Blackwater VP Advising Mitt Romney on TerrorismOnce he was known as the “Flies On The Eyeballs” guy. Lately, he’s been the vice president of controversial private security company Blackwater. Now, Cofer Black has a new position: top counterterrorism adviser to Massachusetts Republican Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
The one-time chief of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center got his flamboyant nickname after delivering a famous post-9/11 briefing to President Bush about the CIA’s plans to destroy al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. (“They’ll have flies on their eyeballs” when CIA is done with them, Black is reported to have said.) But that wasn’t Black’s most famous utterance. In September 2002, in his first-ever public testimony before a joint Congressional inquiry into 9/11, Black — by then the head of the State Department’s counterterrorism shop — acknowledged that in terms of the CIA’s “operational flexibility,” after 9/11, “the gloves come off.” In retrospect, it’s considered the first public reference to the agency’s detention, rendition and interrogation policies.
Black left government in 2005 to join Blackwater, whose activities in Iraq have drawn both the ire of the Iraqi government and the opprobrium of House Oversight Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA). But that hasn’t disqualified Black from advising Romney’s campaign.
Last week, the former Massachusetts governor proudly announced he had brought Black on board:
“The United States faces a new generation of global threats and challenges,” Black said in a statement issued by the Romney campaign. “Governor Romney recognizes the threats before us and has already laid out the policies needed to give our men and women the tools they need to protect our country.”
Given amount of heat Blackwater is drawing these days, it would certainly help the company to be tightly connected to a future administration.
