Robert Baer regarding CIA - Blackwater contract: "The other shoe has dropped" [View All]

[sabra]

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1917759,00.html

Blackwater Hit Squads: What Was the CIA Thinking?

By Robert Baer Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009

The other shoe has dropped. CIA Director Leon Panetta, it turns out, ran up to up to Capitol Hill this June not simply to confess the CIA had a secret assassination program it never implemented but rather to confess it had sub-contracted the job out. As first reported by the New York Times on its website Wednesday evening, the CIA hired Blackwater to help with a secret program to assassinate top Al Qaeda leaders. Although no one was ultimately assassinated before the program was ultimately shelved — and the Times reports that it's not clear that Blackwater was engaged to do anything more than assist with planning, training and surveillance — Panetta must have been horrified the CIA turned to mercenaries to play a part in its dirty work. It's one thing, albeit often misguided, for the agency to outsource certain tasks to contractors. It's quite another to involve a company like Blackwater in even just the planning and training of targeted killings, akin to the CIA going to the Mafia to draw up a plan to kill Castro.

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And there may even be a darker side to Blackwater. This August one former anonymous Blackwater employee filed a sworn statement in federal court in Virginia claiming that Blackwater's founder Erik Prince (who is no longer involved with the day-to-day running of the company) was involved in the murder of at least one informant reporting to federal authorities on his company. The allegation, first reported by The Nation magazine, was part of a civil suit filed by several Iraqis for the company's alleged abuses in the country. Blackwater has denied the claims, calling them "anonymous unsubstantiated and offensive assertions."

Still, the CIA has maintained its various Blackwater contracts, which run from protecting CIA operatives in the field to loading Hellfire missiles on Predator drones. None of this is to mention that as soon as CIA money lands in Blackwater's account it is beyond accounting, as good as gone.

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Even more troubling, I think we will find out that in the unraveling of the Bush years, Blackwater is not the worst of the contractors, some of which did reportedly end up carrying out their assigned hits.

— Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com's intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower