Project Itoh - Genocidal Organ

I pressed my thumb onto the pale green glass pane about the size of a domino; the lock was released and the door opened an inch.

Inside the darkened room a group of men and women were watching a porn flick.

At least, that was what it looked like when we first entered the room. The projector was showing a black man tied up in restraints, and the audience was distinctly middle-aged. They all turned to glance at us as we entered. Amid the dim sea of faces peering at us I spotted our immediate superior officer and boss, Colonel Rockwell, the leader of Special Operations I Detachment.

“My men from Unit G,” said Boss, beckoning to us to fill the empty seats. The men and women sitting at the table were all around Boss’s age or older, so it looked like we were the babies of the group. A man rose from the table to introduce himself.

Undersecretary of defense for Intelligence, he told us. USD (I). In other words, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported to him—we had some civilian bigwigs in our midst, all right. Presumably he was here to speak for the DIA.

Sure enough, intelligence agencies from the CIA to the NSA were also represented to deputy director level, as were numerous members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, including the senate majority leader. To see such a distinguished group of people huddled together in a room to watch a video of a black man being trussed up in what seemed like bondage gear was somewhat disconcerting, to say the least.

“This is a recording taken a week ago,” the USD began explaining. “The fruits of the fourth UNOSOM IV deployment. We identified this man some time ago as being the chief culprit behind the Black Sea Massacre of last October.”

“We arrested him, sir?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop myself. To capture, rather than simply assassinate, the number one target was contrary to all protocol and operating procedure that had been established by the intelligence community these past years.

“Just so. There were special circumstances,” explained Boss.

The USD continued. “Ms. Erica Sales here captured the man in the recording.”

The woman sitting next to the undersecretary of defense nodded curtly.

Williams leaned forward. “Excuse me, ma’am. The undersecretary referred to you as ‘Ms.’ Does that mean you’re not Forces?”

“If by ‘forces’ you mean those institutions that, at certain rare points in history, have been granted an official monopoly on organized violence by the state, then no, I’m not ‘forces,’ ” replied the woman. She stood to take center stage, and the USD took a seat. As per the civilian fashion of the day, the woman was dressed in Pentagon style. “I’m the director of the third planning department at Eugene and Krupps.”

I sighed inwardly with relief—I had chosen my words well—or at least luckily—when, earlier, I had asked, We arrested him? as opposed to what I really meant: Why didn’t we assassinate him? That would have been too blatant for a civilian—after all, the US did not condone the assassination of foreign leaders, or so the official line still went.

“The latest UNOSOM IV deployment was essentially an outsourced project from its conception,” the USD added in support of Erica Sales. “The forces deployed on the ground at the moment consist almost entirely of civilian contractors. Not just the usual suspects providing security arrangements for the Red Cross and NGOs—the actual execution of the business objectives of suppressing the armed insurgency in the area has also been assigned to independent civilian contractors.”

The execution of the business objectives.

Such an interesting way of putting it. So telling. I was sure there were plenty of people who would be repulsed by such a phrase: peace activists, bleeding-heart liberals, and the like. But the phrase gave me a glimpse into a future I had never previously imagined, and it gave me an illicit thrill. As ever, words could have that effect on me.

I listened to the official DIA line: The business of war was no different, from a certain perspective at least, from that of a pizzeria making pizzas or of a pest control company killing bugs. People didn’t have to fight for ethnic identity or to be a martyr for their religion—fighting could be just an occupation like any other. I thought about this. It was precisely because war was a business that it became logistically possible to budget for it, to plan, to project manage, to place orders with manufacturers and contractors. Was modern warfare really nothing more than a purchase order to underwrite a country’s desire to throw its weight around?

Of course, the idea that war was nothing more than a business laughed in the face of the blood-steeped casualties of war, just as it laughed at me and my job. The execution of war. The idea that war was just so much business to be taken care of. That it could be forecast, controlled, and managed like any other industry.

This line of thought had been developed in Cold War–era think tanks. It was determined that the only way to truly face the horrors of a full-blown nuclear war was to take a step back and consider all the factors as cold, objective facts. The futurist Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute think tank, advocated what he called “scenario planning” for a possible “hot” nuclear war and in doing so coined the phrase “to think the unthinkable.” Wittgenstein would have approved.

Megadeath .

In order to deal with the apocalyptic reality of modern warfare, for people to be able to cope with dealing with scenes from the Book of Revelation on a daily basis, a certain finesse had become necessary when it came to terminology. Bland, bureaucratic phrases had become the norm, so that people didn’t have to be constantly reminded of the families who had lost their children or bullet-riddled corpses.

“There are a multitude of tasks required in a massive operation like this: preparing and transporting provisions, canteen setup for local distribution, laundry services, constructing new government buildings, building and staffing rehabilitation camps for the former militia, and constructing and staffing prisons for war criminals. In the past we’ve always had to move in on the ground, establish a GHQ, and call in the military engineers. Now everything can be outsourced in advance to private military companies and UN-approved NGOs, and with UNOSOM IV they’ve gone one step further. No longer is it simply about delegating the logistics to civilian contractors, it’s about having them on board at the strategic and tactical planning stages,” explained the undersecretary of defense, who then turned to Erica Sales.

The woman from Eugene & Krupps, evidently some sort of private military company, picked up where he had left off without missing a beat. “There are only three people on the US government payroll in the entire UNOSOM IV operation. Their role is essentially that of resident auditors, there to monitor our performance and judgment. Eugene and Krupps has received similar instructions from the US, British, French, German, Turkish, and Japanese governments, and we’re currently collaborating with a variety of organizations on the ground, from NGOs to the Red Cross to volunteer organizations to colleagues in the same line of work as us—such as Halliburton, who are responsible for supply train maintenance in this case—in order to lay the foundations for a lasting peace in Somalia.”

At this point Erica Sales turned to us directly to give what seemed like a business pitch. “Our company employs a large number of former Special Forces personnel, and they played an integral role in our special projects last year.”

“In other words they’re Snake Eaters, just like us,” Boss explained, his face expressionless. PMCs cherry-picking his top people by luring them away with “offers they couldn’t refuse” was a perennial headache for Colonel Rockwell, but this wasn’t the time or place for him to publicly tug on that particular thorn in his side. I glanced at Erica Sales’s face to try and see if she had picked up on Boss’s irony-laden use of the term “Snake Eater,” but she was giving nothing away.