The New York Times reports that the CIA has hired Blackwater to assemble and load bombs onto attack drones in Pakistan:
Blackwater employees assigned to the Predator bases receive training at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to learn how to load Hellfire missiles and laser-guided smart bombs on the drones, according to current and former employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of upsetting the company.
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Blackwater is not involved in selecting targets or actual strikes. The targets are selected by the C.I.A., and employees at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., pull the trigger remotely. Only a handful of the agency’s employees actually work at the Predator bases in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the current and former employees said.
They said that Blackwater’s direct role in these operations had sometimes led to disputes with the C.I.A. Sometimes when a Predator misses a target, agency employees accuse Blackwater of poor bomb assembly, they said. In one instance last year recounted by the employees, a 500-pound bomb dropped off a Predator before it hit the target, leading to a frantic search for the unexploded bomb in the remote Afghan-Pakistani border region. It was eventually found about 100 yards from the original target.
The article also reveals that the US has started running drone attacks out of Jalalabad out of concern that the Pakistani government might forbid their continued use of the Shamsi airbase in Pakistan to conduct attacks within the country. Given their stellar performance in Iraq, it’s not surprising that the CIA has hired them to conduct such a senstive mission.
Since my previous posting on the drone attacks, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud has been killed by a drone attack, and another attack this morning targeted the stronghold of Jalaluddin Haqqani.
