It's hard to make this stuff up. Domestically we are sacrificing the Bill of Rights in the name of "fighting terror", but overseas we are paying them money.
Supporters of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan have been getting U.S. military contracts, and American officials are citing “due process rights” as a reason not to cancel the agreements, according to an independent agency monitoring spending.
The U.S. Army Suspension and Debarment Office has declined to act in 43 such cases, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, said today in a letter accompanying a quarterly report to Congress.
So terrorist supporters overseas get "due process rights", but
American citizens don't.
The War on some Terror is becoming a War on Domestic Dissent more and more.
“I am deeply troubled that the U.S. military can pursue, attack, and even kill terrorists and their supporters, but that some in the U.S. government believe we cannot prevent these same people from receiving a government contract,” Sopko said.
Of course this isn't the first time we've put people we were fighting on the military payroll.
President Karsai has
been on the CIA payroll for more than a decade.
Bush's famous "surge" reduced the fighting for one simple reason:
we paid insurgents not to shoot us. Four years before that we
paid Saddam's generals not to fight.
It seems that much of our military "success" over the past decade has been more about dropping cash than dropping bombs.
I'm not saying that I oppose the strategy. It's certainly more cost-effective than sending our military to the other side of the world to fight an enemy that we can't define unless they are actively shooting at us.
But when the legacy of the War on some Terror is a bankrupt economy and a War on Civil Liberties then its time to declare this war as lost.
Assassination of U.S. citizens; Indefinite detention; Arbitrary justice; Warrantless searches; Secret evidence; War crimes; Secret court; Immunity from judicial review; Continual monitoring of citizens; and Extraordinary renditions.