​​​​​​​Erik Prince Responds To Psaki’s Comments, Issues Warning For Kabul Airport

One day after White House press secretary Jen Psaki slammed ex-Blackwater head and current military contractor Erik Prince as “soulless” for charging Americans and Afghans seats on chartered evacuation flights out of Kabul, Afghanistan, Prince responded to Psaki’s comments. 

Prince joined Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on Thursday and denounced Psaki’s claims that he is profiteering off the disastrous situation unfolding in Kabul. He told Bannon: 

“I almost wear it as a badge of honor if she attacks me. I think those are tougher words for me than she has ever even had for the Taliban. I’m certainly not in this to make money, but … I can’t just bill an owner of an airplane to fly their uninsured jet into a war zone to evacuate people. I have to charge something, and unlike the federal government which just prints money ad nauseam and creates it and then wastes it, that’s not how we can roll as private citizens. … She’s firing torpedoes at boats that are trying to help at a Dunkirk type of evacuation.”

Prince, who founded Blackwater, was concerned about “attacks on any of the outgoing aircraft.” 

He criticized Washington “who decided to give up Bagram, our largest airbase in the region – which is actually defendable – to say we’re gonna do our final staging out of Kabul, an airport in the middle of a city of four and a half million surrounded on hills by three sides, where just ten guys, with a couple of motor tubes can shut the whole place down and destroy billions of dollars of U.S. aircraft and kill 1000s of people on those aircraft, and that’s what I’m afraid we’re in store for over the next few days, a few hours.” 

Prince is worried the Taliban may go on a hunting spree for Americans and or Afghan allies. He said “someone at the State Department didn’t get the memo to destroy sensitive technology” at the abandoned embassy.” Now the terror group has an “entire database on a computer with all the biodata, phone numbers, and address for everyone who worked for the U.S.” 

It appears the Blackwater founder’s main concern is that Kabul’s airport is not defendable as 13 U.S. service members lost their lives in a bomb attack on the facility. 

Evacuation flights from Afghanistan continued on Friday as President Biden confirmed the hard deadline exit of all U.S. personnel is Aug. 31. It remains to be seen what happens to Americans and Afghan allies who are left behind, and just how much they will be willing to pay to the private sector to do something the US government can not.