A Subsidiary of the CIA

Blackwater.

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials. ...

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

The questions of the use of mercenaries on the battlefield should be asked thus: "What the fuck were you clowns thinking?"

The CIA should have recalled this line, from a couple of centuries ago:

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

The use of mercenaries brings dishonor upon our country. Those goons have been totally unaccountable to any authority for their misdeeds. Worse, the use of mercenaries has been a serious propaganda windfall for the enemy, for their behavior has been imputed to our own soldiers. I do not think it is overstating the case to say that Blackwater's behavior in Iraq got some of our own soldiers killed.

The use of mercenaries on the battlefield is an evil that should be stopped. If it cannot be stopped, the laws should be changed so that those guys, when in the pay of the United States, no matter how disguised or "cut-out", are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Then we can indeed hold them accountable. And that accountability should extend to the very top of the mercenary companies and, if they have been arranged as interlocking corporations, to all of the managers and officers.