The New York Times reports this morning that the private security group, Blackwater, was far more deeply involved in the Bush administration's CIA than has earlier been admitted. It's right in line with what many of us suspected: Blackwater in many cases acted as a covert government agency.
P.W. Singer, an expert in contracting at the Brookings Institution, said that the types of jobs that have been outsourced in recent years make a mockery of regulations about “inherently governmental” functions.
“We keep finding functions that have been outsourced that common sense, let alone U.S. government policy, would argue should not have been handed over to a private company,” he said. “And yet we do it again, and again, and again.”
In fact Blackwater was involved "in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials." They were involved daily -- nightly -- in "snatch and grab" operations.
While the top management of Blackwater in the US knew what was going on, it's "not clear," the Times reports, whether top brass at CIA in Washington knew "or approved."Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield. ... The secret missions illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private security company than government officials had acknowledged.
