Things were going along pretty well for the Bush Administration Apologists Alumni Association. Sure, they were out of their old offices, but things were good. Obama adopted their wars as his own, the economy has sputtered along long enough to have become (in the public’s mind) at least as much Obama’s fault as theirs (thus the cries of “deficits! deficits! deficits!” from those who launched us into two wars), and most of the BAAAA have landed in cushy lucrative new digs.

Then Obama had to ruin it by getting bin Laden. Suddenly, all the old discussions are back — at least as far as torture goes — and this has at least some of them very worried, like Michael Mukasey.

He should worry. A lot.

The Washington Post has been turning lots of heads this week with a big series on intelligence contracting. The series has gotten a lot of people in DC talking about the problem with contractors. But we here at FDL have been talking about it for years, not least when we hosted Tim Shorrock–who wrote the book on intelligence contracting, Spies for Hire–for a book salon two years ago. As I pointed out on Monday, one thing Shorrock emphasized was the degree to which the contractors are partnering with the government to develop longterm strategy.

On Monday it’s expected that the Washington Post will debut a series by Dana Priest on military contractors, with an emphasis on intelligence contracting. We’ve known for some time there are far more contractors than troops, that we don’t know the exact number — which makes for a lot of interesting questions.

The Obama administration has approved covert military operations in a wide number of Middle Eastern countries, The New York Times reports, including in Somalia, Yemen and Iran (not to mention the long-running, kinda sorta covert war in Pakistan). As former National Security Council staffers Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett note, Obama’s move marks a particularly dramatic “intensification of America’s covert war against Iran” — a war that, because it is being run out of the office of General David Petraeus and CENTCOM, is “not subject to the same congressional oversight and reporting requirements as the Central Intelligence Agency.”