The CIA hired private security firm Blackwater to assist in a programme to assassinate al-Qaeda operatives in 2004, US media reports have said.

The CIA would not confirm that Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, was involved, but George Little, a spokesman for the CIA, said the programme had been unsuccessful.

The New York Times, citing unidentified current and former government officials, first reported Blackwater’s involvement late on Wednesday on its website.

It is unclear if the CIA, then under director Porter Goss, had planned to use the private company in lethal operations or just for planning and surveillance.

‘Circumventing congress’

Jeremy Scahill, an investigative journalist who has written extensively about Blackwater and the rise in use of private contractors in war zones, told Al Jazeera that the allegation was “explosive” and warranted a “deep investigation” into what went on.

He said the administration under George Bush, the former US president, clearly used private contractors as a way to circumvent the need for congressional approval for covert operations.

Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, terminated the programme in June this year and then informed the congressional intelligence committees in an emergency briefing the next day.

The House Intelligence Committee then launched an investigation to determine whether the CIA broke the law by not informing congress about the secret programme as soon as it began.

Blackwater came under heavy criticism for its alleged role in a September 2007 shooting in Baghdad’s Nisoor square that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.

Government officials told the Times that bringing outsiders into a programme with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Michael Hayden, who took over from Goss as CIA director, downgraded the programme from a planned covert action to an intelligence gathering activity.

Contractors

He told congress last year that the CIA regularly uses contractors for intelligence analysis and operations, including in the interrogation of terrorist suspects which critics have called torture.

Contractors are no longer allowed to conduct interrogations, Panetta told congress in April, but more than a quarter of US intelligence agencies’ employees are contractors hired to fill in gaps in the military and civilian work force.

About a quarter of them conduct intelligence collection and operations, according to data released last year by the office of the director of national intelligence.

The CIA lost about a quarter of its manpower and budget in the post-Cold War years, so when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, it hired a large number of contractors while it recruited more permanent personnel.

Source: Aljazeera.net