New York Times stikes again

As a now retired intelligence officer, I still look at the propaganda sources of our country's enemies as a hobby. Chief amount these propaganda sources is the New York Times. Now the Times is very concerned we are using contractors to collect intelligence in Pakistan:

May 15, 2010

U.S. Is Still Using Private Spy Ring, Despite Doubts

WASHINGTON — Top military officials have continued to rely on a secret network of private spies who have produced hundreds of reports from deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to American officials and businessmen, despite concerns among some in the military about the legality of the operation.

Earlier this year, government officials admitted that the military had sent a group of former Central Intelligence Agency officers and retired Special Operations troops into the region to collect information — some of which was used to track and kill people suspected of being militants. Many portrayed it as a rogue operation that had been hastily shut down once an investigation began.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government officials and businessmen, and an examination of government documents, tell a different a story. Not only are the networks still operating, their detailed reports on subjects like the workings of the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and the movements of enemy fighters in southern Afghanistan are also submitted almost daily to top commanders and have become an important source of intelligence.

The American military is largely prohibited from operating inside Pakistan. And under Pentagon rules, the army is not allowed to hire contractors for spying…

…With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the expanded role of contractors on the battlefield — from interrogating prisoners to hunting terrorism suspects — has raised questions about whether the United States has outsourced some of its most secretive and important operations to a private army many fear is largely unaccountable. The C.I.A. has relied extensively on contractors in recent years to carry out missions in war zones.

The exposure of the spying network also reveals tensions between the Pentagon and the C.I.A., which itself is running a covert war across the border in Pakistan. In December, a cable from the C.I.A.’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan, to the Pentagon argued that the military’s hiring of its own spies could have disastrous consequences, with various networks possibly colliding with one another.

Is this the same NY Times that loved what Frank Church did to our intelligence operations in the 1970s, destroying decades of work in building intelligence networks in Europe and South America? I wonder if Seymour Hersh sleeps well knowing he gave the Soviets information that destroyed our networks and led to the elimination of certain assets. In English people died because they were exposed thanks to Church, Hersh et all. OK, you cheer having the Congress first blind the services and the CIA with laws and restrictions and you even like having enemy combatants treated as a civilian criminal prisoner or enemy combatant (which Al Qaeda doesn’t qualify as). But you won’t stand for having a contractor doing what we used to have our government do, but you cheered the Congress outlawing us doing? In other words you like having this country and it's military doing things blind as a bat...

I will cheer the day that rag is under Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Then again that will probably never come...some rich liberal will just keep it going as a service to his ego...