Get contractors in US courts. No? Why not?

From Secrecy News:

BILL ON CONTRACTOR LIABILITY RAISES INTEL AGENCY CONCERNS

Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill to extend federal
legal jurisdiction to crimes committed abroad by U.S. contractors in
war zones such as Iraq, so that such crimes could be prosecuted in U.S.
courts.

But before the bill (H.R. 2740) was passed, it triggered alarms by
those who were concerned that its provisions could undermine U.S.
intelligence activities.

"The bill would have unintended and intolerable consequences for
crucial and necessary national security activities and operations," the
White House said without elaboration in an October 3 statement outlining
its opposition to the bill.

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2007/10/sap100307.pdf

Congressman J. Randy Forbes (R-VA) spelled out those intelligence
agency concerns in more detail on the House floor.

For example, he said, "If a clandestine asset was implicated in a
crime, investigating and arresting that asset under traditional
criminal procedures could expose other assets and compromise critical
intelligence activities."

More fundamentally, he complained, the new bill "applies the entire
criminal code to the new category of potential offenders and could
implicate the authorized business of the intelligence community
employees and contractors."

Rep. Forbes therefore introduced a motion stating that "Nothing in this
Act shall be construed to affect intelligence activities that are
otherwise permissible prior to the enactment of this Act."

The motion was approved, but not without some critical commentary.

"The [Forbes] amendment raises serious questions about the activities
its proponents may be seeking to protect," said Rep. David Price
(D-NC), who authored the new bill.

"Given that my bill only targets activities that are unlawful, why do
my colleagues feel the need to clarify that it does not affect
activities that are permissible?"

"What activities are contractors carrying out that are permissible but
not lawful?" Rep. Price wondered aloud.

"If there are private, for-profit contractors tasked with duties that
require them to commit felony offenses, Congress needs to know about
it. Such a revelation would point to a need for a serious debate about
whether we are using contractors appropriately," he said.

See the October 4 House debate on the new bill, the "Military
Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act Expansion and Enforcement Act of
2007," which was passed by a large majority, here:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_cr/h-meja.html

The awkward fact is that intelligence collection operations are
routinely conducted in violation of established laws, including
international legal norms to which the United States Government is
formally committed.

"The CS [clandestine service] is the only part of the IC [intelligence
community], indeed of the government, where hundreds of employees on a
daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in counties
around the world in the face of frequently sophisticated efforts by
foreign governments to catch them," according to a 1996 House
Intelligence Committee staff report called IC21 (chapter 9, at page
205).

"A safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily
100,000 times a year) DO [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in
highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk
political embarrassment to the US but also endanger the freedom if not
lives of the participating foreign nationals and, more than
occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself."

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1996_rpt/ic21/ic21009.htm

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