What was Mostapha Maanna of Hacking Team, an Italian surveillance company, doing on his three trips to Saudi Arabia in the last year? A new data trove from WikiLeaks reveals travel details for salesmen like Maanna who hawk electronic technology to track communications by individuals without their knowledge.

Wikileaks suspects that Hacking Team technology is used to snoop on activists and dissidents.

Julian Assange, the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, says that the information came from a special counter-intelligence unit that his organisation created “to protect WikiLeaks’ assets, staff and sources from hostile intelligence operations and to reveal the nature of intelligence threats against journalists and sources more broadly.”

According to research conducted by the Kaspersky Lab, an anti-virus company, Hacking Team sells technology that can be used to create emails to target suspects by inviting them to click on a link or attachment that then installs a spy tool called Remote Control System (RCS) on the target’s computer.

RCS (also known as DaVinci) can then copy the Web browsing history of its targets, turn on their computer microphone and webcam to eavesdrop on them, as well record their conversations on computer applications like Skype.

Wikileaks documented the travels of two Hacking Team salesmen to countries with a poor record of human rights.

The first was Maanna, whose LinkedIn profile confirms that he works for Hacking Team in Milan. He came to work for the company in January 2011 after completing high school in Tyre, Lebanon, and an undergraduate and graduate degree in telecommunications engineering from Politecnico di Torino in
Turin, Italy.

In addition to three trips to Saudi Arabia, Maanna’s travel profile places him in Egypt three times in 2013. He also made two trips each to Malaysia and Morocco in the last three years, among other countries, including United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Turkey, according to the documents released by WikiLeaks.

The second individual is Marco Bettini, a sales manager for almost 10 years at HackingTeam whose LinkedIn profile says he studied at the Instituto Radiotecnico Beltrami. Bettini is also identified as traveling to Morocco and UAE in February 2013.

Three of these countries – Morocco, Turkey and the UAE – are nations in which Hacking Team has come under fire from groups like Privacy International and Reporters Without Borders for the alleged use of its software.

For example, Mamfakinch, a Moroccan citizen journalist group that was created during the 2011 Arab Spring, believes that it was targeted with a “backdoor” attack by software that is identical to Hacking Team’s RCS system, according to an analysis by Dr. Web, an anti-virus company.

Slate Magazine described how the Mamfakinch’s computers were infected by spy software after members opened an email titled “Dénonciation” (denunciation) that contained a link to what appeared to be a Microsoft Word document labeled “scandale (2).doc” alongside a single line of text in French, which translates as: “Please do not mention my name or anything else, I don’t want any problems.”

Wired magazine recently published details of an attack on a U.S. activist who was sent an email about Turkey that appeared to come from a trusted colleague at Harvard that “referenced a subject that was a hot-button issue for the recipient, including a link to a website where she could obtain more information about it.” Although she did not click on the email, Arsenal Consulting, a digital forensics company, analysed the link and discovered that it, too, contained RCS attack software.

And Citizen Lab, a computer security research group in Canada, identified emails sent to Ahmed Mansoor, a UAE human rights activist, which were also allegedly designed with Hacking Team software. Mansoor was a member of a group of activists who were imprisoned from April to November 2011 on charges of insulting an Emirati royal family. He told Bloomberg that he was identified and then beaten after he clicked on an email that contained a Microsoft attachment that infected him with the spy software.

Company response

A spokesperson for Hacking Team says the company strictly follows applicable export laws and other regulations and only sells its products to governments or government agencies.

“The point that is generally missed in discussions like this is that the world is a dangerous place, with plenty of criminals and terrorists using modern Internet and mobil technologies to do their business, and that threatens us all,” Eric Rabe, the general counsel of Hacking Team, told Corpwatch via email.

“We firmly believe that the technology we make available to government and law enforcement makes it harder for those criminals and terrorists to operate.”

Rabe says that Hacking Team understands the potential for abuse of its products, so it reviews customers before a sale to determine whether or not there is “objective evidence or credible concerns that Hacking Team technology provided to the customer will be used to facilitate human rights violations.”

He noted that his company’s products have an auditing feature that cannot be turned off so that government agencies can check how and when surveillance occurs.

“Of course, HT cannot monitor the use of our software directly since clients must have the ability to conduct confidential investigations,” Rabe added. “Should we suspect that abuse has occurred, we investigate. If we find our contracts have been violated or other abuse has occurred, we have the option to suspend support for the software. Without support, the software is quickly rendered ineffective.”

Rabe says that Hacking Team did investigate “the Morocco and UAE assertions” but he was not able to comment since the company “does not share the results of such investigations nor do we publish whatever actions we may subsequently take.”

But activists still say that they are very concerned about details in the travel logs released by Wikileaks.

“The evidence and timeline does give credence to the idea that the discovery of Hacking Team software in Morocco and UAE corroborates with their sales team visit to those countries,” Kenneth Page, a policy officer at Privacy International, told Corpwatch.

“This is clearly not an ad-hoc process within a small industry, but a calculated and considered business deal in a global trade with profits made off the suffering of individuals,” says Page. “As the Wikileaks release today has shown, the business procedure behind the sale of surveillance technology is as well laid out as any other international trade – including proposals and presentations, site and country visits, contracts, and costing packages.”

Page said that the companies that develop and sell surveillance technology to such regimes should not be allowed to abdicate responsibility for freely selling this technology to just any government regardless of their human rights record.

“Companies know full well how their products work and, after tailoring to their specific clients’ need, know how they will be used,” added Page.

*A longer version of this story originally appeared on Corpwatch.org.

James Bimen Associates of Virginia and Harris Corporation of Florida have contracts with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to hack into computers and phones of surveillance targets, according to Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

“Bimen and Harris employees actively hack into target computers for the FBI,” Soghoian told CorpWatch.

James Bimen Associates did not return phone calls asking for comment. Jaime O’Keefe, a spokesman for Harris, and Jennifer Shearer, an FBI spokeswoman, both declined to comment for this story.

However, the FBI has not denied these capabilities. The agency “hires people who have hacking skill, and they purchase tools that are capable of doing these things,” a former official in the FBI’s cyber division told the Wall Street Journal recently. “When you do, it’s because you don’t have any other choice.”

Soghoian verified the information from other sources, after uncovering the information from Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) and other publicly available information.

“The government doesn’t have the resources to directly monitor every American or let alone every foreigner but they want to read the communications of every foreigner and they want to collect information on every American,” explains Soghoian. “What do you do when you don’t have the manpower to collect everyone’s communications?”

The answer, he says, is spy software. This is not unprecedented among government agencies. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bought commercial products from a company named SpectorSoft in Florida to track five staff whom they suspected of whistleblowing in 2009.

The software allowed them to capture “screen images from the government laptops of five scientists as they were being used at work or at home, tracked their keystrokes, intercepted their personal e-mails, copied the documents on their personal thumb drives and even followed their messages line by line as they were being drafted,” the New York Times reported last year.

Other companies like Gamma International from Germany and Hacking Team from Italy have also been aggressively marketing their products for purchase by local police officers. A number of national governments like Egypt and Mexico have also reportedly bought such systems that allow them to listen to regular phone and Skype conversations and read email.

But what agencies like the FBI are now worried about is that individuals are “going dark” by using freely available encryption software to prevent their email and phone conversations to be captured by law enforcement agencies.

In order to combat this, Soghoian says the FBI wanted custom designed products, so they turned to a little known internal team named the “Remote Operations Unit” inside the Operational Technology Division, which set up a project called “Going Dark”.

Eric Chuang, the head of the Remote Operations Unit in Quantico, Virginia, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a law degree from Temple University in Philadelphia, was put in charge of this task.

Bimen Associates, which has its headquarters in McLean, Virginia, near the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, provided custom designed software tools developed exclusively for the FBI to crack encrypted conversations, says Soghoian. Agency staff and contractors access computers of suspects remotely to install this software to allow them to watch everything that the target types or says.

In February 2008, Bimen Associates hired Amanda Hemmila, a former U.S. Air Force computer technician, who was working on an online undergraduate degree in computer science with Grantham University in Missouri, to help test their new software.

Hemmila’s LinkedIn resume says that she was responsible for “building, testing, deploying, maintaining and tracking software kits and hardware deployed from the Remote Operations Unit Deployment Operations Center” as well as training them in “processing and viewing software and providing End User phone support.” She also helped write policies, guidance and training material to keep the software secret.

After spending a little over a year at Bimen Associates, Hemmila returned to her studies and graduated in 2012. A few months after she left, Mark Muller, who had an undergraduate degree in information technology from George Mason university, went to work for Bimen Associates in Quantico.

Muller says he wrote up the standard operating procedures for the FBI to use proprietary company software “we use to gain access to criminal subject machines in the field.”

He also conducted “pre-deployment meetings with the FBI agents and management to coordinate details of a case and implement an operational plan to track a subject(s).” After the agents completed monitoring of a target, Muller says he archived information on “previous implant(s) installed on subject’s machine, if any, as a knowledge base for the field agents.”

Bimen Associates does not appear to be a big or well known intelligence contractor – the only public contract that the company has been awarded lists zero income – but it is well connected.

Jerry Menchhoff, president of Bimen Associates, has been with the company since it was founded in 1998, after working for Booz Allen Hamilton, a company famous for two other employees – James Clapper and Michael McConnell, both of whom have worked as U.S. director of national intelligence, the top spy job in the country.

(Booz also made the news more recently when Edward Snowden, another former employee, blew the whistle on the surveillance activities of the U.S. National Security Agency).

The other company that supplies tracking software to the FBI is Melbourne, Florida-based Harris Corporation, which has been awarded almost seven million dollars in contracts by the agency since 2001, mostly for radio communication equipment. In 1999 Harris designed the software for the agency’s National Crime Information Centre database that keeps track of criminal histories, fugitives, missing persons, and stolen property.

Harris made it into the news a couple of years ago when the Wall Street Journal revealed that the company was selling a gadget called a “Stingray” to the FBI that allows the agency to track cellphone locations of users without their knowledge.

At the time Sherry Sabol, chief of the Science & Technology Office for the FBI’s Office of General Counsel, refused to provide any background on the subject because she said that information about Stingrays and related technology was “considered Law Enforcement Sensitive, since its public release could harm law enforcement efforts by compromising future use of the equipment.”

However, legal depositions by FBI agents, together with contract data dating back to 2002, confirmed the existence of the Stingray.

The big question is whether or not the FBI obtains warrants before using tracking software. In the case of the Stingray, the agency claimed that it was okay to use such devices without obtaining a warrant, on the grounds that it was like tracking down phone numbers, which the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled is permissible.

But privacy advocates say that tracking the “metadata” of phone and computer communications and the information on it involves a far greater invasion of privacy, and should require a warrant from a judge. (This discussion is still ongoing in the courts, notably after a U.S. court ruled it was okay for the government to track cell phone location data without a warrant).

Soghoian believes there needs to be a public debate on the use and potential misuse of these tools.

“There hasn’t been a (Congressional) debate about the FBI getting into the hacking business,” Soghoian told attendees at DEFCON, an annual hacker convention that took place earlier this month in Las Vegas. “People should understand that local cops are going to be hacking into surveillance targets. Particularly for dragnet searches where they want to do a keyword search or a social network analysis, you need everyone’s communications.”

Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch. This story originally appeared on CorpWatch.org.

How do U.S. intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the whole world? The ideal place to tap trans-border telecommunications is undersea cables that carry an estimated 90 percent of international voice traffic.

These cables date back in history to 1858 when they were first installed to support the international telegraph system, with the British taking the lead to wire the far reaches of its empire. Today a multi-billion dollar shipping industry continues to lay and maintain hundreds of such cables that crisscross the planet – over half a million miles of such cables are draped along the ocean floor and snaked around coastlines – to make landfall at special locations to be connected to national telecommunications systems.

The original cables were made of copper but about 25 years ago, they were replaced by fibre-optic cables. The oldest undersea cable was Trans Atlantic-8 (installed in 1988 by AT&T to transmit data from Tuckerton, New Jersey to Bude, Cornwall) which transmitted data at 280 megabits per second.

The latest cables like Yellow/Atlantic Crossing 2 (installed in 2000 and upgraded in 2007 by Level Three Communications from Brookhaven, New York to Bude, Cornwall) is capable of transmitting data at an astonishing 640 gigabits per second, which is roughly equal to 7.5 million simultaneous phone calls.

In order to make sure that data and voice are transmitted quickly and accurately across the world even if cables break or equipment fails, cable companies break the data into separate tiny packets that are dispatched over what they call “redundant fibre optic paths” across the ocean before it is captured and re-assembled on the other side, where it also becomes easy to intercept the data unobtrusively.

This is where Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fibre technology, comes in. In September 2002, the company started to ship a pioneering technology to help transmit data accurately over multiple optical paths.

Their patented “3D Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System (MEMS) mirror array” is composed of 210 gold-coated mirrors mounted on microscopic hinges, each measuring just one millimeter in diameter, etched on a single wafer of silicon.

Each mirror can be individually managed by remote operators anywhere in the world to capture or bounce the light signals and even more importantly, communicate with the other mirrors to make sure that the rest of the array stays in place, allowing very accurate data transmission. This technology slashed the cost of optical switching by a factor of 100, and the company claims that the switches are very robust with an expected failure rate of once in 30 years.

For telecommunication companies, Glimmerglass offers three hardware racks to handle optical data – the entry level “100” system which can handle as many as 96×96 fibre ports for traffic as high as 100 gigabits per second all the way up to the “600” system which can handle 192×192 fibre ports. It also offers the “3000” system which can hold up to 12 racks.

A major advantage of the Glimmerglass technology, according to the company, is that operators can “monitor and test remote facilities” at undersea cable landings from a central office and then select any one of multiple optical signals to distribute it to multiple recipients, as well as the ability to redirect any signal.

“With Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical Systems, any signal travelling over fibre can be redirected in milliseconds, without adversely affecting customer traffic,” the company writes on its website. “At a landing site, this connectivity permits optical layer connections between the wet side and dry side to be re-provisioned in milliseconds from the Network Operations Center with a few clicks of a mouse.”

In another section of the public website the company also promotes a product named Glimmerglass Intelligent Optical System (IOS) that combines the 3D-MEMS switches with another Glimmerglass product called CyberSweep into an integrated product that has the ability to “monitor and selectively intercept communications”.

“Service Providers can use the speed and flexibility of the IOS to select and deliver signals to Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA),” add company brochures uncovered by Wikileaks. “The agency gains rapid access, not just to signals, but to individual wavelengths on those signals (and) make perfect photonic copies of optical signals for comprehensive analysis.”

Could the new Glimmerglass optical switching technology be the means by which the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is tapping international phone calls, as revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper?

Vanee Vines, a spokesperson for the NSA, declined to comment on either Glimmerglass or the tapping of the undersea cables. Glimmerglass officials did not return multiple email and phone calls.

But Glimmerglass has told industry media that it sells this technology to some major government intelligence agencies.

“We’ve become a gold standard in the intel and defence community. They’re managing these optical signals so they can acquire, split, move and obtain the necessary information to protect the country,” Robert Lundy, the CEO of Glimmerglass for the last nine years, told Fierce Telecom, an industry blog, in an interview about global malware threats.

“At their undersea landing locations, their major points of presence, on a selective basis they need to acquire and monitor those optical signals rather than wait to get it off somebody’s, when it hits a PC or cellphone.”

Keith May, his deputy in charge of business development, has gone even further. “We believe that our 3D MEMS technology – as used by governments and various agencies – is involved in the collection of intelligence from sensors, satellites and undersea fibre systems,” May told the magazine. “We are deployed in several countries that are using it for lawful interception.”

Fulfilling a dream

Analysis of bulk telecommunications data to track as yet unknown targets has long been on the NSA wish list. For decades, the agency stuck to following specific individuals because there was no way to capture and analyse everything.

In 2000, two rival projects were commissioned to try to collect “all the signals all the time”. Science Applications International Corporation, based in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, was given a contract to design a collection system called TrailBlazer, while the NSA’s in-house Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC) worked on a project called ThinThread.

TrailBlazer was eventually jettisoned as unworkable after 1.2 billion dollars had been spent. ThinThread was more successful, according to its proponents, because it was able to selectively process important information and dump the rest. The designers also created controls to anonymise the data collection to avoid violating privacy laws.

ThinThread could “correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other ‘attributes’ that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing ‘the bad guys,'” writes Jane Mayer in the New Yorker magazine, based on her interviews with former NSA staff.

Unfortunately for the SARC team, ThinThread was vetoed by upper management at the NSA in August 2001. But after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks, the NSA is believed to have returned to the drawing board. Rumor has it that the project was restarted, stripped of any privacy controls.

Some of the scientists who worked on the project recently came forward to say that they had made a mistake.

“I should apologise to the American people,” William Binney, a former NSA staffer who was in charge of designing ThinThread, told Mayer. “It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.”

Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch. This story originally appeared on CorpWatch.org.

Glimmerglass, a northern California company that sells optical fibre technology, offers government agencies a software product called “CyberSweep” to intercept signals on undersea cables.

The company says their technology can analyse Gmail and Yahoo! Mail as well as social media like Facebook and Twitter to discover “actionable intelligence”.

Could this be the technology that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is using to tap global communications? The company says it counts several intelligence agencies among its customers but refuses to divulge details. One thing is certain – it is not the only company to offer such capabilities – so if such data mining is not already taking place, that day is not far off.

“Revolutions in communications technologies are usually followed by revolutions in collection capabilities,” said Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archives and the author of the definitive guide to the U.S. intelligence agencies.

The recent leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper specifically suggest that the NSA is tapping undersea cables, although no details on the specific technology have yet been published. Notably Snowden has revealed evidence that the NSA paid 15.5 million pounds (25 million dollars) in 2009 to “radically” upgrade a listening station operated by its U.K. equivalent – the Government Communications Head Quarters (GCHQ) in Bude, north Cornwall, England, where many of the cables surface.

If GCHQ and the NSA installed Glimmerglass’s commercial optical fibre switching technology on the undersea cables to tap the torrent of data that crosses the Atlantic, they will be able to pair it up with CyberSweep to make sense of the information, according to advertising claims made in a treasure trove of documents on dozens of surveillance contractors released by Wikileaks.

Privacy experts say that if the NSA is using this Glimmerglass technology, it will prove whistleblower Edward Snowden’s claim that the government is collecting everyone’s communications, regardless of their citizenship or innocence.

Vanee Vines, a spokesperson for the NSA, declined to comment to IPS on either Glimmerglass or the tapping of the undersea cables. Glimmerglass officials did not return multiple email and phone calls.

CyberSweep

On the Glimmerglass website, the company claims that CyberSweep can process optical signals to “extract the data source format” and aggregate the data for “probes” to uncover “actionable information from the flood of data on persons of interest, known and unknown targets, anticipated and known threats.”

More details on what Glimmerglass claims CyberSweep can do are explained in “Paradigm Shifts” – a confidential 18 page Powerpoint presentation made in 2011 by Jim Donnelly, the Glimmerglass vice president of North American sales. The document was released by Wikileaks as part of the Spy Files series in December of that year.

On page five of the presentation, Glimmerglass notes that CyberSweep is an “end to end cyber security solution” that can “select, extract and monitor” all “mobile and fixed line data, voice and video, internet, web 2.0 and social networking” with “probes and sniffers.” On the following page, it notes that its product can be used at “submarine landing stations” – a reference to the locations where the undersea cables are connected to terrestrial systems.

On page eight, Glimmerglass provides specific examples of what it can gather – like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail as well as Facebook and Twitter. Over the next four pages it offers screenshots of these capabilities.

One display of what CyberSweep is capable of is a visual grid of Facebook messages of a presumably fictional person named John Smith. His profile is connected to a number of other individuals with arrows indicating how often he connected to each of them. Each individual can be identified with images, user names and IDs. Another pane shows the detailed chat records. Yet another graphic shows Facebook connections between multiple individuals, presumably to identify networks.

A third graphic is a grid of phone calls made by an individual with a pane that allows an operator to select and listen to audio of any specific conversation. Other images show similar demonstrations of monitoring webmail and instant message chats.

Where is this product being used? In a product video on the company website, Glimmerglass states that their optical data management products have been used by the U.S. intelligence agencies for the last five years. The video specifically mentions data transmissions from Predator drones and well as the tapping of undersea fibre optic cables, but it does not go into any details.

“The challenge of managing information has become the challenge of managing the light,” says an announcer. “With Glimmerglass, customers have full control of massive flows of intelligence from the moment they access them.”

The description mirrors the technology described in documents provided by Edward Snowden to the Guardian newspaper.

Collecting all the signals

In a document released by Snowden, Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, was quoted on a June 2008 visit to an intelligence facility in the U.K., saying: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project.”

According to the leaked documents, a three year trial project was soon set up with a 25-million-dollar grant from the NSA to “radically enhance the infrastructure” at the Cyber Development Centre in Bude, Cornwall, as well as potentially at other sites like the GCHQ base in Cheltenham.

Probes were installed on 200 undersea cables and in the fall of 2011, a project code-named Tempora was launched with the help of NSA analysts who came to help at the Bude site. At least seven companies took part in the project – British Telecom, Global Crossing, Interoute, Level 3, Viatel, Verizon Business and Vodafone Cable – according to the German paper Suddeutsche Zeitung, all of whom manage major undersea cable systems.

Under Tempora, a three-day buffer of global internet traffic was held at any given time – totaling some 600 million “telephone events” a day or as much as 21 petabytes (million gigabytes) of data. While much of it was deleted through a process called Massive Volume Reduction for reasons of space, the meta-data (such as the details of who called whom, and when, but not the content) was held for as long as 30 days.

Snowden’s documents suggest that GCHQ now “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA” which was being analysed by 300 U.K. analysts in addition to 250 NSA analysts, as of last May. The U.K. analysts were encouraged to dig deep since they had a less onerous oversight regime compared to the U.S.

“Over the last five years, GCHQ’s access to ‘light’ (has) increased by 7,000 percent,” a Tempora official is quoted as saying in another Powerpoint document cited in the Guardian. “We will have exploited to the full our unique selling points of geography, partnerships, the UK’s legal regime and our skilled workforce.”

A recent interview of a “senior intelligence official” by the New York Times confirmed that “the N.S.A. is temporarily copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most e-mails and other text-based communications that cross the border” by making a “clone of selected communication links.” The official did not state where the communications were being intercepted.

Pratap Chatterjee is executive director of CorpWatch. This story originally appeared on Corpwatch.org.

Spy equipment from the Surveillance Group Limited, a British private detective agency based in Worcester, England, has been found in the Ecuadorean embassy in London where Julian Assange, editor of Wikileaks, has taken refuge.

At a press conference in Quito on Wednesday, Ricardo Patiño, the foreign minister of Ecuador, held up a photo of a “spy microphone” that was found on Jun. 14 inside a small white box that was placed in an electrical outlet behind a bookshelf. The device contained a telephone SIM card allowing it to broadcast any conversations that it picked up.

“We are requesting backing from the British government to continue with the investigation of the device found,” Patiño told reporters.

The device was discovered by embassy security staff just two days before Patiño met with Assange to discuss his predicament. It coincided with revelations from Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staffer, of the extent of U.S. National Security Agency global surveillance of ordinary citizens.

Nobody has yet come forward to claim the device and the company has denied any role. “The Surveillance Group do not and have never been engaged in any activities of this nature,” said Timothy Young, the company CEO in a press statement issued Thursday. “This is a wholly untrue assertion.”

However, a casual web search reveals that the Surveillance Group boasts of its ability to install tracking devices anywhere.

“We can justifiably claim to be the only company in the world to offer an internationally accredited, covert camera construction, concealment and deployment course,” a company website claims. “We can provide a range of bespoke, unmanned, covert camera options to gather vital video evidence in the most challenging environment or scenarios. The cameras can further be supported by the use of micro tracking devices for deployment with customer property or vehicles.”

Bugging places is just one of the services that the Surveillance Group provides to corporations and police forces.

“We are the acknowledged experts in providing Professional Witness surveillance to the police and local authorities in relation to drugs, prostitution, gang violence, hate crime and antisocial behavior,” the company says on another page on its website.

“Our work in this arena includes the detection of malpractice by employees relative to the passing of confidential company information or the infringement of restrictive covenants and breaches of contract.”

Company web pages show pictures of hooded youth smashing store windows, as well as testimonials from companies like Nike who congratulated them on helping find addresses of vendors selling counterfeit goods.

“I am extremely impressed with the service provided by the team at The Surveillance Group and would definitely recommend them for brand protection work,” Chloe Young, a Nike official, was quoted as saying.

The Surveillance Group also offers “professional diplomas” in “tactical counter surveillance” for 5,190 pounds (8,000 dollars)

However, the company appears to have completely failed to foil the plans of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, which were likely hatched in the very building that was being bugged and most certainly did not dissuade them from launching a daring international escape for the former spy, that was worthy of Hollywood.

On Jun. 23, Wikileaks staffer Sarah Harrison spirited Snowden out of Hong Kong – where he had been staying – to Moscow, taking the intelligence agencies by surprise.

The listening device is not the only way that Ecuador suspects that it is being monitored. An article in the Wall Street Journal last week quoted extensively from email correspondence between aides of President Rafael Correa, revealing that someone was hacking internal government communications.

“I suggest talking to Assange to better control the communications,” the newspaper quoted Nathalie Cely, Ecuador’s ambassador to the U.S., in a message to presidential spokesman Fernando Alvarado. “From outside… [Assange] appears to be ‘running the show’.”

The Journal said that it obtained the emails from Univision Networks, a U.S.-based Spanish TV network, but Wikileaks says that the U.S. government could well have provided them with the raw material.

It should be noted that a number of private vendors around the world provide technology to hack email communications for “lawful interception” purposes.

These incidents have stirred deep anger among government officials in Quito.

The Ecuadorian government is being “infiltrated from all sides”, said Patiño. “This is a testament to the loss of ethics at an international level in the relations that we have with other governments.”

However, the interception of emails from South American governments appears to have been just as useless as the bugging at foiling Snowden’s plans. On Tuesday, the U.S. government sparked a diplomatic crisis by attempting to block a flight by President Evo Morales of Bolivia, under the suspicion that he was transporting Snowden. Morales was detained at Vienna airport for 14 hours but eventually completed his journey.

“Sieging/bugging of Ecuador’s London embassy and the blockading of Morales jet shows that imperial arrogance is the gift that keeps on giving,” tweeted Wikileaks.

Late on Monday night, Sarah Harrison, a Wikileaks activist, hand-delivered 21 letters to Kim Shevchenko, the duty officer at the Russian consulate office in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, on behalf of Edward Snowden, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower.

The letters that Harrison delivered were requests for asylum addressed to embassy officials of the following countries: Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, India, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland and Venezuela.

“Although I am convicted of nothing, [the U.S. government] has unilaterally revoked my passport, leaving me a stateless person,” Snowden wrote in a statement for the public that was posted on the Wikileaks website. “Without any judicial order, the administration now seeks to stop me exercising a basic right. A right that belongs to everybody. The right to seek asylum.”

Washington is furious because Snowden has released dozens of top secret documents that prove that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale. As many as one trillion documents have been intercepted under one scheme – codenamed “ShellTrumpet.” Other secret projects include “Prism” which allows the NSA to harvest information on ordinary citizens from servers belonging to companies like Google and Facebook.

Snowden coordinated the releases from a hotel in Hong Kong in late May, working principally with two U.S. reporters – Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras – and the Guardian newspaper in the UK. Der Spiegel in Germany and the Washington Post in the U.S. also were given some material.

For these revelations, the 30-year-old former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staffer – is now a wanted man. The U.S. government has charged him with espionage in a court order issued Jun. 14 and signed by John Anderson, a judge in Virginia, and canceled his U.S. passport.

Informed that the Chinese authorities would allow him to depart without hindrance, Snowden fled from Hong Kong to Moscow on Jun. 23 with Harrison’s assistance after she arrived to help him with safe passage papers issued by Fidel Narvaez, an Ecuadorean consular officer in London.

The pair, however, are now marooned in the Russian capital because Ecuador has since canceled the papers it issued to Snowden.

Snowden’s 21 letters requesting asylum reflect his perilous state, given that the U.S. government is now working the phones to ask governments around the world to prevent him from escaping to freedom.

Russia has said that it will not deport Snowden from Moscow airport, but it has also refused to grant him asylum unless he agrees to stop releasing documents.

“Russia never hands anybody over anywhere and doesn’t intend to do so. If he wants to go somewhere and somebody will host him – no problem,” Putin said at a news conference in Moscow. “If he wants to stay here, there is one condition: He must stop his work aimed at harming our American partners.”

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa has also backed away from helping Snowden after he got a personal call from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden. Correa now says that Narvaez had made a mistake in giving Snowden papers.

“The consul, in his desperation, issued a safe conduct document without validity, without authorisation, without us even knowing,” Correa told the Guardian newspaper. “It was a mistake on our part.”

Snowden’s top hope is now Venezuela, which has expressed an interest in him. “If this young man is punished, nobody in the world will ever dare to tell the truth,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has told the media, hinting strongly that his government would offer Snowden asylum.

By coincidence, Maduro is in Moscow attending talks on oil and gas. In theory he could whisk Snowden away to safety on his presidential jet.

While Snowden is living in limbo, he has not arrived at this extraordinary situation without some forethought.

The computer programmer, who has never attended college, previously worked for the CIA in Geneva where he first became troubled by the NSA’s massive dragnet for global communications and decided to do something about it.

Several months ago Snowden applied for a job as an “infrastructure analyst” with Booz Allen Hamilton, a Virginia intelligence contractor, in order to acquire documents to prove what the NSA was doing. He was hired by the company in March at a salary of 122,000 dollars a year at an NSA station in Hawaii until late May when he left for Hong Kong.

“My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” Snowden told the South China Morning Post.

Most significantly he found evidence that the NSA was storing huge quantities of data for as much as five years under a secret interpretation of the law. Armed with these documents, he left for Hong Kong on May 20 after telling his supervisor that he had to get medical assistance for epilepsy.

While Snowden now faces an uncertain future, he says he remains “unbowed” in his convictions and that he placed his trust in his supporters to fight back against the NSA and the White House.

“The Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless,” Snowden wrote in his statement issued last night. “No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be.”

Edward Snowden, a low-level employee of Booz Allen Hamilton who blew the whistle on the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), unexpectedly exposed a powerful and seamless segment of the military-industrial complex – the world of contractors that consumes some 70 percent of this country’s 52-billion-dollar intelligence budget.

Some commentators have pounced on Snowden’s disclosures to denounce the role of private contractors in the world of government and national security, arguing such spheres are best left to public servants. But their criticism misses the point.

It is no longer possible to determine the difference between the two: employees of the NSA – along with agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – and the employees of companies such as Booz Allen have integrated to the extent that they slip from one role in industry to another in government, cross-promoting each other and self-dealing in ways that make the fabled revolving door redundant, if not completely disorienting.

Snowden, a systems administrator at the NSA’s Threat Operations Centre in Hawaii, had worked for the CIA and Dell before joining Booz Allen. But his rather obscure role pales in comparison to those of others."It is no longer possible to determine the difference between employees of the NSA and employees of companies such as Booz Allen."

To best understand this tale, one must first turn to R. James Woolsey, a former director of CIA, who appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives in the summer of 2004 to promote the idea of integrating U.S. domestic and foreign spying efforts to track “terrorists”.

One month later, he appeared on MSNBC television, where he spoke of the urgent need to create a new U.S. intelligence czar to help expand the post-9/11 national surveillance apparatus.

On neither occasion did Woolsey mention that he was employed as senior vice president for global strategic security at Booz Allen, a job he held from 2002 to 2008.

“The source of information about vulnerabilities of and potential attacks on the homeland will not be dominated by foreign intelligence, as was the case in the Cold War. The terrorists understood us well, and so they lived and planned where we did not spy (inside the U.S.),” said Woolsey in prepared remarks before the U.S. House Select Committee on Homeland Security on Jun. 24, 2004.

In a prescient suggestion of what Snowden would later reveal, Woolsey went on to discuss expanding surveillance to cover domestic, as well as foreign sources.

“One source will be our vulnerability assessments, based on our own judgments about weak links in our society’s networks that can be exploited by terrorists,” he said. “A second source will be domestic intelligence. How to deal with such information is an extraordinarily difficult issue in our free society.”

One month later, Woolsey appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball”, a news-talk show hosted by Chris Matthews, and told Matthews that the federal government needed a new high-level office – a DNI, if you will – to straddle domestic and foreign intelligence. Until then, the director of the CIA served as the head of the entire intelligence community (IC).

“The problem is that the intelligence community has grown so much since 1947, when the position of director of central intelligence was created, that it’s [become] impossible to do both jobs, running the CIA and managing the community,” he said.

Both these suggestions would lead to influential jobs and lucrative sources of income for his employer and colleagues.

The Director of National Intelligence

Fast forward to 2007. Vice Admiral Michael McConnell (ret.), Booz Allen’s then-senior vice president of policy, transformation, homeland security and intelligence analytics, was hired as the second czar of the new “Office of the Director of National Intelligence”, a post that oversees the work of Washington’s 17 intelligence agencies, which was coincidentally located just three kilometres from the company’s corporate headquarters.

Upon retiring as DNI, McConnell returned to Booz Allen in 2009, where he serves as vice chairman to this day. In August 2010, Lieutenant General James Clapper (ret), Booz Allen’s former vice president for military intelligence from 1997 to 1998, was hired as the fourth intelligence czar, a job he has held ever since. Indeed, one-time Booz Allen executives have filled the position five of the eight years of its existence.

When these two men were put in charge of the national-security state, they helped expand and privatise it as never before.

McConnell, for example, asked Congress to alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to allow the NSA to spy on foreigners without a warrant if they were using Internet technology that routed through the United States.

“The resulting changes in both law and legal interpretations (and the) new technologies created a flood of new work for the intelligence agencies – and huge opportunities for companies like Booz Allen,” wrote David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth in a profile of McConnell published in the New York Times Jun. 15.

Last week, Snowden revealed to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald that the NSA had created a secret system called “Prism” that allowed the agency to spy on electronic data of ordinary citizens around the world, both within and outside the United States.

Snowden’s job at Booz Allen’s offices in Hawaii was to maintain the NSA’s information technology systems. While he did not specify his precise connection to Prism, he told the South China Morning Post newspaper that the NSA hacked “network backbones – like huge Internet routers, basically – that give us access to the communications of hundreds of thousands of computers without having to hack every single one”.

Woolsey had argued in favour of such surveillance following the disclosure of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005.

“Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas,” he told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the NSA in February 2006. “Courts are not designed to deal with fast-moving battlefield electronic mapping in which an al Qaeda or a Hezbollah computer might be captured which contains a large number of email addresses and phone numbers which would have to be checked out very promptly.”

Close ties

Exactly what Booz Allen does for the NSA’s electronic surveillance system revealed by Snowden is classified, but one can make an educated guess from similar contracts it has in this field – a quarter of the company’s 5.86 billion dollars in annual income comes from intelligence agencies.

The NSA, for example, hired Booz Allen in 2001 in an advisory role on the five-billion-dollar Project Groundbreaker to rebuild and operate the agency’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.

Booz Allen also won a chunk of the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness contract in 2001 to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts and other databases – a controversial programme defunded by Congress in 2003 but whose spirit survived in the Prism and other initiatives disclosed by Snowden.

The CIA pays a Booz Allen team led by William Wansley, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer, for “strategic and business planning” for its National Clandestine Service, which conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies.

The company also provides a 120-person team, headed by a former U.S. Navy cryptology lieutenant commander and Booz Allen senior executive adviser Pamela Lentz, to support the National Reconnaissance Organisation, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites.

In January, Booz Allen was one of 12 contractors to win a five-year contract with the Defence Intelligence Agency that could be worth up to 5.6 billion dollars to focus on “computer network operations, emerging and disruptive technologies, and exercise and training activity”.

Last month, the U.S. Navy picked Booz Allen as part of a consortium to work on yet another billion-dollar project for “a new generation of intelligence, surveillance and combat operations”.

Booz Allen wins these contracts in several ways. In addition to its connections with the DNI, it boasts that half of its 25,000 employees are cleared for top secret-sensitive compartmented intelligence, one of the highest possible security ratings. (One third of the 1.4 million people with such clearances work for the private sector.)

A key figure at Booz Allen is Ralph Shrader, current chairman, CEO and president, who came to the company in 1974 after working at two telecommunications companies – Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.

In the 1970s, Western Union and RCA both took part in a secret surveillance programme known as Minaret, where they agreed to give the NSA all their clients’ incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.

Minaret and similar snooping programmes led to an explosive series of Congressional hearings in the 1970s by the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho in 1975.

*Jim Lobe contributed to this article.

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, May 6 2011 (IPS)

In Hollywood Westerns, the sheriff engages in a shootout with bad guys and wins. Such was the story of Wyatt Earp, who killed rustlers in the “Gunfight at OK Corral”. Then there is the American cowboy, represented by John Wayne – tall, handsome, Anglo-Saxon – who rides into town whistling before he dispatches the “bad guys” sometimes represented by “Indians” like Geronimo, the Apache, who supposedly terrorised innocent settlers.

Historians are still debating whether Wyatt Earp was a heroic lawman or settling a personal feud. Credit:

“Justice has been done,” said Obama in his midnight address. His lurid tale of a team of new American heroes was backed up by his team.

“He (Osama) was engaged in a firefight with those that entered the area of the house he was in,” said John Brennan, White House security adviser. “It was a firefight. He, therefore, was killed in that firefight.”

In reality, historians are still debating whether Wyatt Earp was a heroic lawman or settling a personal feud in the town of Tombstone, Arizona. Many cowboys were either poor blacks or Mexican, not daredevil fighters. And Geronimo came from a long tribal history of defending his people against Spanish settlers, Mexican and U.S. soldiers who were stealing the land of the Chiricahua Apache.

Like the story of Wyatt Earp, John Wayne and Geronimo, the facts behind Sunday’s gunfight at Abbottabad are dubious at best or simply untrue. What makes matters worse is that numerous laws and human rights rules were broken. Finally, the operation to kill Osama bin Laden shows a complete failure in the fabled intelligence apparatus in the U.S.

Jay Carney, the president’s spokesman, told reporters on Tuesday, “We provided a great deal of information with great haste in order to inform you … and obviously some of the information came in piece by piece and is being reviewed and updated and elaborated on.”

The house that Osama bin Laden lived in was downgraded from a million-dollar mansion to a value of 250,000 dollars after inquiries by reporters from local property dealers. The latest property records, unearthed by the Associated Press news agency, show that the land was actually bought for just 48,000 dollars.

The White House has backtracked on the gun battle, stating that only one of Bin Laden’s men fired a gun from an adjoining house. The “wife” who was used as a “human shield” turned out to be neither Bin Laden’s wife nor a human shield, nor did she die.

The famous photograph of Obama watching the raid live in the White House turns out to be suspect also since the video transmission of the raid failed. CIA director Leon Panetta told PBS television, “Once those teams went into the compound, I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20 or 25 minutes that we really didn’t know just exactly what was going on.”

While the story has unraveled, serious questions are starting to be raised about the legal nature of the killing. And that’s not to mention the repeated flouting of international law by the White House in ordering deadly military operations inside Pakistan, a country with which it has not declared war.

Amnesty International senior director Claudio Cordone said in a statement, “Given that bin Laden was not armed, it is not clear how he resisted arrest and whether an attempt was made to capture him rather than kill him.”

Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights called for a “full disclosure of the accurate facts” on the operation. “The United Nations condemns terrorism but it also has basic rules of how counter-terrorism activity has to be carried out. It has to be in compliance with international law.”

Even religious leaders have weighed in. Dr Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican church, told the Telegraph newspaper in Britain: “The killing of an unarmed man is always going to leave a very uncomfortable feeling because it does not look as if justice is seen to be done.”

Some have condemned Obama outright. Geoffrey Robertson, a human rights lawyer in Britain, told the BBC that Obama’s claim that justice was done “is a total misuse of language”.

“This is the justice of the Red Queen: sentence first, trial later,” he said, in a reference to “Alice in Wonderland”.

Yet perhaps the biggest question of all is why it took U.S. intelligence almost 10 years to track down their quarry when he was apparently living under their noses for roughly half of that, in a compound next to a premier Pakistani military academy with no security other than a couple of guns.

Either the Pakistanis fooled the U.S. military, or neither the CIA nor Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency had any idea, suggesting that the 54-year-old man on dialysis outwitted them.

The answer to the question, unfortunately, lies deep under the Arabian Sea where the U.S. dumped the body of Bin Laden, since the U.S. claims to have killed what could have been their biggest information source in a decade.

There are several survivors who could help shed light. But not one of them is in U.S. hands. Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, the youngest of bin Laden’s three wives, has already told Pakistani interrogators details of Bin Laden’s final years.

No matter. CIA officials are already spinning new tales for the U.S. media, based on documents and data they claim to have captured. “He (Osama) wasn’t just a figurehead,” one U.S. official told The New York Times on condition of anonymity. “He continued to plot and plan, to come up with ideas about targets and to communicate those ideas to other senior Qaeda leaders.”

Like the story of the fish that got away, there is no proof of any of the new allegations. But like Wyatt Earp, the story of the gunfight at Abbotabad is sure to be coming to a movie theatre near you.

*Pratap Chatterjee is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC specialising in fraud, waste and abuse in government procurement.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Apr 28 2011 (IPS)

Was Adel Hamlily an agent for MI6, the British secret services, and simultaneously a “facilitator, courier, kidnapper, and assassin for al-Qaida”? Was there a secret al Qaeda cell in Bremen that even the German government knew nothing about? And could it be possible that an 11-year-old Saudi villager was leading a terrorist cell in London?

Earlier this week, Wikileaks released memos from the U.S. military officials in charge of the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on 759 out of the 779 alleged “terrorists” that have been held at the maximum security facility since the invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. At the time that they were captured, General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters, “These are people who would gnaw through hydraulic lines at the back of a C-17 (aircraft) to bring it down.”

But experts who have trawled through the new files say that the documents show that the U.S. military jumped to some very dubious conclusions. The Wikileaks documents also show that the U.S. military were duped by some of the prisoners. Worst of all the Wikileaks files prove that hundreds of innocent men were imprisoned.

“Some fool of a military officer threw the kitchen sink into the 2008 assessment of Hamlily, in an effort to prove to his superiors that this was a dangerous terrorist,” writes Clive Stafford Smith, the legal director of Reprieve, a British charity, who has represented 128 of the 779 men who were held in Guantanamo Bay.

“It is important to understand that each of the 759 WikiLeaks Guantánamo ‘assessments’ are comprised of the worst gossip that a military officer can come up with,” added Smith in a commentary written for the Guardian newspaper in Britain. “(W)e have proved 64 percent of the habeas petitioners innocent – and that comes after more than 500 prisoners were released by the military before the courts intervened. In other words, the error rate is astonishing.”

Andrew Worthington, author of “The Guantanamo Files” who has compiled the most definitive annotated list of all Guantanamo detainees, says that the files “reveal accounts of incompetence familiar to those who have studied Guantanamo closely, with innocent men detained by mistake – or because the U.S. was offering substantial bounties to its allies for al Qaeda or Taliban suspects.”

The files show that military interrogators themselves concluded that an estimated 150 men, almost one in five, had no connection to any terrorist activity whatsoever. Another 380, roughly half of those held in Guantanamo, were believed to be low-level militants.

Take the case of Mukhibullo Abdukarimovich Umarov, born in Alisurkhan, Tajikistan, and Mazharudin, a Tajik who was born in Pajpai, Pakistan. Both men were arrested while studying at a small library in Karachi, Pakistan on May 19, 2002.

Both Umarov and Mazharudin have one-page files; the two files are almost identical. They state: “It was undetermined as to why the detainee was transferred to GTMO (Guantanamo). Since his arrival at GTMO it has been determined that this detainee is not an al-Qaida or Taliban member. There, after reviewing all relevant and reasonably available information, it is GTMO’s assessment that this detainee is not an enemy combatant.”

The Wikileaks documents also show that U.S. military officials believed that Murat Kurnaz, a Turk who was born in Germany, was a member of “Bremen Group, the Bremen Cell, the Bremen Terrorist Recruitment Cell and the Bremen Jihadist Network.”

But Der Spiegel, a respected German weekly, notes that, “Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, which monitors Islamist radicals, nor any other German investigative authorities have ever heard of a Bremen al-Qaida cell.”

“The documents verify ignorance, incompetence and wanton behavior,” Bernhard Docke, a German lawyer who represented Kurnaz, told Der Spiegel. “Guantanamo appears to be an autistic and Kafka-esque machine of suspicion in which vague conjecture, simply through the passage of time and constant repetition, becomes supposedly solid fact.”

Indeed Joyce Hens Green, a U.S. judge who reviewed Kurnaz’s case, later concluded that the military had “no definite link/evidence of detainee having an association with al-Qaida or making any specific threat against the U.S.” or “any evidence that Kurnaz harbored any individual who has in engaged in, aided, abetted or conspired to commit acts of terrorism against the United States.”

The Wikileaks files also reveal that the military interrogators were willing to believe almost anything. Yasim Basardah of Shabwah, Yemen – a former thief, drug addict and an acknowledged member of Al Qaeda who fought against the U.S. in the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001 – provided testimony against 123 of his fellow prisoners.

“The current U.S. government knowledge base of the personnel and activities within Tora Bora would not have been possible without the co-operation and truthfulness of this detainee (Basardah) whose reporting has directly supported US tactical operations in Afghanistan,” wrote one military analyst. “It seems many JTF-GTMO detainees are willing to reveal self-incriminating information to him.”

For example, Basardah told his interrogators that fellow inmate Yousef Abkir Salih al-Qarani was a leader of a “London, United Kingdom-based al-Qaida cell” in 1998. Yet a more detailed investigation by lawyers showed that al-Qarani was born in 1987 and had not left his family village in Saudi Arabia, making it unlikely that he was leading a terrorist group in the UK at the age of 11.

But Basardah was rewarded well for this information at the time, according to an investigation by the Washington Post, which revealed that he “received a CD player, chewing tobacco, coffee, library books” as well as McDonald’s apple pies and a video game console.

Every single one of these detainees has since been released. Umarov and Mazharudin were held for two years before being released by the George W. Bush administration in 2004 while Kurnaz was let go in 2006. Basardah and Hamlily spent eight years each at Guantanamo and were released by the Barack Obama administration in 2010.

However, 171 of the original 779 prisoners remain in Guantanamo today. Of this number 89 have been cleared for release but are being held for security reasons – either because they are from Yemen, which is still considered to be a major Al Qaeda base, or because the detainees face imprisonment in their countries of origin if they return.

Other Guantanamo prisoners are stuck in a judicial limbo. In March, President Barack Obama signed an executive order extending their imprisonment indefinitely without any charges – even though the government remains unsure of who some of the men are, let alone what, if anything, they did.

One affected individual is Omar Hamzayavich Abdulayev. His file, released by WikiLeaks, merely notes: “Detainee’s identity remains uncertain.”

Glenn Greenwald, a U.S. constitutional lawyer and blogger, says that these new Wikileaks documents “conclusively underscore the evils” of the Obama executive order: “The idea of trusting the government to imprison people for life based on secret, untested evidence never reviewed by a court should repel any decent or minimally rational person, but these newly released files demonstrate how warped is this indefinite detention policy specifically.”

*Pratap Chatterjee is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC specialising in fraud, waste and abuse in government procurement.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Feb 4 2011 (IPS)

When Major General Mohamed Said Elassar, assistant to Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, the Egyptian minister of defence, came to the U.S. capital last April, he was given the equivalent of a red carpet welcome. The delegation of high-ranking Egyptian military officials that he was leading was ushered from one Congressional office to the next, from the Pentagon to the State Department.

His host was Bob Livingston, a former chairman of the appropriations committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. On hand to accompany him to meetings with the military was William Miner, a retired Navy pilot with a master’s degree in Middle East affairs from the Naval Post Graduate School. Cathryn Kingsbury, a former employee of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Center for Public Affairs, an Arabic speaker who had lived in Egypt, took the delegation to Congress on Apr. 29.

Kingsbury, Livingston and Miner were lobbyists employed by the government of Egypt, helping them to open doors to senior officers in the U.S. government. Records of their meetings, required under law, were recently published by the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington watchdog group.

“Many of the meetings with lawmakers were with lawmakers with seats on powerful committees including the panel in charge of foreign aid spending. Lobbyists contacted six of the fourteen members of the Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations Appropriations,” wrote Paul Blumenthal, a Sunlight researcher. In addition, Livingston and Miner traveled to Cairo to meet with the U.S. embassy there to discuss “U.S./Egyptian security issues”.

Indeed Egypt has received over 70 billion dollars in economic and military aid from the U.S. Congress in the past 60 years, according to numbers compiled by the Congressional Research Service.

Specifically, the aid money pays for U.S.-designed Abrams tanks assembled in suburban Cairo under contract with General Dynamics. Boeing sells Egypt CH-47 Chinook transport helicopters, Lockheed Martin sells F-16s fighter jets, Sikorsky Aircraft sells Black Hawk helicopters. Lockheed Martin has taken in 3.8 billion dollars from Egypt in the last few years, General Dynamics 2.5 billion dollars, Boeing 1.7 billion dollars, among many others.

The Livingston Group made the largest number of contacts with the U.S. government for the Egyptians to make sure that this money continued to flow, but they were not the only ones. Tony Podesta, the brother of a former White House chief of staff, and Toby Moffett, a former Democratic Congressman, joined forces with Livingston to create the PLM Group to represent Egypt in Washington, according to foreign-agent records at the Justice Department. Sunlight records show that the joint venture was paid 1.1 million dollars a year.

When contacted by IPS, the Livingston Group lobbyists declined to discuss the exact nature of their support for the Egyptian government, referring enquiries to Karim Haggag, the spokesman for the Egyptian embassy in Washington, who did not return repeated phone calls.

Nor is PLM the only Washington lobbyist for the Egyptian government. Frank Wisner, the former U.S. ambassador that President Barack Obama dispatched to Cairo earlier this week to advise President Hosni Mubarak, is employed by Patton Boggs, a law firm and registered lobbyist. On its website Patton Boggs summarises the contracts that it has won in the last 20 years to advise the Egyptian military, leading “commercial families in Egypt” as well as “manage contractor disputes in military sales agreements arising under the US Foreign Military Sales Act.”

Wisner, a former ambassador to Egypt from 1986 to 1991, sits on the board of the Pharaonic American Life Insurance Company (ALICO) in Egypt as well as the American University in Cairo.

The diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks provide a further glimpse into some of the benefits that the diplomatic lobbying has won the Egyptian government, notably the provision of specialised military training paid for by the U.S. government.

Under the “Leahy law” – a human rights requirement named after Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont that prohibits U.S. military assistance to foreign military units that violate human rights – U.S. embassies have to vouch for all prospective trainees.

One cable from the U.S. embassy dated Oct. 21, 2009, lists dozens of members of a variety of Egyptian security offices from “Central Security” and “Public Security” to “Civil Defense” and “Police Academy” that have been cleared to take U.S. sponsored anti-terrorism classes abroad. Another cable dated Jan. 13, 2010 that has been made public by Wikileaks offered “Security Sector Central” officers three-week courses in how to handle explosives.

The courtship between Washington and Cairo continues to this day. Even as the Egyptian protestors were facing off against the tear gas grenades being lobbed by security forces in Cairo last week, another delegation of Egyptian senior military officials led by Lieutenant General Sami Hafez Enan, the chief of staff of Egypt’s armed forces, arrived in Washington to meet with Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (No public records have been filed yet so it is unclear if the PLM group was escorting them around again.)

The most tangible outcome of this lobbying is the weapons sales and military training authorised by the U.S. Congress and subsidised by the U.S. taxpayer. But the relationship between Cairo and Washington is much deeper and wider.

Another diplomatic memo written on May 14, 2006 released by Wikileaks makes it clear that the U.S. government is working closely with Egyptian spy chief Omar Suleiman on key regional matters such as figuring out how best to marginalise Hamas in Palestine: “(O)ur intelligence collaboration with Omar Soliman, who is expected in Washington next week, is now probably the most successful element of the relationship.”

The diplomatic memo, which was written by Francis J. Ricciardone, Jr. (then U.S. ambassador to Egypt) to brief Robert Zoellick (then Deputy Secretary of State) who was visiting Cairo at the time, notes that “Omar Soliman also told us he would be glad to see you (Zoellick), if schedules permit – he will be working the Israeli and PA delegations in Sharm” – referring to a meeting being held in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm-el-Sheikh.

Suleiman was described by New Yorker writer Jane Mayer in her book “The Dark Side” as “the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions – the covert programme in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.”

This week, Mubarak was lobbied furiously by Frank Wisner and other diplomats in the Obama administration, according to the New York Times, to resign and appoint Suleiman to take over as interim president in Cairo. Enan and Tantawi, the employers of the Washington lobbyists, have been put forward by Washington to lead a process of constitutional reform.

If the protestors do not succeed in ousting this cosy group of diplomats, former members of Congress and high-ranking Egyptian government officials, the game of musical chairs may simply move the players from one seat to the next. Suleiman will replace Mubarak and the military delegations will resume their rounds in Congress, the State department and the Pentagon, accompanied by their Washington lobbyists.

*Pratap Chatterjee is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC specializing in fraud, waste and abuse in government procurement.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Jan 19 2011 (IPS)

One billion dollars and just over four years after Boeing won a contract to build a “virtual fence” on the Arizona-Mexico border, the high-tech project was canceled last week by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) amid widespread recognition that it has been a failure.

The Secure Border Initiative Network (also known as SBInet) was created by the administration of George W. Bush in November 2005 to track down undocumented migrants crossing the 3,200-kilometre land border between the U.S. and Mexico. Estimates of the number of people that make it across range from 400,000 to one million a year, many of whom hike miles of uncharted northbound trails and roads through steep ravines and hills of the desert to evade border patrols.

Some more accessible areas, near cities like Nogales and Tijuana, have physical fencing but these are often breached by migrants who dig under or knock down the barriers. SBInet was intended to showcase a more high-tech approach in the Arizona desert that, if successful, would have been extended throughout the border region.

“We’re asking you to come back and tell us how to do our business. We’re asking you. We’re inviting you to tell us how to run our organisation,” Michael Jackson, then deputy director of Homeland Security, told more than 400 military contractors and homeland security industrialists at a government-sponsored “Industry Day” on Jan. 25, 2006.

Jackson, a former Lockheed Martin vice-president, added: “This is an invitation to be a little bit, a little bit aggressive and thinking as if you owned and you were partners with the CBP (Customs and Border Patrol).”

In September 2006, Boeing won the SBINet contract, defeating four other major bidders. Over the last four years, Boeing installed 400 unattended ground sensors, 15 sensor towers and 13 communications towers along an 85-kilometre stretch of the border in the areas of Ajo and Tucson.

In a 2007 investigation conducted by CorpWatch, Joseph Richey noted that the contract had a pyramid-like management structure whose “multiple subcontracting tiers allow Boeing to exact a cut at every turn, and create a conflict of interest because the company is also in charge of oversight.”

The company came in for scathing criticism at Congressional hearings. Boeing vice president and SBInet programme manager Jerry McElwee was confronted by Congressman William Lacy Clay at an oversight hearing for information about the ballooning costs and the extension of the contract period.

“You bid on these contracts and then you come back and say, ‘Oh we need more time. It costs more than twice as much.’ Are you gaming the taxpayers here? Or gaming DHS?” the Missouri Democrat asked.

“The last time I saw this type of model for managing a project was ‘the Big Dig’ in Boston,” Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Steven Lynch referring to a highway rerouting mega project that included a 5.6-kilometre-long tunnel under Boston.

“This is exactly what they did. They fused the oversight function with the engineering and construction function,” Lynch said. “Everybody was in the same tent. Nobody was watching out for the owner, who in this case is the U.S. taxpayer. This is a terrible model and I see a lot of it. Generally when this model is in place, we see colossal failures and huge cost overruns.”

Blame for the failure has also been directed at the government. A Government Accountability Office report in 2008 stated that “requirements have not been effectively defined and managed and management has not been effective” noting that “important aspects of SBInet remain ambiguous and in a continued state of flux, making it unclear and uncertain what technology capabilities will be delivered and when, where, and how they will be delivered.”

Government officials have finally acknowledged that the massive high-tech project has been an abject failure, according to a recent assessment commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, which concluded: “SBInet has had continued and repeated technical problems, cost overruns and schedule delays, raising serious questions about the system’s ability to meet the needs for technology along the border.”

The Barack Obama administration committed early to canceling failed projects. Vivek Kundra, the U.S. chief information officer, was tasked with conducting high-level assessments of several dozen major infrastructure projects with an eye to stop throwing good money after bad.

“We know what needs to be done, but there are some structural barriers that have to be addressed,” Kundra said last December after examining a number of projects, including SBInet. “We’re trying to move away from huge massive contracts to a model where you will really see true value.”

Last week, SBInet became the latest mega-project to be officially canceled and replaced with simpler and smaller contracts. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano says that the government will now use existing technology, including mobile surveillance systems, unmanned aircraft systems, thermal imaging devices and tower-based remote video surveillance systems. All told, she expects DHS to spend less than 750 million dollars to cover the remaining 517 kilometres of the Arizona border.

“There is no one-size-fits-all solution to meet our border technology needs, and this new strategy is tailored to the unique needs of each border region, providing faster deployment of technology, better coverage, and a more effective balance between cost and capability,” Napolitano said after announcing the SBInet cancelation last week.

Boeing has tried to put a positive spin on the news. “DHS has made a decision to continue using technology in border security, and we appreciate that they recognize the value of the integrated fixed towers Boeing has built, tested, and delivered so far,” the company said in a statement. “We are proud of the accomplishments of our team and of the unprecedented capabilities delivered in the last year that provide Border Patrol agents increased safety, situational awareness, and operational efficiency.”

Yet at the end of the day, many experts note that much of the debate over border fences – physical and virtual – are really more about political perceptions of being tough on immigration rather than actual barriers to undocumented workers. By Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) own estimates, half the country’s undocumented workers enter the United States legally with temporary visas that they then overstay.

*Pratap Chatterjee is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC specialising in fraud, waste and abuse in government procurement.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Jan 13 2011 (IPS)

When the price of salt in Ohio skyrocketed 236 percent in the winter of 2008, Ted Strickland, the governor of the state, asked the state inspector general to figure out why. Investigators quickly found that two government contractors – Cargill and Morton Salt – were responsible for this sudden price increase.

Salt is in high demand during the harsh winters in the U.S. Midwest, but not just to bring out the flavour in local food. Instead when temperatures drop below freezing and a major storm is expected, government authorities dispatch trucks and snow ploughs to spread large quantities of crystalline salt on the roads that dissolve into the fallen snow and lower the melting point to turn it into water.

A study done by Professor David Kuemmel of Marquette University in Madison, Wisconsin concluded that road salt can reduce the risk of pedestrians and cars slipping on icy road surfaces by almost 90 percent. The Salt Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, estimates that government authorities in the U.S. spent some 700 million dollars a year buying 22 million tonnes of rock salt to keep the roads free of snow.

The state of Ohio owns two salt mines – one in Cleveland and the other in Fairport – which it has leased for 100 years to Cargill and Morton to extract salt. Cargill, one of the world’s largest private companies, is based in Minneapolis, while Morton Salt is a Chicago-based company that was recently bought up by K+S, a German conglomerate. These two companies sold 77 million dollars worth of salt back to the Ohio government in 2010 alone.

The report alleged that the two companies took advantage of the Ohio department of transportation’s (ODOT) decision to interpret the “Buy Ohio” law to stipulate that if any two bidders offer salt mined in Ohio to the government, all other bids are to be excluded no matter how much lower they are.

“Lockout bidding has so discouraged out-of-state vendors that they are reluctant to submit bids, assuming that Cargill and Morton will lock them out of the market by both bidding in as many counties as possible,” the report concludes. “Evidence of all of these indicators were primarily identified in the 54-county northern region of the state, where lockout prevails and Cargill and Morton have segmented the market into counties that both companies consistently win, year after year.”

Charlie Ortman, engineer for Ross County in Ohio, estimates his county spent an extra 300,000 dollars on inflated salt prices in 2008 and 2009 when prices jumped from just over 44 dollars a tonne to slightly more than 150 dollars per tonne.

“When we spend that kind of money for salt, it means capital improvement projects like bridge replacement and culvert replacement have to wait,” Ortman told the local newspaper. “We didn’t have that money that we could have given the public smoother roads and bridges with.” Both companies disagree with the inspector general’s findings. “In Ohio, and everywhere else, we compete independently and fairly under the bidding procedures set out by the relevant procurement officials,” Morton Salt said in a press statement.

The Ohio inspector general “admitted that it ‘failed to find any evidence that the two companies communicated on salt bids’ because in fact Cargill never did or would talk with its competitors about bids,” Cargill spokesman Mark Klein wrote in an email to IPS.

“The price of rock salt reflected supply and demand factors, not questionable bidding practices,” he added.

But the inspector general’s report noted that Cargill’s profit margins in Ohio were significantly higher than its margins in seven other states. “At its extreme, in the winter of 2007-08, Cargill’s ODOT profit margin was a staggering 4,000 percent higher than its profit margin on its contract with a transportation agency in a neighboring state,” allege the investigators.

Not only did the companies charge unreasonable prices, the inspector general report says that Cargill and Morton sometimes sold the government non-Ohio salt. “We identified 115 instances in which Cargill certified that it was delivering Ohio-mined salt when a portion of the salt came from out of state,” the investigators concluded.

Cargill’s Klein says that there were only two such incidents. Klein also claims that only four percent of the Ohio awards legally required the company to provide Ohio salt.

The inspector general also published evidence of alleged improper payments. Tony DiPietro, a former Ohio department of transportation executive who went to work for Cargill, allegedly provided approximately 4,700 dollars in gratuities to “public employees who had significant influence on the purchasing of Cargill’s road salt and other Cargill deicing products”.

Frank Bianchi, the vice president of Granger Trucking, one of Cargill’s salt haulers, “spent thousands of dollars to entertain public officials throughout northeast Ohio in the name of Cargill”, the report alleges.

“The vast majority of these entertainment expenses were minor and none were intended to improperly influence purchases,” Klein wrote.

“Nonetheless, in June 2009, after considering how the entertainment could be misconstrued, Cargill Deicing Technology instituted a specific ‘zero tolerance’ policy for entertaining government officials and employees. Since this policy was put into place, there have been no further entertainment expenses relating to Ohio public officials or employees.”

The report concludes that the ODOT may have overpaid Cargill and Morton between 47 million and 59 million dollars over the last decade as a result of the “lockout bidding” practices. ODOT now has 60 days to decide whether or not to respond.

*Pratap Chatterjee is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC specializing in fraud, waste and abuse in government procurement.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Sep 15 2010 (IPS)

Mordechai Orian, president of Global Horizons, a Los Angeles- based labour recruiter, has been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for “engaging in a conspiracy to commit forced labour and document servitude” of approximately 400 Thai citizens who were brought to work on farms in the U.S. between May 2004 and September 2005.

Orian was formally charged on Sep. 1 in what federal officials described as the biggest human-trafficking case ever brought by the U.S. government.

On Sep. 2, Orian “deceived and evaded federal FBI agents for approximately 24 hours by providing sporadic misleading and conflicting information concerning his location, willingness to surrender in Dallas, and failing to report,” government lawyers stated in documents filed with the federal court. They further charged that Orian “flew to Hawaii on another flight to avoid contact with federal agents at the airport.”

Today Orian is sitting in a Honolulu jail awaiting Judge Leslie Kobayashi’s decision on a government request to deny Orian’s release on one million dollars bail secured on his exclusive West Moonshadows Drive home in Malibu. Susan Cushman, assistant U.S. attorney for Hawaii, has filed documents stating that Orian is a flight risk, noting that he had used 26 different aliases and four different Social Security numbers in the past.

Multiple Court Cases

Cushman’s request to keep Orian locked up until trial also described numerous violations of the law, according to a filing delivered to the Honolulu court on Sep. 9.

Cushman provided the court with a copy of a 2003 report, “Migrant Workers in Israel – A Contemporary Form of Slavery,” published by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network and the International Federation for Human Rights. It states that Orian, an Israeli national, took 3,000 dollars from each of 19 Chinese workers for the “privilege” of working in Israel for two years.

“By the end of February Mr. Orian owed each of the workers between 2-3 months wages,” the report concluded. “Instead of paying the workers, he sent ten armed guards to surprise the workers in their sleep, beat them and drive them to the airport, where they were forcibly deported.”

In another document filed by Cushman, U.S. Department of Labour Judge William Dorsey concluded on Nov. 30, 2006 that Global Horizons Manpower, Inc. had “willfully and fraudulently represented it had contracts with Taft Farms” in Bakersfield, California to obtain temporary work visas for more than 200 workers between Aug. 1, 2003 and Apr. 30, 2004.

Dorsey found that the company had neither a contract nor jobs for the 200 workers. Unable to find them paid employment, Global Horizons fired the workers “for poor performance, when in fact, they were terminated for lack of work,” Dorsey wrote in his final decision. He ordered that Orian be barred for three years from bringing guest workers into the U.S.

On Sep. 7, 2007, Philipda Modrakee, a U.S. Department of Labour investigator, filed a report on 156 Global Horizons workers employed at the Maui Pineapple Farm in Hawaii. Modrakee estimated that Global Horizons owed 459,256 dollars in fines for failure to pay wages at the minimum rate and on time, for illegally deducting money from the workers’ paycheques for housing, and for failing to provide them with transportation to their work sites.

Immigration attorney Melissa Vincenty of Honolulu, who is representing 80 clients with claims against Global Horizon, told the Maui News last week that the company had confiscated the workers’ passports and visas. “It is called document servitude,” Vincenty told the newspaper, noting that passports are required for travel between the islands that make up the state of Hawaii.

Orian bought a twin-engine aircraft for inter-island transport of the Thai workers, thereby avoiding the necessity of presenting identification/passport to government officials, according to the documents filed before the court. Cushman noted that the airplane was recently seized as evidence.

Responding to the Government

It was against this history of questionable dealings that Orian’s attorney Mark Werksman asked for his client to be released on bail. Werksman’s Sep. 10 filing presented a series of arguments and documents to prove that his client was not a flight risk.

“The government appears to be asking the court to detain Mr. Orian because it thinks he is a bad employer and a chronic lawbreaker and deserves to be punished,” wrote Werksman. “There is no evidence of this outside of this outside of the government’s cherry-picked examples of adverse administrative rulings.” And the government’s immigration and labour bureaucracies are bound to have “disagreements, legal snafus and paperwork hassles.”

Orian never intended to deceive the FBI, but simply took a lower-priced flight to Hawaii, Werksman says. “What Mr. Orian did not know is that the FBI intended to make a high- profile arrest at the airport,” he charges in the court documents.

The 26 alleged aliases (such as O’Ryan and Moty) were “insignificant misspellings or typographical errors,” Werksman added.

“He is not a flight risk, he is not a danger to society,” Kara Lujan, a public relations executive, told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper. “He pleaded not guilty. He never threatened Thai workers, never took their passports, and there is no evidence of that.” Thai Workers Stand Up

But while Cushman and Werksman were filing competing documents in Honolulu, some of Orian’s former employees were playing out a parallel drama in Los Angeles.

There, on Sep. 8, in front of the Wat Thai Buddhist temple, some 25 Thai farm workers lined up wearing sunglasses, baseball caps, and traditional Thai scarves to disguise themselves for fear of retaliation, they said. One-by-one they told media assembled at a press conference organised by the Thai Community Development Center about their treatment at the hands of Global Horizons.

One 42-year-old man told reporters that recruiters promised him a fulltime job for 1,000 dollars a month – 10 times more than he made as a rice farmer. The recruiters told him that Global Horizons could find him work picking apples in Washington and pineapples in Hawaii. Lee, a pseudonym, arrived in Seattle on Jul. 4, 2004 to discover that he would have to pay 18,000 dollars to the recruiters.

“I thought I would find freedom and jobs here,” Lee said at the news conference. “I thought the United States was a civilised nation, the highest in the world. I never imagined this kind of thing could happen here.”

Lee says he was housed in a wooden shack and threatened with violence and deportation if he tried to escape or to speak to any outsiders. In September 2005, Lee says he escaped one night by running through pineapple fields.

Lee’s story was confirmed by Chanchanit Martorell, executive director of the Thai Community Development Center. Martorell and her staff say they have interviewed more than 200 farmworkers and filed civil charges against Global Horizons. She noted that some of the farm workers were so badly treated that they had to survive on eating leaves from plants or fish they caught in a nearby river.

The FBI says it is taking the Global Horizons case very seriously. “In the old days, they used to keep slaves in their place with whips and chains,” FBI Special Agent Tom Simon told the Beverly Hills Courier. “Today, it is done with economic threats and intimidation.”

*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Aug 31 2010 (IPS)

Military auditors failed to complete an audit of the business systems of an Ohio- based company – Mission Essential Personnel – even though it had billed for one billion dollars worth of work largely in Afghanistan over the last four years.

In September 2007 the U.S. Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) awarded Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) a five-year-contract worth up to 414 million dollars to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan. MEP was a start-up company created by three men, including Chad Monnin, a U.S. Army Special Forces reservist who was injured in a parachute accident. Procurement rules give preference to companies owned by injured veterans, even if they have no prior experience.

When the Obama administration decided to expand the war in Afghanistan last year, MEP quickly hit the ceiling of what it could bill. On May 10, INSCOM gave MEP a 679 million dollar extension without bothering to put it up for competitive bid. MEP will also get a share of the Intelligence Support Services Omnibus III contract, a five-year contract, with a ceiling of 492 million dollars, announced on Aug. 10, 2010.

The only two other contractors that have held multi-billion dollar contracts to supply translators to soldiers and diplomats in the Global War on Terror – L- 3/Titan and Global Linguist Services – have both been investigated for alleged overcharging, suggesting that this type of work falls in the high risk category of government spending.

Yet the Defence Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) failed to conduct a full business systems audit for MEP.

Concerned about DCAA’s failure, Christopher Shays, one of the co-chairs of the Commission on Wartime Contracting told MEP CEO Chris Taylor: “You don’t have to compete for it, and you, whatever your costs are, you get something plus, and you haven’t had any audits.” Shays assured MEP that he was not suggesting that the company had done anything wrong, re-iterating that the commission considered MEP a “a great American success story.”

“We currently have DCAA auditors on our property in Columbus, Ohio, working through any number of audit issues. But we welcome it,” Taylor told the commission. “We are current on our 2008 and 2009 incurred-cost submissions,” he added, referring to the invoices that the company sends INSCOM for payment.

DCAA Director Patrick Fitzgerald says that the problem was that the contract grew quicker than expected. “Are we behind the curve? Yes. We should have been in there quicker,” he told commissioners. “Our experience has shown that when contractors grow that fast, the procedures, processes, and systems have trouble keeping up with that growth.”

When asked to respond to the charges levelled at DCAA at the hearing, a Pentagon spokesperson emailed the following statement: “We agreed with the commission that additional resources were required at MEP and have worked to ensure that additional DCAA assets are directed to MEP.” The spokesperson estimated that it will complete “much of the critical audit work needed to assess MEP’s business systems within the next six months.”

DCAA History

DCAA has oversight over half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money every year. It is supposed to constitute the “first line of defence” against corruption when the Pentagon contracts anything from bunker-buster-bombs from Lockheed Martin, to rockets from Boeing, or when it subcontracts military support operations as it did when it paid Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, to hire Sri Lankans to clean toilets in Iraq.

Founded in 1965 to provide the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and Ordnance Department with uniform oversight of contractors, DCAA was first headquartered in the now closed Alexandria, Virginia Cameron Station, a cold windowless building fitted with rows of steel gray desks.

DCAA expanded quickly. By 1966, it had 3,662 staffers around the country with oversight over 21.5 billion dollars. As the Vietnam War ramped up, the DCAA’s “Flying Squad” would fly Huey helicopters to forward bases in the jungle to check up on work done by contractors.

By the end of the 1980s DCAA had more than 6,000 staff and today, with headquarters in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, it has some 300 offices and sub-offices around the world.

In the last 45 years, DCAA’s oversight of contract dollars has expanded more than four-fold (adjusted for inflation) to 501 billion dollars in proposed or claimed contractor costs that required 30,352 audits in 2008.

Not surprisingly the agency staff has struggled to keep up with demand, and as far back as the 1980s, it had a six to seven year backlog to complete audits. This lag had a major impact on payments to military contractors, which were typically paid just 85 percent of costs on delivery of services, with the remaining 15 percent paid out several years later – only if the auditors were satisfied.

Mad Metrics Meltdown

DCAA found an opportunity to change this record of inefficiency in 1993 when Vice-President Al Gore was appointed to head up a commission to “re- invent government” to “work better, cost less, and get results Americans care about.” Under the Gore mandate, DCAA Director Bill Reed, ordered sweeping changes in how the agency conducted audits.

The first step was telling auditors to catch up as soon as possible. A then senior DCAA auditor told IPS how that order was implemented: “We basically closed out outstanding audits of procurement dollars by looking the other way.”

Next, Reed instructed his staff to focus on performance “metrics.”

“To put it bluntly; cheaper, faster, better,” former DCAA director April Stephenson would recall later. Multiple layers of supervision and management were created to ensure that staff completed even the most complex of audits in less than 30 days. But tracking time under the new “Defense Management Information System” often took longer than the actual sped-up audit, defeating the whole purpose of making the system work better.

“Mad Metrics Meltdown!” wrote a former senior auditor at DCAA to the Government Executive magazine website comment section. “The application of engineering and factory floor measurements to professional activity is a lazy, risk-aversive, anti-intellectual crutch of poor management.”

Firing the Director

In September 2008, DCAA Director April Stephenson announced what appeared to be radical changes: The agency would scrap 18 of the 19 metrics and shut down Webmetrics, a staff performance management software program.

A new set of 11 new “standards” which included eight measurable “metrics” was announced. Stephenson appointed Karen K. Cash, DCAA’s assistant director for operations, to follow up on staff complaints which had been invited via an anonymous website.

Last November, the Pentagon decided that Stephenson wasn’t the right person to overhaul the agency. She was re-assigned and Patrick Fitzgerald, the former director of the U.S. Army Audit Agency, took over.

DCAA Slows Down

During fiscal 2008, the average time to complete a “contractor pricing review” was 28 days. Today the same job takes 72 days. “Some of our audits take longer because we are doing a more comprehensive job,” Fitzgerald told Government Executive magazine in July. “If there are other factors that are causing us to take longer, we need to do a deep dive on those and try to figure out how mitigate or to alleviate them.”

As a result DCAA says it will no longer be able to keep up with the 2008 metrics – 30,000 audits covering more than 500 billion dollars in proposed or claimed contractor costs. To catch up on the missed audits, like the one for MEP, Fitzgerald says that DCAA has hired 500 new auditors and will add 1,000 more in the next four years.

“We are also working to prioritize audit workload and make sure that high- risk audits are identified and completed in a timely manner,” a Pentagon spokesperson told IPS, noting that the agency was currently working to create a new strategic plan, and will re-assess the new performance measures introduced in 2008.

*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Aug 21 2010 (IPS)

When Wikileaks, a whistleblower website, released 76,000 incident reports from the U.S. war in Afghanistan, the exploits of a secret military “capture/kill” team called Task Force 373 was revealed for the first time.

The Wikileaks data suggests that Task Force 373 targeted as many as 2,058 people in Afghanistan on a secret hit list called the “Joint Prioritised Effects List” (JPEL). Yet Task Force 373 was not the only “capture/kill” team identified in the documents, nor was it the first one in Afghanistan.

A British unit known as Task Force 42 that is composed of Special Air Service, Special Boat Service and Special Reconnaissance Regiment commandos appears in at least a half dozen documents.

Task Force 42 operates in Helmand province. Like their U.S. counterparts, they use Hellfire missiles as well as 500- pound Paveway and Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bombs.

The first of several reports in the Wikileaks files lists an air strike 53 metres from the Pakistani border that killed nine people on Oct. 12, 2008.

On Oct. 28, 2008, Task Force 42 launched Operation Beethoven to capture or kill Mullah Ziauddin near Lashkar Gah. Ziauddin and three others were killed. Ten days later Task Force 42 fired a Hellfire missile from an Apache AH-64 helicopter in Nad-e-Ali in Helmand province and killed an alleged Taliban member named Janan.

The last Task Force 42 action incident reported in the Wikileaks document occurred on August 28, 2009, when a team entered a compound in Gereshk district and were blown up by a hidden home made bomb. Lee Andrew Houltram, a British Royal Marine was killed while five British soldiers and an Afghan interpreter were wounded and evacuated to Camp Bastion. Seven armed men leaving the site were killed by air strikes.

Task Force 121

The idea of “joint” teams from different branches of the military working collaboratively with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was first conceived in 1980 after the disastrous Operation Eagle Claw, when personnel from the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy engaged in a botched seat-of- the-pants attempt to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran with help from the CIA.

Eight soldiers were killed when a helicopter crashed into a C-130 aircraft in the Iranian desert. Afterwards, a high- level six-member commission led by Admiral James L. Holloway III recommended the creation of a Joint Special Forces command to ensure that different branches of the military and the CIA do advance planning to coordinate far much more closely in the future.

This process accelerated greatly after Sep. 11, 2001. That month, a CIA team called Jawbreaker headed for Afghanistan to plan a U.S.-led invasion of the country. Shortly thereafter, a U.S. Army Green Beret team set up Task Force Dagger to pursue the same mission. Despite an initial rivalry between the commanders of the two groups, they eventually teamed up.

The first covert “joint” team involving the CIA and various military special operations forces to work together in Afghanistan was Task Force 5, charged with the mission of capturing or killing “high value targets” like Osama bin Laden, other senior leaders of al Qaeda, and Mullah Mohammed Omar, the head of the Taliban. A sister organisation set up in Iraq was called Task Force 20. The two were eventually combined into Task Force 121 by General John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command.

In a new book to be released this month titled “Operation Darkheart”, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer describes the work of Task Force 121 in 2003, when he was serving as part of a team dubbed the Jedi Knights. Working under the alias of Major Christopher Stryker, he ran operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency (the military equivalent of the CIA) out of Bagram Air Base.

One October night, Shaffer was dropped into a village near Asadabad in Kunar province by an MH-47 Chinook helicopter, to lead a “joint” team, including Army Rangers (a Special Forces division) and 10th Mountain Division troops. They were on a mission to capture a lieutenant of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a notorious warlord allied with the Taliban, based on information provided by the CIA.

It wasn’t easy. “They succeeded in striking at the core of the Taliban and their safe havens across the border in Pakistan. For a moment Shaffer saw us winning the war,” reads the promotional material for the book. “Then the military brass got involved. The policies that top officials relied on were hopelessly flawed. Shaffer and his team were forced to sit and watch as the insurgency grew – just across the border in Pakistan.”

Task Force 373

Task Force 121 missions are classified as “top secret” and therefore do not appear in the Wikileaks documents which only cover operations classified at the lower level of “secret”.

The secret teams that are identified in Wikileaks mostly belong to Task Force 373. In a number of provinces – notably Khost, Paktika and Nangahar, three eastern provinces that border the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of northern Pakistan – Task Force 373 is described in over 100 incident reports in the Wikileaks files as leading numerous “capture/kill” efforts.

Some resulted in successful captures, others led to the death of local police officers and even small children, while some have caused angry villagers to protest and attack U.S.-led military forces.

In an ironic twist, one of the last Task Force 373 incidents recorded in the Wikileaks documents was almost a reprise of the original Operation Eagle Claw disaster that led to the creation of the “joint” capture/kill teams. Just before sunrise on Oct. 26, 2009, two U.S. helicopters – a UH-1 Huey and an AH-1 Cobra – collided near the town of Garmsir in the southern province of Helmand, killing four Marines.

*This article is the third of a three-part series adapted from an article originally published on TomDispatch.com.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Aug 21 2010 (IPS)

When Danny Hall and Gordon Phillips, the civilian and military directors of the U.S. provincial reconstruction team in Nangahar Province, Afghanistan arrived for a meeting with Gul Agha Sherzai, the local governor, in mid-June 2007, they knew that they had a lot of apologising to do.

Brigadier General Raymond Palumbo, Task Force 373 commander, at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan on Jul. 26, 2008. Credit: U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Samuel Morse

The incident vividly demonstrated the inherent clash between two doctrines in the U.S. war in Afghanistan: counterinsurgency (“protecting the people”) and counterterrorism (killing terrorists). Although the Barack Obama administration has given lip service to the former, the latter has been, and continues to be, the driving force in its war in Afghanistan.

For Hall, a Foreign Service officer who was less than two months away from a plum assignment in London, working with the military had already proven more difficult than he expected. In an article for the Foreign Service Journal published a couple of months before the meeting, he wrote, “I felt like I never really knew what was going on, where I was supposed to be, what my role was, or if I even had one. In particular, I didn’t speak either language that I needed: Pashtu or military.”

It had been no less awkward for Phillips. Just a month earlier, he had personally handed over “solatia” payments – condolence payments for civilian deaths wrongfully caused by U.S. forces – in Governor Sherzai’s presence, while condemning the act of a Taliban suicide bomber who had killed 19 civilians, setting off the incident in question.

“We come here as your guests,” he told the relatives of those killed, “invited to aid in the reconstruction and improved security and governance of Nangarhar, to bring you a better life and a brighter future for you and your children. Today, as I look upon the victims and their families, I join you in mourning for your loved ones.”

Hall and Phillips were in charge of a portfolio of 33 active U.S. reconstruction projects worth 11 million dollars in Nangahar, focused on road-building, school supplies, and an agricultural programme aimed at exporting fruits and vegetables from the province.

Yet the mission of their military-led “provincial reconstruction team”, made up of civilian experts, U.S. State Department officials and soldiers, appeared to be in direct conflict with those of the “capture/kill” team of special operations forces – Navy Seals, Army Rangers, and Green Berets together with operatives from the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division – whose mandate was to pursue Afghans alleged to be terrorists as well as insurgent leaders.

Capture/Kill Operations

Details of some of the missions of Task Force 373 first became public as a result of more than 76,000 incident reports leaked to the public by Wikileaks, a whistleblower website. The Wikileaks data suggests that as many as 2,058 people on a secret hit list called the “Joint Prioritised Effects List” (JPEL) were considered “capture/kill” targets in Afghanistan.

Task Force 373 is supposedly run out of three military bases – in Kabul, the Afghan capital, Kandahar, the country’s second largest city, and Khost Province which borders the Pakistani tribal lands. It’s possible that some of its operations also come out of Camp Marmal, the German base in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

Sources familiar with the programme say that the task force has its own helicopters and aircraft, notably AC-130 Spectre gunships, dedicated only to its use. Its commander appears to have been Brigadier General Raymond Palumbo, based out of the Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Palumbo, however, left Fort Bragg in mid-July 2010, shortly after General Stanley McChrystal was relieved as Afghan war commander by President Obama. The name of the new commander of the task force is not known.

In more than 100 incident reports in the Wikileaks files, Task Force 373 is described as leading numerous “capture/kill” efforts, notably Khost, Paktika, and Nangahar, the provinces that border the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northern Pakistan. In April 2007, David Adams, commander of the Khost provincial reconstruction team, was called to meet with elders from the village of Gurbuz in Khost province, who were angry about Task Force 373’s operations in their community. The incident report on Wikileaks does not indicate just what Task Force 373 did to upset Gurbuz’s elders, but the governor of Khost, Arsala Jamal, had publicly complained about Special Forces operations and civilian deaths in his province since December 2006, when five civilians were killed in a raid on Darnami village.

“This is our land,” he said then. “I’ve been asking with greater force: Let us sit together, we know our Afghan brothers, we know our culture better. With these operations we should not create more enemies. We are in a position to reduce mistakes.”

As Adams would later recall in an opinion article he co- authored for the Wall Street Journal, “The increasing number of raids on Afghan homes alienated many of Khost’s tribal elders.”

On Jun. 12, 2007, Danny Hall and Gordon Philips, working in a province northeast of Khost, were similarly called into that meeting with Governor Sherzai to explain how Task Force 373 could have killed those seven local Afghan police officers. Like Jamal, Sherzai made the point to Hall and Philips that “he strongly encourages better coordination, and he further emphasised that he does not want to see this happen again.”

Less than a week later, a Task Force 373 team fired five rockets at a compound in Nangar Khel in Paktika Province to the south of Khost, in an attempt to kill Abu Laith al-Libi, an alleged al Qaeda member from Libya. When the U.S. forces made it to the village, they found that Task Force 373 had destroyed a madrassa (or Islamic school), killing six children and grievously wounding a seventh who, despite the efforts of a U.S. medical team, would soon die.

(In late January 2008, al-Libi was reported killed by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone in a village near Mir Ali in North Waziristan in Pakistan.)

Paktika Governor Akram Khapalwak met with the U.S. military the day after the raid. Unlike his counterparts in Khost and Nangahar, Khapalwak agreed to support the “talking points” developed for Task Force 373 when communicating with the media. According to the Wikileaks incident report, the governor then “echoed the tragedy of children being killed, but stressed this could’ve been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”

Yet Task Force 373’s raids continued.

On Oct. 4, 2007, its members called in an air strike – 500- pound Paveway bombs – on a house in the village of Laswanday, just six miles from Nangar Khel in Paktika Province where those seven children had already died. This time, four men, one woman, and a girl – all civilians – as well as a donkey, a dog, and several chickens would be slaughtered. A dozen U.S. soldiers were injured, but the soldiers reported that not one “enemy” was detained or killed.

On a Monday night in mid-November 2009, Task Force 373 conducted an operation to capture or kill an alleged militant code-named “Ballentine” in Ghazni province. A terse incident report announced that one Afghan woman and four “insurgents” had been killed. The next morning, Task Force White Eagle, a Polish unit under the command of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, reported that some 80 people gathered to protest the killings. The window of an armoured vehicle was damaged by the angry villagers.

One of the last Task Force 373 incidents recorded in the Wikileaks documents was a disaster for the soldiers alone. Just before sunrise on Oct. 26, 2009, two U.S. helicopters, a UH-1 Huey and an AH-1 Cobra, collided near the town of Garmsir in the southern province of Helmand, killing four Marines.

*This article is the second of a three-part series adapted from an article originally published on TomDispatch.com

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Aug 20 2010 (IPS)

“Find, fix, finish, and follow-up” – also known as F4 – is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.

Details of one of these secret “capture/kill” teams – named Task Force 373 – first became public as a result of more than 76,000 incident reports leaked to the public in July by Wikileaks, a whistleblower website.

The Wikileaks data suggests that as many as 2,058 people on a secret hit list called the “Joint Prioritised Effects List” (JPEL) were considered “capture/kill” targets in Afghanistan. A total of 757 prisoners – most likely from this list – were being held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (BTIF), a U.S.-run prison on Bagram Air Base, as of the end of December 2009.

The F4 concept was developed at the U.S. Special Forces Command in Tampa, Florida, under the leadership of General Bryan D. Brown, who took over the Special Forces Command in September 2003.

With the support of Donald Rumsfeld, then U.S. secretary of defence. Brown also began setting up “joint Special Forces” teams to conduct F4 missions outside war zones. These were given the anodyne name “Military Liaison Elements.” At least one killing by such a team in Paraguay of an armed robber not on any targeting list was written up by New York Times reporters Scott Shane and Thom Shanker. The team, whose existence had not been divulged to the local U.S. embassy, was ordered to leave the country.

“The number-one requirement is to defend the homeland. And so sometimes that requires that you find and capture or kill terrorist targets around the world that are trying to do harm to this nation,” Brown told the Committee on Armed Services in the U.S. House of Representatives in March 2006.

“Our foreign partners are willing but incapable nations that want help in building their own capability to defend their borders and eliminate terrorism in their countries or in their regions,” Brown said.

In April 2007, President George W. Bush rewarded Brown’s planning by creating a special high-level office at the Pentagon for an assistant secretary of defence for special operations/low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities.

Michael G. Vickers, made famous in the book and film “Charlie Wilson’s War” as the architect of the covert arms- and-money supply chain to the mujaheedin in the anti-Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s, was nominated to fill the position.

Under his leadership, a new directive was issued in December 2008 to “develop capabilities for extending U.S. reach into denied areas and uncertain environments by operating with and through indigenous foreign forces or by conducting low visibility operations.”

“The war on terror is fundamentally an indirect war. It’s a war of partners, but it also is a bit of the war in the shadows, either because of political sensitivity or the problem of finding terrorists,” Vickers told the Washington Post. “That’s why the Central Intelligence Agency is so important and our Special Operations forces play a large role.”

Bush’s departure from the White House did not dampen the enthusiasm for F4 – quite the contrary, even though F4 was altered recently, in typical military fashion, to “find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze,” or F3EA. By all accounts, President Obama has expanded military intelligence gathering and “capture/kill” programmes globally in tandem with drone-strike operations by the CIA.

There are quite a few outspoken supporters of “capture/kill”. Austin Long, a professor at Columbia University in New York, is one academic who has jumped on the F3EA bandwagon.

Noting its similarity to the Phoenix assassination programme, responsible for tens of thousands of deaths during the U.S. war in Vietnam (which he defends), Long called for a shrinking of the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan to 13,000 Special Forces troops who would focus exclusively on counterterrorism, particularly assassination operations.

“Phoenix suggests that intelligence coordination and the integration of intelligence with an action arm can have a powerful effect on even extremely large and capable armed groups,” he and his co-author William Rosenau wrote in a July 2009 Rand Institute monograph entitled “The Phoenix Program and Contemporary Counterinsurgency”.

Others are even more aggressively inclined. Lieutenant George Crawford, who retired from the position of “lead strategist” for the U.S. Special Forces Command to go work for Archimedes Global, Inc., a Washington consulting firm, has suggested that F3EA be replaced by one term: “Man- Hunting”.

In a monograph published by the Joint Special Operations University in September 2009, Counter-Network Organization for Irregular Warfare,” Crawford spells out “how to best address the responsibility to develop manhunting as a capability for American national security.”

These concepts have unsettled even military experts. For example, Christopher Lamb, the acting director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, and Martin Cinnamond, a former U.N. official in Afghanistan, penned an article for the Spring 2010 issue of the Joint Forces Quarterly in which they wrote: “There is broad agreement that the indirect approach to counterinsurgency should take precedence over kill/capture operations. However, the opposite has occurred.”

Other military types claim that the hunter-killer approach is short-sighted and counter-productive. “My take on Task Force 373 and other task forces, it has a purpose because it keeps the enemy off balance. But It does not understand the fundamental root cause of the conflict, of why people are supporting the Taliban,” says Matthew Hoh, a former Marine and State Department contractor who resigned from the U.S. government in protest against the war in Afghanistan last September.

Hoh, who often worked with Task Force 373 as well as other Special Forces “capture/kill” programmes in Afghanistan and Iraq, added: “We are killing the wrong people, the mid-level Taliban who are only fighting us because we are in their valleys. If we were not there, they would not be fighting the U.S.”

*This article is the first of a three-part series adapted from an article originally published on TomDispatch.com.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Jun 29 2010 (IPS)

A system designed to track the success of Afghan police training is deeply flawed, says a report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR).

Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV meets with Afghan National Civil Order Police officers during a visit to Marjah, Helmand province, Jun. 21, 2010. Credit: Staff Sgt. Sarah Brown/U.S. Air Force

“It basically has not been a dependable system on which to determine the capability of the Afghan national security forces,” says SIGAR chief Arnold Fields.

Washington-based SIGAR was created by the U.S. Congress in January 2008 to conduct independent investigations of the 39 billion dollars in humanitarian and reconstruction assistance provided to Afghanistan.

The 55-page report, “Actions Needed to Improve the Reliability of Afghan Security Force Assessments”, is bound to complicate the Barack Obama administration’s plans for Afghanistan. One of the key goals for a drawdown of U.S. troop levels by July 2011 is that at least 100,000 trained police officers should be operating in Afghan towns as well as in the scattered hamlets that make up the bulk of the country.

For example, the inspectors requested a visit to the Baghlan-e Jadid police district in northern Afghanistan, which received the top rating in August 2008 and maintained the rating for nine months until it “graduated” in June 2009.

But in February 2010, U.S. police mentors refused to escort the inspectors to Baghlan-e Jadid, because it was “not secure”. International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) officials also refused, saying that the district was “overrun with insurgents”.

One ISAF official, whose name is withheld in the report, stated that the police force in Baghlan-e Jadid had “withered away to the point that it barely functions”. Another U.S. military official, quoted in the report, said: “Most of their police officers do not even have uniforms, nor has the majority received basic training, either.”

A mentorship team in northern Afghanistan summed up the situation for the inspectors: “The ANP will simply stop doing what we asked them to do as soon as we leave the area. This is especially troublesome in areas of security and patrolling.”

Focused District Development

Until recently, Afghanistan has never really had a national police force, though before the Soviet invasion of 1979 there was a conscription system that produced rank-and-file cops working under a trained officer corps. In 2002, in the wake of the Taliban’s defeat, the Germans set up a police academy in Kabul that offered a five-year training programme aimed at bringing back the officer corps. In 2003, the U.S. awarded a small contract to DynCorp to run a train-the- trainers programme in Kabul, based on prior work it had done in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia.

Yet no one spent much time worrying about beat-cop training, least of all the George W. Bush administration, which was already immersed in planning the invasion of Iraq and preferred to operate in Afghanistan with what it liked to call a “light footprint”.

By 2005, security in Kabul was deteriorating sharply. At the same time, the spectacular failure of the U.S. effort to create a brand new police force in Iraq had helped spark a bloody, devastating civil war in Baghdad, the Iraqi capital. Somewhere in this period, Bush administration officials started to wake up to the possibility that Afghanistan might be heading in the same direction. A series of new contracts were then issued to DynCorp by the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

The initial training was widely considered to be a failure. At a June 2008 discussion at the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Congressman John Tierney summed up findings on the 433 Afghan National Police units this way: “Zero are fully capable, three percent are capable with coalition support, four percent are only partially capable, 77 percent are not capable at all, and 68 percent are not formed or not reporting.”

In order to fix these failures, a new, intensive training programme called Focused District Development (FDD) was launched, under which every police officer in specific districts would be removed en masse for eight weeks of training in another part of the country. In the meantime, the country’s elite police unit, the Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), was to temporarily take over local policing duties. When the original force returned, a mentorship team of 14 internationals accompanied them to provide advice and – at least theoretically – to root out corruption.

By March 2010, FDD was claiming success. One in eight police districts in the whole country was rated as “independently capable”. The rating was even higher for the districts that had completed FDD, where as many as one in five was assessed as independent, a vast improvement over zero percent in 2008.

Flawed measures

Yet these ratings are now being thrown into question by SIGAR which says that the “capability measure” system developed by ISAF is itself flawed or based on inadequate data.

For example, the rating system gives high marks to a unit that has sufficient vehicles. But the inspectors discovered that this is not a good enough measure. On a visit to Bati Kot, a top-rated police district in Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan, they discovered that the district had 10 vehicles on hand, but only three capable drivers.

The inspectors found that as many as 44 percent of police district reports had been missing in a single month when they asked to look at documents filed from September 2009 through February 2010.

Most problematic, according to SIGAR, was the fact that the police units were not able to get adequate supplies like weapons and vehicles, and that police officers often quit as soon as the ratings were completed.

The year-to-date attrition for ANCOP – “the premier force in the ANP” – was about 73 percent on average, with one in western Afghanistan reporting 140 percent attrition, suggesting that police officers were quitting faster than they were being trained. “Mentors said this severe attrition was largely due to actions taken by powerful anti-coalition forces and disappointment over pay levels,” the inspectors reported.

One particularly embarrassing finding by SIGAR is that the Pentagon itself has also allegedly fudged data – claiming to have capability ratings for as many as 559 police units in October 2009, even though only 229 police units were being directly mentored or partnered and assessed as of March 2010.

The new report has already been challenged. Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV, the head of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, said the report was “inaccurate, outdated and damaging”.

However, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, said that the general picture painted was “accurate”.

*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org.

Excerpt:

Every day, as many as 260 trucks filled with supplies for U.S. troops – from muffins to fuel to armoured tanks – are driven from the Pakistani port of Karachi across the Khyber pass into Afghanistan.

U.S. military supplies to Afghanistan are provided by private contractors who supply their own armed security guards. Credit: House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs

Supply lines through the high mountain passes of Afghanistan have always been a dangerous mission – the Soviets reportedly spent most of their occupation in the 1980s fighting off attacks. The U.S. has chosen another method – outsourcing the delivery and even the protection of the vehicles to private contractors.

Almost four out of every five containers delivered to Afghanistan are now hauled by a consortium of eight Afghan, Middle Eastern and U.S. companies under a 2.16-billion- dollar contract called Host Nation Trucking (HNT) that started May 1, 2009. A typical large convoy of trucks may travel with 400 to 500 guards in dozens of trucks armed with heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

These trucks come under irregular attack. On Dec. 7, 2008, a parked convoy of trucks carrying military vehicles for U.S forces in Afghanistan near Peshawar was attacked by insurgents who torched and destroyed 96 trucks. As recently as Jun. 8, 2010, a convoy of contractor was attacked when it stopped at a depot just outside of Islamabad. The insurgents burnt 30 trucks and killed six people.

In November 2009, Aram Roston of the Nation magazine published a startling article: The trucking and security contractors were paying off warlords, and perhaps even the Taliban.

“Within the HNT contractor community, many believe that the highway warlords who provide security in turn make protection payments to insurgents to coordinate safe passage.”

Memos show that occasionally the contractors even worked with the insurgents to shake down the U.S. military for more money.

“U.S. taxpayer dollars are feeding a protection racket in Afghanistan that would make Tony Soprano proud,” Tierney said in a prepared statement, making reference to the fictional mafia boss of a popular TV series. “This arrangement has fueled a vast protection racket run by shadowy network of warlords, strongmen, commanders, corrupt Afghan officials, and perhaps others.”

The report comes on the heels of a two-day hearing in the U.S. Congress by the Commission on Wartime Contracting into abuses – including multiple charges of killings of civilians – by private security contractors hired by the State Department and the Pentagon in Iraq.

Three high-ranking military officials were asked to report to Tierney and other members of the subcommittee at a public hearing in Congress on Tuesday. “Why weren’t questions raised about these allegations earlier?” asked Congressman Mike Quigley, a Democrat from Illinois, echoing similar questions asked repeatedly by Tierney.

“I was personally unaware of these kinds of allegations but we take it seriously,” said Lieutenant General William Phillips, principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the army for acquisition, logistics, and technology. He explained that it was difficult to investigate corruption in Afghanistan.

Tierney dismissed this answer. Noting that the allegations were widely rumoured within days of the new contract and appeared in the media in late 2009, he pointed out that his staff was easily able to secure meetings with one of the warlords. “It took one email and when we met with him, he readily admitted to bribery and corruption.”

Perhaps a more accurate answer came from Brigadier General John Nicholson, the director of the Pakistan/Afghanistan Coordination Cell for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. The issue that his office ranked highest, said Nicholson: “Was the product delivered on time?” explaining that the military’s highest priority was making sure that supplies got to the troops.

Congressman Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona, said that a more appropriate question was: “Where is the tipping point when we say that that the funding of a parallel authority structure should become unacceptable?”

“There seems to be very little indication the Department of Defence is doing anything,” Flake concluded.

Several experts also testified to the subcommittee that the new report presented a major problem for U.S. military objectives in Afghanistan.

Colonel T.X. Hammes, senior research fellow at the National Defence University, said that the military needed to look into whether or not the choice of contractors “directly undercut(s) a central theme of our own counterinsurgency doctrine.’

*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org.

Jerry Torres, CEO of Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, has a motto: “For Torres, failure is not an option.” A former member of the Green Berets, one of the elite U.S. Army Special Forces, he was awarded “Executive of the Year” at the seventh annual “Greater Washington Government Contractor Awards” in November 2009.

On Monday, Torres, whose company provides translators and armed security guards in Iraq, was invited to testify before the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC), a body created in early 2008 to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in military contracting services in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Torres was asked to testify about his failure to obtain the required clearances for “several hundred” Sierra Leonian armed security guards that he had dispatched to protect Forward Operating Base Shield, a U.S. military base in Baghdad, in January 2010.

Torres didn’t show up.

An empty chair at the witness table was placed ready for him together with a placard with his name on it next to those for representatives of three other companies working in Iraq – the London-based Aegis, and DynCorp and Triple Canopy, both Virginia-based companies.

“This commission was also going to ask Mr. Torres why he personally flew to Iraq, to FOB Shield, and strongly suggested that Torres AES be allowed to post the unapproved guards, guards that would protect American troops, and then to ‘catch-up the approval process’.”

Instead, a lawyer informed the commission staff that Torres was “nervous about appearing”.

The failure of a contractor to appear for an oversight hearing into lapses was just one example that the use of some 18,800 armed “private security contractors” in Iraq and another 23,700 in Afghanistan to protect convoys, diplomatic and other personnel, and military bases and other facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq was not working.

Blackwater’s new Afghan contract

Perhaps the most famous private military contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq – North Carolina-based Blackwater – was not invited to sit at the witness table either, despite the fact that the company had been the subject of several investigations into misconduct.

For example, in September 2007, security guards from North Carolina-based Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square.

Blackwater staff have also been accused of killing other private security contractors – in December 2006, Andrew J. Moonen, was accused of killing a security guard of the Iraqi vice president, Adel Abdul Mahdi. And as recently as May 2009, four Blackwater contractors were accused of killing an Afghan on the Jalalabad road in Kabul.

Members of the commission noted with astonishment that the State Department had awarded Blackwater a 120-million-dollar contract to guard U.S. consulates in Heart and Mazar-i- Sharif in Afghanistan this past Friday.

Asked to explain why Blackwater was awarded the contract, Charlene R. Lamb, deputy assistant secretary for international programmes at the State Department, stated that the competitors for the contract – DynCorp and Triple Canopy – weren’t as qualified.

Yet Don Ryder of DynCorp and Ignacio Balderas of Triple Canopy testified that they were both qualified and able to do the contract. The two men said that they would consider lodging a formal protest at the State Department Tuesday after a de-briefing with the government.

The choice of Blackwater, which has been banned by the government of Iraq, left the commissioners with little doubt that the contract award system was flawed. “What does it take for poor contractual performance to result in contract termination or non-award of future contracts?” wondered Thibault.

Inherently Governmental

At a previous hearing of the commission last week, John Nagl, president of the Washington, DC-based Centre for a New American Security, submitted a report on the subject that explained why the government was turning to these companies: “Simple math illuminates a major reason for the rise of contractors: The U.S. military simply is not large enough to handle all of the missions assigned to it.”

Yet it appears that the government does not even have the oversight capability to police the companies that it has hired to fill the gap.

Some witnesses and experts said that by definition this work should not be handed out to private contractors in war zone.

“Private security contractors are authorised to use deadly force to protect American lives in a war zone and to me if anything is inherently governmental, it’s that,” said Commissioner Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general at both the State Department and the Homeland Security Department. “We don’t have a definitional problem, we have an acknowledgement of reality problem.”

Non-governmental expert Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), said: “It has become clear to POGO that the answer is yes, PSCs are performing inherently governmental functions. A number of jobs that are not necessarily inherently governmental in general become so when they are conducted in a combat zone. Any operations that are critical to the success of the U.S. government’s mission in a combat zone must be controlled by government personnel.”

*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org.

Should private contractors like Blackwater be allowed to continue to provide armed security for convoys, diplomatic and other personnel, and military bases and other facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq? A bipartisan U.S. Congressional commission will spend two days cross-examining 14 witnesses from academia, government and the companies themselves to come up with an answer.

Aegis contractors protect U.S. military engineers at training in Tikrit, Iraq, Mar. 21, 2010. Credit: Image courtesy of U.S. Department of Defence

“Some security tasks are so closely tied to government responsibilities, so mission-critical, or so risky that they shouldn’t be contracted out at all,” says Christopher Shays, a former Republican member of Congress from Connecticut.

Shays is the co-chair of the Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC), a body created in early 2008 to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in military contracting services in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The commission is expected to reveal results from a seven day fact-finding trip to Iraq last month in which spot checks on four military bases turned up a contracting company hired to protect a military base that had not been vetted even though they had dispatched hundreds of employees. At another base, individual security guards were identified who had not undergone proper background checks.

The thorny question of what is “inherently governmental” and what can be turned over to contractors was singled out for attention by President Barack Obama in March 2009, when he ordered the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), a department within the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, to come up with an answer.

The Pentagon caught the outsourcing bug when former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered that the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 be conducted with no more than 150,000 troops. Almost by default, the military turned over as much as it possibly could to private contractors, with little guidance on how to do so.

Today, every U.S soldier deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq is matched by at least one civilian working for a private company. All told some 239,451 contractors work for the Pentagon in battle zones around the world – of which roughly one in five is a U.S. citizen, two out of five are from the country at war and the remaining workers are from third countries, according to a census taken by the Pentagon’s Central Command in the first quarter of 2010.

While this workforce is mostly made up of legions of low paid workers from South and Southeast Asia who do menial tasks like cooking and cleaning up after the troops, the protection of senior diplomats and supply convoys as well as military bases and reconstruction projects is also handled by men (and a few women) with guns who work for private companies with exotic names like Four Horseman and Blue Hackle.

All told the Commission on Wartime Contracting estimates that 18,800 “private security contractors” work in Iraq and some 23,700 in Afghanistan.

Basic Questions

The Commission on Wartime Contracting public hearings on Jun. 18 and 21 will attempt to take a step back and ask some very basic questions about whether or not using private armed security is a good idea at all or how it should be done better.

Some technical guidance has been forthcoming from the Obama administration. In late March 2010, Daniel Gordon, the head of OFPP, issued a draft memo on “inherently governmental activities” that suggested applying a “nature of the function” test to ask agencies to consider whether the direct exercise of sovereign power is involved, i.e., committing the government to a course of action.

Michael Thibault, the other co-chair of the commission and a former deputy director of the Defence Contract Audit Agency, told Federal News Radio recently that part of the problem is that the government has been hiring the “lowest price technically acceptable” contracting.

Eventually, Thibault said contractors will “get up to speed but it’s going to take a lot of time and it’s silly. Why would you do that? And should they be doing that?”

Others say that the problem is lack of proper regulation. “Armed private security contractors always pose some risk to civilians but factors that increase risk such as a more dangerous environment, jobs that require movement, and poor oversight make the use of private security more suspect,” Dr. Deborah Avant, a professor of political science at the University of California (Irvine), and author of “Private Security: The Market for Force”, told IPS.

Avant will be one of the six witnesses who will testify before the commission on Friday together with Dr. Allison Stanger, professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College, Vermont, and author of “One Nation Under Contract”.

In a recent publication for the Washington, DC-based Centre for a New American Security, Stanger wrote: “We do not need in-sourcing; we need smart-sourcing that can restore proper government oversight while harnessing the energy and initiative of the private sector for the public good.”

Also testifying will be John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army officer who is best known for his book “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam”.

Non-governmental expert Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight and two former government officials who now work in private industry have also been invited to testify: Allan Burman, the former administrator of OFPP who is now president of the Jefferson Solutions consulting firm and Stan Soloway, former U.S. deputy under-secretary of defence for acquisition reform, who is now president of the Professional Services Council, an industry lobby group.

On Jun. 21, the Commission on Wartime Contracting will hear from government officials on the same subject as well as representatives of four companies: DynCorp International, Aegis Defence Services, Triple Canopy; and Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions.

*This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org.

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, May 10 2010 (IPS)

Pentagon chief Robert Gates has called for a cutback of 15 billion dollars in wasteful military spending on contractors as well as government bureaucracy, or risk not being able to pay for its current force.

In doing so, he acknowledged that the financial costs of military expansion since Sep. 11, 2001 were no longer sustainable.

Military contractors – from multi-billion-dollar jet manufacturers to small businesses who make money overseeing other contractors – are taking the fight to the U.S. Congress where they are lobbying to maintain their lucrative deals with the Pentagon.

“Realistically, it is highly unlikely that we will achieve the real growth rates necessary to sustain the current force structure,” said Gates. “Given America’s difficult economic circumstances and parlous fiscal condition, military spending on things large and small can and should expect closer, harsher scrutiny. The gusher has been turned off, and will stay off for a good period of time.”

Gates was speaking at the presidential library of Dwight Eisenhower in Kansas, on the 65th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany this weekend. Drawing on historical parallels, Gates noted that Eisenhower, who was the supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in 1944 and 1945, had chosen not to go to war in Vietnam and in the Middle East when he was president in the late 1950s.

“This restraint came in no small part from an understanding that even a superpower such as the United States – then near the zenith of its strength and prosperity relative to the rest of the world – did not have unlimited political, economic and military resources,” said Gates.

Today, the U.S. faces the same crippling financial reality after the unchecked spending of the last 10 years. “The attacks of September 11th, 2001, opened a gusher of defence spending that nearly doubled the base budget over the last decade, not counting supplemental appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Gates.

Gates noted that it was politically virtually impossible to cut back on major weapons systems or spiraling healthcare costs for veterans. Ironically, however, Gates said that the one of the few areas of real decline in overhead was “in the area where we actually needed it: full-time contracting professionals, whose numbers plunged from 26,000 to about 9,000.”

These “contracting professionals” used to be federal employees who oversaw government purchasing programmes from pencils to billion-dollar jet fighters and bombers to make sure that the contractors gave taxpayers a fair deal. Today much of that procurement oversight is done by contractors like CACI of Arlington, Virginia.

William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, welcomed the belated realisation that military spending has spiraled out of control and that military contractors were partly to blame.

“A lot of people have been saying that, and the Pentagon has pretty much blown them off. But the fact that Gates is now saying the same thing, it gives the reform groups a lot more leverage to push that agenda,” he told IPS.

In recent months, some members of Congress have backed strict new controls on wasteful spending at the Pentagon. Last May, Senator John McCain, and Senator Carl Levin, the Democratic chair of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, pushed through the Weapons Systems Acquisition Reform Act of 2009 to restrict unchecked spending on new weapons systems.

Two months later, the Senate voted in favour of ending F-22 production after intense lobbying by President Barack Obama. Gates issued a supporting statement that said “the Pentagon cannot continue with business as usual when it comes to the F-22 or any other programme in excess of our needs”.

But in his Kansas speech this weekend, Gates admitted that further cuts in major weapons systems was an uphill battle. Instead, the Pentagon will now seek to cut the military bureaucracy, he said.

In doing so Gates mentioned briefly that his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, had attempted the same thing almost a decade prior.

“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld told senior staff in a major speech on Sep. 10, 2001. “This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond.”

“You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world,” Rumsfeld thundered. “The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy. The technology revolution has transformed organisations across the private sector, but not ours, not fully, not yet. We are, as they say, tangled in our anchor chain.”

Rumsfeld said that the Pentagon was wasting at least three billion dollars a year at the time. “We must ask tough questions. Why is DOD one of the last organisations around that still cuts its own checks? When an entire industry exists to run warehouses efficiently, why do we own and operate so many of our own? At bases around the world, why do we pick up our own garbage and mop our own floors, rather than contracting services out, as many businesses do?”

In the ensuing decade, Rumsfeld oversaw a major transformation in the way the Pentagon did business – by outsourcing most of these services to companies like Halliburton and Kellogg, Brown and Root of Texas and Agility of Kuwait.

Gates acknowledged that mistakes had been made since that speech. “We ended up with contractors supervising other contractors – with predictable results.”

Last April, Gates made a first stab at change by ordering that 13,000 civilians be hired at the Pentagon in fiscal year 2010, including 4,100 in the field of contract oversight. By 2015, the Pentagon hopes to hire another 30,000 federal workers to replace contractors.

Not surprisingly this has raised hackles in some quarters. While service contractors are not quite as powerful as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, manufacturers of the F-22 and the C-130, there is evidence that they too are girding for battle with the Pentagon to prevent Gates from slashing their lucrative contracts.

On Monday, a new coalition called the “Small Business Coalition for Fair Contracting” led by Venable, a Washington DC law firm, was launched to fight the proposed changes.

“Although well intentioned, the federal government’s current in-sourcing initiative threatens to take away work from hundreds of small entrepreneurs,” said Venable partner Rob Burton, who served at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the White House.

In a press release issued Monday, Burton said that the in-sourcing initiative has already forced small contractors across the nation to dramatically reduce the scope of their operations as their contracts are cancelled and their employees are hired into government jobs.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Apr 8 2010 (IPS)

Hollywood and Silicon Valley leaders have teamed up with Middle Eastern royalty and high-level U.S. diplomats to send a message to heads of state who are gathering here in Washington next week: the world needs to reduce its nuclear arsenal to zero as soon as possible.

Next week, U.S. President Barack Obama will host leaders of 47 countries in Washington – including Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, Chinese President Hu Jintao, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel – to discuss how to keep nuclear weapons out of terrorists’ hands. India and Pakistan are expected to attend but Iran and North Korea have not been invited.

In advance of this “Nuclear Security Summit”, the directors of a months-old campaign called “Global Zero” held a press conference in Washington on Thursday.

The centrepiece of the event was a new film “Countdown to Zero” directed by Lucy Walker, a British filmmaker, and produced by Lawrence Bender, who also produced the acclaimed climate change film “Inconvenient Truth” and several Quentin Tarantino films like “Inglorious Basterds.”

The film was financed by Jeff Skoll, Canadian-born billionaire founder of EBay, the online auction site, who has funded a number of political films like “Food, Inc.” as well as dramas like “Charlie Wilson’s War”.

Film publicists say that the documentary – which includes interviews with former heads of state Jimmy Carter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair, and Pervez Musharraf – concludes that “our only option is to eradicate every-last nuclear missile”.

“Nuclear weapons have lost their political and military utility,” said Richard Burt, a former U.S. ambassador who was the chief negotiator in the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) with the former Soviet Union in 1991.

“The danger today is not nuclear conflict but the spread of nuclear materials,” he added as he introduced a range of speakers like Queen Noor of Jordan and General John J. “Jack” Sheehan, former Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic for NATO.

At the peak of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the U.S. possessed 19,000 nuclear weapons, enough to destroy the world hundreds of times over. The two countries have reduced this number to a ceiling of 2,200 weapons each – but a new treaty signed in Prague today by Obama and Medvedev will cut the number of nuclear warheads to 1,550 over the next seven years.

President Obama also unveiled a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) two days ago that will significantly limit the circumstances under which Washington would use nuclear weapons. This new strategy forbids the use of nuclear weapons against signatories in good standing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), puts a stop to the testing of nuclear weapons and development of new nuclear warheads, and requires the White House to seek Senate ratification and the entry into force of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

At the signing ceremony in Prague, Obama and Medvedev ratcheted up the pressure on Iran and North Korea, neither of whom are signatories to the NPT, suggesting that they could face retaliation if they did not join the treaty. Obama called for “smart” and “strong” sanctions by the United Nations, while Medvedev said: “Unfortunately Tehran is not reacting to an array of constructive compromise proposals. We cannot close our eyes to this.”

The two presidents did not agree on everything – they parted ways on U.S. plans to build an anti-missile shield in Europe to counter Iran.

Film producers Bender and Skoll say they would like to break through this global leadership stalemate by getting as many people to sign a statement calling for a complete elimination of nuclear weapons and a lockdown on loose nuclear materials.

In a teaser clip from their documentary film, which is scheduled to be released on Jul. 9, world leaders and ordinary citizens say one after the other: “Zero”.

Asked if he would take the film to countries like Iran and North Korea, Bender said he would be more than willing to. Queen Noor of Jordan, who also spoke at the press conference, and who regularly visits Syria said she would be happy to try and encourage Middle Eastern leaders from throughout the region to view the film and sign the pledge for zero nuclear weapons.

Anti-nuclear activist groups say Obama himself could also do more. They say that while Obama is using the nuclear posture review, the START treaty and the nuclear security summit to paint himself as a nuclear dove, his actions on Iran and North Korea show that he could further reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation.

“It is, in other words, a very hawkish nuclear posture – a hawk dressed in dove’s feathers,” says Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group (named after one of the key sites at which the U.S. government first developed nuclear weapons). “This posture review attempts to reconcile liberal ideals with the hawkish realities of current U.S. nuclear policy. Those policies are to continue almost unchanged.”

Mello put the Prague agreement in perspective by noting that to date – on a numerical and a percentage basis – Obama’s stockpile cuts have been surpassed by the previous administration of George W. Bush. “This posture review aims for nuclear stability worldwide as a background for the continued application of U.S. ‘hard power,'” Mello said.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Mar 18 2010 (IPS)

Propaganda networks that conduct “psychological warfare” for the Pentagon have been in vogue for a long time. Mike Furlong, a senior Pentagon official who is now being investigated for running a covert network of contractors to supply information for drone strikes and assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, had a long history of working in this field.

Furlong’s first major project was to establish transmitting and broadcasting networks in the former Yugoslavia, when he was commander of the Joint Psychological Operations Task Force in Bosnia from 1995 to 1997.

After he left the U.S. military, Furlong took a job as the director of the Strategic Communications and Information Operations Division of San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC).

Founded in 1969 by physicist J. Robert Beyster, SAIC’s biggest source of income has always been surveillance, especially for U.S. spy agencies: it is reportedly the largest recipient of contracts from the National Security Agency (NSA) and one of the top five contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

For example, in 2002 SAIC won the 282-million-dollar job of overseeing the latest phase of Trailblazer, the most thorough revamping in the NSA’s history of its eavesdropping systems.

“We are a stealth company,” Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer, told a now defunct magazine named Business 2.0. “We’re everywhere, but almost never seen.”

On the third floor of the Baghdad convention centre, in a suite of offices tucked away from the bustle of U.S. and Iraqi bureaucrats and soldiers who were using the sprawling complex as a nerve centre to run the country in the weeks following the 2003 invasion, Mike Furlong set up a small media empire called the Iraqi Media Network (IMN).

The public face of IMN was the Al Iraqiya radio and television network. The television station was widely derided by most Iraqis as propaganda, but the radio station, with its mix of Arabic and Western pop music, was very popular.

At the time, Alaa Fa’ik, an Iraqi American from Ann Arbor, Michigan, the second in command at IMN, denied that the Pentagon had any influence on IMN reporting.

“Yes, we are getting money from the Department of Defence. That is from you and me, the taxpayer. Are you reporting the fact that the ministry of education is funded by the United States government, the ministry of health is funded by the United States? I don’t understand why when it comes to the media, you say, no, no, no. So who is going to fund it?”

Fa’ik may have believed that he was building democratic media institutions but his own employees were had their suspicions about Furlong. “He had some TV experience but not much. He was doing other stuff on the side so he was running away from meetings. He didn’t establish a professional-running TV station,” one worker told the now defunct Baghdad Bulletin.

As a project, IMN was a failure. Don North, a correspondent in Vietnam, Washington and the Middle East for ABC and NBC News, called Al Iraqiya “Project Frustration” when he quit in July 2003.

“IMN has become an irrelevant mouthpiece for CPA (the U.S. provisional government in Iraq) propaganda, managed news and mediocre programmes. I have trained journalists after the fall of tyrannies in Bosnia, Romania and Afghanistan. I don’t blame the Iraqi journalists for the failure of IMN. Through a combination of incompetence and indifference, CPA has destroyed the fragile credibility of IMN,” he wrote.

Furlong was fired in late 2003 from the IMN project and went to work for Virginia-based Booz Allen Hamilton, another major CIA and NSA contractor.

In August 2005, Furlong returned to work with the Pentagon but as a senior civilian official – deputy director for the Pentagon’s Joint Psychological Operations Support Element (JPSE) out of the U.S. Special Operations Command in Florida.

At the time, he set up a 300-million-dollar contract in Iraq to hire three contractors for “media approach planning, prototype product development, commercial quality product development, product distribution and dissemination, and media effects analysis.” In other words – propaganda.

“We’re looking at programmes, for example, to counter suicide bombers,” Furlong told USA Today. “While the product may not carry the label, ‘Made in the USA,’ we will respond truthfully if asked by journalists.”

The first contractor was SAIC, his old employer, the second was L-3 subsidiary Sy Coleman and the third was a new outfit called the Lincoln Group that had been set up in Washington D.C. by Christian Bailey, a co-chairman of a political group aligned with the Republican Party called Lead 21.

The Lincoln Group’s efforts ran into trouble when Mark Mazetti, then a reporter with the Los Angeles Times, revealed that the company was secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by U.S. troops.

Willem Marx, a former intern at the Lincoln Group, later described to Democracy Now! how his boss worked: “He was choosing which of those articles would be published in Iraqi newspapers. He was sending them to Iraqi employees, getting them translated into Arabic, getting them okayed by the command back at Camp Victory and then having other Iraqi employees run them down to Iraqi newspapers, where they would pay editors, sub-editors, commissioning editors to run them as news stories in the Iraqi newspapers.”

*Pratap Chatterjee is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch. It is the second of a two-part series.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Mar 16 2010 (IPS)

Mike Furlong, a top Pentagon official, is alleged to have run a covert network of contractors to supply information for drone strikes and assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the U.S. government.

Mike Furlong Credit: Pentagon file photo

Officially, Furlong worked in strategic communications for Gen. David Petraeus, the head of the U.S. Central Command. In reality, Furlong was in charge of a project titled “CAPSTONE” under which he hired former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives who helped him gather intelligence on the whereabouts of “suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps” that was then transmitted to high-ranking Pentagon and CIA officials for “possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

To do this, Furlong tapped the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation, a Pentagon research organisation to reduce the threat from roadside bombs, to provide him with a 24.6-million-dollar pot of money via two obscure contracting offices – the Cultural Engagement Group at the Special Operations Command Central in Tampa, Florida, and the Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Programme Office in Dahlgren, Virginia.

With this money, he hired a newly minted company called International Media Ventures (IMV) of St. Petersburg, Florida, and attempted to subcontract other individuals and companies to run surveillance operations in South Asia.

One of the companies Furlong attempted to subcontract was AfPax Insider, a subscription service run by Robert Young Pelton, author of “The World’s Most Dangerous Places”, and Eason Jordan, a former chief news executive for CNN. After learning more about what Furlong wanted to do, Pelton told IPS that he opted out of the programme in late 2009.

“When we suspected what he was doing, we protested. That moral stand cost us millions,” he said.

At the time Pelton made his concerns known to IPS that Furlong might have set up IMV for clandestine operations. He says that he told Furlong that “kinetic action” (i.e., drone strikes) was incompatible with “the now accepted counterinsurgency strategy.”

In a front page news story written by Mark Mazetti and Dexter Filkins in the New York Times on Monday, Furlong’s secret operation was exposed after the Central Intelligence Agency filed an official complaint with the Pentagon’s inspector general.

The New York Times reports that Furlong boasted to unnamed military officials that “a group of suspected militants carrying rockets by mule over the border had been singled out and killed as a result of his efforts.”

Contract Spies

IMV’s CEO is Dick Pack, who ran special operations for an L-3 subsidiary called Government Services Incorporated in Chantilly, Virginia. For example, GSI provided 300 intelligence analysts such as interrogators to the Pentagon in Iraq under a 426.5-million-dollar contract signed in 2005.

On IMV’s website, Pack, who once ran Delta Force (the elite U.S. commando unit) also claims to have been a mission planner for a rescue of U.S. prisoners-of-war in Laos, the aborted 1980 rescue mission to free U.S. embassy hostages in Tehran, the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983, as well as an operations officer for the Pentagon responding to the hijacking of a TWA plane to Beirut in 1985.

Another company that Furlong subcontracted was Boston-based American International Security Corporation (AISC), a company run by Mike Taylor, a former Green Beret turned private investigator who was accused in a 1995 lawsuit by Massachusetts state trooper Robert Monahan of helping drug traffickers by providing phony Greek passports and even arranging a jailbreak in Florida.

AISC employed Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, a former senior C.I.A. official who has been alleged to have been involved in a host of scandals from Iran-Contra to creating the fake uranium smuggling scandal in Niger.

In one previous scandal, Clarridge admitted to have arranged for the mining of Nicaraguan harbours in 1984 to destabilise the Sandanistas. “I was sitting at home one night, frankly having a glass of gin, and I said you know the mines has gotta be the solution. I knew we had ’em, we’d made ’em outta sewer pipe and we had the good fusing system on them and we were ready. And you know they wouldn’t really hurt anybody because they just weren’t that big a mine, alright? Yeah, with luck, bad luck we might hurt somebody, but pretty hard you know?” he told an interviewer once.

Clarridge has long had a close relationship with Robert Gates, now the head of the Pentagon. “If you have a tough, dangerous job, critical to national security, Dewey’s your man,” Gates is quoted as saying in a book by Joseph E. Persico. “Just make sure you have a good lawyer at his elbow – Dewey’s not easy to control.”

CAPSTONE

Furlong started CAPSTONE in 2008 when he was hired as a “strategic planner and technology integration adviser” at the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

At about the same time, Pelton and Jordan had set up a meeting with General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, to offer an information gathering service on Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pentagon agreed to consider paying for such a service and introduced them to Furlong.

Unknown to either Pelton or Jordan, Furlong then set up a contract with IMV to bring together at least six unrelated companies on the back of this proposal, including AfPax Insider. Whether or not Furlong had approval from higher level officials to provide covert information gathering for drone strikes, together with benign information gathering or even propaganda, is yet to be determined.

Some senior officials felt that Furlong was doing a good job. In an August 2009 assessment, General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, wrote that “CAPSTONE contracts… should be supported as these will significantly enhance… monitoring and assessment efforts.”

But Furlong seems to have had exaggerated opinions of what he was doing, referring to Taylor and Clarridge as his “Jason Bournes” (the fictitious assassin played by Matt Damon in the Bourne Supremacy films).

He also boasted about achievements that others have said were flat wrong. For example, he told Pelton that he had helped free David Rohde, a New York Times reporter who was held captive for seven months by the Taliban, by sending a U.S. doctor to drug the guards and supply the rope. Pelton says these claims aroused his concerns.

What made the situation complicated was that the New York Times had in fact hired Mike Taylor and Duane “Dewey” Clarridge to help them track down Rohde. The newspaper confirmed to IPS that they had hired the two men but insisted that they had no dealings with Furlong.

In a statement issued by the New York Times to IPS, a newspaper staffer who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “The newspaper, Rohde and his family had no contact with Furlong. They had not heard of Furlong until Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti began working on their story. As Rohde stated in the series, no one helped them escape. Any claim by Furlong that he helped them escape is false.”

The question remains – was Furlong running rogue operations or did he have tacit approval from his bosses? After the news broke in the New York Times on Monday, a Pentagon official who talked to the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity said that it was “not apparent who authorised” the operation but that the “potential for disaster” was obvious.

Today the Pentagon says that it has placed Furlong under criminal investigation for his activities, after the CIA’s station chief in Kabul sent a cable to the Pentagon complaining about the covert operations and his own bosses at the U.S. Strategic Command Joint Information Operations Warfare Centre (JIOWC) voiced similar concerns. (Exactly why the CIA was worried about this when they were doing much the same thing is unclear, but there has been a long history of animosity between the two agencies.)

*Pratap Chatterjee is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch. It is the first of a two-part series.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Feb 27 2010 (IPS)

Afghan police are widely considered corrupt, unable to shoot straight, and die at twice the rate of Afghan soldiers and NATO troops. After seven billion dollars spent on training and salaries in the last eight years, several U.S. government investigations are asking why.

DynCorp mentor watches Afghan National Police practice riot control tactics at the Kabul Central Training Centre. Credit: Ronald Nobu Sakamoto

But another rather surprising answer was offered in a little-noticed report published earlier this month after a high-level investigation by two major U.S. government agencies.

The report – titled “DOD Obligations and Expenditures of Funds Provided to the Department of State for the Training and Mentoring of the Afghan National Police” – says that the U.S. State Department has completely failed to do any serious oversight of the private contractors to whom they paid 1.6 billion dollars to provide police training at dozens of sites around Afghanistan.

DynCorp’s International Police Training Programme, run out of Fort Worth, Texas, has won the bulk of the contracts that have been overseen by the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). The company, which has annual revenues of 3.1 billion dollars, has followed a series of wars to run lucrative police training contracts from Bosnia in the 1990s to Iraq in 2003.

DynCorp’s work with Kabul began in 2003, almost two years after the fall of the Taliban. It was expanded in 2004 when the State Department issued it a contract to build seven regional training centres, and provide 30 police advisers across Afghanistan.

This initial contract was replaced by a series of related contracts beginning on Aug. 15, 2005, under which DynCorp today employs some 782 retired U.S. police officers and an additional 1,500 support staff. The contracts expired Jan. 31, 2010 but have temporarily been extended till the end of March.

The cost of hiring contractors to train police is high: Each expatriate police officer makes six-figure U.S. salaries – at least 50 times more than an Afghan police officer. Many experts, including the authors of this new report, have questioned the utility of sending police officers – many from small towns in the U.S. – to teach handcuffing and traffic rules to recruits caught in a war zone.

“The DOS (State Department) Civilian Police Programme contract does not meet DOD (Pentagon)’s needs in developing the ANP (Afghan National Police) to provide security in countering the growing insurgency in Afghanistan,” says the report signed by Pentagon Deputy Inspector General Mary L. Ugone and State Department Assistant Inspector General for the Middle East Richard “Nick” Arntson.

The report concludes that the State department-led training “hampers the ability of DOD to fulfill its role in the emerging national strategy.”

Oversight Failures

The inspectors general have a long list of complaints.

– State Department officials take as long as six months to implement training requirement changes requested by the Pentagon.

-The State Department failed to draw up any means of assessing DynCorp’s work. “The current task orders do not provide any specific information regarding what type of training is required or any measurement of acceptability. …Additionally, the current contract does not include any measurement of contractor performance.”

– Oversight of invoices and receipts submitted by the contractor was virtually non-existent.

– The description of the State department’s seven-member oversight team as “in country” is “misleading”. Only three of the seven “in-country” State Department officials officially in charge of overseeing DynCorp contract were based in Afghanistan. (Three were U.S-based and the seventh worked on an entirely different contract.)

– Much of the equipment provided by the U.S. for training had gone missing. During site visits to three police training centers in Bamiyan, Herat and Kandahar, the inspectors randomly selected 123 items from an inventory list of vehicles, weapons and electronics, but could only locate 34. In Kandahar, nine “sensitive items” – pistols, rifles, and scopes – could not be located.

A subsequent check up at DynCorp’s headquarters in Kabul showed that the weapons were signed out by company personnel. Of 89 non-sensitive items, only two could be located. The Kandahar site coordinator explained that the list was inaccurate and out of date.

– Money, too, was unaccounted for or misappropriated. Inspectors quoted a preliminary audit that identified 322 million dollars in invoices for the State department’s global police training programme that were approved “even though they were not allowable, allocable, or reasonable.”

Roughly 50 percent of the approved invoices that the inspectors reviewed had errors. The inspectors general recommended that the State Department should return a “minimum” of 80 million dollars from the Afghanistan budget to the Pentagon.

Douglas Ebner, a company spokesman, emailed IPS to say that DynCorp “welcome[d] the emphasis on oversight and accountability.”

He noted that DynCorp inventory system had been approved by the Defence Contract Management Agency (DCMA). “Sensitive items are inventoried and documented on a monthly basis. The audit report notes that sensitive items in fact were accounted for as being properly signed out by contractor personnel,” wrote Ebner.

The State department acknowledges many of the problems with oversight. “We agree with report recommendations to station more contracting officer representatives in country for oversight and are moving forward,” said Susan R. Pittman, a State department spokesperson. The State Department, she added, was developing “standard operating procedures (specifically) identifying duties and responsibilities” for the oversight officials.

But Pittman took issue with the inspector general conclusion that there was an 80-million-dollar overcharge, noting that the State department was conducting an audit to determine “how much we can return.”

Failing Grades

While the inspectors general have criticised the lack of State Department oversight, they have not found fault with DynCorp. “Based on what the contract stated, we saw no problem with the contractor,” Arntson told CorpWatch.

Yet if the measures that are used to track the capabilities of the Afghan police are any guide, the contract has not been a resounding success.

All told, the Afghan National Police had 94,958 personnel on the rolls as of Dec. 31, 2009 organised into 365 police districts, but only about one quarter have actually completed formal training, according to Pentagon records.

Just 17 percent of the 64 police districts reviewed by the inspectors general had sufficient equipment and were capable of conducting law enforcement operations by themselves. Half of the police districts were classified as “present in geographic location” with up to a level of 69 percent of equipment and personnel and “partially capable of conducting law enforcement with coalition support.”

Recent statistics appear to show that the success rates is sliding backward, despite a March 2009 promise by the Barack Obama administration to devote more resources to standing up the Afghan security forces.

Figures tucked away in a January 2010 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) report, for example, displayed some alarming trends. A review that covered 97 police districts assessed just 12 percent as capable of independent operations. Between the third and fourth quarter of 2009, the number of police districts that were considered incapable of conducting law enforcement operations rose from 13 to 21 percent.

DynCorp is not being considered for a new billion-dollar training contract by the Pentagon office in charge – the Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Programme Office (CNTPO) in Dahlgren, Virginia. Instead, CNTPO plans to select from five pre-approved vendors: Xe (formerly Blackwater), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and ARINC Engineering Services.

DynCorp is not taking this lying down – the company has filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office, alleging that the approach is “procedurally and legally flawed.” A decision is expected by Mar. 24, 2010.

Ryder continues to insist that DynCorp is the most qualified to do police training. “[N]either our military nor European National police were formed or trained to teach basic law enforcement skills,” he told the Commission on Wartime Contracting. “At DynCorp International we do not build satellites. We do not design aircraft. We do training and mentoring. That is our core competency – and this competency is represented in the DNA of our 30,000 employees worldwide.”

*Pratap Chatterjee is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Feb 4 2010 (IPS)

A diesel-fueled power plant, nearing completion just outside Kabul, demonstrates that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its contractors have failed to learn lessons from identical mistakes in Iraq, despite clearly signposted advice from oversight agencies.

Children in West Kabul. Credit: Stuart Webb/Channel Four News

First the U.S. planners chose to ignore other ongoing reconstruction projects that were cheaper and more likely to succeed, or to pay attention to alternative recommendations from Afghan government officials.

Second, the planners picked expensive technologies that the city of Kabul could not afford to maintain or utilise.

Finally, USAID asked for the plant to be built in record time – by a complex system of multiple contractors – causing costs to soar.

Costs Soar as Project Stumbles

In May 2007, USAID signed an agreement with the Afghan government to build a 105 megawatt plant at Tarakhil, just a couple of kilometres from the Kabul airport. The contract was awarded to a joint venture of Louis Berger, a construction company from New Jersey, and Black & Veatch, another construction company from Kansas.

This venture was guaranteed a profit based on the amount of money spent to complete the project (known as cost-plus contracting).

Black & Veatch sub-contracted on a fixed price basis to Symbion Power from Washington DC, which has completed six fixed-price projects for the U.S. government in some of Iraq’s most conflicted areas in the last four years, including two 400 kilovolt transmission lines from Haditha in Anbar province to Al Qaim near the Syrian border and to Baiji in northern Iraq.

Symbion in turn hired several Kabul companies like AB Managers and Afghan Electrical Power Corporation (AEPC) to provide local workers.

The problems began when USAID decided that they wanted the project completed before the Afghan elections in 2009. So Black & Veatch ordered Caterpillar engines custom-built in Germany at an exorbitant price and then had them flown to Kabul.

Typically the cost of building a diesel plant in the Middle East and Asia is about one million dollars per megawatt or less. For example, Wartsila, a Finnish company, is completing a 200-megawatt project in neighbouring Pakistan for 180 million dollars.

In fact, some says they can do it for less. “I built a 22-megawatt plant in Kandahar (in 2008) for 550,000 dollars a megawatt,” says Abdul Ghaffar, an Afghan engineer who runs his own power plant construction company in Dubai.

By the time the project started, the price tag for the fast-track turbines and multiple layers of contractors was 259 million dollars, two-and-a-half times that of similar projects.

Then, at every turn, the project hit delays. Black & Veatch took over a year to sign the contracts with Symbion to build the power plant. Once that paperwork was completed on Jun. 13, 2008, Symbion started to look for Afghan labour – a process that took another three months.

Nine months later, some 60 percent of the project was complete. By this time, the 260-million-dollar price tag was looking unrealistic – it would eventually exceed 300 million dollars.

On May 19, 2009, Symbion stopped work – because Black & Veatch had failed to pay them for four months. A USAID Inspector General audit published in November 2009 found that Black & Veatch “had charged USAID for subcontractor costs that the contractor had not paid the subcontractor.”

“This situation illustrates the twin policy evils of the cost-plus contracts,” says R. Scott Greathead, a New York lawyer who advised Symbion on the project. “First, they impose no cost or penalty on the cost-plus contractor for its incompetence, inefficiency or failure to perform, and second, they punish two victims, the fixed-price subcontractor, who incurs costs that may never be fully reimbursed, and the U.S. government, which pays in the end for everything.”

Symbion and Black & Veatch are now in arbitration over the missed payments. Officials from both companies declined to be interviewed over the dispute until the legal proceedings are completed. (Black & Veatch’s official position is that the contract with Symbion did not allow the sub-contractor to stop working).

The power plant is expected to be completed this spring. But the electricity is no longer urgent. One year ago, a 300-megawatt power line to Kabul from Uzbekistan was completed, with funding from the World Bank, German and Indian governments. The construction cost was just 35 million dollars and the operation costs are expected to be just over six cents a kilowatt hour compared to the 22 cents a kilowatt hour that it will cost to run the diesel plant.

Chronicle of Mistakes Foretold

Every one of these mistakes could have been predicted.

Afghan planners say that they never asked for the Tarakhil plant. At his office in central Kabul, Juma Nawandish, the former deputy minister of energy and water who was in charge of the electricity sector for four years, pulls out a series of slides and engineering studies of the northern Afghanistan Shebhergan gas fields where he once worked.

“I advised USAID to put their money here,” he said. “If they had rehabilitated the gas wells, and used our local engineers, we would have saved a lot of money.”

In March 2007, two months before USAID signed an agreement with the Afghan government to build the power plant, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released its final report on programme and project management during the U.S.-led reconstruction mission in Iraq that specifically pointed out the perils of poor planning and supervision.

In fact, a January 2006 report by SIGIR faulted U.S. government planners and some of the very same contractors – namely Black & Veatch – for supplying turbines to a combined cycle gas turbine facility at Qudas outside of Baghdad that were unsuitable for the available fuel supply in Iraq, and for failing to provide adequate training and maintenance for the plant.

Thus it may seem ironic that on Jan. 20, 2010, exactly four years later, an audit of the Tarakhil power plant conducted by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) would question the wisdom of building a diesel and heavy fuel plant that has a “technically sophisticated fueling operation that [the Afghans] may not have the capacity to sustain.”

The report also noted that 40 million dollars of the cost escalation was “directly linked to project delays.”

In a written response to SIGAR, William Van Dyke, the president of Black & Veatch’s federal services division, noted that the cost disputes were under arbitration at the International Chamber of Commerce. He added: “B&V remain(s) fully committed to completing and turnover a high-quality plant that will service Afghanistan for years to come.”

A second SIGAR report on the overall Afghan power sector was even more scathing about the lack of planning for the 732 million dollars that the U.S. has provided to the Afghan government to date.

Retired Marine General Arnold Fields, the head of SIGAR, commented: “It is troubling that we have been participating in the reconstruction of Afghanistan for eight years and there is no updated energy sector master plan against which the U.S. and the international community can contribute and measure success.”

In fact, according to the USAID inspector general report, two other major USAID energy projects have also failed to produce results. In February 2008 Black & Veatch was tasked with figuring out how to rehabilitate the Shebhergan gas fields. In June 2009 after spending 7.1 million dollars, USAID “terminated” Black & Veatch from the project for “poor performance.” Black & Veatch says it failed because of security problems and because necessary equipment was held up at the border.

USAID also says that it only been able to complete 16.5 megawatts of a planned 35-megawatt upgrade to the Kajakai dam project in Helmand province. Work was put on hold after two workers were killed in 2007 in an attack.

*Pratap Chatterjee is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Feb 2 2010 (IPS)

The Sultan family of Kuwait runs a variety of businesses alleged to be at the heart of a scheme to overcharge the U.S. military by as much as a billion dollars over the last seven years. The company is currently scheduled to face criminal arraignment on Feb. 8 in Atlanta, Georgia.

Federal criminal investigators say that the Sultan Center supermarkets bought food supplies, marked up the prices and then re-sold them to another Sultan family business named Public Warehousing Corporation (PWC), which in turn sold it to the U.S. military at an even higher price.

PWC was renamed Agility in 2006 and is now one of the eight largest logistics companies in the world with annual revenues of 6.8 billion dollars and offices in 120 countries.

The Sultan Center supermarkets are familiar to any wealthy Kuwaiti and expatriates who flock to their brightly lit, one-stop, 24-hours-a-day stores, often trailed by maids pushing over-laden shopping carts. Located in or near some of Kuwait’s fanciest shopping malls, they offer consumer goods ranging from fresh Horizon organic milk flown in from the U.S. (at 11.50 dollars a liter), to mangosteens from Thailand.

Some shops feature a “Just Ask” programme under which they offer to import “any product you need, local or international, at real time and without any additional cost.”

The supermarket chain was created in 1981 by the family of Jamil Sultan al-Essa, a Kuwaiti family whose heritage has been alternately described as southern Iraqi and Saudi. The first Sultan market was a self-service store near the Shuwaikh Port that focused on hardware and do-it-yourself products.

Almost three decades later, that store had evolved into a chain of 11 Sultan Centers scattered around Kuwait. In 1999 the Sultans expanded the retail chain to Oman, and in 2003 they acquired the Safeway chain in Jordan.

Like many wealthy Middle Eastern families, the Sultans have multiple businesses each operated by a sibling or cousin with overlapping ownership and often senior government positions.

One, Abdul Aziz Sultan al-Essa, was chairman of Kuwait’s Gulf Bank. Another, Kamal Sultan, ran the local franchise for Apple. Yet another Sultan venture, National Real Estate corporation, bought up 25 percent of the shares of a state-owned company – Public Warehousing Corporation (PWC) – when it was privatised in 1997.

PWC was given to Abdul Aziz’s son, Tarek Sultan al-Essa, who is a dual Kuwaiti-U.S. citizen and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. When Tarek Sultan took over PWC, the company was already charging the U.S. military 60,000 dollars a month to operate Camp Doha on a 1.6 million-square-metre property near Shuwaik port in Kuwait.

In 2003, PWC won a contract called Prime Vendor Subsistence to supply food to the U.S. military in Kuwait and Iraq. That contract has since generated 8.5 billion dollars in sales for PWC.

Allegations of Overcharging

The fraud scheme allegedly created by PWC exploits an obscure federal contractual mechanism known as “prompt payment discounts” to increase profits.

The best way to explain it is to use a fictional example: Company A (a shell company) buys a pound of chicken for a dollar and gives it to Company B (e.g. PWC) along with a bill for 1.10 dollars. Then Company B sells it to the military for 1.10 dollars plus the agreed-on overhead and profits. Next, Company B pays Company A 1.10 dollars and pockets the 10-cent mark-up from Company A as a prompt payment discount.

In this case, Company B has effectively earned the agreed-upon (and legal) profits from the military plus an extra 10 cents that the military would never have paid if it bought it directly from company A. At the very least, this system is a waste of taxpayer money. And if Companies A and B are owned by the same people, it may constitute fraud.

The Sultan Center is alleged to have bought food supplies and sold them to PWC at a profit which they then paid back to PWC through prompt payment discounts.

PWC/Agility spokesperson Jim Cox told IPS in September 2008 that “prompt payment discounts” are written into the company’s Prime Vendor contract with the Pentagon to supply food to dining facilities used by U.S. soldiers in the Middle East and therefore not illegal. Indeed, the military even offers such an incentive programme. (Typically, however, the military offers two percent military discounts, not five or 10 percent).

Asked about the relationship between PWC and the Sultan Center, Cox said that the two companies are distinct businesses, listed separately on the Kuwait stock exchange.

In reality, Tarek Sultan and family head Jamil Sultan al-Essa serve on each other’s boards, while Jamil and four other Sultan family members are the largest stockholders in the Sultan Center and also control a large stake in PWC. The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) criminal indictment states: “The two companies had interlocking directorates with at least three directors in common.” PWC/Agility’s Cox explains that this cross-ownership is common and legal in Kuwait.

In the grand jury documents submitted by the DoJ to the courts in November 2009, however, the investigators cite multiple examples of collusion. An Oct. 15, 2004, email from PWC officials asked the Sultan Center to alter figures so that “the temporary price decline in the catalogue will not be obvious to the DSCP (Defence Supply Center, Philadelphia).”

It also quotes emails from Albuquerque-based Professional Contract Administrators (a consulting firm working for PWC) to tell Toby Switzer, the CEO of PWC Global Logistics, to “fire somebody, blame it on them, and cover up” the revisions in the Sultan Center’s local market prices “ASAP – THIS IS VERY SERIOUS.”

Related Allegations

PWC is also alleged to have profited from “prompt payment discounts” from companies in the U.S. In early 2007, the DoJ began a series of investigations into the company’s pricing practices, alleging that PWC had overcharged the Pentagon by as much as 374 million dollars “by inserting a related company to inflate the amount billed.”

One PWC supplier that the DoJ investigated was American Grocers Inc., which provides foods such as Smucker’s peanut butter to the Sultan Center for resale to PWC in Iraq. In July 2009, American Grocers owner Samir Itani, a Houston-based Lebanese-American businessman, was convicted for tacking on “bogus trucking charges.”

Another company under DoJ scrutiny is Ocean Direct LLC, owned by Richmond Wholesale Meats Inc. of California. At one point, it was supplying 2.3 million dollars a month worth of raw cold-water lobster tails to the military at 21 dollars a pound, while the average wholesale price at that time was between 17.60 and 18.75 dollars a pound.

Settlement Talks

In November, PWC/Agility said it “is confident that once these allegations are examined in court, they will be found to be without merit.” Since then PWC/Agility has attempted to reach a settlement with the DoJ by offering to pay a 600-million-dollar fine, according to reports in the Kuwaiti press.

“No agreement has been reached so far and there is no guarantee these negotiations will lead to a solution,” the company stated at the end of December.

Unless these settlement talks bear fruit soon, the arraignment could lead to a trial in which spectators can expect a fascinating view into the extent of corruption engendered by the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

*Pratap Chatterjee is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch. It is the second of a two-part series.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Feb 1 2010 (IPS)

Agility, a Kuwait-based multi-billion-dollar logistics company spawned by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is scheduled be arraigned on Feb. 8 on criminal charges of overbilling U.S. taxpayers for food supply contracts in the Iraq war zone that were worth more than 8.5 billion dollars.

Sultan Center and PWC trucks. Credit: Pratap Chatterjee/IPS

Originally known as Public Warehousing Corporation (PWC), Agility boasts that it once supplied one million meals a day to U.S. soldiers and contractors in the Middle East. The company’s Mercedes trucks hauled delicacies from ice cream to lobster tails to feed soldiers living on military bases scattered throughout Iraq.

Today, it has new contracts to provide food to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and – until about a month ago – was supposed to ramp up food delivery to the troops newly posted in southern Afghanistan.

In a lawsuit filed on Nov. 18, 2005, Kamal Mustafa Al-Sultan accuses Agility of cheating him of a share of profits from the lucrative contract because he refused to go along with alleged corruption. A former business partner of PWC/Agility, Sultan is a cousin of the company founder and CEO, Tarek Abdul Aziz Sultan Al-Essa.

After conducting a grand jury investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) joined Kamal Sultan and filed criminal charges against PWC/Agility on Nov. 9, 2009, immediately boosting the original lawsuit’s chances of success.

“We will not tolerate fraudulent practices from those tasked with providing the highest quality support to the men and women who serve in our armed forces,” said Tony West, assistant attorney general for the District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, in a press release.

“As this case illustrates, the Department of Justice will investigate and pursue allegations of fraud against contractors and subcontractors, whether they are foreign or domestic,” he said.

Joint Venture Leads to Falling Out

PWC was part of the Sultan family’s business empire that is grounded in high-end supermarkets and mega-stores across the Middle East. Starting in the late 1990s, Tarek Sultan teamed up with ex-U.S. soldiers to bid on lucrative U.S. government projects.

PWC’s first major contract, initially advertised in May 2002, was for a U.S. Defence Supply Centre called Prime Vendor Subsistence to supply food eaten on U.S. military bases in the Middle East in anticipation of the invasion of Iraq. (Halliburton/KBR cooks and serves the food, but it does not supply it.)

At the time, Tarek Sultan had no experience in food supply, nor did he have a personal track record with the U.S. military – a requirement for bidding on the contract. However, KMSCO – run by his cousin, Kamal Sultan – had multi-million-dollar U.S. military contracts dating back to1996 for “life support, food supplements, and ice.”

In a January 2007 interview with IPS, Kamal Sultan says he agreed to create a joint venture with Tarek in June 2002 to provide PWC with the qualifications to bid.

A year later in May 2003, PWC won the initial Prime Vendor contract. Soon after that, Kamal Sultan alleges, PWC officials asked him to take part in a scheme to defraud the military. When Kamal refused, Tarek Sultan dropped KMSCO from the contract, thus depriving Kamal Sultan of his expected 30 percent profit share.

Over the next four years, the two men waged a series of legal battles in Kuwaiti courts, with each side alternately gaining the legal upper hand.

Supporters and Critics

The company has powerful supporters in the U.S. military. Its brochures quote Gen. David Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command: “Agility has performed a miracle across Iraq.”

Some see less a miracle and more profiteering. Rory Mayberry, a Halliburton/KBR food production manager for a dining facility at Camp Anaconda, testified before Congress in June 2005: “For example, tomatoes cost about five dollars a box locally, but the PWC price was 13 to 15 dollars per box. The local price for a 15-pound box of bacon was 12 dollars, compared to PWC’s price of 80 dollars per box.”

“PWC charged a lot for transportation because they brought the food from Philadelphia,” he said.

“They get options, privileges, that no one else can get, because they used to be part of the (Kuwaiti) government,” says Saad Salem Al-Qattan, a Kuwaiti businessman who owns Al-Rakeb Company Petroleum Electricity & Construction Services (RAPICO), which is involved in a land dispute with PWC/Agility.

Asked about the U.S. military contracts, he shrugs: “They (PWC/Agility) are greedy, and the (U.S.) military doesn’t know where to go.”

Several lawsuits have been filed against the company. Beth Hanken, an Iowa businesswoman, sued PWC/Agility when she lost contracts to supply pork to the military. The case was dismissed. The only lawsuit that has stuck so far is Kamal Sultan’s 2005 charge against PWC and its top officials.

After the court unsealed the records in November 2009 when the DoJ joined Kamal Sultan’s lawsuit, PWC/Agility posted a statement on its website: “Kamal Mustafa Sultan, owner of Kamal Mustafa Sultan Company … has a long history of strong animosity towards PWC, its officers and its employees.”

PWC/Agility added that Kamal has filed more than 40 court actions against PWC, its executives and its employees in Kuwaiti courts, but that “all of the court actions have been unsuccessful.”

But whether or not Agility wins in court, it is already losing at the cash register. Immediately after the DoJ joined the case, the Pentagon barred PWC/Agility and its subsidiaries from federal contracts by placing it on the “Excluded Parties List System.”

DynCorp, a business partner, followed suit in late December by dropping PWC/Agility from a major U.S. military logistics contract in southern Afghanistan.

In November, PWC/Agility said it “is confident that once these allegations are examined in court, they will be found to be without merit.”

Since then PWC/Agility has attempted to reach a settlement with the DoJ by offering to pay a 600-million-dollar fine, according to reports in the Kuwaiti press. “No agreement has been reached so far and there is no guarantee these negotiations will lead to a solution,” the company stated at the end of December.

A criminal arraignment of PWC/Agility scheduled for early January has been postponed five times so far, the latest delay coming at the eleventh hour on Jan. 29. U.S. Magistrate Christopher Hagy agreed to a new date of Feb. 8, although he expressed exasperation.

“There’s a point at which this stops,” Hagy said.

Unless these settlement discussions bear fruit, the arraignment could lead to a trial in which spectators can expect a fascinating view into the extent of corruption engendered by the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

*Pratap Chatterjee is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch. It is the first of a two-part series.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
KABUL, Nov 19 2009 (IPS)

In a secluded valley a few miles from Kabul’s international airport, Caterpillar turbines custom-built in Germany and giant transformers flown in from Mexico hum away at a brand-new power plant.

If all goes as planned, one engineer sitting at a single computer with four flat screens will be able to run the state-of-the-art diesel facility built by Black & Veatch of Kansas.

Some 285 million dollars in U.S. taxpayer funds have flowed into this power plant outside Tarakhil village. Afghan President Hamid Karzai supported the project, convinced that it could help him win the 2009 presidential election.

In August, two weeks before the vote, at an opening ceremony for the unfinished plant, Karzai stood beside Karl Eikenberry, the current U.S. ambassador, who told the assembled media: “I would ask the citizens of Kabul when you turn on your lights at night, remember that the United States of America stands with you – optimistic of our combined prospects for success, and confident in you and our mission.”

But much, so far, has not gone according to plan. The 280-million-dollar a year cost to run the power plant full tilt is more than a third of total tax revenues for the entire country; the plant would supply electricity to less than two percent of the population; and the plant’s cost – already more than 300 million dollars – is roughly three times that of any similar plant in the region.

Power Plans for the Capital

Two major projects have been in the works for a while to provide power to the capital: a 35-million-dollar project to build a 220 kilovolt power line from Uzbekistan over the Hindu Kush mountains, and a second 28-million-dollar power line from Tajikistan. Each is expected to supply 300 megawatts to Kabul.

Engineers from KEC, an Indian company, have been hard at work since October 2005 on the Uzbek project with money from the Indian government, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank. The Tajik project was awarded in November 2008 with funding from the Asian Development Bank and OPEC Fund for International Development.

But, engineering difficulties and cost aside, U.S. officials were worried that there was no political guarantee that either project would work. Tajikistan was a failed state, and the Uzbeks, who kicked U.S. troops out of their country in July 2005, were seen as an unreliable political partner to the U.S.-backed Karzai regime.

In April 2006, shortly before he left Afghanistan, U.S. ambassador Ronald Neumann dreamed up an alternative to the Central Asian transmission lines.

According to former finance minister Anwar-ul-Haq Ahadi, Neumann asked USAID to offer the Karzai government a 100 megawatt diesel plant. Budgeted at 120 million dollars, it would be able to supply 500,000 people with basic electricity. And if completed in just over two years, before the 2009 elections, it would also allow Karzai, whose political star was already fading fast, to claim that he had provided electricity to Kabul.

Karzai readily agreed and instructed the nervous ministry of finance to approve the scheme in early 2007, and add 20 million dollars of Afghan money to the U.S. contribution.

Price Escalates

In July 2007, the agency issued a contract to a joint venture of Louis Berger of New Jersey and Black & Veatch of Kansas to build a 105 megawatt power plant with the latter company in the lead. The approved price tag was 257.8 million dollars, more than twice what USAID had initially told the Karzai government the project would cost.

Numerous power experts from around the region said that the price was far too high. Bikash Pal, an engineering expert from Imperial College in London, who has been involved with similar projects in India and Iraq, said that the rough price for building a 100 megawatt plant should be 100 million dollars.

The cost escalation “was because [USAID] wanted to do this in the shortest possible time,” says Wali Ahmed Shairzay, the deputy minister of energy and water with responsibility for electricity production. “It became very uneconomical.”

Even at the inflated price tag, the original December 2008 deadline became an impossible target. Ironically, the Indian engineers at KEC finished work on the Uzbek power line months before the Americans were able to turn on just one block of the Tarakhil plant. By January 2009, cheap power was flowing from the north down to Kabul at six cents a kilowatt hour.

By contrast, USAID estimated Tarakhil’s electricity at 22 cents a kilowatt hour. Under the agreement signed with the Karzai government, Kabul is solely responsible for fuel and maintenance costs.

Afghan government bureaucrats have registered anger and dismay. “The contractor was lying to USAID. They were lying to the Afghan government. They were lying to everybody,” says Shairzai. “We were called into the president’s office many times to solve this problem” of getting electricity to Kabul.

One of the biggest problems with Tarakhil is that Afghanistan simply does not have the cash to pay the fuel that will be imported from Turkmenistan.

Jack Whippen, the head of Black & Veatch’s operations in Afghanistan, estimates that if diesel stays at 80 cents a litre, it will cost 96 million dollars to supply and 12 million dollars to operate the Tarakhil plant at 55 percent capacity.

Extrapolating to full capacity brings the operational costs closer to 200 million dollars. If the price of diesel goes up by just 25 percent to a dollar a liter, a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the cost at 280 million dollars a year for full production. By comparison, Afghanistan’s total tax revenue for 2008 was 800 million dollars.

Asked if he could justify spending this kind of money, Mohammed Khan, a member of the Afghan parliament and chair of the energy committee, answered: “No. Not unless we have an emergency.” Khan, a Karzai supporter and trained electrical engineer, worked in the Kabul Electricity Department for many years.

Ongoing Inspections and Investigations

Two weeks before the election, U.S. Ambassador Eikenberry and President Karzai opened the plant – still only a third complete – to great fanfare. Twelve days later, a team of inspectors from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) in Arlington, Virginia, arrived to determine why costs were so high and whether operations were sustainable.

SIGAR spokesperson Susan Phalen confirmed that the agency had “intense concerns” about the plant and that a report would be published on Nov. 30, but refused to speculate on the findings. “SIGAR’s policy is that we do not discuss inspections that are currently underway,” she wrote in an email response.

Veteran political observers including Ramzan Bashardosht, former Afghan minister of planning under Karzai, say that the problems at Tarakhil are in no way unusual, and point to a series of similar project failures in the past. “The problem is that these contractors are here to make money for themselves not to help us,” says Bashardosht. “We have to break up this political and economic mafia if we want to develop.”

Pratap Chatterjee is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
KABUL, Nov 18 2009 (IPS)

Every morning, dozens of trucks laden with diesel from Turkmenistan lumber out of the northern Afghan border town of Hairaton on a two-day trek across the Hindu Kush down to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul.

Among the dozens of businesses dispatching these trucks are two extremely well-connected companies – Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid – that helped to swell the election coffers of President Hamid Karzai as well as the family business of his running mate, the country’s new vice-president, warlord Mohammed Qasim Fahim.

Some of the trucks are on their way to two power stations in the northern part of the capital: a recently refurbished, if inefficient, plant that has served Kabul for a little more than a quarter of a century, and a brand new facility scheduled for completion next year and built with money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Afghan political analysts observe that Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid are striking examples of the multi-million-dollar business conglomerates, financed by U.S. as well as Afghan tax dollars and connected to powerful political figures, that have, since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, emerged as part of a pervasive culture of corruption here.

Nasrullah Stanikzai, a professor of law and political science at Kabul University, says of the companies in the pocket of the vice-president: “Everybody knows who is Ghazanfar. Everybody knows who is Zahid Walid. The [government elite] directly or indirectly have companies, licenses, and sign contracts. But corruption is not confined just to the Afghans. The international community bears a share of this blame.”

The Rise of a Power Broker

Abdul Hasin and his brother, the vice-president, offer a perfect exemplar of the new business elite. The two men are half-brothers, born to the two wives of a well-respected religious cleric from the village of Marz in the Panjshir valley north of Kabul.

In the early 1980s, Fahim, the older brother, joined the mujaheedin forces of Ahmed Shah Massoud in the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In 1992, three years after the Soviet army withdrew in defeat, Fahim was appointed head of intelligence in Afghanistan by the new president, Burhanuddin Rabbani, in the midst of a fierce and destructive civil war among the victors.

When the Taliban took control of the country a few years later, Fahim became the intelligence chief for the Northern Alliance, also led by Massoud, which controlled less than a third of the country. On Sep. 9, 2001, two days before the World Trade Centre in New York was attacked, Massoud was assassinated by al Qaeda operatives and Fahim took control of the Northern Alliance, which the U.S. would soon finance and support in its “invasion” of Afghanistan.

A number of popular accounts of that invasion, such as Bob Woodward’s book “Bush at War”, suggest that the Central Intelligence Agency directly gave Northern Alliance warlords like Fahim millions of dollars in cold, hard cash to help fight the Taliban in the run-up to the U.S. invasion.

“I can take Kabul, I can take Kunduz if you break the [Taliban front] line for me. My guys are ready,” Woodward quotes Fahim telling a CIA agent named Gary after pocketing a million dollars.

Once the Taliban was defeated, Fahim was invited to become vice-president in the transitional government led by Hamid Karzai, a position he held for two years. It was at this juncture that Fahim’s brothers, notably Abdul Hasin, started to build a business empire – and not long after, good fortune began to rain down on the family in the form of lucrative “reconstruction” contracts.

In January 2002, while Fahim took whirlwind tours of Washington and London, meeting General Tommy Franks, who had commanded U.S. forces during the invasion, and taking the salute from the Coldstream Guards, his younger brother was putting together a business plan. Soon thereafter, Zahid Walid, a company named after Abdul Hasin’s older sons, won a series of lucrative contracts to pour concrete for a NATO base as well as portions of the U.S. embassy being rebuilt in Kabul and that city’s airport, which was in a state of disrepair.

On a plot of land in downtown Kabul reportedly “seized” for a song by Fahim, Abdul Hasin also financed the construction of a high-rise building dubbed “Goldpoint”, which now houses dozens of jewelry shops. Soon, the company was importing Russian gas, and not long after that, Abdul Hasin set up the Gas Group, a company that ran a plant in the industrial suburb of Tarakhil that markets bottled gas to households and small businesses.

In the winter of 2006, Zahid Walid won a 12-million-dollar contract from the Afghan ministry of energy and water to supply fuel to the old diesel plant in northwest Kabul, according to data published on the website of the government’s central procurement agency, Afghanistan Reconstruction and Development Services. In the summer of 2007, the company won another 40-million-dollar diesel-supply contract, and last winter it took on a third contract worth 22 million dollars.

On Oct. 6, 2009, Zahid Walid was awarded another exclusive contract for an additional 17 million dollars to supply diesel fuel to a new 100 megawatt diesel power plant being built by Black & Veatch, a Kansas construction company, with money from U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Zahid Walid was hardly the only politically well-connected business to benefit from the diesel contracts: Ghazanfar, a company from Mazar-i-Sharif, also won 17 million dollars in diesel-supply contracts in the winter of 2006-2007, and then an astonishing 78 million dollars in new contracts for 2008-early 2009. Not surprisingly, Ghazanfar turns out to be run by a family that is very close to President Karzai. (One sister, Hosn Banu Ghazanfar, is the women’s minister and a brother is a member of parliament.) In March 2009, the Ghazanfars opened a new bank in the capital, plastering the city with giant billboard advertisements featuring a cascade of gold coins. Less than six months later, the bank wrote out a two-million-dollar interest-free loan to Karzai for his election campaign, paying back the favours his government had done for them over the previous three years.

Afghanistan as Patronage Machine

This week, Mohammed Qasim Fahim will be sworn in as the next vice-president of the new government of Afghanistan. Under an agreement with USAID, this new government is required to spend Afghan money to buy yet more diesel for the Tarakhil power plant, which in turn will put money exclusively and directly into the vice-president’s brother’s pocket.

Hamid Jalil, the aid coordinator for the Ministry of Finance, points out that wasting money on unnecessary projects like Tarakhil has helped to hobble Afghanistan’s progress in the last eight years. “The donor projects undermine the legitimacy of the government and do not allow us to build capacity,” he says. “Corruption is everywhere in post-conflict countries like ours.”

Former Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani agrees. “It’s not crazy, it’s absurd,” he says. “Crazy is when you don’t know what you’re doing. Absurd is when you don’t provide a sense of ownership and a sense of sustainability.”

*Adapted from TomDispatch with permission, under special arrangement with IPS.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Aug 14 2009 (IPS)

Murtaza “Jimmy” Farukhi was killed while on patrol with the U.S. Marine Corps on Sep. 9, 2008, at the age of 23. He was not a soldier, but a local translator employed by Columbus, Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel (MEP).

Farukhi was one of 24 MEP translators killed and 56 injured since the company’s contract with the U.S. military began in September 2007, according to company statistics.

MEP was awarded a five-year contract in September 2007 by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan. MEP defeated the incumbent contractor, San Diego, California- based Titan Corporation. The contract is worth up to 414 million dollars.

When he was alive Farukhi was paid between 650 dollars and 900 dollars a month, depending on how much time he spent on patrol with the soldiers. In compensation for his death, his family got a one time payment of 10,000 dollars from MEP, and is hoping for a similar amount from their insurance company, Zurich Financial Services.

Farukhi’s former colleagues say that they are unhappy with the salaries, which have been cut some 20 percent in the last two years, as well as with the death compensation for their colleagues that have been killed.

Sole Bread Winner

A Tajik from the Panjshir Valley, Farukhi’s family fled their village in the 1980s after Russian jets destroyed their home during the Soviet occupation. They moved to Kabul and then, when the Taliban came to power, to Peshawar in Pakistan. When the U.S. defeated the Taliban, the Farukhi family moved to the Azaadi neighbourhood just outside central Kabul.

Farukhi’s father, Alam Shah, and his two younger brothers, Akbar and Kabir, said that Murtaza had taken a job with Titan in 2003, because his father was sick and the family needed the money.

“He was my best friend,” Akbar, his 19-year-old brother, recalled. “He was very loving, kind, never hurt anyone. We would go to school together. He helped me when I got into fights, preventing me from getting into quarrels with other people.”

Once he started working, Murtaza Farukhi was sometimes away for three to four months at a time. His family arranged for him to marry a distant cousin who was an orphan, and in May 2008 the couple had a daughter they named Najma.

On Sep. 8, 2008, Murtaza Farukhi had a premonition that something bad would happen. His wife urged him not to go to work, but he said that she should not worry. He gave his brother Akbar 50 dollars to fix the household computer. The last Akbar Farukhi heard from his older brother was a text message checking whether the repair had been done.

The following day, Murtaza Farukhi was killed in Nijrab, Kapisa province when a roadside bomb struck the Humvee that he was riding in. Also killed were Lieutenant Nicholas Madrazo and Captain Jessi Melton of the U.S. Marines, and Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Eichmann Strickland.

“It is always a tragedy when one of ours is hurt or killed in the line of duty, and we regard our fallen colleagues as heroes,” says MEP spokesperson Sean Rushton.

Not Enough Compensation

Samim, a Pashtun translator from eastern Afghanistan who previously worked for MEP, says: “God forgive them, but there are many interpreters who have been killed but [their families] haven’t been compensated. Even if they did get any compensation, they got it after long arguments.” He ticks some of them off from memory: “There was Hamid who was killed in Nuristan. Emran was killed in the Devangal Valley in Kunar Province, and another in Paktia,” he says.

Samim, who asked that his full name be withheld for personal safety reasons, also says that MEP pays local translators less than their predecessor. A Titan translator who had spent two years with the company could expect 1,050 dollars a month, but MEP slashed this to 900 dollars or less. New employees who do not travel with the troops make just 650 dollars a month.

“MEP cannot comment on Titan Corporation’s practices. This is a different contract with different pay scales,” says Rushton. He noted that translators who did “more difficult, more strenuous, and more dangerous jobs” were compensated at a higher rate. “When MEP took over the Afghanistan language contract, it overhauled the method by which LNLs [local nationals] were paid, improving it substantially – even while the number of contractors using it has doubled. The previous company’s payroll system was slow and inconsistent, and had a high error rate.”

But former MEP translators noted that the higher salaries for more dangerous work were still lower than Titan’s rate. “I think they don’t really care that we are the people who work hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder with the U.S. armed forces,” said Samim. “They sacrifice their precious lives but [MEP] doesn’t care that they [the translators] are targeted. They may work for one year, but they will be targeted for the rest of their lives by the insurgents, the terrorists and the bad guys.”

For most of the thousands of translators who now work for MEP in Afghanistan, even the lower salaries were better than no job at all, so most accepted the new contracts.

Several Afghan translators say that that don’t even get to keep a copy of their paper contracts. MEP said the lack of copies of the signed agreements was to protect the local hires who are not allowed to carry any documents that link them to the U.S. military.

Fired For Fighting

In July 2008, an MEP site manager fired Samim “for starting a fight with another linguist,” according to a company statement released to CorpWatch. “During the fight, he used disparaging words regarding religion which damaged team morale.”

Samim says that he was not even present at the time of the alleged incident and that the site managers confused him with a different translator. After four years on the job, he was told to leave the base in Kunar overnight “as if I was Taliban.” Samim remains bitter. “I have saved many American lives. People even call me ‘Son of Bush, infidel,’” he said. “But MEP treats us like trash. They treat us like criminals.”

Samim appealed his case to MEP’s director of human resources, but to no avail.

That kind of treatment lost MEP a skilled employee. Samim quickly found new work with DynCorp, a U.S. company with a police training contract, that valued his experience working in the field with U.S. troops in places such as the Korangal Valley in Kunar province, sometimes called the “Valley of Death.” Before long, Samim was making more money than he had at MEP, and being courted by international agencies including the European Police mission in Afghanistan. Today he works for NATO in Logar Province.

Next In Line

In late September Akbar Farukhi and his father were invited to Camp Phoenix to meet MEP staff. They filled out the paperwork and were given 10,000 dollars in compensation – approximately a year’s salary. The family says it is still waiting for the second instalment of promised compensation.

There was only one guaranteed path for the family to stay together and support Farukhi’s widow and her orphan daughter. So on Sep. 21, 2008, immediately after Akbar Farukhi picked up the check for the death of his brother, the 18-year-old walked across Camp Phoenix to register with MEP to take his brother’s place. He did this so that he could get a basic 650- dollar-a-monthly salary to take care of his brother, his father, his widowed sister-in-law and Najma, Farukhi’s three-month-old daughter.

*This is the second of a two-part investigative series on translators in Afghanistan by Pratap Chatterjee. Pratap is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Aug 13 2009 (IPS)

Basir "Steve" Ahmed was returning from a bomb-clearing mission in Khogyani district in northeastern Afghanistan when a suicide bomber blew up an explosive-filled vehicle nearby. The blast flipped the military armoured truck Ahmed was riding in three or four times, and filled it with smoke. The Afghan translator had been accompanying the 927th Engineer Company near the Pakistan border on that October day in 2008 that would forever change his life.

"I saw the gunner come out and I followed him. The U.S. Army soldiers helped pull me out, but I got burns," says Ahmed, who had worked as a contract translator with U.S. troops for almost four years. "The last thing I remember was the ‘dub-dub-dub’ of a Chinook helicopter." A medical evacuation team took the injured men to a U.S. Army hospital at Bagram Base.

Three days later Ahmed regained consciousness, but was suffering from shrapnel wounds in his scalp and severe burns covering his right hand and leg.

A little more than three months after his accident, Ahmed was fired by his employer, Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) of Columbus, Ohio – the largest supplier of translators to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. In a statement released to this reporter, the company said that Ahmed’s "military point of contact (POC) informed MEP that Basir was frequently late and did not show up on several occasions. A few days later, Basir’s POC called MEP’s manager and told her that they were not able to use him and requested a new linguist."

Ahmed says he missed only one day of work and arrived late twice.

Today, he lives in hiding in nearby Jalalabad for fear that his family will be targeted because he had worked with the U.S. military. The 29-year-old has no job and had to wait nine months for disability compensation to pay for medical treatment for the burns that still prevent him from lifting his hand to his mouth to feed himself.

Ahmed is one of dozens of local Afghans who have been abandoned or poorly treated by a complex web of U.S. contractors, their insurance companies, and their military counterparts despite years of service risking life and limb to help the U.S. military in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

"I Trust Him With My Life"

On a table inside a safe house in Kabul, Basir Ahmed placed dozens of photos, certificates of appreciation, and letters of recommendation from the U.S. military units he had worked with between 2005 and 2009. Some pictures showed him in Nuristan wearing T-shirts and wraparound sunglasses and sitting next to the sandbags and concrete barriers. In others, he stood in camouflage gear in the depths of winter next to a snowman.

For example, Sergeant David R. Head and First Lieutenant Candace N. Mathis of the Provincial Reconstruction Team at Task Force Spartan at the Kamdesh base wrote on Dec. 22, 2006 that: "his performance was superb and very professional. He works well as a linguist, and is always punctual."

On May 11, 2008, Ahmed received a certificate of appreciation from Lieutenant Colonel Anthony O. Wright of the 70th Engineer Battalion (Kodiaks) for his help as an interpreter during the road-clearing programme from 2006 to 2008.

It was just five months later, on a similar patrol with the 927th Engineer Company, that Ahmed was injured. At the Bagram Base, the military doctors did some skin grafts, but after about 11 days, sent him to an Afghan military hospital in Kabul. For two to three months he could not sleep properly – scaring his family when he woke up yelling.

Then Gabby Nelson – the MEP site manager – summoned Ahmed back to Jalalabad, where she had the military doctors look at him again. For about 15 days, they treated the burns. He had to report to the gate of the base at 7 a.m. in the middle of winter for Nelson to drive him to the hospital one kilometre away – too far to walk with his injuries. She was often an hour late, he said, a painful and cold delay, but when he asked her to be more punctual, she said she would stop picking him up. He stopped going to the hospital.

Two weeks later Ahmed says Nelson asked him to report for a 12-hour shift starting at 6 a.m. despite the doctors’ recommendation for a month’s rest. After working for the full month, he received 578 dollars, significantly less than the 845 dollars that he normally earned.

Then as luck would have it, he says, he missed work once and was late twice, because of delays on the road to the base, where the Afghan and U.S. forces often tied up traffic with their manoeuvres, he explained. Nelson told him to turn in his badge. He tried to appeal to the military, but they said they couldn’t help him – so he left the base on Jan. 24, 2009.

Soldiers who had previously worked with Ahmed, confirmed the certificates of appreciation and recommendations about his punctuality and the quality of his work. "He did his job diligently and willingly. He served with us during the most uncomfortable times, but never complained," said one soldier, who asked to remain anonymous.

Official Response

Ahmed’s employer – Ohio-based Mission Essential Personnel – was awarded a five-year contract in September 2007 by the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). The contract, to provide 1,691 translators in Afghanistan, is worth up to 414 million dollars.

MEP spokesman Sean Rushton says that the company did the best it could to help Ahmed with his medical needs. "A desire to improve treatment of linguists is what began our company," said the spokesman.

Rushton and MEP’s senior management said that they were pained to hear that Basir was upset at being "let go."

"Anyone reading an account of a translator who was simply let go by a company after being wounded would of course be outraged at the company, but that not only isn’t true in this instance, exactly the opposite is the case," the company said in a statement released to the media.

"We have financial records showing seven disability and salary payments between his injury and the final settlement. It has been said Basir [Ahmed] received insufficient medical care, yet MEP employees not only ensured his medical coverage, they regularly took him to his treatment and got him into a U.S. military hospital," the company stated.

"It has been suggested Basir waited endlessly for his disability settlement, yet the funds arrived within six weeks of his rehabilitation’s conclusion. It has been suggested MEP forced Basir to return to work when he was still recuperating, yet MEP had no financial incentive to do so and in fact, at Basir’s request, MEP got him onto accommodated duty, free of physical hardship. It has been suggested MEP cut Basir loose after he was dismissed by his military supervisor, yet MEP was and is anxious to help Basir, including by considering him for a new job."

Reached by phone for his response to MEP’s statement, Ahmed says that he did get disability payments such as a check for 10,000 dollars sent to him in early July 2009 – nine months after he was injured. Yet he still feels that his employer and the military abandoned him.

But he has not been completely forgotten. About two months after leaving his job, he started receiving death threats. "Believe me, my family is too scared. One day I saw a night letter from the Taliban. They put it in our door: ‘You three brothers work for the U.S. Army. Quit your job. Otherwise we are going to kill your whole family,’" he says.

Like many of his colleagues, Ahmed had kept his employment a secret from his neighbours, he believes that the injuries provided a clue about the true nature of his occupation to Taliban sympathizers in the community.

(*This is the first of a two-part investigative series on translators in Afghanistan by Pratap Chatterjee. Pratap is a senior editor at CorpWatch. This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch – www.corpwatch.org.)

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON, Jun 11 2009 (IPS)

Private security guards abandoning their posts at the U.S. embassy in Kabul for up to three and a half hours.

A logistics manager who bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of counterfeit boots, winter jackets and gloves from his wife’s company.

A 30-million-dollar dining facility that is currently being built by KBR, a former subsidiary of Halliburton, for the U.S. military in southern Iraq that has been deemed unnecessary.

These were some of the allegations of waste, fraud and abuse that were revealed at two hearings Wednesday on Capitol Hill to lawmakers by newly created investigative bodies charged with oversight of federal government contracting.

“Do we have criminals working for us?” Senator Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, asked a senior State Department official, demanding to know why an employee of ArmorGroup North America, the company in charge of providing embassy guards in Afghanistan, had made counterfeit purchases from his wife’s company.

McCaskill, who is the chair of the newly created Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, held a 90-minute hearing into ArmorGroup’s five-year, 189.3-million-dollar contract that was awarded in July 2007 by the State Department.

The company employs approximately 100 Nepali guards at 800 dollars a month under the contract as well as dozens of British, Canadian, New Zealander and U.S. guards at salaries of about 8,000 dollars a month.

Many of the guards who were hired by ArmorGroup allegedly did not speak sufficient English to communicate with embassy staff, according to internal government memos that were made public by the committee staff, despite the fact that the language ability was written into the contract.

ArmorGroup was accused of failing to provide an adequate number of guards, failing to make sure that the guards had the appropriate security clearances and failing to provide adequate weapons training and ammunition supplies for the guard.

A Mar. 10, 2008 memo from Heidi McMichael, the State Department representative responsible for oversight of the Kabul embassy contract, charged that the company did not have 75 percent of the medical technicians available in case of an emergency that were required under the contract.

Five months later, another memo from Joseph DeChirico, another State Department official, alleged that ArmorGroup had no plans for a “mass casualty incident or an extreme loss of personnel due to mass resignation, hostile fire or loss of manpower due to illness.”

Spot checks on guard posts as recently as March 2009 over a two-day period showed that the guards were often absent for hours at a time, McCaskill told the hearing.

“I am not satisfied with the record of mismanagement that is before us today and the oversight this contract had,” a visibly angry McCaskill told William Moser, the deputy assistant secretary of state for logistics management, the government official who was in charge of the contract who testified at the hearing on Wednesday. “So my question for the hearing today is ‘Is this the best we can do?

“I’m not going to say that these were exaggerations (but) people on the ground say this was okay. The previous contractor was so bad that ArmorGroup was a major improvement,” an uncomfortable Moser replied. “At no point were embassy staff in danger.”

Samuel Brinkley, a vice-president of Wackenhut Services Inc., the company that recently bought ArmorGroup, told the senators that the logistics manager who had awarded contracts to his wife’s company had left ArmorGroup. Brinkley stated that most of the other problems had been fixed after Wackenhut bought the company.

“We are very proud that we can do this job now,” he said, noting that the company was now losing one million dollars a month on the embassy contract, as a result of the changes that had been made.

Moser informed the senators at the hearing that the State Department had decided to extend the contract if ArmorGroup and Wackenhut were willing to continue.

“That defies common sense,” McCaskill told Moser.

Commission on Wartime Contracting

The Kabul embassy contract was dwarfed by the sheer number of projects that were examined by a different oversight body at a hearing the same day in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, an independent bipartisan body that was created by the U.S. Congress last year, issued an interim report on the shortfalls in 154 billion dollars worth of contracts issued by the U.S. government in Iraq and Afghanistan which employ 240,000 individuals, about 80 percent of whom are foreign nationals.

The commission did a peer review of 537 reports that had been issued to date by 11 government oversight organisations like the Special Inspectors General and the Government Accountability Office. All told, the commission staff calculated that investigators had issued 1,287 different recommendations to fix waste, fraud and abuse in the Pentagon but many had never been implemented.

The 111-page report also documents poor management, weak oversight, and a failure to learn from past mistakes as recurring themes in wartime contracting.

A field mission to investigate these contracts firsthand by commission staff revealed that Houston-based KBR was building a 30-million-dollar dining facility at Camp Delta near Kut in southern Iraq, despite the fact that the company had just completed a 3.36-million-dollar renovation of the old dining facility, making the new one redundant. (Commissioners blamed the poor planning on the part of the military not the contractor).

The commission singled out contracting in Afghanistan for particular attention. Michael Thibault, the co-chair of the commission, noted that out of the 504 oversight officials that the military estimated that it needed to oversee contracting in Afghanistan, just 166 were actually in the field in April 2009. He also noted that the Pentagon had just four auditors in Afghanistan.

Thibault was incensed that the Pentagon rarely withheld money from contractors for bad performance.

“Money speaks. You need to motivate a contractor. If you don’t penalise them, what’s the motivation?” Thibault told reporters after the hearing. “Take away 10 percent of a 100-million bill and that’s going to motivate (the contractor) to go to the government and say OK, I’m going to do this right now.”

Commissioner Charles Tiefer, the former top lawyer for the U.S. House of Representatives, told members of Congress that the investigators were unable to discover the extend of the fraud because they were not allowed to examine the work of sub-contractors. Although companies like ArmorGroup and KBR work directly for the U.S. government, an estimated 70 percent of the work is done by sub-contractors like First Kuwaiti Trading Company, Prime Projects International from Dubai or Tamimi of Saudi Arabia.

“Let’s take First Kuwaiti – technically we cannot audit them, we can only go to the prime like KBR, look at their documentation and trigger an indirect audit,” Tiefer told IPS. “Because they are a Kuwaiti company, we don’t have legal access. It’s not like we can issue a subpoena or convene a grand jury. There’s no transparency.”

Thibault also noted that many of the soldiers assigned to check up on the contractors had never received the formal training necessary to comply with oversight duties. He cited one example of a soldier in Afghanistan who had been ordered to take an eight-hour class online to do his work, but told investigators that he has been unable to complete the class over a 30-day period because of slow Internet access.

Members of Congress invited a single representative of industry to respond to these charges: Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel at the Professional Services Council, a trade group for federal government contractors.

“We recognise there are bad actors in every field, and there are some in federal procurement. Waste of funds, this is certainly regrettable (but) we were struck by the fact that the examples cited did not, in fact, speak to abuse or fraud,” Chvotkin told the lawmakers.

“Overall, there is no question that the vast majority of contractors, government and military personnel have not only acted honourably but courageously,” he said.

Excerpt:

By Pratap Chatterjee
VANCOUVER, Canada, Dec 4 2008 (IPS)

When Barack Obama visits the Virginia headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in the not-too-distant future, he might want to scan the room to see how many of them sport green badges, the telltale sign that they are contractors and not federal employees.

At the dozen or so other intelligence agencies scattered around the Washington area, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Pennsylvania Avenue or the Maryland-based National Security Agency, he is likely to find quite a number are from the private sector.

A recent federal survey identified some 37,000 private employees in the intelligence sector who work side-by-side with civil servants as analysts, technology specialists and mission managers. About a quarter of this number are involved in the cloak-and-dagger activities of intelligence collection and operations. Indeed, well over half of the 66 billion dollars spent on intelligence in the United States is believed to go to private military contractors that range from the very well known Boeing and Lockheed to much more obscure companies like Anteon (acquired by General Dynamics in 2006 to form GDIT), LPA and Verint Systems.

To learn about the 16 agencies that run the nation's spy operations, Obama might pick up a copy of Jeffrey T. Richelson's authoritative handbook on the intelligence agencies ("The U.S. Intelligence Community"), but if he wants to know what the green badgers do inside the agencies, he'll need a copy of Tim Shorrock's "Spies for Hire," released earlier this year by Simon and Schuster in hardback.

A new updated paperback version will be available right after the new administration takes office this spring.

"We Can't Spy…If We Can't Buy," was the catch-phrase on a PowerPoint slide presented by the Terri Everett, the senior procurement executive of the Director of National Intelligence that Shorrock uncovered last year that sums up the attitude of federal intelligence managers, beginning with the Bill Clinton administration.

Shorrock, an investigative journalist who writes for magazines like The Nation, Mother Jones and websites like Salon, is a former business reporter who worked at the Journal of Commerce. He has dug through hundreds of websites and press releases to compile a guide of precisely what the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have bought for the spy community in the last two decades.

"Spies for Hire" is rather like the best-selling book "Code Names" by William M. Arkin, a veritable encyclopedia of intelligence and military secrets, stuffed with details that make one's eyes glaze over. Yet it is the only guide that exists to the new alphabet soup of companies that work primarily out of places like Tyson's Corner in northern Virginia.

Shorrock notes that private contractors have always been part and parcel of the U.S. intelligence community, notably in the field of reconnaissance, starting with the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s that Lockhheed built. Even today the bulk of the money spent on contractors is for delivering hardware like satellites.

What is new is companies like Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego that have multi-million dollar contracts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency to create software that analyses the email and phone conversations of ordinary U.S. citizens. While these projects have alarmed civil rights groups, Shorrock notes also that if there's one generalisation to be made about them, it's that "they haven't worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures."

Another new trend that Shorrock touches on, although not in detail, is the use of private contractors like CACI and L-3 to provide private interrogators and linguists to the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of whom have been accused of supervising torture, including participation in the torture at Abu Ghraib.

"It's not just the secrecy, or the corruption, or the cronyism, or the lack of oversight that's wrong with intelligence contracting: it's also the extent of outsourcing itself and the way it's carried out," says Shorrock in his book. "The government has yet to spell out what intelligence functions are safe to outsource and which are not."

What jobs are "inherently governmental"? Companies like Halliburton already do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning for the military at home and abroad, but is interrogation going too far?

Interrogators that this reporter knows who have worked at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Camp Cropper and Guantanamo Bay say that they are often more qualified than the soldiers that they work with, and this is mostly true.

Despite several well-publicised cases of alleged contractor abuse during interrogation, the vast majority of the cases of abuse documented by groups like Human Rights Watch in its "By the Numbers" report, the most detailed study to date, have mostly been conducted by military personnel and not contractors.

Some private contractors have actually challenged government propaganda, like David Kay of SAIC who went into Iraq in 2003 to search for the weapons of mass destruction that Pres. Bush claimed Saddam Hussein had hidden. Kay returned in January 2004 to say Iraq did not have any such weapons.

Yet the contract interrogators I have spoken to themselves point out the lack of supervision that they are given and the fact that the worst punishment that they are ever threatened with is being fired.

The question then is who will do this oversight and decide what can be outsourced and what should not?

Obama has already said that he will be extremely vigilant. "Under my plan, if contractors break the law, they will be prosecuted," he told students at the University of Iowa last year.

"I've proposed tougher government reforms than any other candidate in this race – reforms that would eliminate the kind of no-bid contracts that this administration has given to Blackwater," he said.

But Shorrock's book demonstrates that the Obama administration is facing the very same conflicts of interest that the Bush administration did because most of the top-ranking officials in the intelligence industry today are already compromised by having crossed back and forth from public to private employment (at twice their government pay or more) and then back again.

Take the case of Michael McConnell, the current director of national intelligence, who ran the National Security Agency before quitting to work for Booz Allen Hamilton for 10 years, and then returned to work for the Bush administration as the nation's spy chief, where he effectively oversees the agencies that provided most of the revenues of his former employer. McConnell also used to head the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, or INSA, a chamber of commerce for the intelligence contractors.

Obama's first pick for the head of the CIA was John Brennan, a former CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a major intelligence contractor, who actually has the same job at INSA that Mike McConnell once held.

Brennan has since dropped out of the running, but Obama observers would do well to refer to "Spies for Hire" to see what conflicts of interest his future intelligence choices might bring to the table.

Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch. His new book "Halliburton's Army" from Nation Books will be in stores in February 2009.

Excerpt: