Mercliess Mercenaries

Tucked as an aside into former FBI supervisory special agent Ali Soufan's must-read op-ed for the New York Times "about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding" is this interesting note (emphasis mine):

Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came through from Pat D'Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that "we don't do that," and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released last year by the Justice Department's inspector general).

My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were instructed to continue. (It's worth noting that when reading between the lines of the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use of these techniques.)

Those would be the same contractors who the Bush administration used to fill in the gaps (and avoid a draft), making Cheney's friends at Blackwater and Halliburton subsidiaries and other private mercenary corps rich beyond their wildest dreams, the same contractors about whom, in 2006, Bush couldn't say if they were controlled by any recognizable law while operating in Iraq.

At some point, I hope there's a reckoning for the influence private military contractors were allowed to have on our national policy during the Bush administration. I hope, but I suspect there won't be.

In fact, I suspect that outsourcing the really ugly stuff was the point all along.