Blackwater

Erik Prince, the American mercenary, wants to sell you a phone. His Unplugged phone is aimed at stopping big tech and big government spying on you. It’s available in the United States, and shortly in the United Kingdom too. He tells me: “It’s been troubling for me to see the crackdown on free expression in the UK.” But the phone is a sideline. His main business remains sending private armies to some of the world’s most dangerous places. The Biden years were lean ones, or at least quiet ones; now that Donald Trump’s back, so is Prince. Most people know Prince as the founder of Blackwater, the world’s most notorious private military company. In 2014, four of Prince’s soldiers got long prison sentences in the US for opening fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 14.

Two years after the fiery death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the warlord behind Russia’s Wagner Group, the global shadow war waged by mercenaries and contractors still rages on. And now one of the most well-known names in the mercenary world is back in the headlines: Erik Prince. The founder of Blackwater and longtime ally of President Donald Trump, is on the ground in Haiti, where he has signed a deal with the government to take on the armed gangs that have brought the capital to the brink of collapse.Prince sold Blackwater in 2010 after its contractors opened fire on civilians in Iraq and it now operates under a different name.

It’s been a month since the President pardoned a turkey, so why pardon a flock of them now? Presidential pardons and commutations may be lawful and traditional, and the conduct of government agencies in the Trump years has certainly confirmed that presidential fiat might be fairer than the Justice Department. But some of the names in Trump’s flurry of pre-Christmas pardons smack of the Washington insider-trading that Trump has decried — and suggest we might be better off with no pardons at all.There are exceptional cases, of course, but they are rare. The necessity of Andrew Johnson pardoning Confederate combatants after the Civil War is obvious.