[DoD] Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
KABUL, Afghanistan — Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.
It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.
Justice, CIA clash over probe of interrogator IDs
The CIA and Justice Department are fighting over a secret investigation into a controversial program by legal supporters of Islamist terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay that involved photographing CIA interrogators and showing the pictures to prisoners, an effort CIA officials say threatens the officers' lives.
Phi Beta Iota: One reitred Colonel compared the ACLU effort to hold CIA officers accountable to a return of Phil Agee, renegage CIA clandestine case officer who wrote, with extraordinary detail including agent specifics across Latin America, INSIDE THE COMPANY–CIA DIARY. Asked for comment, Robert Steele said “I was one of five CIA officers under cover that Agee did not blow, and I would never condone a violation of one's secrecy agreement nor a betrayal of the specifics of authorized operations however stupid. What I do see now, in my more mature years, is how blatant illegal actions by one's own government can and should be called into question. Both defense and national intelligence are criminally negligent and ineffective. Nice people who get along with one another, they are promoted on the basis on managing inputs at great expense to the US taxpayer, and are not held accountable for outputs or outcomes. When General Mike Flynn and General Tony Zinni and Robert Steele agree on anything as important as this, it is time to replace both national and defense intelligence leaders. They are not doing their jobs. They are betraying the public trust with their well-intentioned ineptitude.”
