Undoubtedly, there are many aspects of the just-released summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program that can and should be pondered.

But, having written on the national U.S. defense and national security sector’s use of private contractors for over twenty years, I naturally focus my attention on the CIA’s reliance on private contractors for the devising and implementation of an “enhanced interrogation” — i.e., torture – program.

It is worth emphasizing that the use of contractors described in the committee summary — including the roles played by what the Washington Post Friday called the “two questionably credentialed advisers, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen,” who were paid more than $80 million before the CIA cut its ties with them — focused only on the use of contractors in the interrogation program. It did not look at other contractor uses, such as their involvement in the rendition of suspected terrorists

The United States has used torture, both psychological and physical, going back decades, as historian Alfred McCoy richly detailed in his 2012 book Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogations. And it is not as if the military did not know how to do harsh interrogations as the Army’s 519^th Military Intelligence Battalion demonstrated at Abu Ghraib. The government recognized long ago that some activities are so sensitive and consequential that they should be done only by the government, not the private sector.

In his 2008 book Spies For Hire, Tim Shorrock quotes Eugene Fidell, then president of the National Institute for Military Justice, who was troubled by the CIA’s and Pentagon’s use of private contractors to interrogate enemy prisoners. “That’s’ really playing with fire,” he said. “That kind of activity, which so closely entails the national interest and exposes the country to terrible opprobrium, is something that ought to be done only by people who are government employees.”

So, why would the government turn to the private sector for this, and what does that say about governmental control of and accountability, or lack thereof, for the use of private security and military contractors?

I don’t ask this rhetorically. There has been lots of debate over what constitute inherently governmental activities – things only the government should do. But almost nobody, outside of companies that are paid to do it, believes that the private sector should be involved in interrogation.

In 2010, for example, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy issued a proposed policy memo to agencies instructing them to use the definition of “inherently governmental” in the 1998 Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act (FAIR). The FAIR Act classifies an activity as “inherently governmental” when it is so intimately related to the public interest that it must be performed by federal employees.

When my book, Shadow Force, on the use of private security contractors in Iraq was published in 2009, I noted that “An Army policy directive published in 2000,” and still in effect today, classifies any job that involves “the gathering and analysis” of tactical intelligence as “an inherently governmental function barred from private sector performance.”

Yet, that is a restriction that seems more honored in the breach. A Georgetown University law review article last year noted:

 Private companies are hired to train troops, collect and analyze intelligence, and carry out special operations. For instance, one company allegedly participated in an extraordinary rendition through a contract for air transport. Two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractors helped design and oversee the interrogation of Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaida. Employees of CIA contractors CACI and Titan have allegedly been involved in the oversight and torture of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib facility. One source estimates that “more than 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service (NCS)–the heart, brains and soul of the CIA–has been outsourced to private firms.

In fact, the outsourcing to the private sector that the government used to reserve for itself has been gathering momentum for decades. With regard to national security functions, it started, at least conceptually, in the Reagan era, gathered steam in the Clinton Administration, and rocketed up into the stratosphere in the years after 9/11. Currently, contractors are so entwined with the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security and numerous other agencies that they are similar to the creature in the Alien movies; trying to remove them would kill the patient.

The reasons for this are many, but some stand out. First, government, whether Republican- or Democratic-led, has bought into the neo-liberal orthodoxy of the “magic of the marketplace,” as Reagan put it, with the presumption that the private sector just does things better. Like the Bionic Man, it is supposedly cheaper, more agile and more efficient.

This is debatable when it comes to municipal services. It becomes even dodgier when applied to the national security sector. For some twenty years now, I have been asking advocates of the private military and security contracting industry to show me empirically based, methodologically sound studies that prove this point. I have not yet been shown any.

Peter Singer, a former scholar at the Brookings Institution, once wrote an article in Foreign Affairs journal in which he noted:

Unfortunately, the Pentagon’s current, supposedly business-minded leadership seems to have forgotten Economics 101. All too often, it outsources first and never bothers to ask questions later. That something is done privately does not necessarily make it better, quicker, or cheaper. Rather, it is through leveraging free-market mechanisms that one potentially gets better private results. Success is likely only if a contract is competed for on the open market, if the winning firm can specialize on the job and build in redundancies, if the client is able to provide oversight and management to guard its own interests, and if the contractor is properly motivated by the fear of being fired. Forget these simple rules, as the U.S. government often does, and the result is not the best of privatization but the worst of monopolization.

Common sense, if nothing else, should tell people that economic rationales for using contractors for interrogations are nonsense. Free markets require competitive environments and numerous customers, yet the government is often the only customer. And even private contractors have their limits on what they are willing to do. In September 2005, CACI announced that it would cease providing interrogation services when its contract expired at the end of that month.

Another, far more likely reason that the intelligence community would use contractors is that it is easier to keep things secret. A government agency carrying out torture could be subject to congressional oversight, weak and ineffective as it often is. But a private company generally doesn’t have to worry about that.

Despite a decade’s worth of strong reporting on the subject, the deep involvement of private contractors in our national-security apparatus is only dimly acknowledged — and even less appreciated — by the general public. One has only to ask how many casualties the U.S. has suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq. The body count almost never includes contractors — nearly 1500 in Afghanistan as of the end of 2013, according to the Department of Labor. In Iraq, the toll was higher. If people don’t care about contractors when they are actually dying on behalf of the government, the probability that anyone cares when they violate law on behalf of the government is practically zero.

Torture has been illegal in the United States since the Senate ratified the UN’s Convention Against Torture in 1994. So, the temptation for the CIA to employ contractors to further hide U.S. government use of torture must have been almost irresistible.

Furthermore, the use of private contractors may well have served as a way to satisfy U.S. government officials’ bloodlust — torture for torture’s sake — even though, according to the Senate committee’s report, it did not help to gain enough useful intelligence to justify its use. As New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote this week:

And why the private contractors? Maybe because the actual government interrogators didn’t believe torture worked either. Some complained that, after Mitchell and Jessen arrived, reasonably cooperative prisoners were suddenly brutalized under the theory that the original approach had been too “sissified.”

Nor is the use of contractors in intelligence for troubling purposes limited to torture. In fact, as I write this, the Associated Press is running a story that about how the U.S. Agency for International Development used contractors for more than two years to secretly infiltrate Cuba’s underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the Castro government.

The idea was to use Cuban musicians “to break the information blockade” and build a network of young people seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.

On at least six occasions, Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.

The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba’s communist government.

The worst truth, however, is this: as the National Security Agency surveillance scandal confirms, private companies are so comfortably and deeply embedded with the national security state — and happily making billions in the process — that separation, let alone divorce, seems almost entirely out of the question.

Every day, private contractors are breaking scores, if not hundreds, of domestic and foreign laws. And why wouldn’t they, considering that the government is willing to grant them immunity or indemnify them against any charges that might be brought against them?

Of course, not all contractors are bad or doing bad things. Most, in fact, are doing their best to implement whatever contact they are working on. But as long as a government is allowed by its own public to do things in the name of ensuring public safety, we can expect similar atrocities in the future. To paraphrase what Shakespeare wrote in Julius Caesar:

The fault, dear American public, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

David Isenberg is an independent researcher and writer on U.S. military, foreign policy, and national and international security issues. He a Senior Analyst with the online geopolitical consultancy Wikistrat and is a U.S. Navy veteran., He is author of  Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. His blog, The PMSC Observer, focuses on private military and security contracting, a subject he has testified on to Congress.

Image Credit: Mike Licht

Much of this bloodletting could have been avoided had Maliki joined with the US in the deal the American military made with the vast majority of Sunni Arab insurgents between Fall 2006 through 2008. That arrangement (in response to Sunni Arab tribal and insurgent overtures known collectively as the “Sunni Arab Awakening”) was a defining moment in greatly reducing US and Iraqi casualties. It not only took the bulk of a formidable insurgency off the battlefield, it also enlisted it in a robust attempt to take down a good bit of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the source of most all bombings against the Iraqi Shi’a community and targets associated with the Shi’a-dominated Baghdad government to this day. Yet, since the departure of US forces and Maliki’s reluctant cooperation with — plus the continued marginalization, harassment and even killings of — former insurgents and their supporters, AQI has been on the rebound.

The latest demonstration of the power of both AQI and its new allied Syrian affiliate the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was the carefully orchestrated, massive late July bombing of and prisoner break-out from Abu Ghraib prison. Hundreds of AQI cadres and many deeply embittered Sunni Arabs of various affiliations escaped to swell the ranks of Maliki’s armed enemies.

The Maliki government cannot mount an effective anti-insurgent effort aimed at Sunni Arab strongholds in Western Iraq because it lacks the means to crush its Sunni Arab tormentors. Even US forces found confronting the same challenge a difficult slog prior to their deal with the “Awakening.” But Maliki’s Iraqi military is far weaker; woefully short of tanks, heavy artillery and combat aircraft. Also, corruption within the army and security services is rampant, reducing their effectiveness and enabling insurgents to access vital information.

Making matters worse, Maliki recently has appointed a Shi’a hardliner to lead a renewed effort to rid the military, security services and government of personnel with pre-2003 links to the Ba’th Party. Tens of thousands of Sunni Arab army officers could be subject to expulsion, either making them more vulnerable targets for AQI & Co. or embittered enough to join with AQI and other hardline Sunni Arab armed elements conducting anti-Shi’a and anti-regime operations. And former government employees and officers that join with anti-government elements would carry with them a wealth of valuable training and insider information.
This is classic Maliki. At nearly every turn responding with greater mistrust and animosity toward Iraq’s Sunni Arabs, the current government feeds the very violence it seeks to eradicate.

Meanwhile, ironically, despite their exclusion from the political mainstream and Maliki’s shunning of much of the Sunni Arab community, a majority of Sunni Arabs inside Iraq may still wish to put an end to the confrontation and violence. In provincial elections held in late June in predominantly Sunni Arab al-Anbar and Nineveh Provinces, the largest grouping favoring regional autonomy, the Mutahhidun bloc, lost a considerable number of seats to relative moderates advocating dialogue with Maliki.

This suggests that despite the rise in violence and widespread anti-central government demonstrations, the percentage of Iraqi Sunni Arabs actively or passively supporting AQI and related resistance groups, despite the rise in bombings, remains relatively limited. Yet, the only signal from Maliki in the face of this sign of hope has been his initiation of another purge of Sunni Arabs from the government and the military.

It is difficult to fathom all aspects of Maliki’s motivations in pursuing such a damaging course. Some Shi’a within the general population have shown support for reconciliation with Iraq’s Sunni Arabs in order to reduce violence, but there is no reason to believe they speak for a majority. Many others are too angry (quite a few with relatives or friends who have been bombing victims) to contemplate a more conciliatory course. We must bear in mind that in addition to the horrific death tolls there have been even higher numbers of Shi’a wounded thrust upon an inadequate medical system as well as their extended families along with considerable private property damage.

Moreover, most Shi’a leaders around Maliki appear supportive of exclusionary policies. And of considerable importance has been Iranian opposition to concessions to Iraq’s Sunni Arabs (with the latter remaining generally hostile toward Iranian influence in Iraq). Maliki doubtless feels the need to retain the support of both his senior Iraqi Shi’a associates and Tehran in order to survive as prime minister.

For Washington, such dependency on the part of Maliki has translated into an inability to steer Iraqi policy toward a wiser course. Many observers have written about the steady loss of American influence over Iraqi governance since 2008 in terms of reduced US regional clout. Yet, for Iraqis, ignoring US advice has meant their leaders have moved in a direction that has undermined Iraqi stability and the safety of much of the country’s population from within.

Furthermore, ignoring US warnings not to aid the Assad regime in Syria (while helping Iran do just the opposite), has placed the Iraqi government in the crosshairs of still more trouble. If Assad prevails, much of eastern Syria would be flush with many hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of vengeful and battle-hardened Sunni Arab extremists (many of them Iraqis) driven there by defeats farther west, and a lot of them likely to move into Iraq. If, on the other hand, the rebels unseat Assad & Co., a hostile Sunni Arab regime in Damascus most likely would assist Iraq’s minority Sunni Arabs in an effort to keep Maliki and his Shi’a majority on the defensive.