Synergy in Security

by Dollars and Sense

An article in yesterday's New York Times, Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants, traces the efforts of a Department of Defense official, Michael D. Furlong, to set up a network of private security contractors, some of them former CIA agents and Special Forces operatives, to "track and kill suspected militants" in Afghanistan and Pakistan:

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

While this kind of "off-the-books spy operation" may count as beyond the pale for today's U.S. military, the use of private security contractors is becoming more and more commonplace, to the extent that, as Tom Barry argues in his feature article in the current issue of Dollars & Sense, the military-industrial complex "has morphed into a new type of public-private partnership—one that spans military, intelligence, and homeland-security contracting, and might be better called a 'national security complex.'"

We've just posted Tom's article to the website; read it here.

Labels: Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, CIA, Homeland Security, militarism, private security contractors, Tom Barry, U.S. military

 

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3/16/2010 05:30:00 PM