Expendable humanitarians

Hard to exaggerate how bad it may be, if it is indeed true. It strikes me as plausible but unlikely — if only because the drawbacks of having Blackwater operate out of an actual (if covert) US military location are so glaring. There have of course been well-sourced allegations of various nations’ military and espionage forces posing as reporters, ambulance crews, etc. Regardless of whether this story is accurate, it does seem to be a growing global trend.

Shelby

“Hard to exaggerate how bad it may be, if it is indeed true. It strikes me as plausible but unlikely—if only because the drawbacks of having Blackwater operate out of an actual (if covert) US military location are so glaring”

Yes, but haven’t they been doing that for years in Iraq? On the ground in the back of beyond, there’s probably huge amounts of mixing. And given that Blackwater would have a large number of US special forces troops, it’s not like they couldn’t talk their way in, using personal networks and phone calls to friends in the Pentagon.

With this, the torture accusations in the UK and Canada, and (if proven) the Guardian claim of birth defects in Fallujah, the war effort is looking increasingly vulnerable, and the chance of a public revulsion at the war is growing. Maybe there is hope for a significant popular movement to build around Afghanistan in the not-too-distant future.

Shelby @2 – So it’s misleadingly plausible.

Is the thinking here something like: if this is known to be true then they (CIA/military/Blackwater) must have been found out – but they wouldn’t be found out, so it can’t be true, so disregard the evidence? If so, it sounds like a fairly typical ‘no-conspiracy’ theorist’s apriorising. There’s a touch of the self-fulfilling prophecy there. Given such priors wrt effective concealment, would it follow that the stronger the evidence, the less likely it is to be accurate?

Such reasoning seems to rely among other things on an overconfident estimate of how much US military/’intelligence’ guys are concerned about the plausibility of their denials. It seems to me that ‘plausible denial’ is a bit of a misnomer – ‘Not-absolutely-categorically-disprovable-to-the-satisfaction-of-the-NYT denial’ seems to be quite adequate. That is so especially if widespread anti-conspiratorial reasoning can be relied on.

And it’s worth remembering that – according to the source, and consistent with expectation – the (alleged) operations are likely to be compartmentalised in such a way that officials with public faces are entirely insulated (and quite possibly ignorant, wilfully or not). In such circumstances any more effort at concealment might be considered rather wasteful. It might even be counterproductive, if the psychological effects of allowing the operation to be a partly ‘open secret’ are adjudged to provide a net expected benefit.

But then, as you say, Whatabout some other unspecified guys?

JQ @5 If proven, they will be a disaster for the government there, as well as for the US Administration.

I can’t see what could feasibly happen that would count as something sufficiently damaging being adequately ‘proven’ so as to be a disaster for the US administration. Domestic corruption and petty crime aimed at the other party (while keeping tapes of all your conversations), or getting a blowjob under the desk – now those are nice uncontroversial scandals people can run with while keeping worms canned, cats bagged, and the ‘National Interest’ (and more importantly, public reverence for it) undamaged.

In the absence of anyone with real political clout and the will to use it, endless buck-passing, obfuscation, salami-slicing and leveraging of the benefit of the doubt is the order of the day until the story is dissipated or superseded. At worst a scapegoat or two get a token punishment. And little here is entirely novel – except the allegation Chris isolated – and is that really going to be proven any more definitively than this, or its enormity even recognised by many voters?

Meanwhile in Pakistan, the interior minister has upped the ante for any domestic investigators by announcing he will resign if Blackwater presence is ‘proved’. To my eye, this is reminiscent of Blair’s similar ultimatum to Hutton. I’d interpret it as a good if bold strategy, since it also tends to partition outcomes into 1. he is forced to resign (which is not exactly going to be done on a hair-trigger), 2. nothing to see here. That’s only speculation hypothesis, of course, but at least gives successful politicians credit for the thorough and ‘realistic’ planning one would expect them to engage in on matters they care about.

tom s @6: the chance of a public revulsion at the war is growing the Obama team might be fairly happy about that (which doesn’t imply any causal link, of course, least of all direct command and control.)

Alex @7 – It’s a bit of a data-dump. agreed. FWIW there don’t seem to be any substantial contradictions, though. Data dumps are good. Much better than filtered, rationalised narratives which tend to be conditioned by conservative, coherentist ‘read-ahead’ considerations: “but that would mean…”. Get the data on the record as quickly as possible and with as little tidying up as possible, I say.

this work is coordinated from Bagram (so why would a planning staff be in Pakistan?) Since speculation is called for: Strategic planning / ‘coordination’ v tactical on-the-ground planning; a briefing/training role is suggested; and insulatory indirection – a major component of the outsourcing strategy. Planning Bagram-style: put a pin in the map, sign off payment, hand over photo, go for a stroll down Disney Drive (not Walt, apparently) for a Big Mac.