Reprinted with permission from Alternet

With Afghanistan having fallen to the Taliban and countless Afghans desperately trying to leave the country, former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince has found a way to profit from the crisis, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The paper's Dion Nissenbaum reports, "Mr. Prince, whose Blackwater guards were convicted of killing civilians in 2014 while providing security for Americans during the Iraq War, said he was charging each passenger $6500 to get them safely into the airport and on a plane, and it would cost extra to get people who have been trapped in their homes to the airport. It remained unclear whether Mr. Prince had the wherewithal to carry out his plans."

Prince is the brother of Betsy DeVos, former secretary of education in the Trump Administration. When Donald Trump was president, Prince had an idea for getting U.S. troops out of Afghanistan: replacing them with a private security force. But that idea fell through.

Warren Binford, a University of Colorado law professor who has been helping with evacuation efforts in Afghanistan, told the Journal, "It's total chaos. What's happening is that we're seeing a massive underground railroad operation where, instead of running for decades, it's literally running for a matter of hours, or days."

The United States' 20-year war in Afghanistan started in 2001 following al-Qaeda's 9/11 terrorist attacks and has existed under four U.S. presidents: George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and now, Joe Biden. Trump and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo worked out an agreement with the Taliban for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and Biden followed through on the Trump/Pompeo agreement — although at a slower pace.

Mother Jones' Inae Oh, reporting on Prince's Afghanistan activities, reports, "Prince's plans to capitalize on tragedy come amid a broader effort by aid organizations to rescue as many people as possible as the U.S. struggles to process visas and evacuate both Americans still in the country and the tens of thousands of Afghans who worked from the U.S. government over the past 20 years of war…. Prince kept busy in recent years by overseeing operations to spy on so-called Trump enemies in government while misleading Congress in the Russia investigation. Now he's back, scrambling to make one last buck from the crisis in Afghanistan."