Horrors! NT Times Slams CIA/Blackwater for... Poor Project Managment Skills

The New York Times is still deeply involved in fighting the ghosts of President's past, trumpeting the headline, Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret Raids by the C.I.A.

Considering the hype, I was expecting something explosive—maybe they helped snatch potential terrorists off the streets of Cairo, or maybe even here in the U.S.—or at least something mildly titillating.

Instead, the Times delivers this:

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

Really? This is the big story? While the confirmation that Blackwater operatives might have participated in raids in combat zones is newsworthy, it isn't exactly surprising, is it? That they've also escorted detainees being transported from one location to another is frankly boring.

But maybe there's more too this story than the lede suggests.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called "snatch and grab" operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Now, that is a bit more interesting. They were engaging almost nightly, and played central roles. The C.I.A. partnering with mercs... sounds like a thousand B-rated action movies, but hey, I like those.

Let's see what else they've got.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Okay, NYT. You had me, and then you lost me.

If I understand this right, the Blackwater guys weren't originally a planned part of the raids, but were there playing security for the C.I.A. guys much as they did the State Department. At some point, there was the need for an extra active participant or more in the raid, and the Blackwater guys, being former military and there were the obvious and logical choice to step in.

I can see a logical (and quite human) progression from being an impressed team member who stepped in as part of his overarching mission to protect his principle (which seems to arguably still be within the scope of his assignment), to the more murky and politically problematic normalized use of Blackwater guards in these missions. There is certainly what the project managers among us with recognize as "scope creep," but the Times still isn't giving us much meat. Were the guards involved in overwatch roles, setting up a perimeter? Or were they intimately active in the actual door-kicking, room-clearing, Tango-bagging searches themselves? If so, to what extent? Did they shoot anyone the shouldn't have? Did they shoot anyone, at all?

The Times doesn't tell us. That seems to be a very important distinction to make if the newspaper is going to level charges of wrong-doing. Lacking that, the story seems to fall flat.

Indeed, a close reading of the story leaves the reader more perplexed than informed. The Times writers certainly set a dark and ominous tone, but what they delivered was anti-climatic.

Other than vague insinuations of wrong-doing and the rehashing of historical events involving the company—stories the paper has already covered ad nauseum—there seems to be very little actual substance in what the authors present .

Scope creep? Really? That is the big story?

If I didn't know better about the Times stellar reputation for politics-free, objective reporting, I might be tempted to offer up an allegation of my own. If I were so inclined, I might suggest they were offering up a red herring to their readers... perhaps to distract them from the sort of things the editors might not want their readers thinking about.