June 24, 2004, on this blog: Congressional box scores
Fifty-four senators feel that top-secret interrogations of prisoners of war conducted to discover intelligence vital to our national security is the sort of tangential activity best outsourced to private contractors. Collecting strategic intelligence from the enemy is, apparently, not considered one of the Pentagon’s “core competencies.” What could possibly go wrong with that?
Employees of CACI International and Titan Corp. have been implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq.
I’m not opposed, in principle, to private contractors supplying government services. I think the folks at Google, for example, ought to be brought in to fix the impending computer crisis at the IRS. But contracting out the interrogation of prisoners seems a bit over the line — even before considering that, in practice, this policy has already helped us to lose one war.
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