by David Waldman Thu Aug 20, 2009 at 09:00:04 AM PDT
Whoops! Looks like the core functions of your federal government got away from you once again, under the insane, anything-goes Bush/Cheney "administration" at which you're not supposed to "look backward."
The Central Intelligence Agency 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 C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.
How perfect is that?
Here was the one thing that almost everybody secretly wanted the CIA to be doing, and yet: 1) they were hiding it; 2) they were outsourcing it, and; 3) they fucked it up and wasted all the money.
They should have just paid me a million bucks. I would also not have assassinated anybody. For half the price.
This would all be very amusing but for the fact that it's also a perfect example of the enormously expensive, idiotic, ineffectual and illegal cronyism that Dr. Evil and his Pretzelnit permitted to destroy almost every aspect of the American concept of how our government is supposed to work.
Hell, they didn't even have the cojones to sign on the dotted line anywhere.
Officials said the C.I.A. did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune.
Meanwhile the Teabaggers, crying at every opportunity about how "our government" has been "stolen from us", will have absolutely nothing to say about a secret sidebar deal between... some person in the government and... some rich guy... to run around assassinating people for money. Oh, and did I leave out the fact that all the money's gone and nobody got assassinated?
Who's accountable? Nobody! If something goes wrong, it's all just a "personnel issue" among employees at a "private firm." Gee whiz.
The last "administration" appears to have ordered prisoners tortured in order to extract false confessions to bolster their lies about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that everyone in the world already knew were lies, and now we find out they were contracting out political assassinations to private entities, and even doing that on the sly.
But the guy with the health care plan is the Nazi.
Remember, though: Don't look backward! We traded away getting to the bottom of the torture/wiretapping/no-bid, non-contract assassination outsourcing, so as not to "suck up all the political oxygen" for [begin strike-through]universal health care the public option[end strike-through] regional co-ops.
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