Jeff Huber (at-Largely): Thugs of Fortune. "Doesn’t all this make you proud to be an American?"

[laststeamtrain]

Thugs of Fortune
Posted by Jeff Huber


A singular absurdity of the 21st century is that the nation that spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined needs to hire mercenaries to fight wars against enemies who have no defense budget at all.

An August 19 New York Times article revealed that in 2004 the CIA hired Blackwater USA to help “locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda.” This is the secret program that Dick Cheney ordered the CIA to not tell Congress about for seven years. “It is unclear,” wrote Times reporter Mark Mazetti, “whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program.” The program, says Mazetti, “did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects,” which makes it sound like they tried to kill terrorist suspects and blew it. There’s something about assassinating “suspects” that makes the mercenary aspect of the program seem trivial.

It was the mercenary facet, though, according to Mazetti, that led CIA director Leon Panetta to cancel the program in June and then tell Congress about it. Panetta would have been fine with assassinating suspects, I reckon, if only CIA types had been involved.

But wait a minute. An August 20 Times article by Mazetti and James Risen says the CIA is still using mercenaries to help them kill terror suspects. A “division” of “the company formerly known as ‘Blackwater’” is loading Hellfire missiles and guided bombs on drone aircraft at “hidden” bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Blackwater mercenaries, now known as “Xe” (pronounced “zee”) mercenaries, also provide security at the bases. They don’t pull the trigger or pickle off bombs though; CIA “employees” do that by remote control from the agency’s Langley, Virginia headquarters. CIA types also pick which terror suspects to target.

How is this drone assassination program different from the assassination program Panetta cancelled in June? Both employ mercenaries. Both target “suspects.” Both rely on iffy information; our intelligence in that part of the world amounts to beating people up or bribing them so they tell us what we want to hear.

Our intelligence is so bad that we don’t even know for certain if our drone assassination program has killed any suspects. We know for sure that we’ve killed a lot of people who aren’t terrorists through collateral damage though, so we can be fairly sure the drone assassination program—like the rest of our woebegone war on terror—creates two or more new terrorists for every one it eliminates.

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http://www.atlargely.com/atlargely/2009/08/thugs-of-fortune.html

[bemildred]

1. Thugs indeed.

And outlaws too.
K&R.