Three weeks ago, I wrote about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s “I’m not here to talk about the past” op-ed piece, in which the agency was just following orders for the previous 8 years. Mr. Panetta was writing because of an uproar over a secret “jihadist” assassination program that had been devised during a previous regime. He canceled the program the day after he found out about it, and reported it to Congress, noting that it had never been put into operation and had not been used to assassinate members of Al Qaeda.
It always felt like a piece of the story was missing, and now we might have that missing piece. According to the NYTimes, the program also employed an outside contractor, Blackwater USA, for “planning, training and surveillance.” And, well . . .
It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.
Now, the main point of my day job is that organizations should stick to their core competencies. You know: “If there’s a function that you can’t do well in-house, then you should look to outsource it.” Still, I can see where a privatized hit team getting captured on foreign soil might create some problems. Fortunately,
Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.
So, good for Mr. Panetta for ending the program the day he found out about it, but I’m afraid this (or programs like it) is going to be like Pete Rose’s slow-motion confession about gambling on baseball: the admissions will keep getting a little worse and a little worse.