IN THE NEWS
I'm sure most people, if asked, would say that US troops performed the now-infamous raids on Ahmed Chalabi's home and offices. Apparently, you'd be wrong.
Now, I'm not automatically assuming that mercenaries from DynCorp would do a lousy job. (They do have an infamous history, to say the least.) And in some cases, mercenaries have filled a vacuum that other forces couldn't, such as the mercenary campaign in Sierra Leone that James Davis describes in his book, Fortune's Warriors.
However, the Baltimore Sun story that describes DynCorp's participation in the raid isn't exactly the portrait of a professional force. I'm also more than a little disturbed that, in what the Bush Administration calls "the central front on terror," the most politically significant and sensitive raid we've probably performed since we got there was executed by someone who hasn't sworn an oath to the Constitution and the chain of command. Someday, if we keep pushing the mercenaries into the foreground, one of these firms will sell us out to a higher bidder. Until that happens, there are still lots of reasons to be worried about our dependence on mercenaries in Iraq.
That is terrible. Proper investigation must be done.
Posted by: resveratrol | 06/21/2011 at 23:43