Contract killers
The revelation that the Pentagon, knowingly or unknowingly, may have been running a private US death squad tasked with hunting down and killing militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan is most alarming.
The allegation is that Michael D. Furlong, a former US Air Force officer who is now a civilian, was hired as a contractor by the Pentagon to assemble intelligence on senior militants. In the performance of his job, he engaged a number of other contractors, including a firm disarmingly entitled International Media Ventures which is staffed by ex-special forces and CIA personnel.
Far from gathering intelligence, it seems that Furlong and his staff were murdering suspects in cold blood. There is clearly a very great deal yet to be revealed about this exercise but already there are key questions that demand to be answered.
The first obvious query has to be why on earth a country as powerful as the US with more than enough official intelligence agencies, often falling over each other as they duplicate efforts, should need to hire a civilian contractor to undertake more spying? An awkward possible answer is that a commercial company would not be subject to the strict discipline and traceable chain of command and orders as a government agency. Should that be the case, then it must also be asked if the sort of orders that the civilian contractor might be giving would be considered impossible for soldiers or government intelligence operatives to give.
President Obama’s crackdown on the US intelligence services has produced a number of assurances of future good behavior. The CIA, for instance, has said that it is no longer going to assassinate people. In the most capitalist of societies, this has however opened a gap in the market. Thus the extraordinary hiring of Furlong and his murky band of trained killers. Hence also commercial operations such as Blackwater/Xe which have been guarding convoys in war zones and undertaking the training of Iraqi and Afghan troops. Both jobs would once have been considered the exclusive preserve of the US military.
There could of course be much more to Furlong’s operation. He may have retired officially, but did he really ever leave US government service? His own situation may in fact be mirrored by that of the hit men he allegedly hired. Was this in fact an official operation all along but structured at arms length, so that if it were exposed or compromised, it could be easily “denied?” If that is what has happened, then it does not seem to have worked, since the US Defense Department is clearly embarrassed by the revelations about Furlong.
He is reportedly under criminal investigation for fraudulent use of his $16 million budget. It would seem altogether more appropriate that the enquiries should be along the lines of murder and conspiracy to murder. Equally, whoever hired him is clearly guilty at best of a gross dereliction of duty and at worst of complicity in the most serious crimes. It would be highly unfortunate if Furlong were to meet with some fatal accident before he can testify.
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SHAH AFFAN
Mar 17, 2010 11:07
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