Remember that top-secret assassination program that so enraged Leon Panetta and Congressional leadership? Your tax dollars paid Blackwater to carry it out, says the Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The secret CIA program to kill top al-Qaeda leaders with assassination teams was outsourced in 2004 to Blackwater USA, the private security contractor whose operations in Iraq prompted intense scrutiny, according to two former intelligence officials familiar with the events.
[I]n 2004, after briefly terminating the program, agency officials decided to revive it under a different code name, using outside contractors, the officials said.
"Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong," said a retired intelligence officer intimately familiar with assassination program.
What could possibly go wrong?
I'll borrow from my own comments below to prompt some more discussion. I don't have a problem with this in and of itself. What concerns me: why didn't we use, or worse, didn't we have the resources to do this within the armed forces? If you're a Bush Administration decision-maker, why bother to outsource when you've publicly labeled the targets as enemy combatants?
The only reason, as a source states obviously in this article, is to cover your rear. That reveals a systemic lack of accountability that ought to scare all of us as it will long outlive the Bush Administration. This is a deep-rooted problem that undermines the operational capacity of our intelligence apparatus and armed forces.
Thoughts?