Keenie Meenie (book review)
Like most of my readers I have had a hard time these past few weeks to stay focused enough to read longer texts so it took a bit longer to read Phil Miller’s excellent Keenie Meenie-The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes . But Miller’s meticulously researched and sourced book about a relatively small British private security company that was active in some of the usual and less usual hot spots in the 1970s and 1980s is an important exploration into the capillary system of power, British foreign policy and ultimately into unpacking how the company’s mercenaries got involved in war crimes in Sri Lanka at the end of the 1980s. Keenie Meenie Services (KMS) with its unclear origins of the name, staffed with predominantly former British SAS elite soldiers and excellent contacts within the establishments at home and abroad was a different outfit than today’s global private military security companies. But it was the right set-up for the ‘old boy network’ days of foreign pol