts about how seriously the Obama administration intends to fight corruption here. The anticorruption drive, though strongly backed by the United States, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. Some argue it should be a centerpiece of American strategy, and others say that attacking corrupt officials who are crucial to the war effort could destabilize the Karzai government.

The Obama administration is also racing to show progress in Afghanistan by December, when the White House will evaluate its mission there. Some administration officials argue that any comprehensive campaign to fight corruption inside Afghanistan is overly ambitious, with less than a year to go before the American military is set to begin withdrawing troops.

“Fighting corruption is the very definition of mission creep,” one Obama administration official said.

Others in the administration view public corruption as the single greatest threat to the Afghan government and the American mission; it is the corrupt nature of the Karzai government, these officials say, that drives ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban.

[snip]

“Corruption matters to us,” a senior Obama administration official said. “The fact that Salehi may have been on our payroll does not necessarily change any of the basic issues here.”

So after stories about who is doing more damage, special forces or credulous CIA, the debate shifts to whether it is more important to crack down on the corruption within Karzai’s government–even if it means cracking down on CIA’s key assets–or whether we have to deal with corruption because that’s the way of the world.

Boy, Dexter Filkins sure has had an interesting week cataloging the sniping within American strategy, huh? Mind you, I’m not complaining about Filkins’ reporting (though his descriptions of anonymous sources doesn’t seem to comply with the NYT’s policy on identifying the motives for these anonymous leaks–it’s sure be useful to readers if he’d place his sources a little better, because no one on the inside is really fooled by these anonymous citations).

But he does seem to be the focus of a lot of competing leaks of late.

Wikileaks has posted a single new document–a CIA Red Cell report contemplating what would (will?) happen if other countries begin to see the US as an exporter of terrorism. The document admits several cases where the US has exported terror–such as the widely known but downplayed fact that David Headley had a role in the Mumbai bombing.

In November 2008, Pakistani-American David Headley conducted surveillance in support of the Lashkar-i-Tayyiba (LT) attack in Mumbai, India that killed more than 160 people. LT induced him to change his name from Daood Gilani to David Headley to facilitate his movement between the US, Pakistan, and India.

More amusing is that CIA classifies as “secret” the fact that Irish-Americans provided the bulk of funding for the IRA.

Some Irish-Americans have long provided financial and material support for violent efforts to compel the United Kingdom to relinquish control of Northern Ireland. In the 1880s, Irish-American members of Clan na Gael dynamited Britain’s Scotland Yard, Parliament, and the Tower of London, and detonated bombs at several stations in the London underground.In the twentieth century, Irish-Americans provided most of the financial support sent to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The US-based Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID), founded in the late 1960s, provided the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) with money that was frequently used for arms purchases. Only after repeated high-level British requests and then London’s support for our bombing of Libya in the 1980s did the US Government crack down on Irish-American support for the IRA. (S//NF)

Note, though, the CIA ignores state-sanctioned terrorism, such as with St. Ronnie’s tampering in Nicaragua.

After acknowledging that Americans may export terrorism overseas, the document envisions what would happen as other countries ask for reciprocity on the US’ sovereignty-infringing counterterrorism policies.

• Foreign regimes could request information on US citizens they deem to be terrorists or terrorist supporters, or even request the rendition of US citizens. US failure to cooperate could result in those governments refusing to allow the US to extract terrorist suspects from their soil, straining alliances and bilateral relations.
• In extreme cases, US refusal to cooperate with foreign government requests for extradition might lead some governments to consider secretly extracting US citizens suspected of foreign terrorism from US soil. Foreign intelligence operations on US soil to neutralize or even assassinate individuals in the US deemed to be a threat are not without precedent. Before the US entered World War II, British intelligence carried out information operations against prominent US citizens deemed to be isolationists or sympathetic to the Nazis. Some historians who have examined relevant archives even suspect that British intelligence officers assassinated Nazi agents on US soil. (S//NF)

[snip]

• If foreign regimes believe the US position on rendition is too one-sided, favoring the US, but not them, they could obstruct US efforts to detain terrorism suspects. For example, in 2005 Italy issued criminal arrest warrants for US agents involved in the abduction of an Egyptian cleric and his rendition to Egypt. The proliferation of such cases would not only challenge US bilateral relations with other countries but also damage global counterterrorism efforts.
• If foreign leaders see the US refusing to provide intelligence on American terrorism suspects or to allow witnesses to testify in their courts, they might respond by denying the same to the US. In 2005 9/11 suspect Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquitted by a German court because the US refused to allow Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a suspected ringleader of the 9/11 plot who was in US custody, to testify. More such instances could impede actions to lock up terrorists, whether in the US or abroad, or result in the release of suspects. (S//NF)

So, to sum up, in this common sense document that passes for the CIA thinking outside of the box, the CIA admits that the US is not all that different from other countries in exporting terrorism, and acknowledges that our hypocrisy on international law and reciprocity might lead to less cooperation on counterterrorism in the future.

Where do I sign up to produce this kind of milquetoast analysis?

Go read this Kevin Drum post. The important takeaway is this picture, showing that home prices had been, except for the last decade, utterly flat since World War II.

Kevin spends his post providing a bunch of reasons why people are so silly as to believe they’re going to get rich off of their house–things like the difficulty of adjusting for inflation and the rarity of coverage of markets (like Detroit) that have steadily lost value. As I said, go read the post, because it’s a fascinating read. (Admittedly, facing the hopefully imminent reality of losing a third of my home’s 2002 value makes me particularly interested.)

I’d like to raise another question raised by the graph, though: what the hell were we thinking? How did most of our society–including many “serious” experts–believe that spike was real–or sustainable?

It’s an important question because those same “serious” experts are treating that gigantic spike as if it should have been treated as real. The guys in Treasury continue their game of extend and pretend so as to spin out foreclosures more slowly, thereby insulating banksters from paying a price from treating this spike as if it were real, all the while suggesting the homeowners were each, individually, responsible for this collective decade of housing insanity. There’s little acknowledgment of how crazy the whole thing was.

And then consider how central this spike was to sustaining America’s economy. We’ve got entire cities and states whose entire culture of affluence was significantly dependent on this spike. The illusion that America hasn’t been in decline for the last decade relied on this spike. And we have yet to start talking about what we’ll replace the spike with (some Democrats had hoped to build a new bubble on green technology–which would at least have the bonus of providing necessary societal value–but unless Obama unleashes EPA to set new greenhouse limits, the do-nothing Senate looks determined to squelch efforts to invest further in green technology).

The spike in this graph really seems like a larger lesson about America: its failed media and pundit class, its fundamentally bankrupt finance-based economy, and its failing political culture.

I owe ROTL a hubcap, apparently, because while I’ve been distracted with the joy of moving in a historically bad housing market, the US won its long extradition battle over Viktor Bout.

Coincidentally, I actually found Douglas Farah’s book on Bout, Merchant of Death, half-read a few weeks ago, as I was packing up the house. So in the days before the Thai court agreed with the US extradition request, I picked up reading of Bout’s exploits during the Afghan and Iraqi wars. And reading the story at this distance, particularly given Russian efforts to prevent Bout’s extradition, I couldn’t help but think the US underplayed Russian involvement in Bout’s exploits.

Which one of the men who investigated Bout for years, Robert Eringer, seems to support.

Former FBI counterintelligence Robert Eringer, who until recently headed the Monaco Intelligence Service, doesn’t think so. In 2002, Eringer investigated Bout’s money-laundering activities, which were allegedly facilitated through Monaco by US-registered company Pastor International. Eringer claims that Russian weapons merchants, including Bout, used the company to launder nearly one billion dollars in sales profits between 1996 and 2001. But Eringer claims to have made another discovery during his investigation: namely that Bout had been “co-opted by the Russian external intelligence service (SVR)” and had been offered shelter by the Russian Federal Security Service in Moscow, despite being named in an international arrest warrant issued by Interpol.

I guess we’ll see whether there have been more formal ties between Bout and Russia (as well as what role Russian organized crime plays in the relationship) as his trial develops here in the states.

But the question is worth asking for what it might say about how countries enact foreign policy as globalization continues to erode the nation-state. In that model, ostensibly private arms dealers repeat the role our government (and Russia’s) did during the Cold War, destabilizing countries in a fight over spheres of influence. Of course, as weapons proliferate, the danger of it all increases.

Here’s what Farah had to say to NYT about the US’ long pursuit of Bout.

Mr. Farah said the United States began pursuing Mr. Bout in the 1990s after officials became alarmed that he was making conflicts more deadly by showering warring parties with weapons on an unprecedented scale, including weapons as sophisticated as attack helicopters.

“They became aware in the mid-1990s that he had fundamentally altered the way wars were being waged,” Mr. Farah said. “He was flying in planeloads of this stuff. There was a lot of alarm that we were facing something new. It was the privatization of warfare.”

Consider the irony, then, that a lawyer seeking a deposition from Erik Prince on a fraud suit had to go to Abu Dhabi yesterday–Bout’s old stomping grounds–to get it.

Blackwater private security firm founder Erik Prince was questioned on Monday in Abu Dhabi in connection with a fraud lawsuit filed by former employees that seeks millions of dollars in damages.”Mr Prince did appear for his deposition” or questioning under oath, Susan Burke, the lawyer who questioned him, told AFP.

[snip]

Burke said it was too early to say exactly how much money the lawsuit is seeking. “My analysis is that by the time we reach the jury, we will be seeking hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Most would go to the US government, she said, adding that former Blackwater employees Brad and Melan Davis, who filed the suit in December 2008, would also receive a percentage.

Citing the Davis’ experiences, the suit alleges that Prince and companies he controlled defrauded the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security via “false records, statements, claims, and omissions,” according to court documents.

This, just days after Blackwater got a light slap on the wrist for the same kind of weapons trafficking for which we’re about to try Viktor Bout.

The private security company formerly called Blackwater Worldwide, long plagued by accusations of impropriety, has reached an agreement with the State Department for the company to pay $42 million in fines for hundreds of violations of United States export control regulations.

The violations included illegal weapons exports to Afghanistan, making unauthorized proposals to train troops in south Sudan and providing sniper training for Taiwanese police officers, according to company and government officials familiar with the deal.

A key part of the settlement, of course, is that the company can continue to receive US contracts.

The settlement with the State Department does not resolve other legal troubles still facing Blackwater and its former executives and other personnel. Those include the indictments of five former executives, including Blackwater’s former president, on weapons and obstruction charges; a federal investigation into evidence that Blackwater officials sought to bribe Iraqi government officials; and the arrest of two former Blackwater guards on federal murder charges stemming from the killing of two Afghans last year.

But by paying fines rather than facing criminal charges on the export violations, Blackwater will be able to continue to obtain government contracts.

We’re about to try Russia’s version of Erik Prince for the same kinds of things we know Prince was doing. Meanwhile, Prince is hiding out where Bout once took refuge.

I suggest these twin legal proceedings ought to be viewed in tandem.

Dexter Filkins confirms today something that had been suggested in earlier reporting: Pakistan cooperated in our capture of Abdul Ghani Baradar in January to disrupt peace talks in Afghanistan.

Now, seven months later, Pakistani officials are telling a very different story. They say they set out to capture Mr. Baradar, and used the C.I.A. to help them do it, because they wanted to shut down secret peace talks that Mr. Baradar had been conducting with the Afghan government that excluded Pakistan, the Taliban’s longtime backer.

In the weeks after Mr. Baradar’s capture, Pakistani security officials detained as many as 23 Taliban leaders, many of whom had been enjoying the protection of the Pakistani government for years. The talks came to an end.

[snip]

“We picked up Baradar and the others because they were trying to make a deal without us,” said a Pakistani security official, who, like numerous people interviewed about the operation, spoke anonymously because of the delicacy of relations between Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States. “We protect the Taliban. They are dependent on us. We are not going to allow them to make a deal with Karzai and the Indians.”

[snip]

“This is a national secret,” he said. “The Americans and the British were going behind our backs, and we couldn’t allow that.” American and British officials denied they were directly involved in talks with the Taliban.

Some of the Americans anonymously quoted in the piece deny Pakistan was driving the capture; elsewhere Filkins repeats suggestions that the CIA got used by Pakistan. So while the ISI seems ready to confirm their reasons for the capture, the US intent in it still remains murky.

But there seems to be a pattern of murky events scuttling peace negotiations of late.

Consider the May 25 drone strike in Yemen that also happened to kill a provincial official, Jabir al-Shabwani, trying to talk al Qaeda into making peace.

At first, the news from Yemen on May 25 sounded like a modest victory in the campaign against terrorists: an airstrike had hit a group suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda in the remote desert of Marib Province, birthplace of the legendary queen of Sheba.

But the strike, it turned out, had also killed the province’s deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight.

[snip]

The May strike in Yemen, for example, provoked a revenge attack on an oil pipeline by local tribesmen and produced a propaganda bonanza for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It also left President Saleh privately furious about the death of the provincial official, Jabir al-Shabwani, and scrambling to prevent an anti-American backlash, according to Yemeni officials.

As with the Baradar capture, it remains unclear whether our partners used us, or whether we intended this outcome.But there does appear to be an emerging pattern of peace negotiations scuttled in one way or another.

(See also Yemen’s arrest of journalists intending to cover a “peace conference” launched by a Yemeni arms dealer today.)

This may just be al Qaeda’s attempts to prevent what happened in Iraq–the payoff of those sympathetic to their cause. Or it may be something else entirely.

But it sure seems like someone–quite possibly our “partners” in the fight against al Qaeda–badly wants to prevent peace from breaking out.