Mercenary Moments

The Los Angeles Times has an interesting story, picked up and commented on at Harpers, about the increasing privatization of US intelligence activities. It's worrisome, not least because commercial interests with an axe to grind are not the most likely neutral sources of intelligence analysis or, indeed, cleanly implemented covert operations. That aside (and not mentioned by either the LAT or Harpers), given the very grayness of it all plus the vast, almost unimaginable sums that disappear into the fog, one could reasonably entertain the possibility that phantom entities may be working both sides of the fence in the war on terror, e.g., that some may have had a hand in 9/11 and/or the anthrax scare. The possibility may not be mainstream, yet, but it seems to me that it's a worthy subject of investigation.