“plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries” Someone on Twitter in mid-May claimed that Erik Prince of Blackwater infamy had been indicted for arms trafficking in (of all places) Austria. I never saw any other mention of it until this morning. So, for those suffering a little Trump fatigue, apparently “the Elon Musk of the privatization of war” was indicted “with four other individuals in Austria on April 20 for exporting war materials without a license back in 2014 and 2015,” writes Ann Marlowe at The Bulwark: The indictment accuses Prince of using an aircraft-customizing company in which he then held a controlling interest, the Wiener Neustadt-based Airborne Technologies, to retrofit two American cropdusters that were then to be shipped illegally overseas. The charges overlap 2021 United Nations allegations that Prince had in 2019 violated the U.N. arms embargo on Libya in an aborted operation called Project Opus, financed by the United Arab Emirates to the tune of $80 million in support of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, head of one of the two perpetually contesting governments in Libya. Project Opus concerned several modified aircraft—both helicopters and fixed-wing planes—including the two mentioned in the Austrian case, which were extensively militarized: Project Opus also involved plans for high-value-target killings by Prince’s mercenaries, including Libyans who were EU citizens. Yes, that’s right: an American planning to murder foreigners with whom we were not at war. Prince has plied hs trade for decades without any sanction, so this news is a switch. But since Wiener Neustadt had a WWII…