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It's plausible to a point, certainly. Several CIA officials have gone to work for Blackwater and probably do keep in touch with current officials at the agency. It'd be a very odd bureaucracy in which that didn't happen. And there's little doubt as to the wastefulness of a number of contracts written between the US government and PMCs; this also isn't news and contract wastefulness has happened any time the US has gone to war since World War Two. It's not out of bounds to think this might have happened again.
However, I think this explanation ignores the context of the CIA's work at the time the contract was dreamed up, which I explained in the last post. Baer seems much more preoccupied with what a bunch of bad dudes Blackwater is, and the state of private contracts in the prosecution of war, rather than getting to the heart of why they're doing it. Undoubtedly, Blackwater is not comprised of nice men and family-friendly entertainment. I wouldn't want them anywhere near a counterinsurgency I was running for an array of reasons. But the fact that they're not the good guys doesn't solve the rest of the equation automatically.
I will say though, this comment makes me interested to know what Baer seems to know:
Even more troubling, I think we will find out that in the unraveling of the Bush years, Blackwater was not the worst of the contractors, some of which did reportedly end up carrying out their assigned hits.
Not that I have a problem that a PMC contractor was successful in the role for which it was hired. But it would be interesting to know the details of what Baer is suggesting to see when and where it was, to see what the state of CIA thought was at the time. It may help us get to a more certain answer as to why they were used, and how often.
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