Ethan Zuckerman highlights a story in Tuesday’s Boston Globe that reports that we’ve hired a notorious British mercenary to coordinate security in Iraq. The $293M contract goes to Tom Spicer, “a retired British commando with a reputation for illicit arms deals in Africa and for commanding a murderous military unit in Northern Ireland…” The Globe goes on:

Spicer is known for his role in the 1998 Sandline Affair in which a company he founded violated a UN-imposed arms embargo by shipping 30 tons of arms to Sierra Leone. When the scandal erupted in the British media, Spicer told the press that the British government had encouraged the operation, touching off a storm that for weeks involved the office of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Spicer also figured prominently in a 1997 military coup in Papua New Guinea. When that country’s army learned that he had received a $36 million contract from the government to brutally suppress a rebellion, the army toppled the sitting government and arrested Spicer, later releasing him.

In 1992, , two soldiers in the Scots Guard unit commanded by Spicer were convicted of murdering an 18-year-old Catholic named Peter McBride in North Belfast.

Ethan adds some details and writes:

I gotta ask – what were they thinking? Anyone who’s concerned about dirty dealings in the developing world knows who Spicer and Sandline are, and what they’re done in the past. With accusations that PMC [private military companies] s tortured people at Abu Ghraib, why would the Bush administration hire a PMC with such a questionable track record? Was this an accident, or just incredible arrogance and an assumption the press wouldn’t follow this story?

Or maybe having an appalling lack of judgment is as baked into this Administration as its commitment to tax cuts and its religious conviction that teaching birth control is immoral.

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