“I’m happy to have a president that will bluntly speak the truth in negotiations,” said Erik Prince of President Donald Trump’s alleged description of certain impoverished states as “s***hole countries.”
Prince made his remarks on Friday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight, hosted by Breitbart News’s Senior Editor-at-Large Rebecca Mansour. He is a retired Navy SEAL and founder of Academi (formerly Blackwater USA).
“If the president says some places are shitholes, he’s accurate,” said Prince, reflecting on time he served in Haiti in 1994 during Operation Uphold Democracy:
I know the president was beaten up even on comments he made about Haiti, and I can speak firsthand about Haiti, because as a young Navy SEAL officer in 1994, Bill Clinton decides to invade Haiti. I was there. My SEAL team ended up sending two platoons, and we actually planned for 100 percent casualties, not from enemy fire, but because of the water quality. We had to swim ashore, and the water was so bad because there were two and a half million people with untreated sewage flowing right into the water that we were going in. We had to get so many shots, so many vaccinations, that none of us could donate blood for six years afterwards. So if the president says some places are shitholes, he’s accurate. Literally.
Prince rejected narratives pushed by Democrats and their news media allies framing Trump’s alleged “s***hole” comments as racist: “It’s a sad characterization of many of these places. It’s not based on race. It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with corrupt incompetent governments that abuse their citizens, and that results in completely absent infrastructure to include open sewers, and unclean water, and crime. It’s everything we don’t want in America.”
“It’s entirely appropriate to regulate or limit who comes to America,” said Prince of screening foreigners seeking entry to the U.S. “Being an American citizen is a privilege, it is not a right of every citizen in the world.”
Asked about recent political unrest in Iran and how America might counter threats from its Islamic regime, Prince recommended the use of “dark arts of statecraft” to fragment the state’s concentration of power:
This is the great gap, I believe, in the United States foreign policy toolbox, because on one end of the spectrum, you have diplomats and embassies and international conferences, and at the other end of the spectrum, you have the nuclear triad [and] conventional army divisions with tanks and ships and all the rest. In the middle are the dark arts of statecraft which include exactly what the intelligence community should be doing. It is political warfare. It is subterfuge. We should be doing to the [Iranian] regime exactly what the CIA and the Catholic church did to the communists in Poland in 1980 that dropped, which caused communism to collapse by empowering alternate centers of power against the regime.
Student groups and labor unions “standing against the regime” in Iran, said Prince, should be supported by the CIA via the aforementioned “dark arts of statecraft.”
“The CIA exists to prevent and to avert wars,” said Prince, describing the agency as overly bureaucratized. Excessive bureaucratization at the CIA causes the agency to become exceedingly “risk averse” in its operational considerations, he added, compromising its ability to fulfill its purpose.
Breitbart News Tonight airs Monday through Friday on SiriusXM’s Patriot channel 125 from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern (6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific).
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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.
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