The Imaginative Conservative. Secret Erik Prince Tape Exposed. Share Erik Prince, the reclusive owner of the Blackwater empire, rarely gives public speeches and when he does he attempts to ban journalists from attending and forbids recording or videotaping of his remarks.
On May 5, that is exactly what Prince is trying to do when he speaks at DeVos Fieldhouse as the keynote speaker for the "Tulip Time Festival" in his hometown of Holland, Michigan. He told the event's organizers no news reporting could be done on his speech and they consented to the ban. Journalists and media associations in Michigan are protesting this attempt to bar reporting on his remarks. Despite Prince's attempts to shield his speeches from public scrutiny, The Nation magazine has obtained an audio recording of a recent, private speech delivered by Prince to a friendly audience. In the speech, Prince proposed that the US government deploy armed private contractors to fight "terrorists" in Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia and Saudi Arabia, specifically to target Iranian influence.
Blackwater Founder Forms Secret Army for Arab State. Merc Firm: Who Is This 'Erik Prince' You Speak of? Rule number one for all security companies doing business in the Middle East: don’t publicly embrace Erik Prince.
A company building a battalion of mercs for the United Arab Emirates is sticking to that code, even though a host of ex-employees have fingered the infamous Blackwater founder as a driving force behind it. Prince is “not an officer, director, shareholder, or even an employee” of Reflex Responses, swears its president, Michael Roumi. Reflex Responses, also known as R2, has a $529 million contract to provide 800 mercenaries to keep the UAE safe from internal unrest or Iranian terrorism. Indeed, Prince’s name can’t be found on official company documents. Yet five former company employees told the New York Times that Prince was “deeply involved” in R2, having ”overseen the hiring of American military and law enforcement veterans for the project, as well as European and South African contractors.”
See Also: January 2010: Adam Ciralsky on Blackwater. Stepping off the plane at Kabul’s international airport, Prince is treated as if he, too, were Al Jazeera–worthy.
He is immediately shuffled into a waiting car and driven 50 yards to a second vehicle, a beat-up minivan that is native to the core: animal pelts on the dashboard, prayer card dangling from the rearview mirror. Blackwater’s special-projects team is responsible for Prince’s security in-country, and except for their language its men appear indistinguishable from Afghans. They have full beards, headscarves, and traditional knee-length shirts over baggy trousers. They remove Prince’s sunglasses, fit him out with body armor, and have him change into Afghan garb. Prince is issued a homing beacon that will track his movements, and a cell phone with its speed dial programmed for Blackwater’s tactical-operations center. Prince in the tactical-operations center at a company base in Kabul. Media blackout at Blackwater founder Erik Prince’s Tulip Time talk in Holland. Dispensationalism. As a system, dispensationalism is expounded in the writings of John Nelson Darby (1800–82) and the Plymouth Brethren movement,[1]:10 and propagated through works such as Cyrus Scofield's Scofield Reference Bible.
The theology of dispensationalism consists of a distinctive eschatological end times perspective, as all dispensationalists hold to premillennialism and most hold to a pretribulation rapture. Dispensationalists believe that the nation of Israel is distinct from the Christian Church,[2]:322 and that God has yet to fulfill his promises to national Israel. These promises include the land promises, which in the future world to come result in a millennial kingdom and Third Temple where Christ, upon his return, will rule the world from Jerusalem[3] for a thousand years.
In other areas of theology, dispensationalists hold to a wide range of beliefs within the evangelical and fundamentalist spectrum.[1]:13 Concepts[edit] Progressive revelation[edit] Dispensations[edit] Eschatology[edit]