I'm a little late getting to this, what with everything else going on in the intelligence world, but an investigation by Mexico-based U.S. freelance reporter Kristin Bricker on the American contractors caught on video teaching torture techniques to police in Leon deserves belated attention.
Bricker has identified one of the men, Gerardo "Jerry" Arrechea as a "high-ranking member of the Comandos F4," a Miami based anti-Castro exile group that has vowed to carry out armed attacks on Cuba as well as Venezuela.
Cuban exile groups long ago perfected the p.r. stunt of inviting TV cameras to "secret locations" in the Everglades to show their masked men crawling through mud with guns and vowing to overthrow Castro. But it's also true that the CIA has intermittently intrigued with such groups for half a century.
Meanwhile, the rest of the connections Bricker turned up on Arrechea and his sidekick Jerry Wilson (AKA Orlando, AKA Andrew Wilson), last seen dragging a Mexican police trainee through his own vomit, are yet another sign that U.S. private security contractors are out of control.
(Take a peek at my recent review of Tim Shorrock's Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, in The Washington Post, then read the rest of Bricker's comprehensive take.)
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