June 12, 2008

When I saw this editorial this morning, praising a Congressman for having "laid bare the folly of using for-profit gunslingers to undertake the highly sensitive task of handling and questioning", I almost thought for a moment that the New York Times had joined those of us who think it's a bad idea for governments to hire contingency-fee counsel (or vice versa) to dive into defendants' filing cabinets and depose their executives in high-stakes litigation. No such luck; it was just another editorial about war policy in the Middle East.

You still have to wonder, though: would it be more reassuring, or less, if the outsourcing of interrogation to Blackwater and other privatized law enforcement entities operated on a "no fee unless successful" basis?