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daemon wrote:

WASHINGTON - The CIA in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training, and surveillance.

The CIA spent several million dollars on the program, which did not capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the CIA used an outside security company for the program was one major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the new CIA director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for years, the officials said.

Oh, but they're not mercenaries! Nope.

This is obviously Nancy Pelosi's fault.

Ok, you tied in back into the thread nicely. good works on your part. You earned your gold star for the day.

daemon wrote:

::accepts flowers and chocolates::

Sorry, fresh out- but they were tasty.

Especially the Chrymanthesums.[/Gumby]

sturner wrote:

Yes, I believe that we are, in Afganistan. I may be incorrect but I think that inertia would keep them in place.

Steyr AUG wrote:

jerwin wrote:

A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/scahill

Are we still using mercenaries?

PMCs arent mercenaries, they dont do offensive operations.

Perhaps this deserves its own thread, but IIRC this is where the whole 'Blackwater- mercs or not?' issue has been argued. Split or not, this news bit points to a role well beyond guard duties. (Darned journalists, going off the reservation again... I'm sure this is 'poorly researched,' or sumfin'. The Times is such a tabloid).

Blackwater said to load bombs on C.I.A. drones
Officials: Contractors facilitate targeted killings of Al Qaeda leaders

WASHINGTON (NYT) - From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees.

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater. It has grown through government work, even as it attracted criticism and allegations of brutality in Iraq.

A spokesman for the C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the agency hired Blackwater in 2004 as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top Qaeda operatives.

In interviews on Thursday, current and former government officials provided new details about Blackwater’s association with the assassination program, which began in 2004 not long after Porter J. Goss took over at the C.I.A. The officials said that the spy agency did not dispatch the Blackwater executives with a “license to kill.” Instead, it ordered the contractors to begin collecting information on the whereabouts of Al Qaeda’s leaders, carry out surveillance and train for possible missions.

“The actual pulling of a trigger in some ways is the easiest part, and the part that requires the least expertise,” said one government official familiar with the canceled C.I.A. program. “It’s everything that leads up to it that’s the meat of the issue.”

Any operation to capture or kill militants would have had to have been approved by the C.I.A. director and presented to the White House before it was carried out, the officials said. The agency’s current director, Leon E. Panetta, canceled the program and notified Congress of its existence in an emergency meeting in June.

Scrutiny and controversy
The extent of Blackwater’s business dealings with the C.I.A. has largely been hidden, but its public contract with the State Department to provide private security to American diplomats in Iraq has generated intense scrutiny and controversy.

I'm sure it's all kosher, somehow.

ah, but advisors are still participants in the conflict.

Which harkens 'Police Brutality' in this case.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor … ml#ref=rss

But most of all, Burke sees Erik Prince, Blackwater's founder and former owner. In her suit, she refers to him as a "modern-day merchant of death," and she alleges that the 40-year-old created a "culture of lawlessness and unaccountability" at Blackwater, where the "excessive and unnecessary use of deadly force" was commonplace. In her motion, Burke also accuses Blackwater of war crimes. The US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Alexandria, Virginia, will now decide whether to take on Burke's civil suit.

War crimes.

The political world will also have to make some decisions. The first question is whether the US government will make public on Monday the most comprehensive report to date on the treatment of terrorism suspects. That alone would trigger a political hurricane in Washington, says former CIA Director []Porter Goss[/u].

Sheesh, Cheech, Chong, Bong, Ding-Dong!

Blackwater characterizes Burke's accusations as "scandalous and baseless," and claims that the cases she cites were isolated incidents. According to Blackwater attorneys, "no diplomat under the protection of this service died or even was injured during the entire duration of the contract."

Finessing a non-denial-denial?

Denying with feigned prays?

eter White, the head of the Mayer Brown team, plans to convince the judges in Alexandria this week that the Blackwater case isn't a case at all.

Steyr AUG wrote:

RatFink wrote:

You seriously think there are fedex trucks are driving around a war zone?  None of those carriers will deliver to a war zone.

Having actually seen them driving around in Iraq, you are wrong.

Moving military hardware and supplies within a warzone is not 'security work'.

Right, its logistics. Still not mercenaries.

Steyr AUG wrote:

Bat wrote:

You must believe us, not the press. We're official.

Dan Rather would be proud.

Let it be noted for the record how you neatly disappeared in non-response to my 'Army Times/Stars & Stripes outing of shady policies on embedding journos' thread. Must've been Mongolian Night or sumfin'... anyway, in lieu of cluttering things up with yet another thread no one can keep track of, more on our rather sloppy outsourcing/ civilian contracting of this last eight years or so of Middle Eastern warfare.

Serious flaws found in war contractor oversight
Defense auditors uncover at least $6 billion in questionable charges

[caption: This photo, provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act
request for documents about the performance of defense contractor Combat Support
Associates, was taken by U.S. military personnel in March, 2008. The picture, which
was digitally altered to remove the guard's name, was included in an inspection report
and shows a for-hire guard asleep in a watch tower at a U.S. military base in Kuwait.]


WASHINGTON (AP) - During a routine check of a watch tower at a U.S. military base in Kuwait, an Army sergeant found the guard leaning back in a chair, his sunglasses on, apparently sound asleep. When the soldier woke the guard, an employee of a defense contractor named Combat Support Associates, he denied he'd dozed off while on duty.

"It's so weird that I can close my eyes for one second and then you appear out of nowhere," the guard said, according to the sergeant's March 2008 inspection report.

The episode illustrates the problems between the U.S. armed forces and the industrial army supporting military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Demand for contractor services is heavy, while oversight of their work isn't. That means problems often aren't discovered until long after the payments have been made.

Eye-popping numbers
A major trouble spot is the business systems and procedures that companies use to bill the government. The numbers are eye-popping. Defense auditors have found at least $6 billion in questionable charges generated by sloppy accounting or, worse, contractors trying to bilk the military.

Yet, the Pentagon has done a poor job of recovering the money and forcing companies to improve, according to the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting. The panel cites dysfunction among auditors and contract managers, a shortage of personnel and a failure to be more confrontational with contractors who don't measure up.

Based in Orange, Calif., Combat Support Associates is a largely unknown enterprise that, since 1999, has held an Army contract worth $2.7 billion to support U.S. troops at bases in Kuwait as they move in and out of Iraq. The company's responsibilities include vehicle maintenance, warehousing, computer repairs and post security.

Between 2003 and 2007, when the U.S. invaded Iraq and then became ensnared in a lengthy counterinsurgency, there was little government scrutiny of the company's business systems, according to interviews and government records obtained by The Associated Press through the Freedom of Information Act.

In late 2007, the military belatedly began paying attention. Numerous contract violations were found, several of them serious, leading to a flood of what contracting officials call corrective action requests. Last fall, the Army Criminal Investigation Command opened an inquiry to determine if Combat Support Associates overbilled the government. The case is ongoing.

The records obtained through FOIA show money flowing to Combat Support Associates despite an alarming catalog of problems later uncovered by Army contracting officials.

'Major systemic weakness'
In one case, the company signed a $48 million deal with a Kuwaiti company to provide food, lodging and transportation for employees, but it did no detailed study to justify such a large expense. A memorandum supporting the buy included a price analysis three sentences long, which an Army review team called a "major systemic weakness."

The documents detail other deficiencies. The company failed to properly secure classified communications gear and weapons stored in warehouses. And it was written up for having no system in place to check the identification of contract employees — who are often not American citizens — at U.S. maintenance facilities in Kuwait.
..

Still a fundamentally sound system, tho, I'm sure. Cheney would be proud, if Rumsfeld a bit less so, of our tax dollars here at war- er, logistics work. Sleep. Whatever.

Shame the Army review team can't support the troops better like, say, Fox, whom I'd expect to call in a tame analyst for if they cover this at all. (Shame on you, AP, shame).

ACORN!

Bat wrote:

Let it be noted for the record how you neatly disappeared in non-response to my 'Army Times/Stars & Stripes outing of shady policies on embedding journos' thread.

Actually note that running back to back to back convoys in a warzone tends not leave as much time on the internet as someone sitting back in the US.

more on our rather sloppy outsourcing/ civilian contracting of this last eight years or so of Middle Eastern warfare.

Which falls directly on the contracting officers, supervisors and reviewers. Having seen them operate here, there are many good individuals in these positions, but several who leave a lot to be desired. Obviously a problem that needs, and is getting a lot of attention, but still hard to deal with when the lower level people writing the contracts dont give a crap.

Bat wrote:

Steyr AUG wrote:

Bat wrote:

Let it be noted for the record how you neatly disappeared in non-response to my 'Army Times/Stars & Stripes outing of shady policies on embedding journos' thread.

Actually note that running back to back to back convoys in a warzone tends not leave as much time on the internet as someone sitting back in the US.

Quite the expected answer, and as always, impossible to verify.

It doesnt need verification. You can feel free not to believe it, however it doesnt change the fact that its true

But here- it's not a zombie by any means. Feel free to use your present free posting time to reply; the thread is here. It follows on from your derisive responses in a previously recent thread, detailing some rather ignoble practices on the manipulation of journos and publc opinion.

And...? What exactly are you looking for?

Last edited by Steyr AUG (2009-10-08 1:35 am)