If
you could find a phrase that was the polar opposite of "more bang for
your buck," all of these efforts would qualify. In the case of the CIA,
keep in mind as well that you're talking about an agency which has for
years conducted drone assassination campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Hundreds of innocent men, women, and children have been killed along
with numerous al-Qaeda types and "suspected militants," and yet -- many
experts believe -- these campaigns have functioned not as an air war on,
but for, terror. In Yemen, as an example, the tiny al-Qaeda outfit that existed when the drone campaign began in 2002 has grown exponentially.
So
what about the Jason Bourne-like contractors working for GRS who turned
out to be the gang that couldn't shoot straight? How successful have
they been in helping the CIA sniff out al-Qaeda globally? It's a good
guess, based on what we already know, that their record would be no
better than that of the rest of the CIA.
One hint, when it comes to GRS-assisted operations, may be found in documents revealed in 2010 by WikiLeaks about joint CIA-Special Operations hunter-killer programs in Afghanistan like Task Force 373.
We don't actually know if any GRS employees were involved with those
operations, but it's notable that one of Task Force 373's principal
bases was in Khost, where Paresi and Wise were assisting the CIA in
drone-targeting operations. The evidence from the WikiLeaks documents
suggests that, as with GRS missions, those hunter-killer teams regularly
botched their jobs by killing civilians and stoking local unrest.
At
the time, Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and State Department contractor
who often worked with Task Force 373 as well as other Special Operations
Forces "capture/kill" programs in Afghanistan and Iraq, told me: "We
are killing the wrong people, the mid-level Taliban who are only
fighting us because we are in their valleys. If we were not there, they
would not be fighting the U.S."
As details of programs like Penny
Lane and GRS tumble out into the open, shedding light on how the CIA
has fought its secret war, it is becoming clearer that the full story of
the Agency's failures, and the larger failures of U.S. intelligence and
its paramilitarized, privatized sidekicks has yet to be told. Next Page 1 | 2 | 3
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
CorpWatch: Non-profit investigative research and journalism to expose
corporate malfeasance and to advocate for multinational corporate
accountability and transparency. We work to foster global justice,
independent media activism and democratic control over corporations.
We seek to expose multinational corporations that profit from war,
fraud, environmental, human rights and other abuses, and to provide
critical information to foster a more informed public and an effective
democracy.
Our guiding vision is to promote human, environmental, social and worker rights at the
local, national and global levels by making corporate practices more
transparent and holding corporations accountable for their actions.
As
independent investigative researchers and journalists, we provide critical information
to foster a more informed public and an effective democracy.
We believe the actions, decisions, and policies undertaken and
pursued by private corporations have very real impact on public life à ‚¬"
from individuals to communities around the world. Yet few mechanisms
currently exist to hold them accountable for those actions. As a result,
it falls to the public sphere to protect the public interest.
In many cases, corporate power and influence eclipses even the democratic
political
process itself as they exert disproportional influence on public policy
they deem detrimental to their narrow self-interests. In less developed
nations, they usurp authority altogether, often purchasing government
complicity for unfair practices at the expense of economic,
environmental, human, labor and social rights.
Yet despite the
very public impact of their actions and decisions, corporations remain
bound to be accountable solely to their own private financial
considerations and the interests of their shareholders. They have little
incentive, nor requirement, for public transparency regarding their
decisions and practices, let alone concrete accountability for their
ultimate impact.
4
3
3
