Private Military Contractors [Archive]

buglerbilly

22-02-10, 10:48 PM

Feb. 21, 2010

The Flight and Crash of "Blackwater 61"

Soldier's Widow Tells 60 Minutes Firm Was Negligent in the Way It Operated the Flight

The widow of one of the soldiers killed in a Blackwater plane crash says the firm was negligent in the way it operated the flight. Steve Kroft reports.

Jeanette McMahon recalls the day she and her sons received the news that changed their lives.

(CBS) More than 5,000 American servicemen and women have now died in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 20 percent of those deaths have occurred under what the military calls "non-hostile circumstances."

We are going to tell you about three of them. All of them were killed when a small turboprop plane with the call sign "Blackwater 61" slammed into a mountain in Afghanistan. The flight was operated by Presidential Airways, the aviation arm of Blackwater, the private military firm. It was operating under a government contract to haul troops, mail and supplies to remote landing strips. The crash was barely noted except for the fact that one of the passengers was Lieutenant Colonel Mike McMahon, at the time the highest ranking soldier to die in the war.

But it was an accident that never should have happened and you would not be hearing about it now if it weren't for his widow, herself a former high-ranking Army officer, who has waged a five-year battle against one of the military's most important contractors.

"He would have liked to have been able to go out, you know, fighting. Not in the back of some plane, somebody else's victim," Army Colonel Jeanette McMahon told "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft.

Col. McMahon was no ordinary widow and in her mind her husband was the victim of Blackwater. Until her retirement a few months ago, the West Point graduate and former helicopter pilot seemed to be a future candidate for general, but her life changed when her husband and West Point classmate was killed on a routine flight back to his cavalry squadron in western Afghanistan.

And while still on active duty, she decided to sue Blackwater's aviation subsidiary for flagrant safety violations and reckless disregard for human life.

"I wanted to understand what happened. For me, if I couldn't be there when he died I felt like I wanted to at least be able to recreate what happened," she told Kroft.

She says it took her a year to get the full story, which begins early on the morning of November 27, 2004 at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul, where Lt. Colonel McMahon had been meeting with his superiors. He hitched a last-minute ride on Blackwater 61, joining two of his soldiers for the two-and-a-half hour flight into a dusty airstrip at Farah.

Forty minutes later the plane's wreckage would be scattered near the top of one of Afghanistan's tallest mountains, far from any logical route.

"What was your reaction when you first found out that the plane had crashed at almost 15,000 feet?" Kroft asked.

"Well, what the heck were they doing up there? It was clearly not anything to do with the mission or where they were going," McMahon replied.

Asked if she thinks they were lost, McMahon said, "Oh, absolutely. Absolutely."

We decided to retrace the flight to try and find out how Blackwater 61 got so far off track on a morning when the flying conditions were perfect. Some of the answers you'll hear from the pilots themselves in this cockpit voice recording recovered at the crash scene.

"Yeah, with this good visibility, it’s easy as pie," the captain, Noel English, could be heard saying on the recording.

The tape has never been made public.

McMahon said she had never heard the actual voice transmission, but told Kroft she wanted to hear it.

"I swear to God they wouldn't pay me if they knew how much fun this was," Captain English said on the recording.

English and his co-captain, Butch Hammer, had only been in Afghanistan for 13 days, and neither one of them had ever flown the route between Bagram and Farah. And their inexperience showed: they didn't file a flight plan, and instead of taking the easier route to the southwest with lower mountains, they set off to the north and never seemed to get their bearings.

"I hope I'm going in the right valley," English said on the voice recording.

Flight mechanic Mel Rowe voiced his concern early on. "I don't know what we're going to see, we don't normally go this route," Rowe said.

"Bingo! 'We don't normally go this route,'" Jeanette McMahon reacted, listening to the tape.

To make matters worse, the Blackwater operations center in Bagram didn't have the equipment necessary to track the flight. So once it left the air base, the company had no idea where its plane was. But the crew seemed unperturbed.

"You're an X-wing fighter. Star Wars man," co-Captain Butch Hammer said to Noel English.

"Damn right. This is fun," English replied.

Twenty five minutes into the flight, McMahon recognized her husband’s voice, from the back of the plane.

"You guys heading to Farah first?" McMahon could be heard asking.

The reply from the cockpit? "Yeah."

"I mean, he seems to be saying…," Kroft remarked.

"Just double checking again," Jeanette McMahon said.

"Yeah, it doesn't look familiar," Kroft remarked.

Ten minutes before the crash, the pilots were flying down the wide Bamian Valley, discussing what kind of music they wanted to pipe into their headsets.

"Philip Glass or something suitably New Agey," English said.

"No, we gotta have 'Butt Rock,' that's the only way to go. 'Quiet Riot.' 'Twisted Sister,'" Hammer suggested.

Jeanette McMahon, an Army aviator, could only shake her head. "When are they gonna start paying attention to where they're going?" she asked.

If the crew had just continued in the valley for a while longer they could have easily crossed over to Farah at a very comfortable altitude. But for some inexplicable reason the pilot turned to the left towards one of the tallest mountain ranges in Afghanistan in an unpressurized plane not known for its climbing ability.

"Well, let's kind of look and see if we've got anywhere we can pick our way through. Doesn't really matter it's gonna spit us out down at the bottom anyway," English could be heard saying.

Blackwater 61 tried to wind its way through a box canyon with steep mountains on both sides, and the terrain rose faster than the plane could climb.

"Come on, baby. Come on, baby, you can make it," English said in the cockpit recording.

"Okay, you guys are gonna make this right?" flight mechanic Mel Rowe asked.

"Yeah, I'm hoping," English replied.

A buzzer similar to a stall warning went off in the cockpit indicating the plane didn't have enough lift.

"Got a way out?" Rowe asked.

"We can do a 180 up in here," English replied.

"Yeah, you need to, ah, make a decision," Rowe said.

They waited another 30 seconds before the pilot tried unsuccessfully to turn the plane around.

"We're going down," Rowe could be heard saying.

Listening to the end of the recording and what presumably was the sound of the aircraft's impact, McMahon told Kroft "Shouldn't have happened. They waited too long. And they had no clue."

"They headed for the tallest mountain around. I don’t get it," Kevin McBride, who was a Blackwater pilot in Afghanistan, told Kroft.

McBride had flown to Farah many times and he said he wouldn't have taken that route. "You don't fly up a box canyon that rises rapidly into a huge mountain. That's just, you know, aviation 101," he said.

And because Blackwater was unable to track the flight, and didn't have anyone on the ground in Farah, it took them five hours to discover that their plane was missing. And only then, because a sergeant waiting to be picked up by Blackwater 61 at the desolate airstrip notified his superiors that the plane was hours overdue.

"Right away we're thinking, 'Well, geez, they must have got shot down or had an engine failure or something.' And I had no idea and neither did anyone else," McBride recalled.

It was mid afternoon before search and rescue teams were in the air but they didn't know where to look. They covered the more logical southern route to no avail. It wasn't until the next morning that a weak homing signal was picked up by a military plane west of Bagram and the wreckage was spotted, a tiny dot in the snow at the top of a massive mountain range.

But bad weather set in and it took recovery teams two more days to reach the site. Battling thin air and sub zero temperatures, they recovered six bodies. Five of the men, including Lt. Colonel McMahon, had died instantly. But inside the fuselage, they found the body of Army Specialist Harley Miller, stretched out on his sleeping bag. Air Force parajumper Miguel Folch was one of the first to see him.

"We were like, ‘Man, looks like this guy could have survived," Folch recalled.

Asked what position Spc. Miller was in, Folch said, "He had his hands around his head. Like, you know, using it as a pillow."

Folch said Miller wasn't in a crash position.

They also found cigarette butts and urine stains in the snow, more indications that Miller had been alive and walking around on the mountain.

After the flag-draped coffins arrived at Dover Air Force Base, autopsies were conducted. Dr. Todd Burd was part of the investigative team.

In Dr. Burd's mind, there is no doubt Miller had survived the crash initially.

Asked how long Miller survived on the mountain, Burd said, "Total survival was probably about eight to ten hours, although he would not have been fully conscious for near that long of time."

"If he'd been rescued during that period, do you think he could’ve survived?" Kroft asked.

"Yes, he could, could’ve survived.

But since no one knew where the plane was the day it crashed, any chance of saving Miller was lost. He is survived by his wife and a son.

Jeanette McMahon says that she and the other widows probably would never have filed the lawsuit if Blackwater or its aviation wing had shown some remorse.

McMahon told Kroft no one from Blackwater ever called her to express their condolences. "Never. They took absolutely no responsibility. I mean, if they had come out with open arms and said, 'We are responsible. We are so sorry.' That point never really came across," she said.

"Did anybody with the Army come and say, 'Look, we really don't want you to file this lawsuit?'" Kroft asked.

"No. It was a personal decision. I do my lawsuit in my civilian clothes and then I go to work in my uniform," she replied.

Asked if she thinks Blackwater underestimated her, McMahon said, "I think so…."

Neither Blackwater nor Presidential Airways would give us an interview. But court records show they tried to get the lawsuit dismissed on the grounds that they were part of the military and immunized from civil lawsuits.

They also claimed there was no actual proof of what caused the crash, and even asked that the case be tried under Islamic law because the crash occurred in Afghanistan.

Under Islamic law companies are not liable for the actions of their employees.

"Yeah, that's almost funny. You know, so am I supposed to go put on a burqa? You know, that's ridiculous," McMahon commented.

Even though a military investigation and a National Transportation Safety Board report faulted Blackwater's flight operations and its pilots for flying recklessly and behaving unprofessionally, Presidential Airways chief Richard Pere tried to lay some of the blame on Lt. Colonel McMahon, saying in a videotaped deposition that McMahon had told the pilots to take the route that they did.

"Something changed them to make them go to the north, sir," Pere said.

Asked when, Pere said, "It took place after Lt. Colonel McMahon got on board that aircraft."

But Blackwater pilot Kevin McBride remembers Pere telling him a much different story not long after the crash.

"Richard Pere pulled me into his office. He says, 'Have you seen the cockpit voice recording transcript?' I said, 'No.' He says, 'You can't believe it. These guys are talking about X-Wing Star Wars fighters and this and that. They were just having a good old time, and they flew into the *** mountain.' That's what he told me," McBride told Kroft.

"Why do you think he was telling you that?" Kroft asked.

"I don't think he could believe it himself," McBride replied.

After the crash, Blackwater aviation was suspended for a month, but it went on to win another $92 million contract from the Pentagon in 2007 to expand its operations out of Bagram.

Flight tracking devices were added to the planes and at least one experienced crew member must now be in the cockpit. American troops continue to fly on Blackwater's planes every day, just as Lt. Colonel Mike McMahon did five years ago, trying to get back to his troops for battles ahead.

He’s buried on Fiddlers Green at West Point, mourned by three sons and one very determined widow.

"There were safeguards that could've been put in place that would've kept this from happening. And in my opinion that's negligence," McMahon told Kroft. "It happened to happen when it did. And unfortunately, it happened to my loved one. But it was gonna happen eventually."

While we were finishing up this story, we received word that a tentative settlement had been reached with Jeanette McMahon and the other two Army widows.

The terms have not been disclosed, but the offer was made after we taped the interview with McMahon and after we requested interviews with Blackwater and Presidential Airways.

McDethWivFries

23-02-10, 02:24 AM

Remember reading about that in the book Blackwater.

buglerbilly

24-02-10, 12:32 PM

Oversight Non-Existent At Blackwater Unit: Levin

By ANTONIE BOESSENKOOL

Published: 23 Feb 2010 21:19

An investigation into a unit of security contractor Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, shows the company didn't properly vet the people it hired for a training contract in Afghanistan, employees recklessly used firearms they weren't authorized to have and the U.S. Army didn't provide sufficient oversight of those contractors when mistakes were reported, according to a statement released Feb. 23 by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich.

The 11-page statement summarized the findings of an investigation the committee started six months ago into armed contractors and a unit of Blackwater called Paravant. Levin released the statement one day before a Senate hearing to address security contracts during the war and the Blackwater-Paravant contract.

Paravant was hired as a subcontractor by Raytheon for weapons training for the Afghan National Army. Raytheon Technical Services Co., Raytheon's training unit, hired Paravant as part of its $11.2 billion Warfighter FOCUS (Field Operations Customer Support) program to integrate all the Army's live, virtual and computer-model based training.

The investigation showed "reckless use of weapons by Blackwater/Paravant personnel, sloppy vetting by Paravant/Blackwater of their personnel, violation of the rules by Blackwater/Paravant personnel relative to obtaining weapons and carrying weapons in Afghanistan," Levin said during a press briefing. "We also found inadequate oversight by the Army of this contract."

To win support from Afghans in the current war, "we need to know that contractor personnel are adequately screened, are adequately supervised and they're adequately held accountable," Levin said.

"These were training personnel, not security personnel. They were not even supposed to be armed," Levin said.

Fatal shooting in May 2009

Levin highlighted a May 5, 2009, incident in which two Paravant employees are alleged to have killed two Afghan civilians and injured a third. Justin Cannon and Christopher Drotleff were charged last month with second-degree murder, attempted murder and weapons charges. The committee sought to examine the "environment" that existed before the incident, Levin said, and found that "Paravant personnel recklessly used their weapons before that."

Specifically, on Dec. 9, 2008, at Camp Darulaman, near Kabul, one Paravant employee shot another in the head when the former jumped on a moving vehicle with his weapon in an attempt to "learn how to shoot" from a vehicle, according to Levin. The victim was seriously injured, flown to Germany and is partially paralyzed, Levin said.

Paravant reported the incident to Raytheon the same day, and Raytheon filed a report in a system used by the Army's Program Executive Office for Simulation Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) to monitor the Raytheon contract. That report said the contributing causes of the shooting were "operating equipment improperly and without authority" and "improper technique," and said safety training wasn't followed. But the report failed to set off alarms at the program executive office, and the office only learned they'd been sent Paravant's report when the Senate committee asked about it, about 10 months later, according to Levin's statement.

"If the shooting had been investigated, PEO STRI would have seen that Paravant personnel were using weapons improperly and unsafely, with inadequate supervision, and that they were carrying weapons that they weren't even supposed to have," Levin said in the statement. "If corrective actions had been taken in December, the May 2009 shooting could have been avoided."

The committee also said Blackwater broke weapons rules by diverting pistols from a contract Blackwater had with Lockheed Martin to the contract with Raytheon, for use by Paravant employees. Blackwater employees knew they didn't have permission to carry those weapons, according to Levin's statement. They also took weapons meant for the Afghan National Police from a U.S. weapons facility near Kabul, called Bunker 22 or 22 Bunkers, in late 2007 and early 2008. Blackwater acquired weapons from the facility for its training, security and aviation companies in Afghanistan, including more than 500 AK47s from the facility.

Blackwater is still in the process of returning some of the weapons, Levin said at the press conference.

Employees' backgrounds criticized

The committee also said there were several instances, some already reported in the media, of Blackwater failing to effectively vet its personnel. The backgrounds of Drotleff and Cannon, the two employees involved in the May 2009 shooting, should have raised flags, according to Levin's statement. Drotleff's military record included instances of assault, larceny, insubordinate conduct and absence without leave; Cannon was discharged from the U.S. military after he was absent for 22 days without leave and tested positive for cocaine. A Paravant assistant team leader, Sebastian Kucharski, was fired from Blackwater's now-ended security contract in Iraq after drinking alcohol and fighting with another contractor, according to Levin's statement. Blackwater put him on an internal "do not use" list, but Kucharski was hired for Paravant anyway, then fired for fighting with military personnel at Camp Darulaman, according to the statement.

Paravant's subcontract with Raytheon expired last year and wasn't renewed, sources said. After the May 2009 shooting, Raytheon sent Paravant a "show cause" notice for failing to maintain "sufficient command, control and oversight of its personnel." Paravant responded that "If [Raytheon] believes that Paravant has an obligation to supervise all subcontractor personnel at all times … Paravant will need to submit a request for equitable adjustment for the additional personnel, security and other costs of providing such '24-7' supervision throughout Afghanistan," according to Levin's statement.

Former Paravant employees and current employees from Raytheon and Xe were set to testify Feb. 24 at the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Two other Blackwater employees - the company's former armorer, Jerry Stratton; and the current Xe country manager in Afghanistan, Ricky Chambers - were asked to testify before the committee but declined, saying they would invoke their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, according to Levin's statement. Both men were involved in the illicit transfer of guns from Bunker 22, the statement said.

"Hopefully, this hearing is going to lead to dramatically better oversight, as well as much more care in who we contract with, looking at backgrounds of contractors before we contract with them," Levin said at the press conference.

Raytheon released the following statement in response to the inquiry: "It would be inappropriate for us to comment prior to testimony, which is the purpose of the SASC hearing."

Calls to Xe, which adopted its new name in 2009, were not returned by Tuesday night.

Riđđu

25-02-10, 09:02 AM

The committee also said Blackwater broke weapons rules by diverting pistols from a contract Blackwater had with Lockheed Martin to the contract with Raytheon, for use by Paravant employees. Blackwater employees knew they didn't have permission to carry those weapons, according to Levin's statement. They also took weapons meant for the Afghan National Police from a U.S. weapons facility near Kabul, called Bunker 22 or 22 Bunkers, in late 2007 and early 2008. Blackwater acquired weapons from the facility for its training, security and aviation companies in Afghanistan, including more than 500 AK47s from the facility.

Ahh this is the Eric Cartman incident. According to yellow press Paravant program manager was really called Johnnie Walker while Blackwater employee named Eric Cartman signed 200 AK-47s. At least all this was reportedly told for the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

buglerbilly

25-02-10, 11:54 AM

Questions Remain After Senate Hearing On Blackwater Unit

By ANTONIE BOESSENKOOL

Published: 24 Feb 2010 20:56

A Feb. 24 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on a Blackwater unit called Paravant did little to resolve concerns raised by the committee in a six-month investigation of Paravant's contract and practices in Afghanistan.

Raytheon, through its Technical Services Co. training arm, hired Paravant under the $11.2 billion Warfighter FOCUS (Field Operations Customer Support) program to integrate all the U.S. Army's live, virtual and computer-model based training. Paravant was hired to train the Afghan National Army.

The Senate committee found Blackwater and Paravant broke the military's rules in obtaining weapons, used weapons recklessly and were ineffective in vetting people hired to work for Paravant. It also disclosed a Dec. 9, 2008, incident in which one Paravant employee shot another in the head while jumping on a moving vehicle during a training session, resulting in partial paralysis to the wounded employee. The committee also said the Army didn't have adequate oversight over the contract.

Several former and current employees of Paravant, Xe and Raytheon Technical Services Co. were assembled for the hearing, but answers were hard to pin down.

For example, Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., pressed witnesses on Paravant's history, pointing out that the company claimed it had "years" of experience in training when it applied in 2008 to be a subcontractor under the Warfighter FOCUS contract - even though Blackwater had only formed Paravant that year.

Fred Roitz of Xe responded that Blackwater created Paravant at Raytheon's request, because Raytheon wanted Blackwater's services for the Warfighter FOCUS program but didn't want to be tied to the Blackwater name.

Raytheon released the following statement after the four-hour hearing: "The contract for these services, including sub-contracting support, was addressed through a competitive bidding, evaluation and selection process that involved our customer. Paravant employees subsequently violated policies of their contract which led to our termination of the relationship for cause last year. Raytheon has been working closely with our customers to enhance controls, procedures and oversight of contractor and subcontractor personnel. We will continue to work with our customers to ensure that strong oversight supports the success of our training services programs."

Xe, the renamed and reorganized Blackwater, didn't return calls for comment.

Raytheon's involvement

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., questioned why Raytheon was involved at all in the mission to train the Afghan military.

"What is Raytheon doing in regards to training the Afghan police or the Afghan military?" McCaskill said. "This is just a classic middleman that they're supposed to be managing, but not providing any personnel to do the work."

"Raytheon also was in charge of managing the subcontractor," responded Steven Ograyensek, contracting officer at the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation. That office was in charge of overseeing the Warfighter FOCUS contract.

The committee's investigation also found that Paravant broke military rules when it took hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK47 rifles, from a U.S. facility known as Bunker 22 or 22 Bunkers. Those guns were intended exclusively for the Afghan National Police, Levin said.

Brian McCracken, a former Paravant vice president and now the Afghanistan country manager for Raytheon Technical Services, said Paravant employees got those weapons and were carrying them while he was still trying to get permission from the U.S. Army to do so.

McCracken said Paravant employees sometimes had to train at remote locations, off-base and without military protection, so they needed to arm themselves.

McCracken had written an e-mail at the time he was seeking permission to get those weapons, saying "I got sidearms for everyone. … We have not yet received formal permission from the Army to carry weapons yet, but I will take my chances. Pass the word."

At the hearing, McCracken said the Dec. 9, 2008, training, during which Paravant employee Sonny Stillitano was shot in the head, was Paravant's effort to train its employees in how to change vehicles or deal with a vehicle breakdown in an unprotected area.

"The training they were doing on Dec. 9 was the result of a difference in the reality of Afghanistan from what the government and what Paravant thought would be actually the case," McCracken said. "For example, we did not anticipate that the Paravant trainers were going to leave the base to conduct the training, but as soon as we got there, we found out that they had to leave at different times to go to different ranges and train, and to address that contingency, that's why we were doing that training on Dec. 9."

Other issues that were unclear at the end of the hearing included:

■ Whether the Army knew Paravant was actually a part of Blackwater when working under the Warfighter FOCUS program.

■ Why criminal history and poor military records for several men hired by Paravant didn't raise red flags in the Army.

■ The corporate structure at Blackwater. "Are there any other corporations that have new names that are actually Blackwater, besides Xe and Paravant? Are there any others we should know about, so we can identify them for what they are?" McCaskill asked Roitz. Roitz mentioned Xe's current training unit, the U.S. Training Center, and said he would provide a complete outline of the company's structure to the committee.

buglerbilly

17-03-10, 01:05 AM

GAO blocks contract to firm formerly known as Blackwater to train Afghan police

By Joby Warrick

Washington Post Staff Writer

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Federal auditors on Monday put a stop to Army plans to award a $1 billion training program for Afghan police officers to the company formerly known as Blackwater, concluding that other companies were unfairly excluded from bidding on the job.

The decision by the Government Accountability Office leaves unclear who will oversee training of the struggling Afghan National Police, a poorly equipped, 90,000-strong paramilitary force that will inherit the task of preserving order in the country after NATO troops depart.

GAO officials upheld a protest by DynCorp International Inc., which currently conducts training for Afghan police under a State Department contract. DynCorp lawyers argued that the company should have been allowed to submit bids when management of the training program passed from State to the Army. Instead, Pentagon officials allowed the training program to be attached to an existing Defense contract that supports counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan.

Xe Services, the new name of Blackwater, was poised to win one portion of a much larger group of contracts, shared among five corporations, that could earn the companies more than $15 billion over five years.

GAO officials said the decision will allow a new round of bidding by DynCorp and other firms, including Xe Services.

"We recognize the Army's position that it needs to swiftly award a contract for these services," said Ralph O. White, an attorney with the GAO's procurement oversight division. But he said the Army must conduct a "full and open competition," or explain in writing why DynCorp had been excluded.

The Pentagon's decision to allow Xe to run the training program drew a strong protest last week from Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Levin cited a history of allegedly abusive behavior by the contractor's employees, including misappropriation of government weapons and hiring of workers with criminal records that included assault and drug offenses. He also accused managers of the private security company of lying to win lucrative jobs in Afghanistan.

Levin, responding to Monday's GAO decision, said government contracting practices had too often been unfairly exclusive, though he acknowledged that Xe may ultimately end up as the winner in competitive bidding.

"If this contract is re-bid and Blackwater is among the bidders, I hope that the Defense Department will take a close look at the company to determine if it is a suitable contracting partner for the U.S. government," he said.

A spokesman for Xe declined to comment.

DynCorp President Bill Ballhaus welcomed the decision.

"We are performing this crucial training mission now, and will continue to meet all objectives of the commanders on the ground while a full and transparent bidding process can ensure the best outcome for the taxpayer, our mission and the Afghan people," he said.

buglerbilly

17-03-10, 03:35 PM

US Spy Operations Become More Reliant on Contractors

(Source: Voice of America news; issued March 16, 2010)

The U.S. Defense Department has ordered an investigation into allegations that one of its employees set up a spy network of private contractors to help track down suspected militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The allegations, which first appeared in The New York Times, are that Defense Department employee Michael Furlong gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action. But outsourcing intelligence operations to contractors is controversial.

Journalist Tim Shorrock, author of the book Spies for Hire, says the military and the CIA have increasingly turned to outside help for secret operations. "The use of private contractors for top-secret intelligence operations is fairly common. There is a line in the story pretty high up that says 'it is generally considered illegal for military to hire contractors to act as covert spies.' Well, I do not know what the New York Times is talking about because the Defense Intelligence Agency, which carries out covert operations as military units, military intelligence units, is highly contracted," he said.

All intelligence agencies are using contractors to fill personnel gaps in areas like analysis and logistics. But the use of contractors for secret intelligence operations is a controversial area. U.S. law forbids employment of mercenaries, but the circumstances under which private contractors can be employed for secret paramilitary operations is a gray area.

A defense intelligence official told VOA the Defense Intelligence Agency has the legal authority for clandestine activities, but does not contract them out.

Normally hunting down suspected militants would be a job for Special Operations troops, working in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency's paramilitary operatives.

But former Army intelligence officer Tony Shaffer says that starting in 2001, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld decided to hoard Special Operations forces for his department and was reluctant to loan them out to the CIA. Shaffer, who was chief of operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004, says that forced the CIA to start using more contractors in operations.

"The decision was that DOD [Department of Defense], which owned the resource, would be getting the resource over CIA. And this resulted, I think, in CIA in almost an act of desperation trying to find a way to continue to augment and expand its paramilitary operations during the period," he said.

Contractors were originally used in Afghanistan and Iraq to provide physical security for bases and convoys. But Shaffer, now with the nongovernmental Center for Advanced Defense Studies, says contractors like Blackwater are being used in roles for which they were not originally envisioned. "I can tell you first hand that, from my experience, the Blackwater contractors in Afghanistan were being used as mercenaries, augmenting the mission of CIA to conduct things. And the idea was this allowed them [CIA] to ramp up rapidly in an area where they did not have a great deal of ability to perform - in this case, paramilitary operations," he said.

Shaffer says he personally dealt with two contractor casualties, Blackwater operatives killed while on a mission for the CIA. "I actually had to handle these guys who were killed. And they were Blackwater contractors who were performing a combat search-and-destroy mission with paramilitary individuals at the time they were killed. So clearly they were not there just to provide security. They were actually on an active mission," he said.

Many of the contractors are former government intelligence officers, lured away by the enticement of as much as twice their government salary for doing the same job for an outside company.

Tim Shorrock says increasing use of contractors for intelligence work, particularly operations, makes oversight difficult. "Contracting does operate differently than government-run, 100-percent government-run, operations. There is not that much accountability in CIA and covert operations anyway. Only a few people know about. But when it is contractors there is even less accountability and transparency, because you can hide contracts in all kinds of ways and bury the information, and the whole lines of authority who they report to, and all that is sometimes quite obscure," he said.

Laws governing the liability of intelligence contractors who commit misdeeds while on government business are still unsettled.

Shaffer says until that is resolved, problems with contractors will continue. "This is not a decided area of law. But as a taxpayer you have got to ask yourself the question, if I am funding this, do I want these things done in my name? Because any taxpayer, who pays taxes, that money is appropriated for whatever purposes the law says. So until there is some better definition of what a contractor can and cannot do, I think we are going to have this sort of problem popping up indefinitely," he said.

Two members of Congress, Democrat Jan Schakowsky and Independent Bernie Sanders, proposed legislation last month that would phase out the use of private security contractors in war zones.

-ends-

buglerbilly

17-03-10, 04:37 PM

Danger Room Explainer: Outsourced Intel in Afghanistan

By Nathan Hodge March 17, 2010 | 9:49 am

When is intelligence really intelligence, and when is it merely “atmospherics”? It may sound abstract, but it goes to the heart of a New York Times scoop about a defense official who apparently set up an off-the-books intelligence operation in Afghanistan.

On Monday, the Times ran a story about Michael Furlong, the Defense Department official being investigated over an ad hoc spy ring. The piece raised more questions than it answered, and Washington Post intelligence columnist David Ignatius is now filling in some of the blanks.

In a column today, Ignatius distills the story. “Under the heading of ‘information operations’ or ‘force protection,’ he writes, “the military has launched intelligence activities that, were they conducted by the CIA, might require a presidential finding and notification of Congress. And by using contractors who operate ‘outside the wire’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the military has gotten information that is sometimes better than what the CIA is offering.”

Ignatius also unpacks some of the curious semantics around this, noting that reports by contractor (and CIA veteran) Duane “Dewey” Clarridge were labeled “force protection atmospherics,” not intelligence, and that sources were called “cooperators.” It’s a key distinction: By avoiding the vocabulary of intelligence collection, Clarridge’s network evidently tried to avoid crossing the line into Title 50 activities (i.e., covert action).

I’ve beaten up on Ignatius for parroting the CIA line before, but he’s also plugged in with the intel community. This time he delivers. In particular, he offers some tantalizing details on what services, exactly, Clarridge was providing, and the size of his operation.

But he also points to a broader problem, which we’ve highlighted before. The military has been frustrated by a general lack of understanding about the social and cultural landscape of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And in its quest for ground truth, it has turned to nontraditional sources to fill in the gaps on cultural knowledge and the local scene.

The Times report touched on the role of AfPax Insider, a newsgathering-type operation founded by former CNN executive Eason Jordan and author/adventurer Robert Young Pelton (who has provided commentary for Danger Room). General David McKiernan, the former top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, greenlighted AfPax Insider to help provide open-source assessments of the local situation in areas where coalition forces were operating. It was part of an effort to improve information flow — as well as respond to reports of civilian casualties, among other things.

“What we were providing was what Alexander the Great probably had when he was in Afghanistan — someone at your elbow to tell you what is going on,” Pelton tells Danger Room. “We were a ‘reach forward’: When something happened we went to that spot or reached out to people who lived there.”

But the controversy doesn’t mean the military is stepping back from efforts to hoover up more information, and hiring contractors to do it. A new job ad posted by contractor Centra Technology on Monster.com is looking for “all-source intelligence analysts” willing to work for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan. The ad states that the analysts would be responsible for “analysis, reporting, data-basing and dissemination of Afghanistan measures of stability which include security, governance and development, Human Terrain Analysis, preparation of Campaign and Mission Analysis briefings and annexes, High Value Individual Targeting products, Extremist and Regional Threat Network Nodal Analysis, Preparation of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Assessment Metrics which include daily IMINT, SIGINT and HUMINT products to gauge the effectiveness of collection operations, 24/7 Indications & Warning and all-source exploitation of documents and media from detainees.”

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/03/danger-room-explainer-outsourced-intel-in-afghanistan/#more-23257#ixzz0iRdN6BKL

buglerbilly

18-03-10, 01:47 AM

The Logistics and Support aspect of the Contractors, the area where most of the financial risk lies.............and a risk of Infiltration of otherwise secure facilities

Challenges Remain in Battlefield Contracting

By ANTONIE BOESSENKOOL

Published: 17 Mar 2010 18:01

The Pentagon has made major improvements in how it contracts for "contingency" operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for jobs such as food service, laundry, construction, security, translators and logistics, but challenges remain, Pentagon and Government Accountability Office (GAO) officials told Congress members March 17.

The GAO, the auditing arm of Congress, said it recommended how the Pentagon could improve wartime contracting in areas such as providing enough personnel to oversee contractors, screening host-country and third-country nationals hired by contractors, and training military personnel on how to work with contractors in the field.

"GAO has made many recommendations starting in the mid-'90s at addressing each of these challenges," William Solis, director of defense capabilities and management for GAO, told members of the U.S. House Appropriations defense subcommittee. While the department has implemented some of those recommendations, "it's been slow to implement others."

Those shortcomings include a lack of sufficient and sufficiently trained military personnel and civilian employees to oversee contractors day-to-day during wartime operations. For example, in Afghanistan, there was concern the military didn't have people with enough knowledge of trades such as plumbing and electrical wiring to oversee contractors doing those jobs.

But, said Shay Assad, Pentagon director of defense procurement and acquisition policy, improvements have been made in wartime contracting. For example, Assad said, the Pentagon has improved on filling its requirements for trained contracting officer representatives to oversee contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the last year, the Pentagon went from filling 59 percent of those slots in Iraq to 94 percent. In Afghanistan, the fill rate went from 38 percent in January 2009 to 84 percent in January 2010, he said.

One concern raised at the hearing was whether U.S. contractors and the U.S. military adequately screen host-country nationals and third-country nationals who work for U.S. contractors.

A high proportion of those working for contracting companies hired by the U.S. military fall into those two categories. According to data prepared by DoD and presented at the hearing, only 9 percent of contractors in Afghanistan and 28 percent of contractors in Iraq are U.S. citizens. The rest are categorized as third-country nationals or host-country nationals. In Afghanistan, host-country nationals are 75 percent of all contractors, according to DoD.

While some members of the committee pointed to hiring host-country nationals as a way to stimulate local economies in the field, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, said that practice risks security breaches, especially when such hires aren't adequately screened.

"I'm very concerned about the security of our forces," Kaptur said. Although hiring locals may help foster good relationships with local communities, "each one is also a potential for infiltration and a breach."

"It is a concern, and it is a risk," Assad responded. "We are doing what we can do to screen local nationals, but it is a challenge."

buglerbilly

19-03-10, 01:45 AM

Bureaucrat Who Allegedly Hired ‘Jason Bournes’ Speaks

By Nathan Hodge March 18, 2010 | 11:15 am

The Pentagon official who allegedly boasted of running his own private team of “Jason Bournes” is finally speaking out.

Early this week, the New York Times landed a curious scoop about a freelance spy ring in Afghanistan and Pakistan that is reportedly under criminal investigation by the Defense Department. Now the San Antonio Express-News has landed an interview with the man alleged to have been at the center of the operation.

Reporter Guillermo Contreras tracked down Air Force official Michael Furlong at his San Antonio apartment. While the interview does little to clear things up, it offers a few tantalizing details.

For starters, Furlong disputed the wildest claim made by the Times: That the program was actively involved in trying to target and kill militants. What’s more, Furlong said it helped avert the assassination of two Afghan government officials.

“I take stuff in open source and throw it in the intelligence pipeline,” Furlong said. “I don’t take this information and go directly to a kill.”

As the story notes, it’s hard to verify this account; whether it crossed a line into intelligence activity; and whether funds were misused. According to Furlong’s account, the whole thing grew out of Gen. David McKiernan’s frustration after the battle of Wanat, when a U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan came close to being overrun by the Taliban. McKiernan, then top U.S. commander, wanted to hire ex-journalists to get better “atmospherics” (a picture of the situation on the ground).

Getting a fix on “ground truth” is still a major issue for the military. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, said it was still a challenge for military intelligence.

“We have been conditioned in our careers, in many cases, to focus on the enemy, to ask how many insurgents there are, what kind of weapons they carry, who are their leaders,” he said. “And while that’s all important, in this war, in fact, we need to recalibrate and refocus our effort so that we really understand the environment in which the insurgents operate.”

That approach, he added, is being applied to Kandahar, a traditional Taliban stronghold where U.S. and NATO forces are preparing to step up operations. He said his intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, had undertaken “deep dive” to understand the traditional power structures and tribal history of the area.

“That’s just one of the first steps at this level, as we build up an understanding of all the other things that really define this situation,” McChrystal said. “And that’s — in this kind of war, that’s much of what you’ve got to deal with. It’s much wider than just the enemy.”

[PHOTO: U.S. Air Force]

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/03/bureaucrat-who-allegedly-hired-jason-bournes-speaks/#more-23302#ixzz0iZhluYvr

buglerbilly

25-03-10, 01:36 AM

Ares

A Defense Technology Blog

Contractistan

Posted by Paul McLeary at 3/24/2010 10:12 AM CDT

Since I’m heading up to the Hill later this afternoon for a Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs hearing about contracting for police training in Afghanistan, I thought I’d pass along a piece I wrote about contracting problems in Afghanistan for the March issue of DTI.

It is generally estimated that the U.S. has spent about $23 billion on contractors in Afghanistan since 2002. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) estimated during Congressional hearings in December that $950 million of that has been “in questioned and unsupported costs.”

Despite the well-publicized boondoggles of wartime contracting since 2002, and the tens of millions that is generally accepted to have been wasted on phantom projects and poorly laid plans, the Pentagon and State Dept. have started to get their act together. After eight years of war, the U.S. government is finally “starting to grapple with the issue of contractors in ways that they haven’t before. . . It’s a hell of a lot better than it was two years ago,” says Moshe Schwartz of the CRS, who adds that the “Defense Dept. [is] improving, but they’ve still got issues.”

One well-known issue is the lack of oversight of contracts in the field, even though the Congressional Budget Office estimates that from 2003-08 the Defense Dept. spent about $100 billion on contractors in Iraq. Add to that the $23 billion spent in Afghanistan so far, and you have a recipe for waste: An astronomical amount of money spent with little or no oversight.

Adding to the mess is the fact that the U.S. only started keeping records on contractor spending in 2007. Schwartz says that this lack of data makes it difficult to interpret the numbers currently coming in. Despite having two years of data to work with, “the first year is questionably reliable,” he tells DTI, and often, information is poorly cataloged.

More here: -

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/dti/2010/03/01/DT_03_01_2010_p38-205538.xml&headline=Contractor%20Expenses%20Come%20Under%20Sc rutiny

buglerbilly

25-03-10, 02:14 AM

Alleged Private Spy Ring Prompts DoD Study

By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Published: 23 Mar 2010 17:34 Print | Email

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert Gates has ordered a study of U.S. "information operations" after a Pentagon official allegedly set up a spy network with private contractors, a spokesman said March 23.

A small team of senior military and defense officials will "conduct a quick look assessment" and report their findings within 15 days, press secretary Geoff Morrell said at a news conference.

He said the assessment would look at the role of private contractors in information operations, which covers a range of efforts including psychological warfare and public relations.

The study was "designed to provide the secretary with a factual baseline from which to determine whether or not systematic problems exist and, if so, proper scope and focus of subsequent corrective action," Morrell said.

He said a separate Pentagon investigation was examining allegations that a Defense Department official had hired private contractors in an unofficial spy ring to help with manhunts of militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The official reportedly set up the network under the guise of an information-gathering program.

"There is an ongoing investigation by investigative bodies in this building, including the [Inspector General], in the particulars of that case," Morrell said.

The allegations were reported first in The New York Times. Some U.S. officials told the paper they were concerned that the Defense Department employee, Michael Furlong, was running an "off-the-books" spy operation and were not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It was possible that Furlong's network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to gather information about the region, according to the paper.

Gates on March 22 said the role of private contractors in collecting intelligence in the field was "something I need to know more about."

Congress approved about $520 million for "information operations" for fiscal 2010 and takes "a great deal of interest" in the subject, Morrell said.

A declassified Pentagon document written in 2003 stressed the importance of information operations, referring to efforts to plant stories in foreign media and plans to destroy enemy computer networks if necessary.

The document, "Information Operations Roadmap," was signed by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and released in 2006.

buglerbilly

27-03-10, 01:46 AM

Despite Drawdown, Big Bucks for Baghdad Embassy Security

By Nathan Hodge March 26, 2010 | 9:50 am

When it comes to diplomatic security, contractors are a hard habit for the State Department to break. According to a new audit by the department’s Office of the Inspector General, or IG, the department has paid one company — Triple Canopy — a whopping $438 million to guard the embassy in Baghdad since mid-2005.

The report does not contain any damning allegations, like the Animal House-style antics of contracted guard force at the Kabul embassy. But it does give insight into the size of the force that is required to provide security for the Vatican-sized compound on the Tigris. What’s more, it suggests that the embassy has poorly planned for the anticipated U.S. drawdown in Iraq, meaning the government will pay a “projected unnecessary cost” of around $20 million to maintain the contract guard force in Baghdad.

All told, the company currently has around 1,800 employees dedicated to embassy security in Baghdad. Around 1,600 of them are from either Uganda or Peru. And that presents something of a problem: The report found that the contracting officer’s representative — a government employee who is supposed to exercise oversight — “does not enforce contractually required standards for guards’ English language profi ciency.”

And that, potentially, could be a problem if English-language supervisors can’t communicate with guards, especially during an emergency.

Hiring “third country nationals,” or TCNs, as guards is not an uncommon practice in Iraq: Ugandans are perhaps best known for guarding the entrances to military dining facilities in Iraq. Companies like Triple Canopy hire them because they are relatively cheap, compared to U.S. or European expatriates. But the TCNs, apparently, don’t complain as much about working conditions either.

The IG, for instance, faulted Triple Canopy for not providing adequate housing, saying that Triple Canopy “houses guards in unsafe conditions.” Guards, the report says, “live in crowded barracks and shipping containers that exceed occupancy limits by more than 400 percent.”

Generally speaking, the IG said Triple Canopy “performs well” in areas where the State Department properly performs oversight. More than anything, it suggests that State’s oversight, not necessarily the contractor’s performance, is the bigger issue. Triple Canopy, as well, seems to have learned from the repeated public relations disasters of competitors like Xe (a.k.a. Blackwater): It maintains a more low-key, corporate image, complete with a spiffy, Lockheed Martin-style logo, seen in the screenshot here.

[Image: Triple Canopy]

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/03/state-department-pays-big-bucks-for-baghdad-embassy-security/#more-23419#ixzz0jKUDe39O

buglerbilly

31-03-10, 03:32 PM

Warfighter Support: DOD Needs to Improve Its Planning for Using Contractors to Support Future Military Operations

(Source: Government Accountability Office; issued March 30, 2010)

Contractors provide a broad range of support to U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, with the number of contractors at times exceeding the number of military personnel in each country. The Department of Defense (DOD) has acknowledged shortcomings in how the role of contractors was addressed in its planning for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Although DOD guidance has called for combatant commanders to include an operational contract support annex—Annex W—in their operation plans since February 2006, we found only four operation plans with Annex Ws have been approved and planners have drafted Annex Ws for an additional 30 plans.

According to combatant command officials, most of the annexes drafted to date restated broad language from existing DOD guidance on the use of contractors to support deployed forces. Several factors help explain the difficulties planners face in identifying specific contract support requirements in Annex Ws. For example, most operation plans contained limited information on matters such as the size and capabilities of the military force involved, hindering the ability of planners to identify detailed contract support requirements.

In addition, shortcomings in guidance on how and when to develop contract support annexes complicate DOD’s efforts to consistently address contract requirements in operation plans and resulted in a mismatch in expectations between senior DOD leadership and combatant command planners regarding the degree to which Annex Ws will contain specific information on contract support requirements. Senior decision makers may incorrectly assume that operation plans have adequately addressed contractor requirements. As a result, they risk not fully understanding the extent to which the combatant command will be relying on contractors to support combat operations and being unprepared to provide the necessary management and oversight of deployed contractor personnel.

According to combatant command officials, detailed information on operational contract support requirements is generally not included in other sections or annexes of the operation plans. Although DOD guidance underscores the importance of addressing contractor requirements throughout an operation plan, including the base plan and other annexes as appropriate, GAO found that nonlogistics personnel tend to assume that the logistics community will address the need to incorporate operational contract support throughout operation plans.

For example, combatant command officials told GAO that they were not aware of any assumptions specifically addressing the potential use or role of operational contract support in their base plans. Similarly, according to DOD planners, there is a lack of details on contract support in other parts of most base plans or in the nonlogistics (e.g., communication or intelligence) annexes of operation plans.

DOD has launched two initiatives to improve its capability to address operational contract support requirements in its operation plans, but these initiatives are being refined and their future is uncertain. DOD has placed joint operational contract support planners at each combatant command to assist with the drafting of Annex Ws. In addition, the department has created the Joint Contingency Acquisition Support Office to help ensure that contract support planning is consistent across the department.

For both initiatives, a lack of institutionalization in guidance and funding and staffing uncertainties have created challenges in how they execute their responsibilities.

Click here for the full report (55 pages in PDF format) on the GAO website.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10472.pdf

-ends-

buglerbilly

17-04-10, 03:23 AM

Former Blackwater Employees Indicted

By WILLIAM MATTHEWS

Published: 16 Apr 2010 17:31

The former president and four other former employees of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide were indicted on weapons charges in a federal court in North Carolina on April 16.

Gary Jackson, who was Blackwater president until last year, was charged with conspiracy to violate firearms laws, making false statements, possessing a machine gun and possessing an unregistered firearm, a court official said.

Indicted with Jackson were Andrew Howell, Blackwater's former general counsel; Bill Mathews, former executive vice president; Ana Bundy, who oversaw the firm's armory; and Ronald Slezak, who managed documents regarding the company's status as a firearms dealer.

The indictments stem from weapons purchases Blackwater made in conjunction with a local North Carolina law enforcement official. The purchases included AK-47s.

Blackwater, which last year changed its name to Xe Services, has been under fire for its aggressive security work in Iraq, including a 2007 incident in which several of its security guards opened fire on cars on a Baghdad highway, killing 17 Iraqis.

Legal cases against the guards were bungled by U.S. prosecutors who mishandled evidence.

buglerbilly

20-04-10, 03:14 AM

Security Contractors in the Crosshairs, in Washington and Afghanistan

By Nathan Hodge April 19, 2010 | 8:32 am

Over the past five years, the U.S. government has spent a combined $80 billion on contractors to support its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that has U.S. military leaders concerned: On Friday, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan suggested that the coalition had become too dependent on private contractors to carry out its mission there effectively.

On a visit to France’s Institut des hautes études de défense nationale, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said that the military had “gone too far” in hiring private contractors. “I actually think we would be better to reduce the number of contractors involved,” he said.

McChrystal’s remarks are likely to come up when the Commission on Wartime Contracting convenes today for a hearing on oversight of the private-sector workers who provide everything from Pashto interpreters to guns-for-hire. The hearing will include testimony from Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s director of defense procurement; Lt. Gen. William Phillips, the principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army, Acquisition Logistics and Technology; Edward Harrington, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for procurement.

The commission is a bipartisan panel created by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 to bolster legislative oversight of the booming wartime services industry. In an advance statement, commission Co-Chairman Michael Thibault said the Army — which manages around two-thirds of Iraq and Afghanistan contracts — had failed to get a grip on management of the contracted workforce. “Congress specifically required improved management and coordination of service contracts in the National Defense Authorization Acts for fiscal years 2002 and 2006,” he said, “but it appears that the Army has not responded effectively to this direction.”

Despite the calls for reining in contractors, it seems unlikely that their numbers will go down anytime soon. In addition to logistics support, security and other functions, the U.S. military depends on contractors to oversee infrastructure projects and support the Afghan government. And, often to the chagrin of traditional aid groups, it sees development agencies as as a key “force multiplier” in counterinsurgency and stability operations.

It also seems that the Taliban have identified U.S. and coalition contractors as a soft target. On Thursday, a pair of car bombs in downtown Kandahar targeted the offices of a number of foreign aid contractors. As the New York Times reported today, the attacks hit the offices of the Louis Berger Group, a construction firm; the Afghan Stabilization Initiative, which supports local governance; and Chemonics, a large, for-profit USAID contractor. Employees of at least two other aid contractors were wounded or killed in the attacks.

[PHOTO: U.S. Department of Defense]

buglerbilly

07-05-10, 02:52 AM

Meet the New Frontline Bloggers: Security Contractors

By Noah Shachtman May 6, 2010 | 9:54 am

I'm not involved with "security" BUT wearing the pistol (Glock?) where he's wearing it is NOT what I call easily accessible........chest mount is OK as long as it is the bottom of the chest not the top............

The frontline soldier blogs have largely come and gone — victims of the military’s confusing, often contradictory, approach to social media. But you can still get unfiltered reports, straight from Afghanistan’s war zones. Private security contractors are now writing the new must-read online diaries from the battlefield. And they’re as raw and brutally honest as anything written by a blogger in uniform.

While support for the troops has been near-universal in our current words, contractors have been demonized as lawless, bloodthirsty guns-for-hire. (It’s a trap I’ve been accused, not without reason, of falling into myself.) These blogs show how shallow that stereotype can be.

“Today was a bad one — so many things happening all at once and I’m feeling the pressure. I feel a bit like a spinning top and am experiencing that classic loneliness of command in that I have no-one I can vent to or confide in. I have to stay cool and in control, keep a smile on my face and boost the rest of the lads when they are feeling the pressure. It’s bloody hard to do some days,” writes the pseudonymous “Centurion” on his blog, Kandahar Diary.

A BBIED (suicide bomber) walked into the middle of one of my convoys today, stuck in traffic on Route 1, and detonated. One guard KIA, 4 WIA (seriously). Not long after, a truck on another convoy tripped an IED — damaged vehicle, nil injuries — and my guard force travelling [sic] from here to Ghazni were contacted by fairly heavy small arms fire – thankfully, no injuries….

As this was all happening I was scratching my head on a budget reconciliation. The whole exercise seemed kind of pointless to me given what was happening on the ground, and I found myself contemplating the budget line item simply titled ‘Coffins’.

… I’m thinking a lot about home and L and the kids. I miss them terribly and worry how they are coping without me.

The best-known of these contractor-bloggers is Tim Lynch (pictured). He owns the small security consultancy Free Range International, currently operating in Afghanistan. As an independent operator, he’s able to publicly critique the war effort in ways that most bloggers in uniform can’t. “Our fundamental problem in Afghanistan is that we are fighting on behalf of a central government which is not considered legitimate by a vast majority of the population,” Lynch wrote in a recent post.

And to make matters worse, he added, the majority of the American-led International Security Assistance Force are holed up in concrete-reinforced Forward Operating Bases, where picayune rules about dress code, chow hall passes and speed limits seem to occupy more minds than the fighting outside.

Napoleon said that in war “the moral is to the physical as three is to one.” This is the consequence of fronting a government which abuses the population and international guests alike. If the ISAF soldiers were methodically clearing areas of Taliban and then assisting in the establishment of law and order, governance and services which serve the people, and that the people appreciate, we would be achieving moral ascendancy. But that is impossible because the vast majority of troops are based on FOBs and never leave them, and there is no legitimate government with which to entrust areas we have cleared. So now that we are unable to do what is important, the unimportant has become important and the mark of military virtue is the enforcement of petty policies like the mandatory wearing of eye protection at all times while outdoors.

The blogging contractors represent only a small minority of the tens of thousands of hands-for-hire employed by western militaries in Afghanistan. Most of the security firms have strict prohibitions against discussing their business in public. But the ones that do talk can be just as harsh as Lynch. Take “Paladin Six,” who writes at Knights of Afghanistan.

“Basically, everyone here, from the lowliest shopkeeper to the highest government official is in a mad scramble to grab every Afghani, rupee, ruble and dollar that they can get their hands on before ISAF finally bails out and this place returns to the Dark Ages from whence it came,” he writes. “Yeah, I’m looking at you [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai. And your scumbag brother too.”

These writers don’t just bitch about the military and their partners in Kabul. Lynch, in particular, is an equal-opportunity basher of the boneheaded. “There is a group of rogue contractors working the border from Spin Boldak to Kandahar who are apparently shooting small arms indiscriminately. They are an all Afghan crew, off duty ANP [Afghan National Police] soldiers are working with them, and they are on an ISAF contract. It is up to ISAF to put a stop to this and to do so immediately. But they can’t because nobody seems to know who these clowns work for,” he writes in one post.

In another, he takes aim at the local militants.

Yesterday morning started with an event so senseless and evil that it is hard to describe. An American army patrol was moving through downtown Jalalabad when the villains detonated a bicycle mounted IED. This IED had no chance of even denting the paint job on an MRAP [armored vehicle], but it did throw out a bunch of shrapnel, which killed one of the best diesel engine mechanics in town and wounded another 15 civilians — mostly children.

I drove up behind the convoy a few minutes after the attack. They had stopped, dismounted and were treating the injured…. Once I saw where the bomb had gone off I was stunned — the traffic circle is full of children at that time of the day.

“The good people of Jalalabad were pissed off about the bike bomb, but not enough to stage a protest and shout “death to the Taliban,’” Lynch continued in another post. “That is the critical dynamic with which to judge how the people feel about us and the assorted groupings of bad guys who cause them much more grief and hardship, in their reaction to loss of life through stupidity. When people react with spontaneous outrage to Taliban killings, then we will know the tipping point is well behind us.”

There was a time when U.S. troops had all but cornered the market on these first-person anecdotes and war-hardened analyses. But like so much else, that effort has now been outsourced to contractors.

[Photo: Free Range International]

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/meet-the-new-frontline-bloggers-security-contractors/#more-24385#ixzz0nCTnUU00

buglerbilly

13-05-10, 01:25 AM

Unlimited Talk, Only $679 Million: Inside the No-Bid Deal for Afghan Interpreters

By Noah Shachtman May 12, 2010 | 4:40 pm

Three years ago, Mission Essential Personnel was a miniscule military contractor, banking less than $6 million annually to find a handful of linguists for the American government. Earlier this week, the U.S. Army handed the Columbus, Ohio, company a one-year, no-bid $679 million extension of its current contract to field a small city’s worth of translators to help out American forces in Afghanistan.

Not bad for a company that’s been accused of everything from abandoning wounded employees to sending out-of-shape interpreters to the front lines. MEP vigorously rejects the charges.

The U.S.-led counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan relies on gaining the trust of the local population. But those relationships can’t be established without people who can speak Afghanistan’s array of languages. So the American military turns to Mission Essential Personnel (MEP) to recruit, screen and bring more than 5,000 of those interpreters to the battlefield.

Today, no other company comes close to supplying as many translators in Afghanistan. And with this new “indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity with cost-plus-award fee contract,” MEP is guaranteed another year as the dominant player in the translation market there.

To MEP spokesman Sean Rushton, the $679 million contract extension is a validation of “our very positive performance” — and a stop-gap measure to ensure that U.S. forces can keep talking with the locals while a more competitive contract is prepared to be put up for bid. Tens of thousands of fresh troops are streaming into Afghanistan for a new offensive there; they need people who can speak the language. “Obviously, this coincides with the surge,” Rushton tells Danger Room.

A small handful of MEP’s translators are American citizens of Afghan descent. If they have the right language skills, and can pass a security clearance, they can make up to $235,000 per year, plus health benefits and a 401-K, “analyz[ing] communications” and “perform[ing] document exploitation” on one of Afghanistan’s big, comfortable military bases.

But the vast majority of MEP’s recruits are local Afghans, earning about $900 a month to accompany frontline troops into action. These interpreters are given a week’s worth of training before they’re shipped out to combat. Once there, they’re required to spend a year working 12-hour days, seven days a week, and be on-call during the remaining time.

It can be a grueling schedule. The work is dangerous — “some 24 MEP linguists have been killed and 56 injured” in less than two years, CorpWatch’s Pratap Chatterjee reported. Not all of MEP’s hires are up for it.

“In just the bare minimal outlines of how they could run their contract effectively, they are a resounding failure, and have a knack for hiring septuagenarians for combat units while misassigning their language skills,” Registan.net’s Josh Foust complained last summer.

“I’ve met guys off the planes and have immediately sent them back because they weren’t in the proper physical shape,” linguist supervisor Gunnery Sgt. James Spangler told the AP around this same time. “They were too old. They couldn’t breathe. They complained about heart problems,” he said.

But the Army, not MEP, assigns where interpreters go. And the military’s contract doesn’t specify how many pull-ups an MEP translator has to do. Besides, senior citizens can be invaluable in a senior commander’s headquarters, Rushton responds. “All of our linguists meet and exceed the requirements that we were given,” he says.

MEP instantly became Afghanistan’s biggest linguist shop in 2007, after the defense contractor Titan only managed to muster about half of the translators it promised to the military. The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command put the translation contract up for competitive bid, and awarded the job to MEP, a startup founded by special forces veterans.

Today, the company, led by former marine and Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor, says it fills 97 percent of the translators’ billets, up from Titan’s 41 percent fulfillment rate.

While MEP hasn’t faced the kind of scrutiny paid to contractors like Blackwater, the firm has come under fire for the treatment of its linguists. Chatterjee reported last year that MEP rehired many of Titan’s old interpreters — and then promptly cut their salaries by as much as 50 percent. Some were canned, for seemingly flimsy reasons. One linguist, wounded in action, felt he was fired, essentially, for getting hurt.

MEP insists the accusations are way off-base. ”We’re very committed to making our company a different kind of company. To giving these guys better treatment,” Rushton says. “We bend over backwards to provide benefits and medical care.”

But, according to Chatterjee, MEP’s record of caring for injured translators is far from perfect. When interpreter Abdul Hameed was wounded by an improvised bomb last August, MEP made sure he received disability pay. But it was only “$110.01 a week — barely enough to pay for his medical expenses.” MEP says they are working with their insurance company to make sure all wounded employees are treated quickly and properly.

Meanwhile, the company is gearing up for the Army’s next translation contract. A formal request for proposals is expected to be released by the end of the summer.

Photo: U.S. Army

buglerbilly

22-05-10, 01:37 AM

Guns for Hire Get Their Own Online Comic

By Noah Shachtman May 21, 2010 | 11:25 am

When you think of private security contractors, online comics naturally come to mind. No? Well, maybe that’ll change, after perusing this amusing little strip from LMS Defense, the small Nevada-based security consultancy.

The company is currently best known for its seminars in low-light fights, room-clearing tactics, wilderness patrols, and AK-47 bursts. (They also do some testing and development of procedures for lasers and night-vision gear.) But LMS is also making waves in the private military industry for their monthly online comics, lampooning uniformed troops and contractors alike. It’s like War is Boring for the gun-for-hire set.

“We had all these funny stories, so we thought we’d put ‘em into cartoons for our community,” says LMS’ John Chapman. “It’s something we do for our friends.”

FreakAngels it ain’t. But then again, you read comics about Armageddon-inducing children all the time. Jokes about KBR — um, excuse me, “RBK” — those are less common.

[Illos: Righteous Duke / LMS Defense]

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/#ixzz0obtBTi8M

buglerbilly

04-06-10, 04:14 AM

Ex-Blackwater Workers: Charges Unlawful

June 03, 2010

Virginian-Pilot

NORFOLK -- Lawyers for two former Blackwater workers charged with murdering two Afghan civilians are mounting a constitutional challenge that has never been tested before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The government has had difficulties in the past gaining convictions against private contractors and military personnel for conduct in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This latest move represents the challenges faced by both sides in the murder case against Christopher Drotleff and Justin Cannon.

Both defendants filed a flurry of motions over the past two weeks seeking to have the case thrown out and, among other things, demanding the government turn over any evidence favorable to the defendants that it might have.

One joint motion calls for the dismissal of the indictment, arguing that Congress overstepped its authority when it passed a law, and several amendments, specifically targeting private contractors accused of crimes in war zones.

"Congress has attempted to expand federal criminal jurisdiction overseas in ways never imagined by the Founding Fathers," Cannon's attorneys wrote in a May 19 motion to dismiss.

The argument has been tried before, without success, but one federal judge in a similar case called it "rather strong." Legal experts and a military analyst say the U.S. Supreme Court must eventually decide whether Congress went too far.

U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar will hear arguments in the case July 9.

Drotleff, of Virginia Beach, and Cannon, of Texas, were employed by Paravant, a subsidiary of Blackwater (also known as Xe) in May 2009. They were based at Camp Alamo in Kabul, training the Afghan National Army on the use of weapons.

On the night of May 5 last year, Drotleff, Cannon and two other Paravant workers were driving three Afghan nationals to a taxi stand. The Afghans worked as interpreters and computer technicians for the Army and private contractors.

The new filing paints a different picture of the ensuing events from what prosecutors have alleged, adding new details supporting their self-defense claim: The Paravant workers -- who were driving in two vehicles on Jalalabad Road, which the State Department describes as one of the most dangerous in the country and one where travel is tightly restricted -- say they were concerned about the safety of the Afghans. Drotleff, armed with an Army-issued handgun, drove one vehicle with Cannon riding in back protecting the rear with an assault rifle.

A speeding car pulled up on them from the rear, passed Drotleff and then wedged in between them, striking the lead Paravant vehicle. That Paravant driver lost control and crashed into a wall, injuring everyone inside.

As Drotleff and Cannon tried to help the injured, the car that caused the accident, or another car just like it, began heading toward them "again at a high rate of speed," according to the May 19 court filing.

"Fearing for their own safety and the safety of their fellow Paravant employees and the Afghans, the defendants fired their weapons at the approaching car," the court filing states.

The approaching car suddenly turned down a side street and sped away. Drotleff and Cannon did not learn until later that they had struck two people in the car as well as a bystander walking by.

The pedestrian, Rahib Mirza Mohammad, also known as Rahib Heleludin, was shot in the head. He slipped into a coma and died about a month later. His father told the Los Angeles Times that his son was walking home from prayers that evening.

The passenger in the car, Romal Mohammad Naiem, was killed, and the driver, Fareed Haji Ahmad, also known as Sayd Kamal, was injured. Witnesses told the Times that the two young men were driving home from work when they were fired upon for no reason. They were unarmed.

A federal grand jury in Norfolk indicted Drotleff and Cannon in January on 13 charges of murder and illegal use of firearms. They remain jailed without bond pending trial on Sept. 14.

Prosecutors said Drotleff had been drinking that day and fired out of aggravation over an unintentional traffic accident. They also say the contractors left Camp Alamo without permission and took weapons without authorization.

But defense attorneys say they have reviewed statements -- supplied by prosecutors, the defendants' co-workers, investigators, interpreters and Afghan nationals -- and none indicated that Drotleff or Cannon had been drinking or were intoxicated that day. They also cite a report by the Army's lead investigator into the incident that said alcohol was not a factor.

The attorneys have also asked the judge in the case to prohibit prosecutors from introducing evidence showing that the defendants were fired by the contractor or that they had left the base and carried weapons without permission, calling such information irrelevant.

A larger challenge looming in the case is whether the charges against the defendants are legal under the U.S. Constitution.

Drotleff and Cannon were charged under a relatively new section of law called the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, passed by Congress in 2000 and amended several times since. The act was meant to close loopholes that prevented the government from charging nonmilitary civilians with crimes committed outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The act "goes well beyond the enumerated powers of Congress," the attorneys argue.

Congress is limited, they said, to punishing offenses involving navigation, trade, diplomacy, war, terrorism, torture or piracy that occur outside traditional U.S. borders. None of those apply here, they say, not even war, because the middle of Kabul is not a traditional battlefield in a declared war.

The same arguments failed in similar criminal cases against Iraq and Afghanistan contractors, pending in Louisiana and Washington. The Washington case, the now-notorious 2007 Nisoor Square mass killings in Baghdad by five Blackwater contractors, was ultimately dismissed for other reasons.

Columbia Law School professor Scott Horton, who consulted with Congress on some of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act's amendments, said the Founding Fathers would have considered it "preposterous" to prosecute anyone outside the United States during the American Revolution, but that doesn't mean they didn't give Congress the authority to change the law.

"In the course of the 20th century, the U.S. began getting assertive," he said. "We would say there were certain types of crimes that affected U.S. interests. MEJA was designed to deal with those cases."

The alternative, he said, is to let the foreign nations prosecute the contractors, which would create obvious problems of fairness.

Horton said challenges to the act are only now making their way through the federal appeals courts.

Eugene Fidell, a Yale law professor and president of the National Institute of Military Justice at American University, said he, too, has been following the issue and sees a likely Supreme Court challenge, though not one he'd expect to favor Drotleff and Cannon.

"To say that Congress lacks authority, I think, is a very tough row to hoe," he said. "Congress does make a number of crimes extraterritorial for good reason. Would people really prefer to be prosecuted by an Afghan court?"

David Isenberg, a military analyst and author of a book on private contractors in Iraq, sees it as the federal government "attempting to fit square pegs in round holes."

Still, he said, "no one can say what the Supreme Court is going to say or do."

© Copyright 2010 Virginian-Pilot. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

07-06-10, 11:28 PM

Retail Guns-for-Hire: Blackwater Opens Storefronts

By Noah Shachtman June 7, 2010 | 2:31 pm

The company formerly known as Blackwater has tried, with only limited success, to shed its tainted name. So now, “Xe Services LLC” is embracing the Blackwater brand, and opening a series of retail stores under the infamous guns-for-hire moniker.

At the Blackwater Pro Shops in Fayetteville, North Carolina and Salem, Connecticut, you can “purchase clothing and equipment emblazoned with the logo,” the Solider Systems blog explains. ”If that doesn’t get your blood pumping you can also try out your new firearms at their indoor range.”

There’s already an online store selling all sorts of swag — from a “BW Cosmopolitan Pilsner Glass” to a rifle. Maybe they’ll get really smart and leverage the awesome logos that Danger Room readers designed for ‘em a few years back.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/retail-guns-for-hire-blackwater-opens-storefronts/#more-25707#ixzz0qClbh2pt

buglerbilly

10-06-10, 04:34 AM

More on this.........

June 8, 2010, 2:07 p.m. EDT

Security contractor formerly known as Blackwater is for sale

Xe Services says a troubled past hinders growth, it could also complicate a saleRelated stories

By Christopher Hinton, MarketWatch

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Xe Services LLC, the private security company that gained notoriety under its former name, Blackwater Worldwide, has buckled to years of political pressure and is putting itself up for sale, though it was unclear Tuesday who would buy it.

"Because of Xe's reputational issues, it and many of the firms that have gone to market already which modeled themselves after Xe have found it very difficult to attract the interest of the larger defense players," said Jon Kutler of the investment firm Admiralty Partners, in an interview.

Xe Services

"If [Xe] sells, it is more likely to go to a private investor or private-equity firm," he added. But "even the latter may be sensitive to such a purchase, if it has highly visible large investors like public pension funds."

Blackwater was the de-facto militia group hired by the U.S. State Department to provide logistics and security services once provided by the military, winning huge contracts after the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

But accusations of tax fraud, improper use of military force, arms trafficking and overcharging the government for services have dogged its reputation. Xe provides tactical training for the military, as well as security and law-enforcement consulting.

Two years ago, Cerberus Capital Management turned down a chance to invest in the company when it was still called Blackwater. Though no reason was given, it was speculated that the reclusive private-equity firm shied away from the unwanted attention that would have come with such a purchase.

To sell, Xe may have to break itself up and sell its services a la carte.

Three months ago, Xe did sell its aviation division to Wood Dale, Ill.-based, AAR Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!air/quotes/nls/air (AIR 18.00, +0.16, +0.90%) for $200 million. The transaction occurred despite a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by families of three soldiers killed in Afghanistan, when one of the company's helicopters slammed into a mountainside in 2004. (An Army investigation of the crash blamed it on "poor navigation and decision-making," according to press reports at the time.)

No one from Xe was available for comment.

Xe announced late Monday it would put itself up for sale, according to a report from the Associated Press. The company went through a management shake-up in 2009 and tried rebranding itself, but its poor reputation was making it hard to grow its military- and government-contracting business.

"Performance doesn't matter in Washington, just politics," said Erik Prince, the owner and founder of Moyock, N.C.-based Xe, said in the AP story.

Xe Services was founded in 1997 as Blackwater and changed its name in February 2009. The company continues to operate in Afghanistan, providing military and law enforcement training and logistic services.

The company has about 800 employees; according to the research firm Hoover's.

Finding a buyer is expected to take several months.

Xe and Prince, a former Navy SEAL who attended the U.S. Naval Academy, have been in the hot seat since 2007 when several of its guards on contract in Baghdad opened fire on civilians and killed 17 people.

Though charges against the guards were later dropped, the incident outraged the Iraqi government and led to the State Department revoking the company's license to operate in the country.

Last year, Baghdad removed the immunity U.S. security contractors enjoyed from prosecution under a military accord with Washington.

But Xe continues to attract the wrong kind of attention. Last month, the New York Times reported that Gary Jackson, the former president of Blackwater, tried to bribe Iraqi officials to "silence their criticism" following the fatal Baghdad shooting.

More recently, Jackson and four other former executives were indicted on charges of conspiring to violate federal firearm laws, the AP said.

Jackson was one of the first executives to leave Xe in a broad turnover of management last year, according to the news service.
.
Christopher Hinton is a reporter for MarketWatch based in New York.

buglerbilly

10-06-10, 03:38 PM

AF Suspends L-3 Special Ops Unit

By Colin Clark Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 6:44 pm

The government has taken the rare action of cutting a unit of L-3 off from all new business while it investigates alleged misuse of an email system and has threatened the broader company, saying it is “considering” suspending the parent subsidiary as well.

A source with long experience of black contracting, and who knows L-3 reasonably well, characterized the suspension as “a very serious matter” for both the government and the company. This source said that such suspensions usually occur “because the contracting agency does not feel they have gotten the attn of the company’s senior leadership.”

We bet that L-3’s senior leadership is fully engaged now.

Here’s the company’;s announcement:

L-3 Communications Corporation received notice that its Special Support Programs Division (L-3 SSPD, formerly known as L-3 Joint Operations Group (JOG)) has been temporarily suspended from receiving any new contracts or orders from U.S. Federal Government agencies, including under its Special Operations Forces Support Activity (SOFSA) contract.

The notice of temporary suspension was received from the Office of the Deputy General Counsel of the U.S. Air Force on June 4, 2010 and relates to an on-going governmental investigation of L-3 SSPD concerning the alleged inappropriate use of an e-mail system by L-3 SSPD employees. L-3 SSPD is continuing to perform on outstanding orders under its existing contracts, including the SOFSA contract. The temporary suspension will remain in effect until lifted at the discretion of the Air Force.

The Air Force has also notified L-3 that it is considering whether a suspension of L-3 Communications Integrated Systems L.P., as the parent of L-3 SSPD, is also warranted.

Read more: http://www.dodbuzz.com/2010/06/09/af-suspends-l-3-special-ops-unit/#ixzz0qSORVmut

buglerbilly

19-06-10, 04:23 AM

L-3 Unit Under U.S. Investigation

By ANTONIE BOESSENKOOL

Published: 18 Jun 2010 19:49

The U.S. government has suspended a unit of L-3 Communications, New York, from doing any new business with government agencies. The government is investigating whether employees at the unit improperly used a military e-mail network to monitor other employees and government workers.

The investigation centers on whether L-3's Special Support Programs Division (SSPD), formerly called the Joint Operations Group (JOG), improperly used the U.S. Special Operations Command's e-mail network to monitor e-mails from L-3 employees, other government contractor employees and government workers, Reuters reported June 10, citing a memo it obtained from the U.S. Air Force's Office of the Deputy General Counsel.

The L-3 unit monitored the e-mails to see if its employees had shared information with another contractor, the memo said, according to Reuters.

The JOG contract is estimated to generate about $450 million in annual revenue for L-3 and contribute about $25 million to earnings before taxes, according to a research note from Jefferies & Co., a New York investment bank.

In documents filed June 9 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, L-3 said the unit is still working on outstanding orders under its existing contracts, and that the suspension will stay in effect until it's lifted by the Air Force. The Air Force also is considering suspending L-3 Integrated Systems, the parent firm of SSPD, L-3 said.

An L-3 spokeswoman declined June 18 to comment on the suspension.

buglerbilly

25-06-10, 03:23 AM

CIA Hires Blackwater for Afghan Security

June 24, 2010

UPI

The CIA has hired private security firm Xe Services, the company once known as Blackwater Worldwide, to guard its facilities across the globe, officials said.

An industry source said the contract, worth about $100 million, includes security services in Afghanistan and in "multiple regions," The Washington Post reported Thursday.

The previously undisclosed contract came to light as members of a federal commission investigating war-zone contractors chastised the State Department for awarding Xe a $120 million contract to guard U.S. consulates under construction in Afghanistan, the Post said.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano, while not confirming the contract, said Xe personnel would not be involved in operations.

"While this agency does not, as a rule, comment on contractual relationships we may or may not have, we follow all applicable federal laws and regulations," Gimigliano said. "We have a very careful process when it comes to procurement, and we take it seriously. We've also made it clear that personnel from Xe do not serve with the CIA in any operational roles."

As Blackwater, the Moyock, N.C., company has been under scrutiny since a September 2007 incident in Baghdad when its guards opened fire in a city square, allegedly killing 17 unarmed civilians and wounding 24. It has been fending off prosecution and lawsuits since.

"Blackwater has undergone some serious changes," a U.S. official familiar with the deal told the Post. "They've had to prove to the government that they're a responsible outfit. Having satisfied every legal requirement, they have the right to compete for contracts."

It also won't hurt in the oft-rumoured sale of Xe to a.n.other party or parties..............

© Copyright 2010 UPI. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

28-06-10, 04:17 PM

US Won't Prosecute Blackwater on Sudan

June 28, 2010

McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON -- The security contractor Blackwater Worldwide tried for two years to secure lucrative defense business in Southern Sudan while the country was under U.S. economic sanctions, according to current and former U.S. officials and hundreds of pages of documents reviewed by McClatchy.

The effort to drum up new business in East Africa by Blackwater owner Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who had close ties with top officials in the George W. Bush White House and the CIA, became a major element in a continuing four-year federal investigation into allegations of sanctions violations, illegal exports and bribery.

The Obama administration, however, has decided for now not to bring criminal charges against Blackwater, according to a U.S. official close to the case.

Instead, the U.S. government and the private military contractor are negotiating a multimillion-dollar fine to settle allegations that Blackwater violated U.S. export control regulations in Sudan, Iraq and elsewhere. Prince renamed the company Xe Services in an apparent attempt to shake off a reputation for recklessness, and this month put it up for sale.

Had the company been indicted, it could have been suspended from doing business with the U.S. government, and a conviction could have brought debarment from all government contracts, including providing guard services for the CIA and the State Department in war zones. In recent weeks the Obama administration awarded the company a $120 million State Department security contract, and about $100 million in new CIA work.

The story of Blackwater's efforts in Sudan is a tale of mixed motives that echo an earlier era of overseas empires, of evangelical Christians who offered to help defend Christian and animist Southern Sudan from the Muslim Arab military dictatorship in the north, but also sought to exploit the region's oil and mineral wealth.

According to two former senior U.S. officials, the company headed by Prince, who's long been active in evangelical groups, at one point proposed a broad defense package that would have required Southern Sudan to pledge as much as half its mineral wealth to pay for Blackwater's services.

It's also a story of a divided Bush administration. Prince personally lobbied Vice President Dick Cheney to lift the sanctions on Southern Sudan, according to the documents and a former senior U.S. official, who said that one meeting took place aboard Air Force Two. Prince's aides also helped draft a letter from Southern Sudan's leader, Salva Kiir, to President George W. Bush seeking an end to the sanctions.

Cheney supported Blackwater's sales pitch, according to the documents. The State, Justice and Commerce departments, however, investigated whether Blackwater had violated the sanctions that were imposed on Sudan beginning in 1997, some of which the Bush administration lifted in late 2006.

McClatchy reporters reviewed the documents on Blackwater's drive for a security contract with Sudan and interviewed more than a dozen senior officials who were involved in Sudan policy decisions in the Bush and Obama administrations. None would speak on the record due to the sensitivity surrounding an ongoing law enforcement investigation. The company didn't respond to repeated requests for comment.

Perhaps the most unique character in the story is Bradford Phillips, a Christian evangelical activist and former congressional aide who runs the Persecution Project Foundation, a Culpeper, Va., nonprofit that works to publicize and alleviate the plight of Sudan's Christians.

At Prince's request, Phillips called on the government of Southern Sudan and recommended Blackwater's protective services. He helped set up meetings between Kiir and Prince in Africa and Washington. The Washington session took place in November 2005 at the J.W. Marriott Hotel, a few blocks from the White House, the documents show.

The chief salesman to the Sudanese during the Washington meeting appears to have been Cofer Black, a former top CIA and State Department official who in 2001 famously demanded that a CIA subordinate kill terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and deliver his head in dry ice.

Southern Sudan had emerged in 2005 as an autonomous region after a U.S.-brokered peace deal ended a 22-year war with the North. Weeks after he took the helm of the new Southern Sudan government, Kiir's predecessor, John Garang, was killed in an unexplained helicopter crash, and Blackwater's sales pitch to the Bush administration was that protecting the new leader would support U.S. policy objectives.

The company, however, also saw huge potential profits.

After negotiating a $2 million draft contract to train Kiir's personal security detail, Blackwater in early 2007 drafted a detailed second proposal, valued at more than $100 million, to equip and train the south's army. Because the south lacked ready cash, Blackwater sought 50 percent of the south's untapped mineral wealth, a former senior U.S. official said.

I always thought Prince was a New Catholic nut job, I didn't realise he was a thief as well..........50% indeed, ridiculous...........:doh

In addition to its well-known oil and natural gas reserves, Southern Sudan has vast untapped reserves of gold, iron and diamonds.

"Most people don't know this stuff exists. These guys did," said a second former senior official who saw the document, which apparently was never signed.

Ultimately, though, Blackwater's venture in Southern Sudan foundered, U.S. officials said.

"Blackwater had some problems in Iraq," said Deng Deng Nhial, the deputy chief of Southern Sudan's Washington office. "Nothing really materialized. No services were performed."

Deng said he had "no knowledge" that any contracts had been negotiated or signed.

Federal investigators, however, found evidence that Blackwater's sales campaign had violated U.S. sanctions, export control laws and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which is designed to prevent U.S. companies from bribing foreign officials in return for business, according to the officials and documents.

The suspected violations included brokering for defense services without a U.S. government-approved license; transferring satellite phones and encrypted e-mail capabilities to Southern Sudanese officials; and attempting to open a joint escrow account with the south's government at a Minnesota bank.

The focus on Sudan was part of a broader federal probe of Blackwater that began in 2006 and also examined the alleged bribery of foreign officials in Jordan, Iraq and Sudan and the alleged illegal exports of rifles, silencers and other military hardware to the Middle East, some of it hidden in pallets of dog food.

The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, where Xe Services is based, established a special task force that at times comprised as many as two dozen federal agents from at least eight U.S. agencies. They included the Justice, State, Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury and Commerce departments, and the FBI and CIA Inspector General's office.

Prosecutors convened a grand jury in North Carolina to consider the case.

In April, a federal grand jury in that state indicted former Blackwater president Gary Jackson, former general counsel Andrew Howell and three other ex-employees for violating U.S. firearms laws, including falsifying federal paperwork to conceal a gift of firearms to King Abdullah II of Jordan, with whom the company had extensive ties.

No charges have been brought against the company itself, or against Prince or current executives.

Prince, who founded the firm in 1997 and won more than $1.6 billion in unclassified federal contracts and an unknown amount of secret work, announced in early June that he plans to sell Xe Services.

"The intent [of the pending fine] was not to force the company to go out of business. That may be the result -- that was not [the] intent," said the U.S. official familiar with the case and with the pending multimillion-dollar fine.

Why Blackwater hasn't been charged in the Sudan matter remains contentious.

"These were ... allegations of serious violations," said a former State Department official with knowledge of the case. "Anything that involves a proscribed country like Sudan is ... serious."

Some officials charge that Blackwater has received special treatment, in light of the wide range of alleged export control violations -- some of which the company has acknowledged to the U.S. government, according to documents McClatchy has reviewed.

The U.S. official close to the case, who asked that neither he nor his agency be named, indicated that there are differences over whether there's sufficient evidence to support a successful prosecution. Moreover, he said, Xe has improved its export control practices.

The official also emphasized that "Southern Sudan was a very unique beast," a U.S.-backed enclave within a country that was under stiff American sanctions.

Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said the department doesn't comment on internal deliberations. "The Justice Department follows the facts and the evidence wherever they lead in investigations and prosecutions, and will continue to do so," he said.

If the renamed Blackwater were indicted under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, it would cost Xe Services more than 95 percent of its business.

As Blackwater, that business included protecting the CIA's Kabul station and participating in a never-implemented program to hunt down and kill al-Qaida leaders.

Blackwater's failed foray into Sudan began as an attempt to branch out from its work in Iraq, which peaked in 2006, where it first gained international attention after four of its security guards were ambushed and killed, and two of the charred bodies hung on a bridge in the town of Fallujah in March 2004.

Africa was a new market, and Sudan's Christian-Muslim divide looked to some within Blackwater as a front in Bush's "war on terrorism."

Several officials with knowledge of Sudan policy said the State Department and CIA initially encouraged Blackwater to explore providing protection for Southern Sudan's leaders, fearing they could be targeted for assassination.

The Bush administration promised protection, secure communications and air transport to Garang, the long-time Southern Sudanese rebel leader, said a U.S. official with years of experience in Sudan. The promise went unfulfilled, however, and Garang's untimely death in July 2005 caused great bitterness among his backers in Washington.

A month earlier, Prince had met with Bradford Phillips, who knew Garang, to discuss possible Blackwater training for the Southern Sudanese leader's security detail.

The two men had met years earlier through their fathers, industrialist Edgar Prince and conservative activist Howard Phillips, both prominent in the Christian conservative movement.

That fall, Blackwater formally retained Phillips, who traveled to the Southern Sudanese capital of Juba, where he promoted Blackwater to Kiir, who was Garang's successor.

Christopher Taylor, a Blackwater vice president who led the company's Sudan initiative, accompanied Phillips on two subsequent trips.

Phillips didn't respond to repeated requests for comment and ordered a reporter who visited his Charlottesville, Va., home to get off his property. Reached by phone, Taylor declined comment for this report. Neither man has been charged with any wrongdoing.

Documents show there was extensive activity by the company well before the U.S. sanctions against Southern Sudan were lifted in late 2006. In November 2005, Kiir traveled to Washington on his first official visit and met Cheney.

While there, Kiir and his aides met Blackwater executives, including Prince, Taylor and Black, the veteran CIA officer. At the Marriott hotel, Black delivered a presentation on Blackwater's capabilities and urged Kiir to lobby Bush to lift the sanctions on Southern Sudan.

Several days later, accompanied by Philips, two of Kiir's close advisers toured Blackwater's sprawling Moyock, N.C., facility.

A senior Southern Sudanese official confirmed the trip to Blackwater's headquarters, and said Kiir's government was interested in elite bodyguard training and secure satellite phones that couldn't be intercepted by the Khartoum government.

Taylor and Phillips then visited Sudan in February 2006. Taylor gave Kiir and his aides the satellite phones, access to the secure e-mail accounts and a formal proposal for Blackwater protective services.

Over subsequent months, and while the U.S. sanctions were still in effect, Blackwater pressed its sales drive, which included a meeting between Prince and Kiir in Nairobi, Kenya, and a third visit to Sudan by Taylor.

Bush lifted the U.S. sanctions on Southern Sudan by executive order on Oct. 13, 2006, but by that time, federal investigators had concluded that Blackwater had already crossed the permissible line in brokering defense services.

Eleven days later, Blackwater and Southern Sudan concluded preliminary negotiations on a contract to train Kiir's bodyguards. It's not clear whether the contract was ever implemented.

Sudan, Africa's largest country in land area, was riven by a 22-year civil war between the mostly Muslim north and the Christian and animist south that killed an estimated 2 million people and forced millions more to flee. The International Criminal Court last year charged Sudan's president, Omar al Bashir, with war crimes stemming from the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region and which the U.S. has called genocide.

Sudan was added to the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism in the 1990s, in part because it harbored Osama bin Laden. President Bill Clinton imposed comprehensive sanctions on the country in 1997 in an attempt to weaken the country's Islamic dictatorship.

The 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, brokered with U.S. help, ended the north-south war. However, there's widespread concern that civil war could erupt again if the south chooses to secede in a referendum scheduled for January. Both sides are rapidly arming themselves, Sudan specialists say.

© Copyright 2010 McClatchy Newspapers. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

28-06-10, 04:23 PM

9 Years In, U.S. Finally Tries to Get a Grip on Warzone Contractors

By Spencer Ackerman June 28, 2010 | 12:01 am

More good news from Afghanistan: the U.S. military has no idea where the billions it’s spending on warzone contractors is actually ending up. And nine years into the war, the Pentagon has barely started the long, laborious process of figuring it out.

Rear Admiral Kathleen Dussault just arrived in Kabul about a week and a half ago as the commander of Task Force 2010, a new unit established to ensure that the military’s dependence on contractors for everything from laundry to armed security doesn’t end up undermining Afghanistan’s stability in the process. That’s no hypothetical concern: a congressional report last week found that Afghan, U.S. and Mideastern trucking companies who have a piece of a $2.16 billion logistics contract with the military pay about $4 million every week in protection money to warlords and Taliban insurgents.

Enter Dussault, one of the military’s few flag officers to specialize in contracting and the former commander of the Joint Contracting Command-Iraq/Afghanistan. Her priority for Task Force 2010’s joint military/civilian team of auditors and investigators, Dussault tells Danger Room in a phone interview from Afghanistan, “is to put a laser-like focus on the flow of money, and to understand exactly how money is flowing from the contracting authorities to the prime contractor and the subcontractors they work with.” It’s imperative, she adds, to get contractors to “understand they have to be more specific about who their network is and what their subcontractors are.”

The basic problem is that the military structures its Afghanistan contracts in such a way that doesn’t actually know where its money goes after it inks a deal with, for instance, a trucking company to deliver goods to a military base. “Service contracting has traditionally been an omnibus result,” Dussault says. “You deliver that service. We don’t tell you how to deliver that service.”

In practice, that means the oversight the U.S. exercises over these warzone contracts is even weaker than the deals to build planes or ships — which is saying something, since those contracts regularly go over budget and slip deadlines. But at least there are reimbursable-cost vouchers and internal audits and reports on sub-contractors when the Pentagon buys gear. Once these deals are inked, the U.S. hasn’t been particularly interested in whatever shady sub-contractors a firm in Afghanistan hires to grease the wheels.

After Task Force 2010 follows the money trail, it’ll make recommendations to the commander of the International Security Assistance Force, NATO’s military command in Afghanistan, about how contracting practices need to change. “I would suspect that we’re going to recommend limiting some partnerships that we’re in right now, apply more controls in a number of them, and in some cases, we’re going to need to walk away from some providers,” Dussault predicts, declining to comment on any specific contract or contractor.

Then there are the most controversial contractors of all: the not-so-small army of private security contractors who guard military installations, protect contractor convoys and, in some cases, kill Afghan civilians and filch rifles intended for the Afghan police by using the names of South Park characters. (At least 14,000 of them, according to September testimony from Arnold Fields, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.) ”One of our failings” in Afghanistan, Dussault concedes, has been to “lump private security contractors to the delivery of a service [and] apply good governance” to those contracts.

To correct it, she’ll work with yet another new contracting task-force, an entity called Task Force Spotlight — subtle! — and commanded by Army Brigadier General Margaret Boor, the chief of staff of the Defense Logistics Agency. Spotlight will look at the armed contractors’ rules of engagement and other day-to-day tactical behavior for the specific contracts those companies hold. From there, Dussault explaines, “our mandate is to operationalize the guidance” that Spotlight produces in order to come up with a more sensible and harmonious set of rules for armed security firms doing business with the military in combat zones more generally.

John Nagl, the president of the Center for a New American Security, says shedding light on these contracts is a must. But it won’t be easy. “There is a critical shortage of contracting officers who understand counterinsurgency and are willing and able to deploy to conflict zones, but their services will be essential to providing greater transparency in subcontracting operations,” Nagl, the co-author of a recent CNAS report on wartime contracting, tells Danger Room.

All this is in the very early stages. Not all of Dussault’s approximately 20 task-force members are currently assembled. Boor isn’t even in Afghanistan yet. And it’s worth wondering if the sudden proliferation of contractor-oversight entities — there’s also Inspector General Field’s office — represents an inadvertent division of focus. (Dussault doesn’t think so, saying “this is an opportunity to fuse together all the partnered efforts that are happening in theater” on oversight.)

But Dussault is marking time with a stopwatch. She said she expects to issue her first batch of recommendations about contractor reform in September to General David Petraeus, whom President Obama tapped last week as the new commander in Afghanistan.

Photo: Noah Shachtman

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/9-years-in-u-s-finally-tries-to-get-a-grip-on-warzone-contractors/#more-26533#ixzz0s9pluTyk

buglerbilly

06-07-10, 03:38 PM

Blackwater Case: ‘I Just Want the Truth’

July 06, 2010

Virginian-Pilot

More than six years after four Blackwater contractors were ambushed, killed and their bodies strung up from a bridge in Fallujah, Iraq, a lawsuit over the grisly incident is at a critical point.

Three years ago, Blackwater steered the case into private arbitration, invoking a clause in the four men's contracts in which they gave up their legal right to sue the Moyock, N.C.-based security company.

But in the latest twist in the long-running case, the arbitration proceedings have been terminated over nonpayment of fees and expenses to the arbitrators.

Now the families of the four contractors are trying to get the case back into the North Carolina state court where it was filed in January 2005.

Having already raised fundamental issues of battlefield accountability and liability in an era of increasingly privatized warfare, the Fallujah case now seems poised to plow new legal ground over whether and how disputes over battlefield deaths can be resolved by arbitration.

This new development comes at a time when Blackwater founder Erik Prince has put the company, now known as Xe, up for sale and has settled several other lawsuits spawned by the company's security and military support work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The families of the Fallujah victims are disheartened and frustrated over the years of delays in their case, which they blame on obstructionist tactics by Xe. They say they want the company to be held publicly accountable for sending their loved ones into an active war zone without adequate protection against insurgent attack.

"I want the world to know what they did," said Katy Helvenston-Wettengel of Leesburg, Fla., mother of one of the victims. Her son, Scott Helvenston, was a former Navy SEAL who was once stationed in Virginia Beach.

"It's enough to drive a mother crazy," said Donna Zovko of Cleveland, mother of Jerry Zovko, a former Army Ranger. "I just want the truth. Once I get all the answers, maybe it'll be a little bit easier."

Xe did not respond to requests for comment.

Had the case been resolved in arbitration, there would have been no public accounting for the four Fallujah deaths. Arbitration proceedings typically occur behind closed doors and the outcome is confidential.

The contractors' families resisted arbitration from the start, arguing that the men's estates -- the named plaintiffs in the case -- were not bound by the contracts the men signed with Blackwater.

They further argued that the estates did not have the assets to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and expenses billed to the parties by the arbitrators.

For nearly two years, Blackwater paid both its share and the plaintiffs' share of the bills, but finally decided to quit paying unless the other side started chipping in, according to court papers.

When that didn't happen, the arbitrators closed the case last month.

The families now plan to go back to the federal court that sent the case to arbitration, seeking to have it sent back to the state court where it originated.

"The families deserve to have their day in court," said their lawyer, Marc Miles, of Santa Ana, Calif. He called the aborted arbitration proceedings "pay-to-play justice."

What will happen next is unclear. "There's not a lot on the legal landscape," Miles said. "We may be forging new law."

Scott Horton, a New York lawyer who specializes in armed-conflict law, agreed that there is little legal precedent for the courts to draw on.

It's understandable that Blackwater wanted to resolve the case in arbitration, Horton said.

"They were obviously trying to create the most advantageous forum possible for themselves," he said. "By and large, arbitration panels are filled with lawyers who largely represent corporate interests, and in handling cases, they tend to come to solutions that are very friendly to corporations."

Now that the arbitration has been halted, he said, the courts must consider questions such as this:

"Are you going to deny the parties access to the courts because the arbitrators won't complete their work for commercial reasons?"

As the courts wrestle with such issues, the case has potential implications for the pending sale of Xe, which Prince put on the market last month.

The Fallujah case was one of the first in a cascade of lawsuits that have kept Xe lawyers busy in multiple courts. In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine in December, Prince said the company's legal bills were running $2 million a month.

Some of the highest profile cases have been settled.

In January, Xe settled a series of suits brought on behalf of more than 60 Iraqis allegedly killed or wounded in unprovoked attacks by Blackwater guards, including the 2007 incident in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in which 17 civilians died.

In April, the company settled a suit brought by the families of three U.S. servicemen who died when a Blackwater plane crashed into a mountainside in Afghanistan in 2004.

Other legal battles are still under way. The company faces suits brought by several more alleged Iraqi shooting victims in Raleigh, N.C., and allegations of contract fraud brought by two former employees in Alexandria.

In addition, the government is appealing the dismissal of criminal charges against five ex-Blackwater guards involved in the Nisoor Square shootings. Two other ex-Blackwater contractors are on trial in Norfolk for the alleged murders of two civilians in Afghanistan.

In April, five former Blackwater executives were indicted on federal firearms charges.

"All this litigation definitely is going to figure into the valuation of the company in a sale," Horton said.

If the Fallujah plaintiffs successfully steer their case from arbitration back into state court where there is the potential for a large jury award, that could translate into a steeper discount to the sale price, he said.

© Copyright 2010 Virginian-Pilot. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

08-07-10, 09:58 AM

CIA & Blackwater: Who’s Playing Who?

By Spencer Ackerman July 7, 2010 | 2:54 pm

LOVE this GIF put together by Wired.com! :banana

Sure, the CIA might have hired the world’s most controversial mercenary army to do a few highly-classified favors for them. But according to one of the agency’s former top counterterrorism agents, Blackwater might not have even known what the CIA’s real missions actually were.

That’s what Robert Grenier suggested to Jeremy Scahill. They’re an unlikely pair. Grenier is a decades-deep spymaster whose career peaked with a 2005-6 stint leading the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Scahill is Blackwater’s foremost journalistic pursuer. They joined forces late last month for an evening program at the International Spy Museum in Washington. And one of the subjects up for a rare public discussion was the agency’s ongoing relationship with Blackwater.

In January, company founder Erik Prince, gave an extraordinary interview to Vanity Fair portraying Blackwater as what the magazine called the CIA’s “Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror.” Reportedly, that included a never-quite-launched assassination program. Or, as Prince put it, “I put myself and my company at the C.I.A.’s disposal for some very risky missions.” But Grenier thinks Prince has it twisted.

Scahill recounts their conversation on his blog for The Nation. Yes, the agency relied heavily on contractors in the years after 9/11, Grenier said, owing to onerous federal hiring restrictions. But that doesn’t mean the agency clued its contract employees into everything it was up to.

“It may well be that you’re dealing with an individual and let’s just say for the sake of discussion that he’s a Blackwater employee and perhaps that individual knows some other individual–perhaps foreigners with whom he or she has dealt in the past — that you want to gain access to and bring in on the team,” Grenier told Scahill. “And maybe you want them to know what they’re supposed to be doing and maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re going to have them only partially aware of what they’re doing and not aware of what the ultimate purpose for it.”

Uh, like for what? “If, let us say, that one wanted to find individuals, probably foreign nationals who can go out and mount an effective surveillance against a particular target for whatever purpose — intelligence collection or whatever — then you are going to be looking for the right group of individuals who provide you with the right combination of skills that you are seeking.”

In English: there’s a set of skills that Blackwater has that CIA needs but doesn’t possess. Maybe it’s a technological fix. Maybe it’s a set of connections to individuals of ill repute. Maybe it’s the right kind of identity-protecting cover. Who knows. But if the CIA goes to Blackwater to purchase that assistance, the company isn’t going to know the whole story about about the mission CIA needs accomplished. Or, as Ted Leo once sang: CIA, only you know what you’ve done.

Who knows who’s telling the truth here. But it would be yet another strange twist in the CIA’s history with Blackwater if the company was unaware of what the agency was actually hiring it to do. Or Grenier could be obfuscating. Either way, Blackwater will just have to content itself with another $100 million in CIA money to guard operatives in dicey parts of the world.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/cia-blackwater-whos-playing-who/#more-27171#ixzz0t4kApGrJ

buglerbilly

01-08-10, 04:40 AM

Audit Finds Blackwater Overcharged

July 31, 2010

The Virginian-Pilot

Lax oversight by the State Department appears to have allowed Blackwater to overcharge a nonprofit organization for security services in Iraq, according to a government audit released Thursday.

For five years, the Moyock, N.C.-based private military company, now known as Xe, held a no-bid contract to provide security for the Iraq operations of the International Republican Institute. The company lost the contract last year -- along with a much larger contract with the State Department -- after the Iraqi government canceled its license to do business in the country.

The institute "advances freedom and democracy worldwide by developing political parties, civic institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law," according to its website. Although it bills itself as nonpartisan, prominent Republicans occupy many of its leadership positions. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is chairman of the board.

The organization is funded largely by government grants.

Over the three-year period from Oct. 1, 2005, to Sept. 30, 2008, the institute paid Blackwater $50 million -- more than one-fifth of its budget -- for security services, according to its most recent tax returns.

Since 2004, the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor has awarded the institute eight democracy-building grants totaling $131 million.

Auditors for the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction examined the largest of those, for $50 million.

There are no records to indicate that the institute conducted any analysis of the reasonableness of the security costs that Blackwater was charging, the auditors found.

The company lost its operating license last year over allegations of unprovoked killings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors.

The institute then opened up its security work to competitive bidding and replaced Blackwater with two other companies. The auditors found that those companies provided the same level and type of services for significantly less money.

For example, in January 2008, Blackwater charged $114,470, which included $120.11 per day for 30 Iraqi static security guards.

In February 2010, one of the successor companies, Ardan Energy Services, charged less than one-third of that amount, $33,120, for 34 guards who were paid $27 to $33 per day.

Lisa Gates, an institute spokeswoman, said the organization takes the auditors' findings seriously but defended the Blackwater contract.

"IRI believes that its prudent and reasonable approach on security is reflected in the fact that U.S. nongovernmental organizations that paid less for security suffered casualties and deaths, while IRI has not lost a single employee to violence in Iraq," she said in a statement.

The State Department still uses Xe's security services. Last month the company won a contract worth more than $120 million to protect U.S. consulates in Afghanistan.

© Copyright 2010 The Virginian-Pilot. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

09-08-10, 07:22 PM

Karzai: Shutter Private Security Firms

August 09, 2010

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- President Hamid Karzai called Saturday for the international community to stop supporting private security companies in Afghanistan, which he said have created parallel security forces in competition with police and army.

He also said foreign donors should help curb corruption by telling his government details about the reconstruction contracts they award.

Karzai spoke during a visit to the Afghan Civil Service Institute, which is training thousands of civil servants in Kabul and across the nation to bolster the capacity of the Afghan government. The president boasted that the recent international conference he hosted in the capital is proof that the government is becoming stronger.

To help strengthen his government, the U.S. and NATO should eliminate private security companies, which Karzai said has created a security structure in Afghanistan that undermines the Afghan army and police.

"Afghan or foreign companies, there are some 30,000 to 40,000 people in these security companies," Karzai said. "They have created security problems for us, whoever is working in these private security companies, they are not working for the benefit of Afghan national interests. ... If they really want to be at the service of Afghans, they should join Afghan National Police."

The Afghan government has no oversight over the private security guards.

"Very urgently and seriously we want from the foreigners to stop creating private security companies," Karzai said. "We cannot tolerate these companies, which are like a parallel structure with our forces. We cannot have police, army and -- at the same time -- another force as private security companies."

Karzai also said that Afghan officials will not be able to effectively battle corruption until foreign donor nations and organizations reveal more information about the billions of dollars of aid flowing into the Afghanistan.

"The United States of America and NATO should reveal the details of their contracts," Karzai said. "If we don't know who has received a contract, we cannot eliminate corruption in Afghanistan."

Afghan government officials have blamed the international community for the corruption by criticizing the way foreign nations award contracts, which sometimes end up in the hands of politicians and powerbrokers.

"The contracts that they are making to anyone -- either politicians or government officials -- should be revealed to us," Karzai said. "We must know who has a contract, why he has and how he has it. Until then, we will not be able to solve these problems. Our struggle with corruption would be very difficult."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, while in Kabul for the recent international conference, agreed that the international community needs to take a close look at its own contracting process, which sometimes contradicts the war strategy.

"We also have to take our hard look at ourselves because it is very clear our presence, all of our contracting, has fed that problem," she said. "This is not just an Afghan problem, it's an international issue. We have to do a better job of trying to more carefully channel and monitor our own aid."

She said the U.S. is "pressing the Afghan government at all levels to be more accountable, to go after corruption," but that the U.S. also had a responsibility to improve management of its programs.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

16-08-10, 02:57 PM

US Backs Afghan Plan to Dump Contractors

August 16, 2010

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military supports the Afghan government's plan to dissolve private security companies and is tightening oversight of its own armed contractors in the interim, an official said Monday.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called repeatedly for banning private security companies, saying they undermine government security forces. Contractors perform duties ranging from guarding supply convoys to personal security details for diplomats and businessmen.

A presidential spokesman said last week a deadline to abolish private security contractors was imminent. In his inauguration speech in November, Karzai said he wanted to close down both foreign and domestic security contractors within two years.

"Certainly, we understand President Karzai's statements that he is determined to dissolve private security companies. We are committed to partnering with the government in meeting that intent," said Brig. Gen. Margaret Boor, head of a new task force to better regulate and oversee private security operations. The group, called Task Force Spotlight, started work in June.

However, Boor declined to give a timeline, saying private security contractors can only be phased out as the security situation improves. That could be a long time given worsening security in recent months in areas of northern and central Afghanistan that had previously been relatively safe.

About 26,000 armed security contractors work with the U.S. government in Afghanistan, including 19,000 with the U.S. military, Boor said. The majority of military contractors protect convoys, though some also provide base security, said Maj. Joel Harper, a spokesman for NATO forces.

Karzai has said such responsibilities should fall to either enlisted military or police, though it's unclear how soon Afghan forces would be ready to take on additional jobs.

Boor said private contractors were needed right now to keep development projects and military operations running.

"Since the Afghan army and the Afghan police are not quite at the stages of capability and capacity to provide all the security that is needed, private security companies are filling a gap," Boor said.

Though the task force is new, she said it is already taking steps to improve oversight of security firms, including registering all contractors and ensuring they have the necessary qualifications and receive training on appropriate use of force.

Contractors have been in the spotlight on several occasions in Afghanistan.

In 2009, a private security contractor hired to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was exposed for holding lurid parties flowing with alcohol, with guards and supervisors photographed in various stages of nudity. A U.S. government investigation also found Amorgroup employees frequented Kabul brothels.

In February, U.S. Senate investigators said the contractor formerly known as Blackwater hired violent drug users to help train the Afghan army and declared "sidearms for everyone" -- even though employees weren't authorized to carry weapons. The allegations came as part of an investigation into the 2009 shooting deaths of two Afghan civilians by employees of the company, now known as Xe.

Last month, police a crowd of angry Afghans shouted "Death to America" after an SUV driven by U.S. contract employees from DynCorp International was involved in a traffic accident that killed four Afghans.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

17-08-10, 12:47 PM

Karzai wants private security firms out of Afghanistan

By Joshua Partlow, Washington Post

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Another Karzai "let's do it and NOT think" action to pander to Nationalism........I have no problem getting rid of most of the PMC's especially Xe/Blackwater/Xabadudah or whatever name they may occasionally or variously operate under, but lets get some commonsense in here as well............there are "some" PMC's who seem to know what they are doing.........surely?

KABUL -- American officials were stunned Monday by a surprise announcement from President Hamid Karzai's spokesman calling for the dissolution within four months of the private security companies that foreign armies and aid organizations in Afghanistan rely on to do their daily work.

The move signaled a new effort by the Karzai government to assert Afghan control over the work of foreigners, and it presented a fresh challenge to the United States government, which quickly made clear its belief that the deadline was too ambitious.

The U.S. military alone employs about 19,000 private security guards in Afghanistan, to provide security for everything from logistics convoys to military bases. The numbers have increased sharply as the United States has dispatched more troops to contend with a growing insurgency, with violence at record levels. Most of the guards are Afghan.

"Four months is a very challenging deadline," the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said in Washington. He said that "at this moment, we believe that there is still a need for private security companies to . . . continue to operate in Afghanistan."

Karzai had previously made it clear that he wanted security efforts consolidated under Afghan control, but he had mentioned timetables stretching into late 2011 or even 2014. Some U.S. military officials in Kabul said they saw the announcement as an attempt by Karzai to seize a stronger bargaining position, and they said that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Afghanistan, will now face the challenge of persuading Karzai to back away from his latest stance.

"What this timeline means is withdrawal," said a Western official in Kabul, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the new dispute. "The discussion that needs to happen now is: What do you really want? What are your real concerns? Let's draw up a different plan."

Fifty-two licensed private security firms operate extensively in Afghanistan, employing more than 25,000 people. Among the major American firms are Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater, and Triple Canopy.

About half of the companies employed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan are Afghan-owned, including Watan Risk Management, run by two of Karzai's cousins, and NLC Holdings, which provides security for U.S. military convoys and is run by Hamed Wardak, the son of the defense minister. Many other companies are unlicensed and have been accused of operating as violent militias that often bribe the Taliban for safe passage.

Private security companies have left a checkered record in Afghanistan, as they did in Iraq, with periodic allegations of employee misconduct. Afghan officials have complained that many private security firms act recklessly and are unanswerable to local law. The U.S. military acknowledges that the companies need better oversight and training so that they do not behave as trigger-happy mercenaries.

In Iraq, similar protests by the Iraqi government ultimately led to an agreement with the United States that stripped contractors of their legal immunity. But the Iraqi government never called for the complete withdrawal of private security companies, not even after a September 2007 shootout in downtown Baghdad that involved Blackwater guards and killed 17 people.

Brig. Gen. Margaret Boor, the head of a new NATO task force on private security companies in Afghanistan, said Monday that the U.S. military supports Karzai's intention to phase out private security companies. But she said that the time frame should be based on improving security and a growth in the capability of the Afghan army and police.

"Since the Afghan army and the Afghan police are not quite at the stages of capability and capacity to provide all the security that's needed, private security companies are filling a gap," Boor said. "So what they do is important."

The confrontational move by Karzai was the second he has aimed at the United States this month, beginning with his criticism of U.S.- and British-backed anti-corruption authorities who investigated an Afghan national security aide. A commission formed by Karzai accused the Westerners of operating outside the constitution and violating human rights in their work as mentors to an elite Afghan law enforcement body known as the Major Crimes Task Force and the Special Investigative Unit.

Karzai's spokesman, Waheed Omar, said that the details of the plan would be spelled out in a presidential decree to be published Tuesday. He said he had not read the decree and that it was still being revised, but that it would establish governmental structure to oversee the transition of Afghan private guards into the security forces.

While some U.S. military officials said they thought Karzai's intention was to focus on disbanding foreign security firms, Omar said the decree would apply to all companies.

"It doesn't apply only to foreigners. It's all private security firms," he said. "Getting the people who might lose their jobs, getting them into the national army and the national police, there will be a process."

Karzai's move was greeted by confusion among some contractors. Ahmed Rateb Popal, an executive at Watan Risk Management, said the federation of private security companies had scheduled a meeting for Monday evening to discuss the new deadline.

Special correspondent Javed Hamdard in Kabul and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

buglerbilly

18-08-10, 03:22 AM

Afghanistan Cuts Off Its Nose to Spite Its Face

August 17th, 2010

According to an AP report By HEIDI VOGT filed this morning, Afghanistan’s president issued a decree today giving a four-month deadline for private security companies to register and join the Afghan Police Force or disband.

According to the article:

“It does provide an exception for private security firms working inside of compounds used by international groups, including embassies, businesses and non-governmental organizations.

“They will have to stay inside of the organization’s compound and will have to be registered with the Interior Ministry,” the decree states.

All security outside of these compounds will be provided by Afghan security forces, as will all security for supply convoys for international troops, the decree says.”

This move will result in either the Afghani Police actually becoming an effective force, or more likely, in speeding up the withdrawal timetable of US and NATO forces. There is little chance that commercial businesses who provide security services will allow themselves to effectively be nationalized. This move will also most likely trepidation on the part of those interested in investing in Afghanistan as they concern themselves over security of their investments as well as the threat of further nationalization.

Afghanistan is assuming a serious risk with this move as they have proven unable to secure their own objectives, let alone guard coalition partners. In order to make up the shortfall of over 30,000 security contractors who currently protect convoys and installations, coalition forces will need to substantially increase the number of troops on the ground or develop alternative and more costly logistic strategies. Either alternative will surely cause countries already strapped for cash to question their commitment to Afghanistan’s security.

Ironically, the Karzai regime may become victim to its own decision to take on too much, too soon.

buglerbilly

25-08-10, 01:05 AM

State Dept: Blackwater Broke Export Laws

August 24, 2010

Knight Ridder

WASHINGTON - The company formerly known as Blackwater violated U.S. export control laws nearly 300 times, from attempts to do business in Sudan while that country was under U.S. sanctions to training an Afghan border patrol official who was a native of Iran, the State Department said Monday.

The alleged violations were spelled out in documents released Monday by the State Department as part of a $42 million settlement with Blackwater that will allow the company, now known as Xe Services LLC, to continue receiving U.S. government contracts.

The agreement appears to spell the end of a three-and-a-half-year, multi-agency federal probe into Xe Services' unauthorized exports of defense technologies and services. While elements of the case were presented to a federal grand jury, the company and its currently serving officers have avoided criminal prosecution.

DARTThe State Department said Monday that Xe Services' alleged violations, while widespread, "did not involve sensitive technologies or cause a known harm to national security." Additionally, it said, they took place while Xe "was providing services in support of U.S. government programs and military operations abroad."

Under the agreement with the U.S. government, the Moyock, N.C., company was levied a $42 million fine, but Xe is allowed to use $12 million of that to strengthen the company's export control compliance programs. Xe won't be barred from further U.S. government contracts, and a government policy of denying most of the firm's export control applications, in place since December 2008, will be lifted.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Blackwater founder Erik Prince, didn't immediately return a phone call seeking comment. Prince recently moved to the United Arab Emirates and has put Xe Services up for sale.

McClatchy Newspapers first reported in June that Xe Services and the U.S. government were negotiating a multimillion-dollar fine to settle allegations that it violated laws regulating the export of defense equipment and know-how overseas. The report detailed Blackwater's extensive efforts to secure business in southern Sudan at a time when the country was under U.S. sanctions for its sponsorship of terrorism.

© Copyright 2010 Knight Ridder. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

04-09-10, 07:37 AM

Blackwater won contracts with `network'

September 4, 2010 - 1:34PM

The security company Blackwater Worldwide formed a network of 30 shell companies and subsidiaries to try to get millions of dollars in government business after the company faced strong criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, The New York Times reported on Friday.

The newspaper said that it was unclear how many of the created companies got American contracts but that at least three of them obtained work with the US military and the CIA.

Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has asked the Justice Department to see whether Blackwater misled the government when using the subsidiaries to gain government contracts, according to the Times.

It said Levin's committee found that North Carolina-based Blackwater, which now is known as Xe Services, went to great lengths to find ways to get lucrative government work despite criminal charges and criticism stemming from a 2007 incident in which Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians. A committee chart outlines the web of Blackwater subsidiaries.

Messages left late on Friday with spokespeople for the Michigan Democrat and Xe were not immediately answered.

The 2007 incident and other reports of abuses by Blackwater employees in Iraq led to criminal investigations and congressional hearings, and resulted in the company losing a lucrative contract with the State Department to provide security in Iraq.

But recently the company was awarded a $100 million contract to provide security for the agency in Afghanistan, prompting criticism from some in Congress.

CIA director Leon Panetta said the CIA had no choice but to hire the company because it underbid others by $26 million and that a CIA review concluded that the contractor had cleaned up its act.

Last year, Panetta cancelled a contract with Xe that allowed the company's operatives to load missiles on Predator drones in Pakistan, and shifted the work to government personnel.

However, the Times quoted former Blackwater officialsas saying that at least two Blackwater-affiliated companies, XPG and Greystone, obtained secret contracts from the CIA to provide security to agency operatives.

The newspaper said the network of subsidiaries, including several located in offshore tax havens, were uncovered as part of the Armed Services Committee's examination of government contracting and not an investigation solely into Blackwater.

But Levin questioned why Blackwater would need to create so many companies with various names to seek out government business, according to the Times.

The report quoted unidentified government officials and former Blackwater employees as saying that the network of companies allowed Blackwater to obscure its involvement in government work from contracting officials and the public, and to ensure a low profile for its classified activities.

© 2010 AP

buglerbilly

24-09-10, 03:12 AM

Ain’t No Party Like a Blackwater Party, ‘Cause a Blackwater Party Got Coke, ‘Roids, and AKs

By Spencer Ackerman September 23, 2010 | 1:14 pm

Your favorite ballplayers had former bat boy Kirk Radomski get them their steroids. While in Iraq, Blackwater had a Texas businessman named Howard Lowry, who bought steroids “by the case” for juicing security contractors.

And Lowry didn’t just help Blackwater’s guards get jacked. He helped them get deadly as well, buying over 100 AK-47s and ammunition for the company on the black market.

And what goes better with guns and steroids than nudity and drugs? In a sworn deposition for a lawsuit brought by two ex-Blackwater employees, Lowry maintains that he hung out at Blackwater parties in Baghdad where “company personnel had large amounts of cocaine and blocks of hashish and would run around naked.” Addled guards would step onto the balconies of the their rooms at the Hamra Hotel, point their automatic rifles at Iraqi housing complexes and open fire.

That’s all reported by Blackwater nemesis Jeremy Scahill, who acquired Lowry’s deposition for a new Nation piece. One of Lowry’s friends was Jerry Zovko, one of the four Blackwater contractors lynched in Fallujah in 2004. Lowry testified that Zovko gave him “tremendous insight into the company and confirmed that the use of steroids and human growth hormone, testosterone, were pretty endemic to them and almost companywide.”

The entire lawsuit is wild. Ex-employees Brad and Melan Davis have accused Blackwater of defrauding the government by, among other interesting bookkeeping techniques, billing the government for money spent on strippers.

But Lowry’s accusations are some of the most baroque yet. Guards charged with protecting the U.S.’ viceroy in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, were “beyond out of control,” dumping ounces of cocaine on tabletops to sniff before letting off a spray of gunfire into populated areas. Such parties, he claimed, were a “weekly” ritual.

“One of the suites would be absolutely packed with gentlemen running around with either no clothes on, no shirt on,” Lowry testified, according to Scahill. “It was like a frat party gone wild. Drug use was rampant. There was cocaine all on the tables. There were blocks of hash, and you could smell it in the air…walking up to the door.”

Lowry’s drug stories all raise questions, to put it mildly, about what kind of behavior Blackwater’s guards are up to on their secret missions in Pakistan.

That isn’t the only lawsuit that Blackwater is facing. Two of its former guards, Justin Cannon and Christopher Drotleff, are staring down federal murder charges in Virginia for shooting Afghan civilians in Kabul last year. Their defense counsel rested their case yesterday. (At least two groups to support Cannon and Drotleff have set up shop on Facebook.)

Blackwater’s currently up for sale. Judging from Lowry’s deposition, Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory is a natural future owner.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/aint-no-party-like-a-blackwater-party-cause-a-blackwater-party-got-coke-roids-and-aks/#more-31644#ixzz10PB2bjNJ

buglerbilly

27-09-10, 03:20 PM

This Year, Contractor Deaths Exceed Military Ones in Iraq and Afghanistan (excerpt)

(Source: ProPublica.org; published Sept. 23, 2010)

More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America’s battlefields.

More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010, according to a ProPublica analysis of the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Labor, which tracks contractor deaths. In the same period, 235 soldiers died, according to Pentagon figures.

This milestone in the privatization of modern U.S. warfare reflects both the drawdown in military forces in Iraq and the central role of contractors in providing logistics support to local armies and police forces, contracting and military experts said.

Steven Schooner, a professor of government contracting at George Washington University Law School, said that the contractor deaths show how the risks of war have increasingly been absorbed by the private sector. Private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan provide fuel, food and protective services to U.S. outposts — jobs once performed by soldiers.

“It’s extremely likely that a generation ago, each one of these contractors deaths would have been a military death,” Schooner said. “As troop deaths have fallen, contractor deaths have risen. It's not a pretty picture.”

Schooner, who conducted a recent study of contractor fatalities published in Service Contractor [1] (PDF), an industry newsletter, said contractors now make up more than 25 percent of total deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan — a proportion that has grown steadily throughout the conflicts. Official figures show that 5,531 troops and 2,008 civilian contract workers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan between the beginning of hostilities in 2001 and June 2010.

Many working under U.S. contracts are local civilians, often working as translators for troops, or are hired from third world countries to do basic labor, such as cleaning kitchens and toilets.

Previous ProPublica stories [2] have noted that companies employing such workers often fail to report their deaths and injuries to the Labor Department, as required by law. Government figures likely understate the total number civilian contractor deaths.

(end of excerpt)

Click here for the full story, on the ProPublica website.

http://www.propublica.org/article/this-year-contractor-deaths-exceed-military-ones-in-iraq-and-afgh-100923

-ends-

buglerbilly

28-09-10, 03:29 AM

Murder Mistrial for Facebook-Friendly Blackwater Guards

By Spencer Ackerman September 27, 2010 | 4:48 pm

Two Blackwater contractors will get a new trial in March after a jury in Norfolk, Virginia couldn’t decide if they murdered two Afghan civilians last year. They may not have been able to persuade half the jurors, but both men have loyal followings on Facebook.

Parents of one of the contractors, Justin Cannon, looked on the bright side on their son’s Facebook support-group page: “As Justin said, he’s not been found guilty and it is my hope and prayer that in March, or perhaps before then, he will be found not guilty and freed.”

On May 5, 2009, the two contractors, Cannon and Christopher Drotleff (pictured), opened fire on a sedan traveling near their SUV on a Kabul road. The shooting injured the car’s driver, killed a man in the front passenger seat, and also killed a bystander walking his dog.

The facts in the case are in dispute. Lawyers for Cannon and Drotleff contended the contractors acted in self defense: the sedan clipped the front vehicle in their convoy and then turned and sped back toward them as they got out to help their comrades. Prosecutors claimed that’s all a cover story, charging that the Afghans car tried to leave the scene after the accident. The jury ultimately told Judge Robert G. Doumar this morning that it couldn’t come to a consensus on whether Cannon and Drotleff are murderers.

Both contractors have a fair amount of support online. Cannon, a former Army Ranger, has a dedicated website called the Ranger Defense Fund set up with a PayPal donation button to raise money for his legal expenses. It also hosts links to stories that portray Blackwater in a negative light, as the company fired Cannon and Drotlef shortly after the shooting. (His mom has also posted in our comment section.) A 2,923-member Facebook group for Cannon, seemingly an adjunct to Ranger Defense Fund, has posted updates from the trial.

Drotleff’s wife Gina set up a Facebook page to support her husband — 2966 members as of this afternoon — even posting his prison letters. “[B]ehind all this concrete and steel I feel more hopeless than I ever have,” he wrote on March 8. “But knowing that those people are out there and that you are praying for me and watching after my family at least makes the separation bearable.” In response to today’s mistrial news, a well-wisher active on both pages posted on the Drotleff-support group’s wall, “gina dont be sad maybe this good for them,dont be sad at all,i know its again a long trip,this destiny was for a reason [sic].”

There’s at least one other Facebook group devoted to supporting Cannon and Drotleff, but it doesn’t have a lot of activity on it.

Blackwater subsidiary Paravant, which employed the accused, has come under fire from the Senate for all manner of shadiness. An armed-services committee investigation reported in February that Paravant employees circumvented their lack of weapons authorization by signing out hundreds of guns from U.S. military depots under the name “Eric Cartman” — as in the authoriteh-obsessed fat kid from South Park. Chairman Carl Levin charged that Paravant is a shell company, set up just so Blackwater could win a contract from Raytheon with the military to train Afghan soldiers without all the negative publicity that comes from the controversial company’s name. Its employees often carried on drunkenly, the Senate inquiry found, even firing weapons under the influence — something Cannon has denied.

Lawyers for Cannon and Drotleff told Newport News Daily Press reporter Peter Dujardin that the jury deadlock is “unbelievably frustrating.” Their next chance at satisfaction comes in March.

Photo: Chris Drotleff’s Facebook support page

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=270579446154#!/photo.php?pid=36070&fbid=104384512937535&op=1&o=all&view=all&subj=117689681577448&aid=-1&oid=117689681577448&id=100000979605505

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buglerbilly

30-09-10, 01:56 AM

Despite Clinton Pledge, State Department Ready to Pay Billions to Mercs

By Spencer Ackerman September 29, 2010 | 5:31 pm | Categories: Mercs

Now its fine and dandy to bitch and moan about outifts like Blackwater BUT what is the alternative, go back to your own "troops" providing security? I thought they got out of that idea cos they don't have the resources to suit increased needs, its more expensive to do it themselves (?) and they can't train more people quickly enough cos they don't have either the time, money or resoirces to do so? No alternatives so you are left with the PMC's............

Get ready to meet America’s new mercenaries. They could be the same as the old ones.

Two State Department sources who requested anonymity say a new multi-billion contract for private security firms to protect diplomats is “about to drop.” And one winner could well be Blackwater, or whatever it’s calling itself these days. So much for Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s one-time campaign pledge to ban “Blackwater and other private mercenary firms.”

Neither source would say which private security firms have won the four-year contract or how much it will ultimately be worth. The last Worldwide Protective Services contract, awarded in 2005, went to Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp. Rough estimates place that contract’s value at $2.2 billion.

This one is likely to be even more lucrative. That’s because this time, the reduction and forthcoming withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq is causing the State Department to splurge on private security. In June, a senior department official told the congressional Wartime Contracting Commission that the department requires “between 6,000 and 7,000 security contractors” in Iraq, up from its current 2700 armed guards. And that doesn’t even take into account those needed to guard the expanded U.S. civilian presence in Afghanistan. Mo’ mercs, mo’ money. And mo’ danger: this year, for the first time, U.S. contractor deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeded troop deaths, ProPublica found.

But the mercs involved could be the same ones as last time. In a nod to open-government practices, State has pledged to pick six security companies to receive the Worldwide Protective Services contract, double the current three. But that doesn’t mean the firms who won the last time around can’t potentially re-up — including Blackwater.

The deadline to award the contract, known as the Worldwide Protective Services contract, is tomorrow, September 30, but it’s unclear whether the department will meet its long-announced goal. State is finalizing the contract right now, so if it doesn’t drop tomorrow — the last day of the fiscal year — it’ll be soon afterward.

In April, a State Department official confirmed that “any company, including Xe Services [another name for Blackwater] and its subsidiary companies, [may] submit a proposal in response to an acquisition process established on the basis of full and open competition.” Despite the slayings of civilians at Nisour Square in Iraq in 2007 — which got Blackwater de-certified by the Iraqi government — and on the road in Kabul in 2009, no federal acquisition official has ever recommended that Blackwater be barred from bidding on government contracts. That means it would violate federal law to prevent Blackwater from entering a bid. A company spokeswoman told me last year that Blackwater intended to bid on the next round of Worldwide Protective Services.

And while the contract may almost be in place, its oversight won’t. Last week, the contracting commission’s co-chairman told a House panel that even if the State Department can afford its merc surge in Iraq, “it is not clear that it has the trained personnel to manage and oversee contract performance of a kind that has already shown the potential for creating tragic incidents and frayed relations with host countries.” In other words, expect more wasted money — and the possibility of more Nisour Squares.

Photo: Wikimedia

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/despite-clinton-pledge-state-department-ready-to-pay-mercs-billions/#more-32069#ixzz10xvnv32N

buglerbilly

01-10-10, 12:28 AM

Translator Shop Moves Into the Intelligence Biz

By Spencer Ackerman September 30, 2010 | 1:06 pm

In just a few years, a Columbus, Ohio-based firm has become the Army’s dominant supplier of translators in places like Afghanistan, taking in hundreds of millions in military contracts. Now, Mission Essential Personnel is set to grow even larger, with a half-billion dollar contract to shift its translation business into the intelligence game.

Earlier this week, Mission Essential Personnel won a Central Command contract for “aiding in the coordination, planning and execution of intelligence collection operations, exploitation and analytic support” in Afghanistan. It’s worth up to $475 million through 2013. And it comes just months after the company won a re-up from the government for its translator work totaling an eye-opening $679 million.

Ask Chris Taylor, Mission Essential Personnel’s CEO, and he’ll say the company’s evolution into the intelligence world is natural. “We’ve been in Afghanistan for three years, with a lot of people, a lot of understanding, a lot of ground truth, a lot of experience in the theater,” Taylor, a former Blackwater vice president who left that company three years ago, tells Danger Room. “It makes us a good partner for the services that were just awarded and makes us a good partner for anyone in Afghanistan.” But Mission Essential Personnel has faced accusations of being anything but a good partner.

Critics have charged that the contractor doesn’t pay its 6,000 translators in Afghanistan a decent wage; that it exposes them to too much danger; and that its linguists are insufficiently fluent in the local tongues and physically unfit to boot. The company categorically rejects all the claims: “Don’t believe everything you read,” Taylor says when asked about the loud criticisms of his company.

More serious was a lawsuit brought by a former employee, Paul Funk, alleging that the company sends poorly trained translators to Afghanistan. ABC News hyped the suit heavily earlier this month. But almost as soon as the piece came out, bloggers ripped it apart — a prelude to a federal judge, Leonie Brinkema, dismissing the suit last week. (Funk may refile, though.)

Taylor doesn’t exactly call his new intel contract a vindication, but he comes pretty close. “I can’t speak to other people’s opinions or what they write,” he says, “but it’s indicative that we’ve been doing a good job and will continue to do a good job.”

What exactly his company will be doing in the intel field isn’t clear. Taylor shies away from specifying, saying the particulars of Mission Essential Personnel’s new tasks haven’t been provided to the company yet. But its future intelligence work will probably be intimately tied to its translation work. The same interpreters that the company provides to 250 bases throughout Afghanistan will probably get new intel responsibilities.

“Our strength, obviously, is language, in the written and the spoken word, and what nuances, if any, could be pulled from either of those forms,” Taylor says. If there’s a flow of information “there are nuances, and the best people to analyze those nuances are the people who have translated them.”

So does that mean interpreting captured documents? Detainee statements? “The tasks you suggest could be in a future task order and would be within our capabilities,” he says, adding, “We specialize in interpreters and translation operations. Other than that, it would be difficult to speculate what could be asked of us within that context.”

Whatever it is exactly, Mission Essential Personnel is going to be well compensated to provide it. Just another example of how lucrative the U.S.’ move into privatized intelligence is turning out to be.

Photo: U.S. Army

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/09/translator-shop-moves-into-the-intelligence-biz/#more-32102#ixzz113RRNgVC

buglerbilly

01-10-10, 04:53 PM

Exclusive: Blackwater Wins Piece of $10 Billion Merc Deal

By Spencer Ackerman October 1, 2010 | 10:24 am

Never mind the dead civilians. Never mind the stolen guns. Never mind the murder arrests, the fraud allegations, and the accusations of guards pumping themselves up with steroids and cocaine. Through a “joint venture,” the notorious private security firm Blackwater has won a piece of a five-year State Department contract worth up to $10 billion, Danger Room has learned. Apparently, there is no misdeed so big that it can keep guns-for-hire from working for the government. And this is despite a campaign pledge from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to ban the company from federal contracts.

Eight private security firms have won State’s giant Worldwide Protective Services contract, the big Foggy Bottom partnership to keep embassies and their inhabitants safe. Two of those firms are longtime State contract holders DynCorp and Triple Canopy. The others are newcomers to the big security contract: EOD Technology, SOC, Aegis Defense Services, Global Strategies Group, Torres International Services and International Development Solutions LLC.

Don’t see any of Blackwater’s myriad business names on there? That’s apparently by design. International Development Solutions is the mechanism through which Blackwater retains a toehold into the contract, according to the department.

As Danger Room reported on Wednesday, Blackwater did not appear on the vendors’ list for Worldwide Protective Services. And the State Department confirms that the company, renamed Xe Services, didn’t actually submit its own independent bid. But: “its affiliate U.S. Training Center is part of International Development Solutions (IDS), a joint venture with Kaseman,” according to an official State Department statement to Danger Room. “This joint venture was determined by the Department’s source selection authority to be eligible for award.”

Last year, a subdivision of Blackwater, the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, changed its name to U.S. Training Center. In February, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, blasted Blackwater for setting shell companies in order to keep winning government security contracts despite its infamy.

According to State’s statement, the contracting process for the new Worldwide Protective Services deal included a “review” to ensure that companies met “minimum criteria” for eligibility. “This review included a process to determine whether any offerors had been suspended or debarred from the award of federal contracts,” it said. Despite Blackwater guards killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007; killing two Afghan civilians on a Kabul road in 2009; and absconding with hundreds of unauthorized guns from a U.S. military weapons depot in Afghanistan using the name of a South Park character, federal contracting authorities have never suspended or debarred Blackwater.

It’s not yet clear what the U.S. Training Center-International Development Solutions-Kaseman “joint venture” will do for the State Department. Worldwide Protective Services is actually a bundle of contracts in one, each governing specific duties for a firm to handle in a given country. Only two of those component contracts have been awarded so far.

One of them is to guard the huge U.S. embassy in Baghdad. That’s gone to SOC, which has ousted Triple Canopy, the incumbent security provider (which will still be part of the overall Worldwide Protective Services deal). If SOC remains the contract holder in Baghdad for the full five years — there’s an annual review — it stands to make nearly $974 million.

But because that so-called “task order” is specifically for on-site security around the gates of the Baghdad embassy, it’s not clear if SOC will also provide the 6,000-7,000 security guards the State Department estimates it needs to protect diplomats on the move around Iraq or its other outposts around the country. Last year, the Iraqi government barred Blackwater from doing business in Iraq in response to Nisour Square. But it’s not clear whether this new “joint venture” is eligible to operate in Iraq.

The other task order issued under Worldwide Protective Services is to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. That contract’s gone to EOD Technology, a global firm has in the past guarded the British and Canadian embassies in the Afghan capitol. And that means ArmorGroup North America — last seen with its guards taking tequila shots out of each others’ butts and engaging in extracurricular sex trafficking — has lost a contract worth nearly $274 million over five years.

According to a different statement from the Department of State, the new Worldwide Protective Services contract comes with new safeguards to prevent abuse. Those include mandatory cultural awareness training; the addition of interpreters on all protection missions; financial penalties for poor performance; and a formal ban on alcohol. (Yes, after years of alcohol-related contractor incidents.) Despite these new protections, the department still sees fit to continue business with the most infamous member of the private-security world.

Photo: Wikimedia

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buglerbilly

04-10-10, 04:58 PM

Mystery Merc Group Is Blackwater’s 34th Front Company

By Spencer Ackerman October 4, 2010 | 12:01 am | Categories: Mercs

This tasteful, quaint red-brick house on a tree-lined street in northwest Washington doesn’t appear to be the headquarters for a private security company that stands to make millions in a war zone. But the online trail for a mysterious firm, partially owned by Blackwater, leads here. And that company not only just won part of security contract with the State Department worth up to $10 billion last week. It’s also the latest in a series of cutouts used by the notorious mercenary firm to hide its work from public scrutiny. The business that’s listed at this house? Blackwater’s 34th front company, if you’re counting.

Maybe I wouldn’t have driven over to the wealthy Tenleytown neighborhood in D.C. had International Development Solutions LLC answered its listed number, but it was out of service on Friday. Had my calls been returned by the two security companies that make up the “joint venture,” Virginia-based Kaseman and Blackwater arm U.S. Training Center, I would perhaps have gotten some clarity on whether this was definitely the right “International Development Solutions.” But not only did no one return my calls, but the joint venture’s generic name is as Google-resistant as they come, so when I found a business listing for International Development Systems in Washington D.C., I drove on out.

Two rings of a doorbell and ten minutes of waiting didn’t yield a response from anyone who might have been inside what was clearly someone’s three-story residence. No one was around to explain how a company supposedly located here ended up with a chunk of a five-year State Department contract. Blackwater has pulled this sort of thing before, setting up dozens of front groups to get government cash while concealing its tainted brand. More of a mystery is why the State Department let the company get away with it. Again.

A months-long investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year found that the Army and Raytheon awarded a multi-million dollar sub-contract to a firm called Paravant for the training of Afghan troops. Paravant claimed to have “years” of experience performing such work. As it turned out, Paravant didn’t really exist. “Paravant had never performed any services and was simply a shell company established to avoid what one former Blackwater executive called the ‘baggage’ associated with the Blackwater name as the company pursued government business,” committee chairman Carl Levin said in March.

If you like Paravant, you’ll love International Development Solutions. Very few people seem to be familiar with it. Hill sources didn’t know what it was. Both critics of and advocates for the private-security industry were just as baffled. “I’ve never heard of IDS,” confesses Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the Project on Government Oversight, in a typical comment.

All of a sudden, though, International Development Solutions is a major player in the private-security field. Last week, Danger Room broke the story of the State Department including it in an eight-company consortium of merc firms, including industry giants like DynCorp, that will hold its elite contract for protecting diplomats and embassies: the Worldwide Protective Services contract. The official announcement of the award gives absolutely no indication that International Development Solutions is tied to Blackwater; State only disclosed that fact after Danger Room pressed it.

Diligent work by the Senate Armed Services Committee determined a web of names under which Blackwater — renamed Xe last year — did business to avoid such baggage. Among them (deep breath): Total Intelligence Solutions; Technical Defense Inc.; Apex Management Solutions LLC; Aviation Worldwide Services LLC; Air Quest Inc.; Presidential Airways Inc.; EP Aviation LLC; Backup Training LLC; Terrorism Research Center, Inc. All in all, the committee found 33 aliases. International Development Solutions appears to be number 34.

Those other spinoffs are generally up front about the services they offer. Aviation Worldwide Services, for instance, is now part of AAR Corp., which provides cargo services and “specialized aircraft modifications” to the military. Total Intelligence Solutions does threat analysis for corporate clients doing business in dicey parts of the world. Its subsidiary, Terrorism Research Center Inc., offers clients classes in DIY counterterrorism and threat prevention. (A forthcoming module: “How to Identify a Terrorist Cell in Your Jurisdiction.”) By contrast, International Development Solutions doesn’t have much of an online profile.

The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein provided a clue as to how the newcomer might have gotten a foot into the door for the Worldwide Protective Services contract. The board of Kaseman, Blackwater’s partner on the venture, is filled with former State Department, CIA and military notables: State’s one-time anti-terrorism chief Henry Crumpton; former CIA Director Michael Hayden; and retired General Anthony Zinni, to name a few. (The CIA and Blackwater have a looooong history.)

Blackwater has a lot it might reasonably wish to obscure. To wit: High-profile shootings of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan; murder trials; allegations of steroid and cocaine abuse; improper removal of weapons from U.S. weapons depots using the name of a South Park character.

The big question is why the State Department is continuing to do business with this oh-so-classy-group. In the past, government contracting officials have explained that they can’t stop any company that hasn’t been de-certified from federal bidding from seeking contracts. Blackwater, despite everything, somehow has retained its certification.

But that doesn’t explain why State awarded the contract to the Blackwater-tied company. State has always taken notice of the fact that Blackwater has never lost a single diplomat it’s protected. But that sends the implicit message that State considers foreign lives less valuable than American ones — a problematic one for a diplomatic entity to send. The new Worldwide Protective Services contract was, among other things, an opportunity for State to break from the company that caused an international debacle when its guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. State stood by Blackwater — or at least a company that didn’t want the public to know it was Blackwater.

For years, numerous internal reviews and external watchdogs have criticized State for weak oversight over its security contractors — or worse. In March, the New York Times reported that the department’s oversight officials “sought to block any serious investigation” of Nisour Square. After discovering that State failed to correct years’ worth of security violations from the company hired to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, the Project on Government Oversight’s executive director, Danielle Brian, testified last year that the department is “incapable of properly handling a contract.” A former State security official told Mother Jones that a “bigtime revolving door” between the department and the contractors accounts for State’s blase attitude.

“The State Department has supported the Department of Justice investigation and prosecution of this case every step of the way,” reads an official answer the State Department provided when Danger Room asked why it did. “We fully respect the independence and integrity of the U.S. judicial system, and we support holding legally accountable any contractor personnel who have committed crimes.”

But that’s not a substantive answer. What experience does International Development Solutions have with providing security for diplomats in war zones? What makes this unknown company more qualified than at least four other established firms that didn’t win part of Worldwide Protective Services? What sort of due diligence did State perform to ensure that International Development Solutions isn’t another Paravant?

State has yet to address any of those questions. And no answers are forthcoming in the red-brick house near a Whole Foods that supposedly houses Blackwater’s latest alias.

Photo: Spencer Ackerman

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/blackwaters-34th-front-company-wins-big-diplo-jackpot/#more-32299#ixzz11P0HCdiF

buglerbilly

05-10-10, 02:11 AM

Karzai Starts Closing Security Firms

October 04, 2010

Associated Press

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The Afghan government said it has started dissolving private security firms in the country by taking steps to end the operations of eight companies, including the firm formerly known as Blackwater and three other international contractors.

"We have very good news for the Afghan people today," presidential spokesman Waheed Omar told reporters in the capital on Sunday. "The disbanding of eight private security firms has started."

Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced in August that private security contractors would have to cease operations by the end of the year -- wiping out an industry with tens of thousands of guards who protect military convoys, government officials and businesspeople.

Some security contractors have been criticized for operating more like private militias, and the government said it could not have armed groups that were independent of the police or military forces.

The eight companies include Xe Services -- the North Carolina-based contractor formerly called Blackwater; Virginia-based NCL Holdings LLC; New Mexico-based Four Horsemen International; and London-based Compass International, Omar said. Two large Afghan firms, White Eagle Security Services and Abdul Khaliq Achakzai, are also on the list. The remaining two companies are small operations with fewer than 100 employees, so he declined to name them.

Xe, at least, has been the subject of investigations. In February, U.S. Senate investigators said Xe hired violent drug users to help train the Afghan army and declared "sidearms for everyone" -- even though employees weren't authorized to carry weapons. The allegations came as part of an investigation into the 2009 shooting deaths of two Afghan civilians by employees of the company.

Omar said many of the firms had turned in weapons, some voluntarily. He did not say why the eight firms had been chosen as the first to be closed down, and if any international firms had actually left the country. A statement issued by the president's office was more strongly worded, saying that the process of closing down the eight companies was "almost complete."

An owner of White Eagle, Sayed Maqsud, said his firm had handed over weapons for a contract that had finished but was still employing guards under another contract.

"We are not shut down. Only we gave up 340 weapons," Maqsud said, explaining that the company's contract to guard fuel convoys for American troops in southern Helmand province had ended. He said he fired 530 guards who had been working under that program when the contract finished and handed over the leftover guns to the government.

However, he said they have another 1,200 guards protecting cell phone towers for South Africa-based mobile phone company MTN, and said he plans to continue that unless the government says they have to close down.

"According to the decree of Karzai, still we have two months until December. We don't know what will happen after that," Maqsud said. He said he was angry at being lumped in with militias.

"We are not warlords. We are normal people. We started at the beginning from zero. After four years, we had 2,000 people. I am very proud that I gave an opportunity to 2,000 people to work," he said. None of the employees Maqsud let go joined the police, he said -- noting that the pay is low and police are targeted by insurgents in Helmand.

"I think most of them joined the Taliban," Maqsud said.

None of the other companies named could be immediately reached for comment.

Karzai's original decree gave an exemption to companies used to guard the compounds of international embassies or organizations, and Omar said the disbanding process does not apply to these organizations. It was unclear what this means for companies on the list that also have contracts to guard U.S. government installations or other diplomatic missions.

Omar said the government was focused on security companies who are providing protection for highways or convoys, not those training Afghan forces or guarding embassies.

"We would like to be able at some point to be able to provide security for embassies and international organizations," but the security forces are not yet able to do so, he said.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said it was looking into what the decision would mean for U.S. government contracts.

"We are looking closely at the implications of today's announcements. We are going to continue working closely with the government to ensure that the safety and security of our personnel is preserved as the decree is implemented," spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden said.

The Afghan government has estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 armed security guards are working in the country.

The Interior Ministry has 52 security firms licensed, but some older contracts are still being completed by unlicensed firms, according to the U.S. military. About half of the companies are Afghan-owned.

About 37 companies are working with the U.S. government, totaling about 26,000 armed security guards. The majority of those work for the military, though some are employed by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the military.

NATO forces and Western diplomats have cautiously backed the Afghan plan to dissolve private security firms -- praising the push by the Afghan government to take control of its security but warning that it should only happen as fast as conditions allow.

The gap left by the contractors will have to be filled by Afghan police or soldiers -- putting more demands on forces that are pushing to expand substantially in the next few years so that they can take the lead in the country's security by 2014.

Afghan officials say the expansion is on track, but the Afghan army and police are still widely seen as hobbled by a lack of education, drug abuse and corruption.

The push also comes as much of the country has gotten more dangerous. The Taliban now regularly launch attacks in formerly peaceful northern provinces and a U.S. troop surge in the south has been accompanied by rising troop casualties and civilian deaths.

This has been the deadliest year for international troops in the nine-year conflict. The toll has shaken the commitment of many NATO countries, where there are rising calls to start drawing down troops quickly.

The prime minister of Australia -- where parliament is expected to hold a debate soon on the country's role in the war -- made Afghanistan her first state visit this weekend. Prime Minister Julia Gillard visited troops Saturday and had a private dinner with Karzai and pledged continued backing, her office said in a statement Sunday.

Australia has 1,550 troops in Afghanistan, mostly in southern Uruzgan province. Twenty-one Australian soldiers have died since the war began.

On Sunday, NATO said two more servicemembers were killed in weekend attacks, making seven killed in the first three days of October. One died in an insurgent attack in the north on Sunday and the other in a bomb attack in the south on Saturday. No other details were provided.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

05-10-10, 02:18 AM

U.S Hires Gun-Runner, Coup-Plotter to Guard Diplos

By Spencer Ackerman October 4, 2010 | 12:45 pm

As if a Blackwater front group wasn’t enough. The State Department is also giving a slice of its $10 billion security contract to Aegis Defense Services, a company run by a notorious “mercenary king” who’s violated international arms embargoes and tried to overthrow at least two African governments.

Aegis is a private-security giant. Since 2004, it’s held a contract to oversee reconstruction security in Iraq, one of the largest that the Defense Department has ever awarded. And despite much skepticism, government watchdogs have given its performance a thumbs-up. But Aegis’ work has been overshadowed in the public eye by its picaresque, Aston Martin-driving founder, who turns up in an conspicuous number of third-world coup attempts.

If it wasn’t for Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Spicer might be the most colorful (and most notorious) person in the private security field. A former British commando and self-identified “Unorthodox Soldier,” Spicer served in the Falklands, the Gulf war, Bosnia and Northern Ireland. But his infamy came as a private-security pioneer in the 1990s.

Spicer’s first company, Sandline International, got a $36 million deal in 1997 to guard a copper mine for the government of Papua New Guinea before an incensed Army launched a coup and briefly arrested him. Undeterred, the next year Spicer ran 30 tons of weapons to Sierra Leone’s “government in exile” in violation of a United Nations arms embargo. He’s also been connected to a 2004 coup attempt against the government of oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, as Vanity Fair recounted.
The Iraq war allowed Spicer to move into the U.S. government market. Two years after starting Aegis — his current company, which trades on his reputation — Spicer won a massive contract with the Defense Department in 2004 to guard reconstruction projects in Iraq and coordinate the movements of thousands of private security guards working on reconstruction. It’s earned the company at least $670 million.

Aegis’s guards in Iraq took the company viral. YouTube features a number of swagger-filled Aegis videos depicting the tough security work the company performs. But in 2005, the above “trophy video” surfaced showing Aegis guards firing on Iraqi vehicles that don’t pose obvious risks — all set, light-heartedly, to Elvis’s “Mystery Train.” The U.S. military never reprimanded the company for its release.

Danger Room had its doubts about Aegis’s oversight. But independent watchdogs have given Aegis high marks. While initially critical of its performance, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction assessed last year (.pdf) that Aegis’s work for the Defense Department has been “satisfactory to outstanding.” Since 2008 alone, it helped the military track over 55,000 private-security operations through Iraq, SIGIR found, and reported 80 of all 380 private-security “serious incidents” there to the proper authorities between February 2008 and January 2009. (Though that seems like a low percentage for a supervisory body, no?)

The State Department has yet to respond to requests for comment about why Aegis won part of its Worldwide Protective Services contract. We’ll update this post if and when it does.

But one possible clue about the award — aside from SIGIR’s assessment — is that the new State Department contract is potentially much bigger than the last one: up to $10 billion over five years, compared to perhaps $2 billion for its predecessor. While it’s not yet clear what Aegis will do for State, it could be that the department wanted to go with a company that can go big. SIGIR found last year that Aegis employed 1400 guards in Iraq. State estimates it may need up to 7000 guards — plus armored vehicles, plus helicopters — to protect its diplomats in Iraq now that the military drawdown is accelerating. And Spicer’s company is nothing if not outsized.

Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/u-s-hires-gun-runner-coup-plotter-to-guard-diplos/#more-32365#ixzz11RHJqjf3

buglerbilly

05-10-10, 05:56 PM

ManTech Awarded $70 Million Contract to Operate Advanced ISR, Battle Command and Force Protection Systems in Iraq

(Source: ManTech International Corporation; issued October 4, 2010)

A slightly different kind of PMC, one providing Intelligence services.............

FAIRFAX, Va. --- ManTech International Corporation, a leading provider of innovative technologies and solutions for mission-critical national security programs, announced today that it has received a task order under its Strategic Services Sourcing (S3) prime contract to provide Base Expeditionary Target Surveillance Systems-Combined (BETSS-C) operators in Iraq.

The multiple-award task order, in support of the U.S. Army’s Project Manager Night Vision/Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition (PM NV/RSTA), has an initial period of performance of 12 months and two optional six-month extensions. The expected value to ManTech is $70 million if all contract options are exercised.

Under the contract, ManTech will provide BETSS-C operators and related administrative, managerial, logistics and business services necessary to support their deployment to Iraq.

BETSS-C enhances perimeter surveillance, battle command and force protection at joint security stations, forward-operating bases and combat outposts throughout Iraq. The system provides commanders with a digital map display of video, images and other information from ground sensors, pan-tilt-zoom cameras, mid- and long-range electro-optical/infrared sensors and radar mounted on towers, aerostats and other unmanned airborne vehicles.

“ManTech’s superior communications and electronics expertise, coupled with our extensive in-theater operations support experience will be a valuable asset to the BETSS-C program,” said Louis M. Addeo, president and chief operating officer of ManTech’s Technical Services Group. “We are proud to continue our support of the U.S. and coalition mission in Iraq.”

Headquartered in Fairfax, Va., with approximately 9,300 professionals in 40 countries around the world, ManTech is a leading provider of innovative technologies and solutions for mission-critical national security programs for the intelligence community; the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security and Justice; the space community; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and other U.S. federal government customers.

-ends-

buglerbilly

08-10-10, 03:02 AM

Scathing Report Details War Contracting Mess

Oct 7, 2010

By Paul McLeary paul_mcleary@aviationweek.com
WASHINGTON

More on this in the Afghanistan and Pakistan thread...............

An explosive Senate Armed Service Committee report charges that “the Department of Defense has little insight into the operations of private security providers hired as subcontractors by DOD prime contractors” in Afghanistan.”

In addition, “the files kept by U.S. contracting authorities “contain little or no information about contractors’ past performance and whether or how they vetted and trained their personnel,” the Oct. 7 report says. “Further, most of those contract files contained no information abut how those security contractors actually performed on the job.”

The narrative arc of the report revolves in part around the saga of two competing warlords, Mr. White (real name Timor Shah) and Mr. Pink (Nadir Khan), who fought over lucrative security contracts in Herat worth $12,000 a month. Mr. White would eventually be killed by Mr. Pink, who then fled into the protection of the local Taliban even as his men continued to work as security contractors for contractor Armor Group at Shindand Airbase for more than a month.

They were eventually fired for supplying intelligence about the base to Mr. Pink, whom the U.S. military eventually identified as a “mid-level Taliban manager.”

The report, rolled out for reporters by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), targets two security contractors, Armor Group North America and EOD Technology, and the larger failure of American and international forces to contract out security work to Afghan nationals.

The Senate committee “uncovered evidence of private security contractors funneling U.S. taxpayers’ dollars to Afghan warlords and strongmen linked to murder, kidnapping, bribery as well as Taliban and other anti-Coalition activities.” Also of interest, though not directly related to the story, is the fact that Armor Group recently lost the contract to supply guards for the U.S. embassy in Kabul to EOD Technology.

buglerbilly

19-10-10, 02:36 AM

Blackwater guard won't be indicted

October 19, 2010 - 10:14AM

Federal US prosecutors say a former security contractor for Blackwater USA will not be indicted in the 2006 killing of an Iraqi guard.

A congressional report alleges Seattle resident Andrew Moonen was wandering drunk around Baghdad's Green Zone when he encountered and fatally shot Raheem Saadoun, a 32-year-old guard for Iraqi Vice President Adil Abd-al-Mahdi.

Moonen reported the shooting at another security contractor's post, saying he'd been in a gunfight with Iraqis.

US Attorney Jenny Durkan say prosecutors decided there was too little evidence to sustain a criminal conviction in the killing.

Durkan wrote in a letter to Moonen's lawyer that the decision was not made lightly. He added: "There is no question that the shooting death of Mr Saadoun by your client was a tragic event."

© 2010 AP

buglerbilly

29-10-10, 02:48 PM

ArmorGroup’s Afghan Shenanigans Detailed in State Dept. Watchdog Report

(Source: Project On Government Oversight; issued Oct. 28, 2010)

A new report by the State Department Office of Inspector General (OIG) confirms and expands upon numerous problems identified by POGO in a September 1, 2009, letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The OIG report evaluated the performance of ArmorGroup North America (ArmorGroup, AGNA), the contractor responsible for guarding the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan. ArmorGroup’s contract expired on June 30, 2010 and EOD Technology, Inc. (EODT) was selected to take over. ArmorGroup will continue to guard the Embassy through the end of 2010.

Some of the new revelations in the State OIG report include:

-- AGNA employed, and the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security failed to scrutinize, “Nepalese guards without verifiable experience, training, or background investigations in violation of its contract.”

-- “AGNA cannot account for 101 U.S. Government-furnished weapons that have been missing since 2007. AGNA used U.S. Government-furnished weapons for training rather than required contractor-furnished weapons.”

-- “AGNA regularly allows individuals who are not vetted by Embassy Kabul’s regional security office unescorted access to Camp Sullivan, a U.S. Government-owned camp containing sensitive materials.”

“This report offers more proof that the State Department is either lacking the will or the capacity to keep its contractors in line,” said POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian. POGO investigator Jake Wiens questioned the timing of the report, asking, “Why did this report come so late in the game? It would have been more relevant had it come before the decision to remove ArmorGroup was made.”

POGO’s letter garnered international media attention in part because of a number of pictures which documented ArmorGroup guards behaving in a lewd and obscene manner. But the letter was predominately focused on woefully inadequate oversight of the contract by the State Department and the resulting deficiencies in ArmorGroup’s performance, many of which threatened the safety of the Embassy and its personnel.

A separate report by the Senate Armed Services Committee recently raised concerns about both ArmorGroup and EODT, the contractor that will soon be responsible for guarding the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

http://levin.senate.gov/newsroom/supporting/2010/SASC.PSCReport.100710.pdf

The report detailed how a Taliban-linked warlord “appears to have been successful in placing men fired by ArmorGroup onto EODT’s contract” in western Afghanistan. That finding raises concerns that EODT may be even worse than ArmorGroup in terms of properly vetting their staff.

In June testimony before the Commission on Wartime Contracting, Ms. Brian questioned the outsourcing of security functions in war zones.

Founded in 1981, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) is a nonpartisan independent watchdog that champions good government reforms. POGO's investigations into corruption, misconduct, and conflicts of interest achieve a more effective, accountable, open, and ethical federal government.

Click here for the full report, on the State Dept. OIG website.

http://oig.state.gov/documents/organization/150316.pdf

-ends-

buglerbilly

30-10-10, 05:08 AM

Pentagon: Intel Contractors Went Too Far

October 29, 2010

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- A military contractor says he'll fight Pentagon accusations that his people went too far in gathering intelligence in Afghanistan that ended up being used to target militants.

A high-level Defense Department inquiry concluded that defense contractor Michael Furlong, a retired Army officer, ran what amounted to an illegal spying ring of private military contractors.

The 15-page classified report into the matter, obtained by The Associated Press, says Furlong's human intelligence collection program, known as "Information Operations Capstone," amounted to a "violation of executive orders" and Defense Department policy.

Drafted by Michael Decker, the Pentagon's assistant secretary for intelligence oversight, and initialed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the inquiry calls for further investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

In an interview, Furlong denied the accusations and said he never was questioned by the investigators nor has the Pentagon shared the report with him so he can answer the charges. He currently is on administrative leave, pending final review of the case.

The dispute over the Capstone operation centers on the military's struggle over the past two years to ramp up intelligence-gathering to support counterinsurgency. The strategy includes elements of nation-building, which requires more social, civil and economic data, as well as the tactical intelligence needed for targeting.

The outgoing head of military intelligence operations in Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, wrote a controversial public critique of intelligence-gathering in the war zone earlier this year. Flynn criticized the military intelligence gathering structure as too focused on hunting al-Qaida, to the exclusion of building a multilayered picture of Afghan civil society.

The program criticized by the Pentagon inquiry was set up to provide just that sort of non-targeting intelligence.

Furlong says that the contractors -- retired CIA officers and special operations veterans, in addition to local Afghans -- were tracking social and civil society for the U.S.-led NATO war effort and that if and when they sometimes came across militant plots, they passed that information on to the relevant authorities as outlined in their contract.

Former officials who worked under the program say the contractors also refused to ask any follow-up questions of their sources when military authorities asked them to pursue leads from their initial reports, to keep their contract intelligence collection separate from military capture-and-kill activities.

The former officials who worked under the program spoke on condition of anonymity because the $22 million operation, which ended May 30, is now part of the legal dispute.

But the inquiry concluded that Furlong's program was carrying out "unauthorized" human intelligence operations by what it termed "nongovernment personnel under the guise of gathering and reporting 'Force Protection Atmospherics.' "

The inquiry also accuses Furlong of "deliberately misleading" the military leadership on the "legal basis" for the program.

The inquiry further recommends that the Pentagon clarify what is legal, and what's not, when it comes to human intelligence and information operations, a recommendation initialed by Gates as "approved."

Since it was shut down in May, the Furlong program has been replaced by an enhanced structure of intelligence collection, along the lines of Flynn's blueprint. Flynn, who has been tapped for a top job working for the director of national intelligence, added new layers of collection and analysis, including a staff with field operatives who travel and function like media reporters.

Furlong says his team operated in much the same way.

The Capstone contract was run by Lockheed Martin and staffed by subcontractors including Strategic Influence Alternatives and International Media Ventures, a communications company based in St. Petersburg, Fla., with Czech ownership.

There are two more Pentagon investigations under way into the matter, including one by the Defense Department inspector general, in addition to the Air Force investigation.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

04-11-10, 03:06 PM

Pentagon awards $630m Afghanistan contract to controversial supplier

The Pentagon has awarded an Afghanistan fuel supply contract worth a potential $630m (£388 million) to Mina Corp, a highly secretive company which refuses to disclose its ownership and whose role is under investigation by the US Congress.

by Richard Orange in Almaty
Published: 12:58PM GMT 04 Nov 2010

A U.S. C-5 Galaxy aircraft lands at Manas International Airport near Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan Photo: REUTERS

The award of the contract to supply the Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan, goes directly against the requests of the country’s President, Roza Otunbayeva, making it an enormous diplomatic gamble for the US.

Derek Mitchell, principal deputy assistant secretary of defence, said that the Pentagon’s main concern was ensuring supplies for the war in Afghanistan.

'“It is a priority of the United States to ensure a secure, reliable and uninterrupted supply of fuel to the transit centre to enable us to sustain our critical operations in Afghanistan,” he said.

Mina Corp and Red Star, which share personnel and operations, have won more than $3bn worth of contracts to supply Manas and the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan since 2003, but have never revealed their ownership.

The award has been made even more controversial by the revelation in the Washington Post over the weekend that Erkin Bekbolotov, one of Mina Corp’s partners, met with Atai Sadybakasov, Mrs Otunbayeva’s son, in Istanbul in July. Two revolutions in the country in the past five years have been caused in part by public suspicions that the families of the then Presidents were benefiting from the contracts.

Mrs Otunbayeva has in recent months lobbied Washington to cancel the tender and instead give the contract to a joint venture between Russian state-controlled oil firm Gazpromneft and a state-owned Kyrgyz oil company.

John Tierney, chairman the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which launched its investigation into the two companies in April, confirmed yesterday that his team had discovered no evidence of business links between Mina Corp and the former president’s family.

“The Subcommittee has not uncovered any credible evidence to support the allegations that the Bakiyev family or their affiliates, owned or received financial benefits from the fuel contractors or subcontractors,” he said.

His report, out later this month, will instead criticise the Pentagon for its lack of transparency. “The Pentagon and State Department ignored widespread Kyrgyz public perceptions of contract corruption engendered by a fundamental lack of transparency in the contracting process and Mina Corporation’s operations,” he said yesterday.

The new contract includes provisions for a second supplier, such as the Kyrgyz-Russian joint venture, to supply a portion of the fuel.

But it is unclear whether this will be enough to placate Kyrgyz politicians opposed to Mina Corp’s role, who are likely to play prominent roles when a new government is formed within the next few weeks.

Omurbek Babanov, the leader of the Respublika party, and Almazbek Atambayev, chairman of the Social Democratic Party chairman, have in the past pushed to oust Mina Corp. And Ata-Zhurt, the party which won the most seats in last month’s election, favours ejecting the US from the base.

buglerbilly

06-11-10, 12:51 PM

Controversial defense contractors Mina and Red Star reveal owners

By Andrew Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, November 6, 2010; 1:01 AM

Amid rising anger in Kyrgyzstan over a new Pentagon jet fuel contract for a vital U.S. base in the Central Asian nation, a secretive business group at the center of the storm Friday lifted a veil of mystery surrounding its ownership.

The group, which comprises Gibraltar-registered Mina Corp. and Red Star Enterprises, has won Pentagon deals worth billions of dollars over the past eight years but only on Thursday - a day after announcing another contract with the group - did the Pentagon ask for, and then receive, details of who owns the operation.

The business, according to a Defense Logistics Agency official who requested anonymity, belongs to Delphine Le Dain, the French wife of Douglas Edelman - an elusive Californian businessman who used to run a bar and hamburger joint in Kyrgyzstan - and to Erkin Bekbolotov, his 35-year-old Kyrgyz partner.

Pentagon contracting regulations do not require that contractors reveal their ownership. Mina and Red Star nonetheless went to great lengths to conceal the ownership role of Edelman's wife - who has no known experience in jet fuel logistics - and Bekbolotov behind a web of offshore entities.

Revealing this data should help meet demands from the White House that the Pentagon shed more light on the controversial jet fuel deals, but it is unlikely to calm the fury in Kyrgyzstan, which demanded Friday that Washington stop dealings with Mina Corp. The company won a major new Pentagon contract Wednesday to supply jet fuel to a U.S. air base in the former Soviet republic. The award infuriated Kyrgyz officials, who want private contractors replaced by a Russian-Kyrgyz joint venture.

A statement issued by the Foreign Ministry in Bishkek, the Kyrgyz capital, said that Washington must "suspend cooperation" with Mina until the completion of an investigation by state prosecutors. It cited "corrupt schemes around fuel deliveries" to the U.S. base and demanded steps to "ensure transparency and remove suspicion."

A serious rupture between Washington and Bishkek could jeopardize the future of a U.S. base that is used to fly troops to and from Afghanistan and houses a fleet of aero-tankers that do in-flight refueling over the Afghan combat zone. The jet fuel controversy is fed in part by political jockeying in Bishkek following an election last month that boosted the clout of politicians hostile to Mina and Red Star.

Kyrgyz officials have repeatedly accused the companies of corrupt ties to the family of former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who was ousted in April. But they have provided no proof of wrongdoing and a six-month investigation by the House subcommittee on foreign affairs and national security has found no credible evidence of corruption.

The companies have denied wrongdoing and say they are the victims of misinformation spread by rivals.

But, U.S. officials say, their secrecy and the Pentagon's contracting rules have helped fan suspicion. Mina and Red Star spokesman John Lough declined to comment on why the firms had hidden their ownership, but he said that they provided the data "immediately" when the Defense Logistics Agency asked for it Thursday. Mina's recently appointed chief executive Denis Grigoriev revealed the ownership details to DLA Friday morning. Lough had no comment on why Edelman's wife, a former journalist, would be co-owner of the business.

Mina and Red Star told congressional investigators of their ownership this summer, but only after elaborate negotiations over confidentiality. Edelman did not comply with a congressional subpoena. Bekbolotov, the co-owner, and the companies' director of operations, former U.S. military intelligence officer Chuck Squires, agreed to answer questions.

buglerbilly

21-12-10, 12:15 AM

Contractors Behaving Badly Causes US Headaches

December 20, 2010

Associated Press

WASHINGTON - At two in the morning on Sept. 9, 2005, five DynCorp International security guards assigned to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's protective detail returned to their compound drunk, with a prostitute in tow. Less than a week later, three of these same guards got drunk again, this time in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight to Thailand.

"They had been intoxicated, loud and obnoxious," according to an internal company report of the incident, which noted that Afghanistan's deputy director for elections and a foreign diplomat were also in the lounge. "Complaints were made regarding the situation." DynCorp fired the three guards.

Such episodes represent the headaches that U.S. contractors can cause in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They are indispensable to the State Department's mission overseas, handling security, transportation, construction, food service and more. But when hired hands behave badly - or break the law - they cast a cloud over the American presence.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad State Department security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va.; Triple Canopy of Reston, Va.; and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide - Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.

Most of the infractions, which include excessive drinking, drug use, sexual misconduct and mishandling weapons, were violations of corporate and U.S. policies that probably went unnoticed by ordinary Afghans and Iraqis. But other offenses played out in public, undermining U.S. efforts in both countries and raising questions about how carefully job candidates are screened.

Despite complaints from foreign capitals about reckless behavior and heavy-handed tactics, U.S. contractors are more important than ever.

In Iraq, the departure of U.S. combat forces has left a security and logistics support vacuum to be filled by the private sector. In testimony to the independent Wartime Contracting Commission in June, a State Department official said as many as 7,000 security contractors - more than double the current number - will be needed to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other offices across Iraq.

Karzai had to back away from the Friday deadline he had set to ban security contractors after Western diplomats said the move threatened the completion of billions of dollars worth of critical reconstruction projects that need to be protected from insurgent attacks.

In 2009, DynCorp employees working under a separate State Department contract to train Afghan police would be the source of more trouble. A diplomatic report disclosed by the WikiLeaks organization described a panicked Afghan minister urging U.S. officials to stop The Washington Post from running a story about DynCorp workers who had hired an Afghan teenage boy to dance at a company party. Videotape of the event showed more than a dozen DynCorp workers cheering the teenage dancer on as he moved around a single employee sitting on a chair, according to the Post story, which ran in July 2009.

Interior Minister Hanif Atmar claimed the embarrassing publicity could cause a backlash in Afghanistan and "endanger lives."

DynCorp is one of the department's most prominent vendors. More than one-third of the company's $3.1 billion in 2009 revenues came from State Department contracts for armed security, law enforcement training and aviation services, according to the company's latest annual report. The police training contract alone is valued at $651 million.

DynCorp fired four senior managers for the dancing episode, which it said was "culturally inappropriate" and reflected poor judgment by the employees.

"No company can guarantee that their employees will behave perfectly at all times, under all conditions," DynCorp spokeswoman Ashley Burke said. "What we can guarantee is that we will clearly define expectations, train our employees according to those expectations and hold people accountable for their behaviors."

U.S. contractors have sought to improve their reputation through advocacy groups such as the Professional Services Council and the International Stability Operations Association, both based in Washington. In Geneva last month, more than 50 companies that work in war zones signed an international code of conduct to improve openness and accountability.

Ignacio Balderas, Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, said his company will push to ensure the code gains worldwide acceptance "and becomes an integral part of how the industry operates."

But reversing entrenched attitudes isn't easy. In a telling assessment of how U.S. contractors are viewed, Atmar, who Karzai dismissed as interior minister in June, reported that "these contractor companies do not have many friends."

The documents obtained by AP help to show why.

In March 2008, Blackwater guards forced an Afghan soldier to the ground and handcuffed him after he refused to let their vehicle pass through a checkpoint at the Kabul airport because they didn't have proper identification. A 13-page report by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul describes a tense confrontation between the Blackwater personnel and Afghan troops that could have resulted in a gun battle.

The confrontation caused "significant damage" to the embassy's reputation with the Afghan National Army, the report said. The embassy ordered the firing of the two Blackwater guards it said were most responsible.

In early 2006, when U.S. authorities were stressing the importance of cultural sensitivity in Iraq, a Blackwater contractor was openly hostile to Iraqis, according to a company record. During a detail at Iraq's ministry of water, he refused to shake hands with the ministry's chief of security, accusing the Iraqi official of being "part of the (expletive) Mahdi militia," a reference to a paramilitary force loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

A month later, the same employee repeatedly disrupted a class on Iraqi culture, accusing the instructor of "spreading propaganda." He was fired after that for being "unable to act professionally" toward the Iraqis, State Department employees and co-workers, according to the document.

In March 2005, a fired Blackwater contractor who was in a hotel in Jordan awaiting a flight back to the U.S. ignored a supervisor's order to stay in his room until his plane was ready to leave. He got drunk and fought with several Jordanians, spit at and tore down a picture of Jordan's King Abdullah, and was arrested. Blackwater managers escorted him from the jail to the airport.

Blackwater eventually lost its license to operate as guardian of U.S. diplomats in Iraq after its security guards were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.

In a written statement, Xe said it maintains high standards of conduct. When company policy is violated, "disciplinary actions are taken up to and including termination from employment," the company said.

On Friday, the investment group USTC Holdings announced it had bought Xe in a deal that includes the company's training facility in North Carolina. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

© Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

10-01-11, 01:10 PM

Onetime Blackwater affiliate scores U.S. contract

By Jeff Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, January 9, 2011; 6:54 PM

A company closely associated with the security firm once known as Blackwater has won a new State Department contract worth more than $84 million over five years.

The contract went to International Development Solutions, a joint venture that includes U.S. Training Center, a company owned until recently by Xe Services, which changed its name from Blackwater after a cascade of legal problems over several years.

The consortium will provide protective security in the Israel-occupied West Bank, "services that are based from the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem," State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

The initial contract, awarded Jan. 3, is for one year, "with the possibility of four, one-year renewable options" with a total value of roughly $84.3 million, Toner said.

International Development Solutions (IDS) is a joint venture between majority partner Kaseman, a McLean company whose board is stocked with top former State Department and CIA officials, and U.S. Training Center (USTC), the onetime Blackwater affiliate that former officials say still employs many of its operatives.

A USTC spokesman said the company would have no comment. A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the contract freely, said the company no longer had a relationship with Xe. Both companies are based in tiny Moyock, N.C., the former headquarters of Blackwater as well.

Training for the new Jerusalem contract almost certainly will be done in Moyock, close observers said, because USTC has no comparable facilities elsewhere.

The company had no comment, a representative said.

Despite its legal troubles, Blackwater-associated companies have continued to score government contracts. Last June, Xe Services won a $100 million contract from the CIA to provide protective services in Afghanistan. Then in October, partnering with another company, Xe won a share of a $10 billion State Department contract for worldwide protective services.

"The mere fact that the [State Department] is still throwing millions of dollars their way for work is completely amazing and speaks to their ability to get around things," said a former Blackwater employee, who asked to remain anonymous because he now works for the government.

Blackwater was plagued by problems about its work in Iraq, including an incident in which contractors allegedly fatally shot 17 Iraqis in a crowded square. Eventually, the Iraqi government refused to give the company a new operating license.

Last February, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to investigate whether Xe Services and Raytheon set up "a shell company" to bid on an Army contract without "the 'baggage' that the name Blackwater carried."

Last summer, with his former top managers facing criminal charges and saying he was weary of "proctology exams" from Congress, Blackwater founder and erstwhile chief executive officer Erik Prince put the company up for sale and moved to Abu Dhabi.

In December, Xe Services was acquired by a consortium of investors led by Forte Capital Advisors and Manhattan Partners. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Forte's managing partner, Jason DeYonker, has been close to Prince for years. From 1998 to 2002, he managed Prince's personal financial portfolio.

According to associates, Prince is developing protective security and antiterrorism business in Africa, relying on many of the third-country nationals he employed during Backwater's heyday.

Meanwhile, Xe Services has "cleaned up its act," CIA Director Leon Panetta said last summer. The State Department also has set up a special unit to vet its contracts.

steinj@washpost.com To read more on SpyTalk go to washingtonpost.com/spytalk.

buglerbilly

12-01-11, 12:10 AM

Despite Denials, Blackwater Still Working for U.S.

By Spencer Ackerman January 11, 2011 | 11:30 am

Reports that Blackwater is out of the government’s private-security game have been greatly exaggerated. A consigliere to the company’s new owners tells Danger Room that not only does the controversial firm still hold security contracts with the State Department, it has every intention of seeking more.

In October, Danger Room reported that U.S. Training Center, a division of the renamed “Xe Services,” had won part of State’s $10-billion Worldwide Protective Services contract to guard diplomats. U.S. Training Center formed a partnership with Kaseman, another security firm, called International Development Solutions, to bid on the contract. But last week, an anonymous State Department official told Danger Room pal Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that the firm “no longer had a relationship with Xe.”

Untrue, says Harry Clark, an adviser to USTC Holdings LLC, the group of investors that purchased Xe from founder Erik Prince last month. “U.S. Training Center is a subsidiary of Xe Services. Still,” Clark says. Any future security services Xe provides to State will be conducted through International Development Solutions, in which USTC is a “minority partner.”

First up — as Stein was the first to report — International Development Solutions will guard the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, part of a Worldwide Protective Services deal worth up to $84 million. It includes providing “protective security in the West Bank,” says State Department spokesman Andy Laine. That’s the first opportunity for the revamped Xe to demonstrate that its guards are no longer the sort of people that open fire on civilians, take drugs or carry unauthorized firearms — part of the rationale for selling the company off.

That’s a case Xe 2.0 wants to make. The new ownership is “committed to being the best-in-class in security services,” in Clark’s words. Don’t think for a second Xe isn’t going to keep pitching the government on its guard services, even as it also emphasizes its training packages for law enforcement. “USTC will pursue training and security services contracts as [Xe] did before,” Clark says.

While the $84 million Jerusalem contract is a boon, just a week after USTC Holdings bought Xe, the company was dealt a loss when the Army opted to hire DynCorp for a $1.04 billion contract to train Afghan cops. Still, Xe got a $100 million deal to guard CIA bases in Afghanistan last year, and Clark said that the new owners retain “95 percent” of Xe’s pre-sale government contracts. He declined to specify which ones the firm no longer retains.

Next up for Xe: finding a new CEO and building an independent board and appointing an external-compliance officer, all of whom will chart the company’s future. Could this be the end of an era when lawmakers accuse Xe of setting up front companies to win government contracts? Clark said to expect the firm to be more open and transparent “than when Erik Prince was in charge.” We’ll be watching.

buglerbilly

26-01-11, 12:33 AM

Blackwater Suit Tossed 7 Years After Deaths

January 25, 2011

Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. - A federal judge has tossed a lawsuit that blamed the security company formerly known as Blackwater for the deaths of four contractors killed in a grisly 2004 ambush on the restive streets of Iraq.

U.S. District Judge James C. Fox said court-ordered arbitration fell apart because neither side was paying the costs of that process, so he decided to shut the case nearly seven years after the killings. Katy Helvenston, the mother of contractor Scott Helvenston, said Tuesday the families couldn't afford the costs, and she fears the case is over. The lawsuit was filed about a year after the men's deaths.

"It's pretty much destroyed my life," Helvenston said. "I haven't known one moment of joy since Scotty was slaughtered. I think the worst party is the betrayal from my country. I feel so betrayed."

Insurgents killed the four contractors, then mutilated the bodies, dragged the charred remains through the streets and hung two of the corpses from a bridge. Images from the scene were relayed around the world, and the event triggered a massive U.S. military siege known as the Battle of Fallujah.

Survivors of the contractors contend Blackwater failed to prepare the men for their mission and didn't provide them with appropriate equipment, such as a map. Helvenston, Jerry Zovko, Wesley Batalona and Michael Teague were sent in Mitsubishi SUVs to guard a supply convoy. Their survivors argued they should have been given armored vehicles.

A congressional investigation concurred with that view, calling Blackwater an "unprepared and disorderly" organization on the day of the ambush.

Blackwater, however, argued that the men were betrayed by the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and targeted in a well-planned ambush. The company said the result of the ambush likely would have been the same even if they had stronger weapons, armored vehicles, maps or even more men.

Following a 2007 shooting in Baghdad, Blackwater changed its management, name and eventually its ownership. USTC Holdings, an investment firm with ties to founder Erik Prince, acquired the company that's now called Xe Services in December. The deal includes its training facility in Moyock, N.C.

Daniel Callahan, an attorney representing the survivors, said they plan to appeal the ruling. Helvenston said she doesn't expect success from further appeals.

An attorney for Xe didn't immediately repond to requests seeking comment.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

06-03-11, 03:42 PM

Private security firms paid £29m last year for contracts in Afghanistan

Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act confirm growing reliance on privatisation underpins Britain's war effort

Mark Townsend The Observer, Sunday 6 March 2011

Senator Carl Levin briefs the US media on the inquiry by the Senate armed services committee into the role and oversight of private security contractors in Afghanistan. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images

A record £29m worth of contracts were awarded last year to British private security firms in Afghanistan, fuelling fears over the increasing privatisation of the UK's military capability.

New figures, released under the Freedom of Information Act, confirm that a growing reliance on private firms is underpinning Britain's war effort. They come as the private security industry regulator reveals it is being encouraged by the government to take a "more extended" role in supporting military operations.

Andy Bearpark, director general of the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC), will meet Foreign Office officials this Wednesday to discuss a closer relationship with Whitehall. He said: "The point is that the British government has just about finalised its position on private security, this will legitimise companies working with the government."

The £29m spent last year in Afghanistan represents a significant increase compared to the £62.8m spent on security contractors between 2007 and 2009. Most contracts were awarded to G4S, with £23.3m designated to provide "mobile and static security" in Afghanistan. The company is the parent firm of ArmorGroup, the focus of a US Senate inquiry alleging it "relied on a series of warlords to provide armed men" engaged in murder and bribery.

The government has opted in favour of self-regulation, but the senior campaigns officer for War on Want, Yasmin Khan, said: "As the government is plunged deeper into the conflict in Afghanistan, national regulation is urgently needed to hold British mercenary companies to account."

A Foreign Office spokesman said: "Private military security companies play a vital and necessary role in hostile environments."

buglerbilly

05-05-11, 03:01 AM

Two More Merc Firms Get Big Iraq Contracts

By Spencer Ackerman May 4, 2011 | 5:01 pm

Two more security firms have won contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build the State Department a private army in Iraq. The department confirms to Danger Room that longtime Iraq contractor Triple Canopy and newcomer Global Strategies Group will contribute to State’s planned protection force of 5,500 contractors.

In September, the State Department announced that eight security firms would share in a $10 billion contract to guard diplomats. Both Triple Canopy and Global were among those firms, which have the right to bid on so-called “task orders” for protecting specific department operations around the world. One of the first task orders awarded was to SOC, to safeguard the Baghdad embassy, a deal that would net the company up to $973 million over five years.

At the time, that looked like a slap to Triple Canopy, which has provided security forces for the massive compound since 2005, earning itself $438 million in the process. But it turns out Triple Canopy won’t be going anywhere — despite a warning about the firm from State’s own watchdogs.

In response to Danger Room queries, the State Department confirms that on February 10, it tapped Triple Canopy for “protective services” for diplos in Baghdad. SOC will guard the embassy itself, in what’s called “static security,” while Triple Canopy will perform “protective security services” for its residents. When diplomats travel around the Iraqi capitol, it’ll be guards for Triple Canopy who’ll protect them.

Triple Canopy has been doing that work since Iraq kicked Blackwater out in 2009 and the State Department (briefly) ended its contract with the firm. It’s more lucrative than guarding a building. If State re-ups with Triple Canopy for the full five-year span of the task order, Triple Canopy will earn $1.53 billion.

The company doesn’t have the same controversial reputation as other private firms. But the State Department’s inspector general raised red flags about Triple Canopy in a March 2010 audit. The firm doesn’t adequately enforce English-language proficiency standards for its crew of 1800 guards, most of whom come from Uganda and Peru. That’s a potential security liability in the event of an attack on the embassy, when the guards will have to corral hundreds of English speakers to safety.

What’s more, the company doesn’t provide decent housing conditions for its non-American guard force. The inspector general found they “live in crowded barracks and shipping containers,” which are over maximum occupancy capacity by as much as 400 percent.

The other security contractor is the British firm Global Strategies Group, which won a task order to provide both protective and static security for diplomats at the Consulate General in the southern city of Basra. That contract is worth up to $401 million over five years.

Global is something of a jack of all trades in the defense contracting world. In Afghanistan, it guards the Kabul airport and worked to screen the movement of cash through it, an anti-corruption measure that appears to have earned it the ire of President Hamid Karzai. But it’s also held contracts spanning from engineering ($358 million, with the Naval Research Laboratory) to providing vehicle transponders ($285,000, with the Army ) to lots of security-guard duties for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

It’s not clear how many guards each company will have to provide. A statement the State Department prepared for Danger Room merely says that the total 5,500 guards projected to work for State in Iraq “will be subject to further refinement” as the department “continues to plan and coordinate” the departure of U.S. troops from the country by year’s end.

There are still three major State Department facilities in Iraq awaiting task orders for security contractors: the placid Erbil outpost in Kurdistan and the volatile consulates in multiethnic Mosul and Kirkuk. One contractor is expected to win a task order for both of those two cities, according to State.

As the December 2011 date for leaving Iraq draws nearer, some in the U.S. military are getting skittish about leaving. House Speaker John Boehner endorsed keeping a “small” residual force in Iraq past the deadline, which would require renegotiating a 2008 bilateral accord that the Iraqi leadership hasn’t requested to revisit. But whatever happens with the troop withdrawal, the State Department is moving forward with its plan to field a private security force of thousands — something it’s never, ever done before and lacks a roadmap for commanding.

Photo: U.S. Army

buglerbilly

05-05-11, 03:08 AM

Blackwater’s New Ethics Chief: John Ashcroft

By Spencer Ackerman May 4, 2011 | 9:18 am

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private-security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former U.S. attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement. The subcommittee is designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private-security industry.”

In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, no more signing for weapons its guards aren’t authorized to carry in war zones, no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry, and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.

Ashcroft’s arrival at Xe is yet another clear signal it’s not giving up the quest for lucrative government security contracts now that it’s no longer owned by founder Erik Prince, even as it emphasizes the side of its business that trains law enforcement officers. In September, it won part of a $10 billion State Department contract to protect diplomats, starting with the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.

Ashcroft, a U.S. senator before becoming attorney general in the Bush administration, is a very known quantity to the federal officials that Xe will pitch. Even if he’s not lobbying for Blackwater, Ashcroft’s addition on the board is meant to inspire confidence in government officials of its newfound rectitude.

To some, Ashcroft will be forever known as the face of Bush-era counterterrorism: the official who vigorously defended the Patriot Act’s sweeping surveillance powers; told civil libertarians that their dissents “only aid terrorists,” and covered up the Spirit of Justice’s boob. At the same time, when Ashcroft was critically ill in 2005, he resisted a White House mission to his hospital bed entreating him to reauthorize warrantless surveillance in defiance of the acting attorney general.

“This is a company with a strong history of service to its country, and a reputation of best-in-class offerings to its public and private customers,” Ashcroft said in a statement. “I look forward to helping USTC enhance its governance and oversight capabilities as the company moves forward,” referring to U.S. Training Center, another of Blackwater’s many names. Like scores of other senior security officials, Ashcroft has spent his post-government career running a Washington consulting firm.

Xe is still sorting out its leadership and searching for a permanent CEO. For now, the investor team that bought the company in December assembled and empowered a board of directors to run the shop along with the existing management. That board includes former National Security Agency director Bobby Ray Inman. Its chairman is Clear Channel co-founder Red McCombs.

Ashcroft and his new subcommittee will report to the board. “With the formation of this subcommittee, and with Ashcroft as its chair,” the firm says in the statement, “USTC aims to set the bar for industry standards against which all other companies will be measured.”

buglerbilly

16-05-11, 01:04 PM

Military debates role of contracted support

May 16, 2011

Considering the vast MAJORITY of PMC's for the aviation support aspect come from the Military, i.e. Ex Military, in 10 years or more (or less) where do they think they are going to come from post that time period?

The military will always retain responsibility over its rotorcraft maintenance, despite the increasing trend to employ contractors for the servicing of its aircraft.

A panel of military representatives at the 2011 International Military Helicopter conference on 12 May agreed that the future of air force engineering personnel looked ‘bleak’ due to the greater role of contracted engineers.

‘The answer deliberately poses a point of a yes or no, and I think it’s in the grey areas that we need to operate and think,’ said Wg Cdr David John Tozer, commanding officer of Forward Support Wing at RAF Odiham.

‘If you have outsourced your complete capability, can you go and do what you need to do? Is the military instrument actually agile? And the answer I think is no.’

He said that the requirements to outsource some of that to a contractor needed to be looked at and that contracting out all responsibility could put the military at a significant risk.

‘Military aircraft are a responsibility for the military organisation. In the military I am responsible for anything that happens to that aircraft. If I outsource anything on that to industry, I outsource that responsibility as well,’ Col Remy Michelshein, of the Netherlands Ministry of Defence’s Defence Materiel Organisation told the audience.

‘It is very good to co-operate with industry, I think we should move to co-operate more with industry, but I agree there are certain aspects that we cannot outsource.’

An industry viewpoint came from Trevor Pritchard, UK director of business for Vector Aerospace, who said that each component of an agreement is there to play up to its strengths.

‘Industry’s part isn’t to bear arms,’ Pritchard told Shephard.

‘If we concentrate on the best way to deliver output, I think the respected roles in industry and the services are defined a bit more clearly.’

He emphasised the importance of contracting for output, and said that if industry was contracted to do so, it can play to its strengths and deliver and demonstrate reduction in cost and value for money, factors considered by the panel to be the main purpose of contracting out.

‘In my mind there is absolutely a point beyond which industry will not be able to provide the services currently provided by uniformed personnel,’ he told the panel.

Another potential problem was the military having no personnel available to take on the role that industry is now playing if it was forced to do so.

Tozer pointed out that although facilities and resources were now arguably limited as a result of work being directed to industry, the ‘green and blue suits’ were still available if they were ever needed to take on their former roles.

Beth Stevenson, London

buglerbilly

17-05-11, 02:53 AM

Blackwater Founder Builds Mideast Mercenary Army to Put Down Revolts

By Spencer Ackerman May 15, 2011 | 3:13 pm

What’s Erik Prince been doing since he sold off Blackwater, the infamous mercenary company he founded and turned into a juggernaut of the private security world? His shadiest, most morally-compromised guns-for-hire scheme yet.

Prince moved to Abu Dhabi last year as legal and governmental scrutiny of Blackwater intensified. “I’m done. It’s all sold or shut down,” he told journalist Robert Young Pelton shortly before boarding his farewell flight. “I’m getting out of the government contracting business.” And provided he meant the U.S. government, that vow has stood the test of time. But his adoptive country is a different story.

Documents obtained by the New York Times indicate that Prince rebooted his efforts in private security to build a praetorian army of mercenaries for the ruling clique in the United Arab Emirates. His new company, Reflex Responses, hires a mixture of Colombian soldiers of fortune and South African vets of Executive Outcomes, the pre-Blackwater merc firm that fought nasty counter-guerilla wars in Angola and Sierra Leone. That’s right: forces from Christian nations hired to protect Muslim leaders, possibly against their own people. And in keeping with Prince’s history, if Reflex is doing business legally — from the perspective of U.S. law — it’s only barely so.

Prince, who conceals his involvement in the firm by using the codename “Kingfish,” takes money from the UAE to ”conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts.” His take: $529 million so far, and the possibility of earning “billions more.” His contract with the UAE lasts until 2015.

The tiny UAE is a financial giant on the Persian Gulf, drenched in oil and unconcerned with political liberty for its wealthy citizens. It lives in fear of Iran. And its military keeps only about 65,000 men under arms. It’s had a murky interest in helping Somalia contain its piracy problem — another effort rumored to involve Prince. And so far, the Mideast uprisings haven’t touched the UAE, but you never know. Its ruling sheikhs are used to paying foreigners to do their dirty work: its labor force is imported. Now it prefers to apply that model to its security needs.

That’s where Prince comes in.

Under terms of Reflex’s contract with the consortium of monarchies, obtained by the Times, Prince will build, train and field a battalion of foreign auxiliaries “independent of formal command and support structures throughout the UAE.” They’re supposed to be for “internal” defense, conducting “cordon and search,” “stability and support operations” and general “security operations.” Only “leaders” of the force need be proficient in English; the contract doesn’t say anything about the mercs speaking Arabic.

Consider for a second that this is a force comprised of mercs from Christian countries operating on Islamic soil. The Executive Outcomes veterans — not exactly known for their subtlety; they were involved in a coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea — will staff a quick reaction force, able to seize key infrastructure and put down a protest that spins out of control. What could go wrong?

Indeed, Reflex is supposed to provide a full survice military in miniature. It’s going to have “aviation support capability,” with “rotor and/or fixed wing aircraft,” capable of medevac and “basic” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Advanced mission training” will include “sniper,” explosive ordnance disposal, “scout/surveillance [and] military working dog” responsibilities. There’s even a private navy, tasked with “small boat operations and seaman ship, Maritime Interdiction Operations (MIO), Securing Oil Delivery Stations/Platforms” and more.

That’s a lot to ask of 800 people. It also begs the question of why the UAE would continue to invest in its elite military units, which have served in Afghanistan, when there’s this new hired Army to use.

The contract doesn’t specify what gear they’re going to use. But it’s going to need ships, helicopters, transport planes, communications gear, fuel depots or access to existing ones, a motor pool of trucks and, of course, guns. They’ve built a barracks in the desert to house and train the new Reflex force.

Because of all this gear and all this construction, it’s surprising that the effort — which the contract indicates began in June 2010 — stayed secret for this long. But it’s astonishing that someone leaked the Times the actual contract Reflex holds with the UAE. Is there internal dissent within Reflex already?

Prince’s new gig also might run afoul of U.S. laws prohibiting citizens from trailing foreign militaries. That kind of work requires a government license. The State Department wouldn’t say if Reflex has such a license, and told the Times it’s “investigating” to see if Reflex is on the right side of the law.

Blackwater, renamed Xe Services, ain’t what it used to be. While it’s still collecting government contracts to protect diplomats, it’s undergoing another rebranding effort by the new ownership, even hiring former U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft as its ethics chief. It wants to emphasize its business training law enforcement more than its guard duties — understandable, given that most people know Blackwater as the guard force that killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

Some aspects of Reflex make it seem like Prince is getting the old band back together. One of his top deputies is Ricky Chambers. Chambers, a former FBI agent, ran the Blackwater subsidiary Paravant — whose guards in Afghanistan signed for guns under the name “Eric Cartman” and shot Afghan civilians dead during a 2009 vehicle accident.

Mideast leaders are reeling from the reformist uprisings. So far, only Moammar Gadhafi has hired mercenaries to backstop his rule. And the UAE’s interest in Reflex predates the current Mideast uprisings. But while it might be crazy to hire South Africans and Columbians to break up protests by Muslims calling for democratic change, desperate autocrats have done far crazier things. They surely know how to get in touch with Erik Prince.

Photo: Wikimedia

buglerbilly

17-05-11, 02:55 AM

Statement by General Juma Ali Khalaf Al Hamiri, Head of HR and Administration, GHQ, UAE Armed Forces

May 16, 2011 - 12:31 -

Abu Dhabi, 15 May 2011 (WAM) - General Juma Ali Khalaf Al Hamiri, Head of HR and Administration, GHQ, UAE Armed Forces, has made the following statement: The United Arab Emirates armed forces have been through an accelerated and extensive process of development and Emiratisation since their creation at the founding of the UAE four decades ago. The result is that the UAE armed forces have been able to make meaningful and significant contributions in theatres of operations such as Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and most recently Libya.

At the heart of the successful approach has been strong alliances within the international community and in part the sourcing of expertise through the private sector. International contractors providing planning, training, development and operational support have been integral to the successful development of what is a robust military capability of over 40,000 Emirati personnel at a high state of readiness.

Importantly these third parties have also played significant roles in supporting the UAE Armed Forces in training Iraqi and Afghani security forces with the aim of contributing to the stability of both countries.

The UAE armed forces currently engage a number of third parties, such as Spectre, which delivers academy training capabilities; Horizon, a pilot training partner and R2 which provides operational, planning and training support.

As you would expect of a proactive member of the international community, all engagements of commercial entities by the UAE Armed Forces are compliant with international Law and relevant conventions.

WAM/MAB

buglerbilly

17-05-11, 02:57 AM

United Arab Emirates Confirms Hiring Blackwater Founder’s Firm

By EMILY B. HAGER and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: May 15, 2011

The United Arab Emirates confirmed on Sunday that it had hired a company run by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, to provide “operational, planning and training support” to its military. But it gave no details of the company’s project to build a foreign mercenary battalion for the Emirati government.

Secret Desert Force Set Up by Blackwater’s Founder (May 15, 2011)

A written statement from a top Emirati general, issued through the U.A.E.’s official news agency, said that the country had relied extensively on outside contractors to bolster its military, and that all work with contractors was “compliant with international law and relevant conventions.”

The statement, by Gen. Juma Ali Khalaf al-Hamiri, said that the U.A.E. had signed a contract with Reflex Responses, Mr. Prince’s company, but made no mention of the hundreds of Colombian, South African and other foreign troops now training at an Emirati military base. The statement did not mention Mr. Prince by name.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the company last year signed a $529 million contract with the Emirati government to recruit and train a foreign battalion for counterterrorism and internal security missions, according to former Reflex Responses employees, American officials and corporate documents.

Former employees said that the company had a separate lucrative contract to help protect a string of nuclear reactors planned in the U.A.E. and to provide cybersecurity for the nuclear sites.

The U.A.E is a close American ally, and officials in Washington indicated that there was some support in the Obama administration for the foreign mercenary battalion. But the State Department is looking into the project to ensure it does not violate American laws regulating the export of defense technology and expertise.

General Hamiri’s statement said his country’s military had gone through an “extensive process of development and Emiratisation,” which has allowed Emirati forces to make “meaningful contributions” in recent conflicts in places like Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

Kateri Carmola, a professor at Middlebury College in Vermont who researches the use of private security companies, said that it was common for countries to hire contractors for military training, but that it appeared that Reflex Responses had more ambitious goals both in the U.A.E. and elsewhere.

“There is no real legal precedent for a company like this, where the U.A.E. would be used as a launch pad for a wide range of missions, and potentially for a wide range of clients,” she said.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 16, 2011, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: United Arab Emirates Confirms Hiring Blackwater Founder’s Firm.

buglerbilly

28-05-11, 03:25 AM

U.S. Tells Its Afghan Workers: No Torture, Corpse Mutilation

By Spencer Ackerman May 27, 2011 | 11:52 am

It’s never a good sign when you have to tell the men guarding your base not to murder civilians, torture detainees or desecrate corpses. But U.S. special-operations forces in Afghanistan are leaving nothing to chance.

The Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Afghanistan put 10 contracts for “perimeter security“ up for bid on Friday morning. Hired guards, mostly Afghans, will keep watch over anyone who approaches the elite commandos’ remote outposts. The bases on which they’ll work range in size from tiny “village support platforms” staffed by a mere 12-man “A Team” to one near Kabul’s infamous Pol-e-Charkhi prison, but there are uniform expectations for would-be guards. Some of them read more like baseline conditions for membership in civilized humanity.

So-called “Afghan Security Guards” are instructed, “Do not kill or torture detained personnel.” For good measure, if someone’s taken captive, “immediately turn over to U.S., Coalition or [Afghan forces].” Should they kill someone who poses a threat, there is to be “no booby-trapping, burning [or] mutilation” of their corpses.

Afghans guarding U.S. bases don’t exactly have the best track record. A Senate report last fall found them getting into gun battles with one another for cash and doing favors for warlords and even Taliban. But indications that they’ve been murdering civilians, torturing captives and turning dead bodies into gruesome homemade bombs are few and far between. If those cases actually exist, it’s not stopped the task force from hiring Afghan guards to stand watch over their outposts.

While the rules bar Afghan guards from conducting “offensive ops,” they’re still instructed not to “attack protected persons or protected places,” like “mosques, hospitals, cemeteries and schools.” So apparently they’ll spend some time off-base.

Which leads to the most crucial instructions of all. “Fight only combatants,” the contract rules insist. “Destroy no more than the mission requires. Returned fire with aimed fire. Must limit/eliminate collateral damage to innocent civilians.”

Afghan guards might be an enduring feature of U.S. bases. But as the basic instructions indicate, U.S. forces don’t exactly trust them. “Contractor personnel are not permitted to eat in U.S. government dining facilities,” the contract rules read. Only a few of them can work out at the base gyms.

If these are the kinds of instructions that even the most elite U.S. warriors have to provide their would-be local protectors, how wise is it to have men who need to be told not to commit murder watching their backs?

Photo: U.S. Air Force

buglerbilly

07-06-11, 04:04 PM

Previous post Merc Firm: Who Is This ‘Erik Prince’ You Speak of?

By Spencer Ackerman June 7, 2011 | 9:53 am

Rule number one for all security companies doing business in the Middle East: don’t publicly embrace Erik Prince. A company building a battalion of mercs for the United Arab Emirates is sticking to that code, even though a host of ex-employees have fingered the infamous Blackwater founder as a driving force behind it.

Prince is “not an officer, director, shareholder, or even an employee” of Reflex Responses, swears its president, Michael Roumi. Reflex Responses, also known as R2, has a $529 million contract to provide 800 mercenaries to keep the UAE safe from internal unrest or Iranian terrorism. Indeed, Prince’s name can’t be found on official company documents.

Yet five former company employees told the New York Times that Prince was “deeply involved” in R2, having ”overseen the hiring of American military and law enforcement veterans for the project, as well as European and South African contractors.” A Blackwater veteran, Ricky Chambers, is reportedly involved in R2 as well. According to the Times‘ sources, Prince goes by the codename “Kingfish” within the company to conceal his involvement.

Roumi’s disavowal of Prince came in a letter to the Obama administration and Congress obtained by the New York Times. And for good reason. If Prince or any other American is involved in R2, it could violate U.S. laws barring citizens from transferring military technology or expertise to foreign countries without a license. The State Department isn’t sure it’s given R2 any such permission.

Alternatively, denying involvement with Prince might just be good business and PR sense. Under Prince’s stewardship, Blackwater became a dirty word after its security guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007. More recently, he’s been the subject of widespread rumors in the Middle East tying him to an anti-pirate Somali militia. If you were a confederation of Arab sheikhs hiring Christian security guards to potentially suppress Arab revolts, would you want it known that you went to Erik Prince for the job?

buglerbilly

14-06-11, 02:49 AM

Blackwater Gets ‘Too Big To Fail,’ Hires AIG Castoff

By Spencer Ackerman June 13, 2011 | 3:08 pm

Nothing says, “We’re through with scandal!” quite like hiring a former executive from one of the country’s leading economic bloodsuckers.

Blackwater — sorry, Xe Services — really wants to turn the PR page from the bad old days of Nisour Square, when the infamous private security firm’s guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians. It’s no longer owned by Erik Prince, who may be involved in yet another shady mercenary firm. It’s on a hiring spree for new executives. And that’s kind of the problem.

Xe’s new owners, USTC Holdings, aren’t exactly bringing in scandal-free talent to run Xe v.2.0. On Monday, they announced Xe’s new “Chief Regulatory & Compliance Officer,” a new position for the company, will be Suzanne Folsom, most recently of insurance giant AIG.

Yes, the woman in charge of making sure the world’s most infamous private security firm is in compliance with U.S. laws and regulations is a veteran of the insurance giant that helped plunge the country into financial chaos. The public bailed out AIG to the tune of $182 billion. Folsom — then as now, regulatory compliance chief for a scandal-plagued firm — got a golden parachute reportedly worth $1 million.

Nor is Folsom the only such example. Xe’s new CEO is Ted Wright, hired June 1 to run the company after helming North American operations for military services giant KBR. Among KBR’s recent hits: kidnapping Filipinos to work for the company in Iraq; confining its Iraq workers to “windowless warehouses“; and locking a woman employee in isolation after she was gang-raped — by other KBR employees.

Then there’s the fact that Xe brought on former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the face of the Patriot Act, as its ethics chief. (Though it has to be noted that Ashcroft, gravely ill, bravely resisted an effort by the Bush White House to improperly extend a warrantless surveillance program. Respect.)

Representatives for USTC Holdings have yet to respond to requests for comment. We’ll update if and when they do.

There’s been a lot of talk for years about Blackwater’s effort to rebrand itself as a squeaky clean company. Hiring from AIG and KBR doesn’t exactly scream Good Corporate Citizen. It does, however, suggest that the company knows how to get what it wants from the government — with impunity.

buglerbilly

26-06-11, 03:32 AM

Blackwater Founder Dismissed From Lawsuit

June 25, 2011

Associated Press|by Matthew Barakat

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A federal judge dismissed Blackwater founder Erik Prince from a civil lawsuit alleging his former security firm cheated the government in bills it submitted for protecting government employees in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a ruling made public Friday.

Former Blackwater employees Brad and Melan Davis sued Prince and his company in 2008, alleging the company overbilled the government for its work.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III said there is no evidence Prince participated or had direct knowledge of any of the allegedly false billing invoices.

The case is still scheduled to go to trial next month, with the company itself remaining as a defendant. But the judge has tossed out some of the lawsuit's claims, including a salacious allegation that Blackwater was billing the government for prostitutes under the category of "morale, welfare and recreation."

After ruling in May that significant parts of the case should go to trial, Ellis in recent weeks has chipped away at some of the plaintiffs' claims, tossing out specific allegations and most recently now by dismissing Prince as a defendant.

Prince's lawyer, Victoria Toensing, said Friday she was pleased with the court's ruling. The Davises' lawyer, Susan Burke, declined comment.

The exact amount of the alleged overbilling on the $1 billion security contract is not clear, but the Davises allege that Blackwater overbilled the State Department for security it provided in Iraq and Afghanistan. The contract allowed Blackwater to bill a specific amount for personnel in the country on any given day. Spreadsheets showing who was in the country do not match the bills submitted by Blackwater, and employees were ordered to alter paperwork to ensure that "no money was left on the table," Burke said at a pretrial hearing.

Prince, meanwhile, no longer is associated with Blackwater, which now operates under the name Xe. He no longer lives in the U.S. Earlier this year, Prince helped a contractor in the United Arab Emirates establish a permanent force of about 800 foreign fighters to supplement the Emirati military. A spokesman for Prince, Mark Corallo, said Prince is doing a variety of security consulting work, including natural resource and agriculture security.

The Davises' lawsuit is one of several legal battles that Blackwater has fought following its contract work in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company has been trying to rehabilitate its image since a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 people, outraged the Iraqi government and led to federal charges against several Blackwater guards.

Those accusations were thrown out after a judge found prosecutors mishandled evidence, but the case was resurrected by a federal appeals court.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

buglerbilly

06-07-11, 04:37 PM

Blackwater’s New Director: Bill Clinton’s Lawyer

By Spencer Ackerman July 6, 2011 | 10:10 am

Blackwater’s rebranding continues at a torrid pace. Danger Room has learned the latest Washington greybeard hired to spruce up the image of the world’s most infamous private security firm is Jack Quinn, a top Washington lobbyist and former White House counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Now renamed Xe and owned by an investor consortium called USTC Holdings, the company is bringing Quinn — pictured left, with Rep. Joe Crowley — onto its board as an “independent director.” He’ll focus on “governance and oversight,” keeping the company out of trouble, especially with the government. USTC Holdings’ Jason DeYonker says that Quinn’s reputation for “commitment to the highest ethical standards of conduct in both the public and private sectors” makes him a great fit.

To be cynical about it, a man who gave legal advice to Clinton knows a whole lot about crisis management. Which is important, since Xe intends to keep providing security to U.S. diplomats in dangerous places – activities that, under its old leadership, led its guards into a shooting debacle that killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

Quinn is one of a string of board members and executives Xe brought on to draw a bright line between the old Blackwater and the new. All of them are powerful people, like ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft. Quinn’s lobbying clients include AT&T, old-folks association AARP and Visa.

But the real thread running through most of the hires is that they have experience dealing with scandal, like former AIG bigwig Suzanne Folsom, now Xe’s senior regulatory and compliance officer and new CEO Ted Wright, most recently of military services giant KBR.

You’ll recall that the Xe had extensive ties to the Republican Party under founder Erik Prince. Consider the Quinn hire a step toward political diversity. It’s something Quinn knows a great deal about: he started his lobbying firm with Ed Gillespie, a former Republican National Committee chairman.

But Quinn is a perennial in Democratic politics. Check out his mash note to President Obama in Politico. Despite his ties to the Clinton family, Quinn sat on his hands during the 2008 Dem primary, preserving his options for access to the winner. That’ll come in handy if and when Xe needs to talk with the White House.

Photo: Picasa/kikiryan9

buglerbilly

08-07-11, 05:41 AM

101st Tequila Brigade Pays Up in ‘Mercs Gone Wild’ Case

By Spencer Ackerman July 7, 2011 | 12:00 pm

The company who turned a compound near the U.S. Embassy in Kabul into a dangerous, booze-fueled party just agreed to reimburse the government $7.5 million for its misdeeds.

ArmorGroup North America used to hold a contract worth an estimated $189 million to protect the embassy. But that was before the Project on Government Oversight revealed in 2009 that the guard force operated a “Lord of the Flies environment” nearby — complete with pictures documenting it, like the one above. That meant, in the words of one of the guards, “peeing on people, eating potato chips out of ass cracks, vodka shots out of ass cracks (there is video of that one), broken doors after drnken [sic] brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity.” (He allowed, “they are not jamming guys in the ass per say [sic].”)

Whistleblowers from the company charged an even wider pattern of misconduct: intentionally low-balling its expenses to the State Department in order to win the guard contract. Hiring cheap Gurka guards who couldn’t speak English. Even pimping. ArmorGroup ultimately lost its contract in December 2009.

[Update: Actually, State recently signed another contract, worth $8 million, with ArmorGroup to guard that same embassy, from April until August -- a renewal that occurred after State canceled the contract of troubled firm EODT, reports Mother Jones' Daniel Schulman. Thanks to @pj4533 for the eagle eye. We've reached out to State for an explanation.]

Now it’s out of legal trouble.

The Justice Department announced on Thursday that it secured a deal with ArmorGroup to pay the government $7.5 million to resolve the charge of improper billing. A statement from Justice says that it also “resolved” the additional charges against the guards for potentially violating sex-trafficking laws, misrepresenting the work history of its non-American guards and other offenses. ArmorGroup had denied misconduct in all of those cases.

That doesn’t sound like such a big financial hit for the company. Not only did ArmorGroup hold its hefty contract in Kabul for over two years, it held a separate, $5.1 million contract with the Air Force to protect a western Afghanistan air base. Its subcontractors? Feuding warlords who shot at each others’ crews.

But if there’s a silver lining to the settlement, one of the whistleblowers, former Kabul contract manager James Gordon, will get $1.35 million from ArmorGroup for wrongful termination. Quite the sobering conclusion.

Photos: Project on Government Oversight

buglerbilly

07-08-11, 06:01 AM

Jury Rules in Favor of Blackwater in Lawsuit

August 06, 2011

Associated Press|by Matthew Barakat

ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A jury ruled Friday in favor of the security firm once known as Blackwater, rejecting two former employees' claims that the company overbilled the State Department for its work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ex-employees Brad and Melan Davis alleged that Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, falsified travel and labor records so it could defraud the government. Blackwater's lawyers argued the Davises irresponsibly claimed fraud without evidence.

Company spokesman John Procter referred to the lawsuit as a "legacy matter."

"Xe's new leadership team is gratified by the result in this case, which from the beginning has been based on false and unfounded allegations," he said in a statement.

Many of the allegations in the lawsuit, first filed in 2008, were tossed out by the judge before they even got to the jury, including a claim that Blackwater billed the government for prostitutes. Federal Judge T.S. Ellis III said there was not enough evidence to support the claim.

Instead, Ellis said it appeared that a laundry supervisor was fired less than two weeks into her job, apparently for prostituting herself. Melan Davis was told by a supervisor - perhaps in jest - to bill the woman's laundry services under the morale category, but the government was never billed.

The Davises' lawyer, Susan Burke, argued that Blackwater cheated the government out of an unspecified sum of money by submitting phony invoices for travel and labor to the State Department. Specifically, she alleged that some records show Blackwater double-billed for flights in and out of Iraq and billed the government for the services of contractors when travel records showed they weren't even in the country where they were supposedly working.

Blackwater's lawyers said the Davises and their lawyer fundamentally misunderstood the company's billing and personnel records, which documented when contractors were in and out of country.

And the alleged double-billing, they argued, resulted when some contractors innocently missed scheduled flights because of the unpredictability of life in a war zone - everything from sandstorms to sniper fire.

Burke was barred from presenting much of the evidence she sought to put in front of the jury. She had hoped to present testimony about an alleged threat a Blackwater employee made to State Department auditors. But Ellis barred the testimony because he said there was no evidence that the confrontation between the two men had anything to do with the auditors' work.

The case was initially filed in 2008 under the False Claims Act, a sort of whistleblower statute that allows people to sue on behalf of the U.S. when they have knowledge that the government is being defrauded.

While the jury rejected the lawsuit's claims of fraud and overbilling, a 2009 State Department audit found that Blackwater overbilled the State Department by as much as $55 million on a contract that produced roughly $1 billion in revenue.

Burke was barred in her lawsuit from specifying to the jury the exact amount of the alleged fraud but had argued in court papers that it could have been as much as $300 million.

Burke said in email to the Associated Press on Friday evening: "We will be filing the appeal on Monday. We believe the Court erred by excluding the majority of the evidence."

She is also representing two other former Blackwater employees who have filed a similar False Claims Act lawsuit against the company.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved

buglerbilly

25-10-11, 11:14 PM

Army Gives Big Afghan Guard Deal To Firm Karzai Hates

By Spencer Ackerman October 25, 2011 | 11:17 am

Just months after Hamid Karzai launched a crackdown against a private security company in Afghanistan, the Army’s given the same firm a massive, multi-year contract to guard U.S. reconstruction projects there.

Global Integrated Security, an armed subsidiary of Britain’s Global Strategies Group, just won an eye-opening $480 million contract with the Army Corps of Engineers for unspecified “reconstruction security support services.” That means Global now holds a merc contract worth much more than the State Department will pay to guard the U.S. Embassy in Kabul — and more than State will pay Global to guard a U.S. consulate in Iraq.

It’s quite a reversal for Global, and one that can’t make the Afghan president very happy. In December, Karzai’s forces arrested one of Global’s consultants in Kabul, ostensibly because the firm stored 11 unregistered firearms. The firm, which holds an unrelated contract to protect the Kabul airport, maintained that the guns were going to be broken down for spare parts. Some suspected the arrest was a demagogic move to cover Karzai politically while he backed off his promise to kick merc firms out of Afghanistan.

It’s surely a coincidence that Global won the reconstruction-protection contract right after Karzai said he’d support Pakistan if his neighbor ever went to war with his American patrons. But it still looks like a rebuke.

Global already holds a Corps of Engineers contract to guard its Afghan reconstruction projects. The Corps must like the firm, because its last re-up with Global, in 2009, was worth a mere $21 million. (.PDF)

But Global won’t just be a big player in Afghanistan. It holds a piece of State’s $10 billion contract to protect diplomats, which will earn it up to $401 million over five years to guard a consulate in Basra. Last month, it announced another big deal with an unnamed oil firm to guard development at the Rumaila oil field in Iraq, one of the world’s largest.

Global’s new deal runs through October 19, 2015, well after U.S. troops are supposed to end combat duties in Afghanistan. Karzai’s got to put up with them at least through then.

Photo: ISAF

buglerbilly

03-11-11, 07:34 PM

Taliban suicide bombers attack private firm working with Nato

Two Afghan guards were killed when suicide bombers and attackers besieged the office of a logistics company working with foreign forces, near the Nato-led force's western headquarters.

3:49PM GMT 03 Nov 2011

Western troops were deployed to crush the attack at the offices of Monaco-based international firm ES-KO on the outskirts of Herat city, where Nato soldiers passed control to Afghan forces four months ago.

It happened a few hundred metres from the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in western Afghanistan, which is Italian-led, as well as Herat's airport.

The attack raises questions about security in the relatively peaceful province, handed over in July as part of plans for the 140,000 mainly US foreign troop force to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014.

But in Brussels Thursday, NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted its mission in Afghanistan was "moving in the right direction" despite a string of headline-grabbing "spectacular" attacks in recent weeks.

These included a car bomb Saturday which killed 17 people, including 13 foreigners, in the deadliest single attack on NATO in Kabul in 10 years of war.

One foreign soldier was among five people injured in the latest attack, according to Herat governor's spokesman Mohayddin Noori.

An AFP reporter saw a wounded Italian soldier being walked away from the scene but a spokesman for the NATO-led ISAF could not confirm any injuries to its personnel.

Officials said the attack happened when two suicide bombers detonated a car bomb at the gates of the office, allowing three accomplices to get inside.

"Five attackers were killed along with two guards working for ES-KO company," Noori told a press conference after the attack finished.

"Five people - one policeman, one ISAF soldier and one intelligence officer along with two other guards of the company - were wounded in today's attack."

The Taliban, leaders of the decade-long insurgency in Afghanistan since the late 2001 US-led invasion ousted them from power, were not immediately reachable for comment on the attack.

The killings came the day after President Hamid Karzai told a regional conference in Istanbul that there was no hope for peace in Afghanistan without help from neighbours such as Pakistan, where insurgents have rear bases.

The ISAF spokesman in western Afghanistan, who declined to be quoted by name, said it had provided ground and air support to Thursday's operation, which took place outside the compound of Regional Command West.

Noori said that ISAF helicopters had been scrambled.

Noor Khan Nekzad, a regional police spokesman, said foreign forces killed the insurgents but the ISAF spokesman could not confirm this.

One witness, who did not give his name, told AFP he saw several wounded people evacuated after two men with guns and rocket-propelled grenades ran into the office and opened fire.

Attacks on contractors working with ISAF happen relatively frequently in Afghanistan. ES-KO works at a number of locations in Afghanistan and its recent projects have included extending the runway at Herat airport.

buglerbilly

14-11-11, 01:22 PM

U.S. Hiring Mercenary Air Force for Iraq Rescues

By Spencer Ackerman November 14, 2011 | 6:30 am

Uploaded by MH6M on Oct 13, 2007
Video of the dramatic October 3 rescue of Polish Ambassador Edward Pietrzy show just how risky the maneuver was for the skilled Blackwater helicopter pilot.
It's no small thing to land a helicopter with its spinning rotor blades into a city street. Apart from possible terrorists and insurgents, the real dangers to the crew were the many lightposts and telephone and electrical lines that bordered the landing area.
The Blackwater "Little Bird" is shown landing, with high lamp posts on the right and what appear to be telephone or electrical poles on the left. The lower photo shows phone or electrical wires strung across the street. The slightest pilot error, shift in weight or unexpected wind could have caused havoc with the helicopter and with the people on the ground. The mission, however, was a complete success.

It’s January 2012. A convoy of SUVs ferrying American diplomats to a meeting with Iraqi politicians runs over a roadside bomb. Several of the passengers inside are seriously injured. They need to be rescued, now.

But the U.S. military left Iraq on Dec. 31. Which means the only call for help has to go to a team of mercenaries employed by the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. They’re the only guys left in Iraq who are running medical evacuation operations — or any other complex air op.

The State Department has already requisitioned an army, part of the roughly 5,000 private security contractors State is hiring to protect diplomats stationed in Iraq. Now, State is hiring someone to provide a little help from the air: an “Aviation Advisor” responsible for “Search and Rescue (SAR), medical evacuations (ME), transporting Quick Reaction Forces (QRF) to respond to incidents, and provid[ing] air transportation for Chief of Mission personnel.” It’s not a familiar job for the diplomatic corps, which is why State is seeking to bring in someone from the outside.

The State Department put out this notice on Nov. 4. That’s 58 days before the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Fifty-eight days before State has the skies over Iraq to itself.

There are lots of contractors with long experience in search and rescue and other air operations. The secretive Virginia company Blackbird Technologies, staffed with U.S. special operations veterans, won an $11 million contract in 2010 to rescue missing or kidnapped U.S. troops in Iraq, one of the military’s most important missions.

State has also contracted out for air support in the recent past. Its former principal security company in Iraq, Blackwater, kept a fleet of Little Bird helicopters at the ready in case diplomats in trouble couldn’t get hold of U.S. troops. In an August 2009 internal email acquired by Danger Room, the State Department’s David Adams explained that Blackwater’s aircraft in Iraq were used for “quick reaction forces, search and rescue/medical evacuation, reconnaissance and escort, disabled aircraft recovery, VIP missions (Codels [congressional delegations]), contingency operations, and aerial transportation of personnel and cargo.” The video above shows a Blackwater helicopter in 2007 rescuing a Polish diplomat.

Managing Blackwater’s small helicopter fleet in Iraq was a warmup. This is the main event: a complex structure of transit, support and even “Quick Reaction” (that is, combat) “fixed wing aircraft, light lift helicopters and medium lift helicopters,” on a “24 hour” basis. The Aviation Advisor will not be able to call upon the U.S. Air Force to bail him or her out of a jam.

“Any operation of any aircraft of any type into the sovereign airspace over Iraq after [Dec. 31] would need to comply with Iraqi laws and policies,” says Capt. Mellisa Milner, the chief spokeswoman for the Air Force in the region. “We are not aware of any special arrangements or exceptions for any aircraft, and are not aware of any ongoing discussions with MoD [Iraq's Ministry of Defense] on the matter.”

Air operations are not as simple has hiring skilled pilots to put well-maintained machines in the skies. The military has long-standing procedures in place for designing and executing aerial missions. An experienced chain of command maintains order, discipline, coordination and success. This is what the military does.

It’s not what the State Department does. Only a relatively few officials go into the U.S. diplomatic corps to oversee security operations. And in practice, the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security doesn’t run those operations itself, it hires contractors to run them. And it’s the part of the department that appears the least functional, with performance or financial scandals ensnaring its contractors ArmorGroup, DynCorp, and of course Blackwater.

Inevitably, things will go wrong in these complex air operations. A functioning chain of command exists to minimize those mistakes and mitigate their impact. The State Department still does not have someone atop that chain, with fewer than 60 days before it finds itself alone in the skies. No wonder the State Department’s own inspector general warned in May that a “lack of senior level Department participation dedicated to the [Iraq] transition process” contributed to a transition plan where “several key decisions have not been made, some plans cannot be finalized, and progress is slipping in a number of areas.” (.pdf)

Until State can figure out its chain of command for air operations, its employees in Iraq — some 17,000 of them, according to current plans — had better hope they don’t need air support. There’s not much time to put one in place.

buglerbilly

22-11-11, 01:45 PM

Pentagon’s War on Drugs Goes Mercenary

By Spencer Ackerman November 22, 2011 | 6:30 am

An obscure Pentagon office designed to curb the flow of illegal drugs has quietly evolved into a one-stop shop for private security contractors around the world, soliciting deals worth over $3 billion.

The sprawling contract, ostensibly designed to stop drug-funded terrorism, seeks security firms for missions like “train Azerbaijan Naval Commandos.” Other tasks include providing Black Hawk and Kiowa helicopter training “for crew members of the Mexican Secretariat of Public Security.” Still others involve building “anti-terrorism/force protection enhancements” for the Pakistani border force in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan.

The Defense Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office has packed all these tasks and more inside a mega-contract for security firms. The office, known as CNTPO, is all but unknown, even to professional Pentagon watchers. It interprets its counternarcotics mandate very, very broadly, leaning heavily on its implied counterterrorism portfolio. And it’s responsible for one of the largest chunks of money provided to mercenaries in the entire federal government.

CNTPO quietly solicited an umbrella contract for all the security services listed above — and many, many more — on Nov. 9. It will begin handing out the contract’s cash by August. And there is a lot of cash to disburse.

The ceiling for the “operations, logistics and minor construction” tasks within CNTPO’s contract is $950 million. Training foreign forces tops out at $975 million. “Information” tasks yield $875 million. The vague “program and program support” brings another $240 million.

That puts CNTPO in a rare category. By disbursing at least $3 billion — likely more, since the contract awards come with up to three yearlong re-ups — the office is among the most lucrative sources of cash for private security contractors. The largest, from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, doles out a $10 billion, five-year deal known as the Worldwide Protective Services contract.

CNTPO is “essentially planning on outsourcing a global counternarcotics and counterterrorism program over the next several years,” says Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the Project on Government Oversight, “and it’s willing to spend billions to do so.”

For the vast majority of people who’ve never heard of CNTPO, the organization answers to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Low-Intensity Conflict Directorate, within the Counternarcotics and Global Threats portfolio. It’s tucked away so deep, bureaucratically speaking, that it doesn’t actually have an office at the Pentagon.

The organization, run by a civilian named Mike Strand, has been around since 1995. In 2007, it made a big push into contracting, hiring the Blackwater subsidiary U.S. Training Center as well as defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and ARINC for “a wide range of Defense counternarcotics activities,” according to a statement provided to Danger Room by the agency. That award, which has doled out $4.3 billion so far, is the precursor to the current bid.

Maybe that’s why an “Industry Day” last week at a Fredericksburg, Virginia hotel to introduce CNTPO to would-be contractors attracted “approximately 180 companies,” CNTPO boasts.

CNTPO might not be well-known. But in some circles, it’s infamous.

In 2009, a bureaucratic shift plucked the responsibility for training Afghanistan’s police out of the State Department’s hands. Suddenly, the contract — worth about $1 billion — landed with CNTPO. CNTPO quietly chose Blackwater for the contract, even though Blackwater guards in Afghanistan on a different contract stole hundreds of guns intended for those very Afghan cops.

The incumbent holder of the contract, Blackwater competitor DynCorp, protested. It didn’t help that a powerful Senate committee discovered Blackwater’s gun-stealing antics. In December, DynCorp finally received the contract — administered by an Army office, not CNTPO.

But that hasn’t stopped CNTPO’s expansion. In its new contract, the office explicitly stakes out a broad definition of its mandate: “to disrupt, deter, and defeat the threat to national security posed by illicit trafficking in all its manifestations: drugs, small arms and explosives, precursor chemicals, people, and illicitly-gained and laundered money.” It declares its practices “beyond traditional DoD acquisition and contracting scopes.”

How broad is that in practice? Tasks contained in the CNTPO contract range from “airlift services in the trans-Sahara region of Africa” to “media analysis and web-site development consultation to officials of the Government of Pakistan.”

The small agency is “worldwide,” the contract says, as “the primary regional areas of interest include Central and Western Asia, Sub-Sahara Africa, and Central and South America.” But its contracting oversight efforts are comparatively local.

According to CNTPO, oversight for its contracts are themselves outsourced to an Army Contracting Command outfit in Hunstville, Alabama. CNTPO “provides all contracting support for this effort, with 10 contracting officers/contracting specialists and legal/policy review of all contracts and task orders,” CNTPO’s statement reads, with “program management and customer support requirements” provided by CNTPO itself. That’s 10 bureaucrats to review billions of dollars in private security contracts, spent all over the world.

A member of the Wartime Contracting Commission, created by Congress to stop war profiteering, came away from an interaction with CNTPO concerned about that level of oversight.

“The overriding consideration tends to be helping the military with their mission,” says commissioner Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who interviewed CNTPO officials about the Afghanistan police contract. “Economies for tight supervision of private security activities take a back seat.”

CNTPO’s rise underscores an emerging trend in private security contracting: a move into some of the most sensitive missions the military performs. Mercs protect the bases in Afghanistan where U.S. Special Operations Forces live and work. When soldiers are taken prisoner, hired guns are entrusted to rescue them. Their tracking technology finds terrorists for U.S. commandos to kill. Now they’re training foreign commando forces.

“These are special-forces operations, and they’re best left in hands of our SF folks,” Schwellenbach says. “This stuff isn’t delivering paper clips or even fuel or bullets. It’s complex, sophisticated services, and there’s a reason we have Special Forces do this kind of training, not the regular Army. This is something you really want to keep a tight lid on.”

[I]Photo: Noah Shachtman

buglerbilly

01-12-11, 01:22 AM

Now Might Not Be the Best Time to Hire Pakistani Mercs

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author November 30, 2011 | 6:30 am |

Call it a case of bad timing.

The State Department wants to hire “local guards” to protect its diplomats in Pakistan. Yes, now. Right after a U.S. military mission gone wrong killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, delivering another battering to an already fragile alliance.

The State Department recently announced it’s seeking local Pakistani guards to keep its diplomats safe at the embassy in Islamabad and consulates in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar. Those guards will need to “deter potential terrorist attacks,” according to a contract pre-solicitation, by “restricting entry of unauthorized personnel, operation of walk-through metal detectors, and hand-held detectors.”

Give the State Department points for good intentions. The department relies on contractors, not U.S. troops, to protect its diplomats in dangerous places. Only U.S. contractors aren’t exactly the most popular people in Pakistan, after CIA contractor Ray Davis caused an international incident by killing two Pakistanis in Lahore who he said tried to rob him. Hiring Pakistanis instead looks like a goodwill gesture, even if it was born out of necessity.

But.

It’s disturbingly too easy to imagine Pakistani guards working with terror groups to give dangerous people access to a U.S. official or facility, both alluring targets. Pakistani troops whom the U.S. has funded and equipped for a decade, at a minimum, look the other way when insurgents fire rockets at U.S. troops across the border in Afghanistan. Hired Pakistani guards could just as easily ignore the trill of a hand-held metal detector. Or strap themselves with explosives.

What kind of background checks will those guards go through? It’ll be “conducted by the Contractor in accordance with Pakistan law,” the pre-solicitation announces. State’s trust-but-don’t-verify record doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Security contractors who’ve passed background checks have ended up holding frat-style parties on the job, engaging in extracurricular sex trafficking, snorting coke…. The list goes on and on.

State’s in a bind here. Hiring U.S. contractors to protect its diplomats carries risks. But so does hiring Pakistani guards. It’s almost like outsourcing security responsibilities is an inherently flawed concept.

According to the pre-solicitation, State doesn’t have much time to resolve the dilemma. It’ll formally issue the Pakistan contract on Thursday. If that’s not enough time, it had better hope against hope for a sudden burst of pro-Americanism in Pakistan.

Photo: Flickr/Fantaz

buglerbilly

09-12-11, 02:52 PM

Mercs May Run Air Missions on Afghan-Pakistan Border

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author December 9, 2011 | 6:30 am

Mercs are running Chinooks are they?!!!

Barely two weeks after a NATO helicopter disaster killed 24 Pakistani troops, the skies above the Afghanistan-Pakistan border may get even more dangerous. The State Department’s Islamabad embassy is hiring a contractor to coordinate air operations along the border to stop the flow of drugs and insurgents. Just what a tense situation calls for.

The new “aviation adviser” will oversee both the State Department’s “fleet of … aircraft” in Pakistan, which isn’t very often discussed, and provide “aviation support” to the Pakistani Frontier Corps, which patrols the tribal areas. The “end game” of the adviser’s mission is “interdicting the movement of illegal drugs, arms and people across the border,” not exactly a diplomatic specialty.

It’s unclear what kind of aircraft the State Department has in Pakistan. It’s also unclear whether the State Department will help the Frontier Corps maintain its own aircraft or actually provide air support for the corps, a much more dramatic step. Either way, the department’s call for the “aviation adviser” comes at a time when U.S. generals accuse the Frontier Corps of helping insurgents attack U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

Judging from a contract solicitation released on Thursday, the aviation adviser’s life in Pakistan will be a rugged one. The adviser “must be able to independently perform fieldwork in remote areas for extended periods without assistance,” the contract reads. “Some field sites have been declared hazardous duty locations by the Department of State due to hostile activities of armed groups within Pakistan and therefore pose significant risk to the incumbent while at these sites.”

And the operations themselves do not sound very diplomatic. The Frontier Corps has long possessed a mandate to stop the flow of drugs across the border — and performed pretty badly, from the U.S.’s perspective. Not only is the border porous for insurgents, but two Pakistani factories produce a total of 400,000 metric tons annually of ammonium nitrate, a material commonly found across the border in Afghan homemade bombs.

Into that breach steps contractors for the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In the past, the bureau has provided aviation support in Colombia, another partner nation racked by narcoterrorism. In Colombia, the bureau merely trained the Colombian military in air operations; judging from the job solicitation, missions in Pakistan sound more, um, direct.

It also comes at the intersection of two trends. First, the State Department is beefing up its security contractor presence in Pakistan: It put out a call last week for Pakistani embassy guards. Second, the relationship between Washington and Islamabad is spiraling downward after last month’s helicopter accident, with the very Frontier Corps that the aviation adviser will work with getting yanked off the border.

State is about to send even more security contractors into that hostile environment. What could go wrong?

Photo: Flickr/U.S. Army

buglerbilly

13-12-11, 01:18 AM

Blackwater 3.0: Rebranded ‘Academi’ Wants Back in Iraq

By Spencer Ackerman Email Author December 12, 2011 | 12:00 pm

So much for naming your mercenary company after an obscure element from the periodic table.

Say goodbye to Xe. The company formerly known as Blackwater — the world’s most infamous private security corporation — has jettisoned the name it chose in its 2009 rebrand. Now the “security solutions provider” wants to wash away the taint of the 2007 Nisour Square shootings by adopting the new name “Academi.”

But the company is changing its name — not its core business. And it even wants back into the country where it ran its brand through the mud: Iraq.

“Our focus is on training and security services. We’re continuing that,” new CEO Ted Wright tells Danger Room. “We’re not backing away from security services. The lion’s share of our business today is providing training for security services and [providing] security services.”
If Blackwater — sorry, Academi – was a sports franchise, you’d consider 2011 its rebuilding year. A consortium of investors close to the family of founder Erik Prince bought the company in late 2010, and spent 2011 putting together its new leadership team. It brought on board former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bill Clinton consigliere Jack Quinn and Suzanne Folsom from the insurance giant AIG. Wright came from military-services giant KBR. Notice a pattern? All have deep experience with crisis management.

Notice another pattern: All of those hires either worked in senior government positions or worked closely with those who did. That signals confidence in the company’s traditional business — getting big government contracts to protect diplomats, aid workers and even the military in dangerous places. On its new website, Academi says providing “stability and protection to people and locations experiencing turmoil” is its “core” business. New name, same wheelhouse.

The company formerly known as Blackwater

The name, however, is meant to convey that “we lead with training,” Wright says — using the company’s “elite training facility” at Moyock, North Carolina to train cops, first responders, and even U.S. troops. No more will the company, say, act like a cutout for the CIA.

Xe certainly didn’t get the company out of the private security business. But after Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, turning the company radioactive, it played down its own brand name. When Xe ventured out into the security business, it often did so by using spinoff, subsidiary or front companies that obscured their ties to Xe, like “International Development Solutions,” its partnership with Kaseman that won part of a $10 billion State Department security contract in 2010.

That’s coming to an end, Wright says. All future Academi subsidiaries “will have the word ‘Academi’ in front.” International Development Solutions will keep its name, however, since Academi is a “minority partner” in the firm.

And that’s part of convincing everyone that the company has turned over an ethical leaf. Academi will issue new codes of conduct to its guards and trainers soon, and Wright promises “accountability and openness” over the company’s actions. Translation: no more stealing guns, coked-up warzone parties, or killing civilians.

Wright acknowledges that rebranding the world’s most infamous security company might seem like an exercise in cynicism. And so he sets himself a challenge: getting the company back into Iraq.

“As we make changes and they take root and we convince everyone they’re real,” Wright says, “then the real proof in the pudding is convincing the government of Iraq and the U.S. government to let us do business in Iraq.”

That’s a hard sell: Iraq stripped Blackwater of its business license after Nisour Square. Iraqis are unlikely to give Academi anything like the benefit of the doubt. But with U.S. troops set to leave Iraq at the end of the month, mercs are filling the security gap. There’s a lot of business to be had — if Wright and company can convince either government they deserve it.

Wright wants a shot to show a very skeptical world that Academi represents “an institution of trained thinkers and warriors,” he says, conveying ”excellence, dignity, honor, integrity.”

Photo: Flickr/Peter Gene

buglerbilly

30-12-11, 04:01 AM

“I Gave Up Being a SEAL For This?”

By Mark Thompson | @MarkThompson_DC | December 29, 2011

Army photo by Spc. Elisha Dawkins
A contractor pours tea for a U.S. soldier in Iraq

Suzanne Kelly over at CNN’s Security Clearance blog pulls back the curtains on what it’s like to be a private contractor toiling in Iraq or Afghanistan. Hint: the big-money dreams seem to be just that.

Read more: http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/12/29/i-gave-up-being-a-seal-for-this/#ixzz1hyzJbZSV

December 27th, 2011

04:38 PM ET

Confessions of a private security contractor

by Suzanne Kelly

"There are a lot of assumptions about contractors, and a lot of the assumptions are wrong." Those are the words of a private security contractor who asked to be referred to only as "Lloyd" for this story, because like most of his colleagues he is not authorized to speak to the media.

By Lloyd's count, he has spent some 1,000 days working in Afghanistan in the past four years. He, like many other well-trained military men, decided to leave his position as a Navy SEAL and take his chances finding employment in one of the hot spots around the world where highly skilled contractors were well-paid, and in demand.

Very few people outside the contracting industry really understood just what a private security contractor did before March 31, 2004. That was the day four American security contractors accompanying a shipment of kitchen equipment through Iraq were ambushed, killed, set on fire, dragged through the streets, and hung from a bridge before a cheering crowd in the city of Fallujah.

As shock subsided, questions arose. Who were these American men? If they weren't members of the military, what were they doing in one of the most volatile regions of Iraq?

All four men were private security contractors working for a company called Blackwater. At the time the company, like many others, was just getting on its feet as U.S. demand for security services skyrocketed. The government needed armed, well-trained security personnel in hostile territories. The new push started when the United States went to war in a CIA-led operation in Afghanistan in 2001. e CIA's early advance teams were not fully prepared for the pace of their own success. They quickly needed makeshift facilities to hold hostile enemy combatants and establish secure operating bases. The military wasn't yet in a position to help, so the CIA hired Blackwater.

It was a similar story when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. A heavy presence of diplomats and reconstruction experts working in a hostile area meant they needed to be protected. Blackwater won a part of the contract to provide security services in the country. But being a private security contractor was a shady business, if not in the "legal" sense, in the "keeping off the radar" sense. Many of the contracts that were granted to companies such as Blackwater included clauses that severely limited the companies' ability to talk to members of the media. Contracting was, by the design of the U.S. government, secretive.

It was also designed to be nothing more than a cost-saving, stopgap measure. But as U.S. troops leave Iraq, there is an army of contractors staying behind, and 5,000 of them will be providing security services.

A contractor's experiences often don't draw a great deal of attention, unless someone is kidnapped, or has done something wrong. As Congress began to investigate the government's use of contractors several years ago, the issues that drew the most attention were the lack of clear rules governing contractors, and just how much money they were being paid. While it's true that money has always been a big draw, there are other parts of the job and lifestyle that rarely get reported.

"I remember when I got out of the military and took my first job with Blackwater," says Lloyd, "I thought I was going to be a millionaire, but after working five years in contracting, I can tell you I was chasing a carrot the whole time."

At the height of the boom in the years following the start of the Iraq war, private security contractors with military or law enforcement experience could make upwards of $750 a day. They would work for several months at a time and then come home before heading off on the next assignment. Many of the jobs didn't come with life insurance policies or medical coverage for their families back home.

"Layoffs and breaks between deployments have all affected my financial progress," says Lloyd. "It's two steps forward and one step back." He has a wife back home who is awaiting the birth of the couple's first child and says he worries because he has no pension. He reports that he has $30,000 in a 401(k) and another $15,000 in A Roth IRA. It's nowhere near the million he thought he would earn.

Another contractor, who worked for two of the larger private security companies before finding an office job back home, says it was a sense of duty after 9/11 that prompted him to leave his job as a SWAT team officer and go overseas. But the money wasn't bad, either.

"I got in so early that when I got into it the money was good," says Carter, who doesn't want to use his real name out of fear that he will have trouble getting hired for another contract if anyone knows he's spoken with CNN. "We were making $700 – $750 a day regardless of the contract. Some paid higher, some paid lower, but over time the company started paying less. They diluted the pool of skills. They lowered the qualifications 'cause they needed people. Six hundred dollars a day - pay dramatically dropped, then new companies came in - $500 day and it went from there."

Was it worth the money? "I had spent five months not eating, not sleeping, because you'd have death missions, seeing people get blown up all around me, going on dangerous missions where I could have died," says Carter. "I had so many close calls when we should have been killed, dozens of times. Small arms fire, some RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), some grenade attacks on the vehicles. It didn't happen daily, but it was dangerous."

"I have even had people tell me that I'm not like they are, because I'm a contractor," said Lloyd. "As if a rocket attack isn't just as stressful for me as it is for them, because I make "so much money.'" As if (post-traumatic stress disorder) is only for soldiers and combat veterans, because I make so much money that I have nothing to be stressed about."

Like many private security contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan, Carter moved between contracts, sometimes working on CIA tasks and sometimes on DEA contracts. For a while, he provided base security at one of the most sensitive CIA bases in the region. On other contracts, he often had to accompany reconstruction officials to meetings with Iraqi counterparts.

Carter recalls one night where he believed that there was a good chance that he wouldn't go home to his wife again.

"Here I am sweating bullets because I know the next day I have to take someone to a dangerous neighborhood, and it's me and another guy protecting someone and I'm scared to death."

"I had no benefits, no veterans services, no college fund, no disability insurance. There were some limited benefits from the company, but we got no veteran's credit. That was a big downside. We were getting murdered on medical insurance. Couldn't get any life insurance back then," recalls Carter.

There were contractors in the early days who saved up money, put their kids through college, or paid off the mortgage, and came home. It wasn't the kind of job that many people took on thinking they could do it for 10 years. But there was another big drawback once they were home: finding a job to match their skill set wasn't easy.

"I didn't bring home one skill I could use," says Carter, who has been home for three years now but is thinking seriously about going back.

"I still stay in touch with all of my friends who are deployed. Every day they are a part of something that matters. Every day, I sit behind a desk and do nothing. I used to be working along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan doing operations that the military wouldn't do - and now I come home and I have to answer to some boob about what I'm doing. It's such an emotional and mental letdown. I'm literally rotting," says Carter.

But if he went back now, depending on where he went, there could be even more dangers. The U.S. is still negotiating with the Iraqi government about whether U.S. contractors will be granted any diplomatic protections under Iraqi law. It's been a point of contention since Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqis in a Baghdad traffic circle in 2007. Given the unwelcoming position of the Iraqi government toward U.S. contractors in light of that shooting, it's another risk worth weighing before packing the duffel bag.

buglerbilly

04-01-12, 02:19 AM

Past Lingers for Company Formerly Called Blackwater

January 03, 2012

Virginian-Pilot|by Bill Sizemore

As it goes about the complicated task of putting its past behind it, the Moyock, N.C.-based company once known as Blackwater is going through some lean times.

Nevertheless, its reach has never been wider. Its workers have deployed to more than a dozen countries around the world, many of them hot spots of civil unrest.

That should be no cause for alarm, the current owners say, because the old company is no more. Blackwater -- some of whose security operatives were accused of killing civilians in war zones, and several of whose top executives face felony firearms charges -- is dead and buried, a stake plunged into its heart.

It is a new company with new leadership now, they say, one dedicated to playing by the rules.

To drive the point home, last month the company unveiled its second rebranding since 2009, dumping the name Xe, successor to Blackwater, in favor of the studious-sounding Academi.

The urgency of outrunning the Blackwater legacy is apparent in recent revenue numbers.

The company lost one of its most lucrative jobs -- guarding U.S. diplomats in Iraq -- in 2009 when it was barred from the country by the Iraqi government, incensed over a 2007 shooting incident in Baghdad in which 17 civilians were killed. Four ex-Blackwater guards face federal manslaughter charges in the case.

The loss of that work is reflected in a Virginian-Pilot analysis of the company's publicly identifiable federal contracts in an online database.

Those contracts, which form the bulk of the company's revenue, dropped to about $160 million in 2011, a seven-year low.

Even though the United States has pulled its troops out of Iraq, there's still a big market there for private security contractors. Ted Wright, Academi's president and chief executive officer, has told interviewers the company wants to get back into the country.

Academi's other big cash cow, Afghanistan, is still going strong for now. The company has banked more than $1 billion for its work there since 2002 -- roughly the same amount it collected over five years in Iraq.

The future there is uncertain, however. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, blaming foreign security companies for inciting instability in the war-weary nation, has said he plans to ban them all. He recently extended the deadline for their departure from March 2012 to September 2013.

Academi is prepared for that eventuality, Wright said in an interview. As U.S. military operations abroad wind down, the company is shifting its primary focus from security to training.

"As the situation in Afghanistan changes from private security companies to Afghans doing that for themselves, what they're going to need is our training services," Wright said. "So I think that fits inside of our strategy extremely well."

In the past six months, the company has won contracts -- mostly for training -- in a variety of other countries on three continents where security concerns loom large:

- Algeria, Tunisia and Bahrain, predominantly Muslim countries in North Africa and the Middle East that have seen demonstrations and rioting during the "Arab spring" uprisings over the past year.

- Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, former Soviet republics in central Asia, also predominantly Muslim, that have seen nationwide protests and armed conflict between government and militant forces.

- Mexico, a major source of illegal narcotics where powerful drug-trafficking organizations have engaged in bloody feuding, resulting in tens of thousands of homicides.

Some of the contracts were awarded by the State Department, a longtime Blackwater client. Others came from the Counter Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, an obscure agency in the Defense Department whose stated mission is to deter and disrupt drug-trafficking operations that support terrorist activities.

Blackwater was one of five prime contractors awarded five-year contracts by the agency in 2007 worth up to $15 billion. A 2009 audit of that award by the Defense Department's inspector general found mismanagement and potential violations of federal appropriations law valued at more than $20 million.

In November, the agency announced a new round of bidding for $3 billion in follow-on contracts.

Even as Academi strives to put its best foot forward, however, the shadow of Blackwater lingers.

Erik Prince, the former Navy SEAL who founded the company in 1997 and built its 7,000-acre training compound in Moyock, N.C., sold it to an investor-owned consortium in late 2010 after agreeing to pay the State Department a $42 million fine for 288 alleged violations of federal arms export laws and regulations. He now lives in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.

Prince's only remaining connection to Academi is an "earn-out" clause in the sales contract that gives him a share of the company's earnings for a specified period, Wright said.

"It's to ensure that he doesn't do anything to hurt the company," Wright said. Otherwise, he said, "Erik Prince has absolutely no association with the company from the perspective of ownership or of control or anything else."

But Prince retained the rights to the Blackwater name, and it's clear he doesn't plan to let it fade quietly into the sunset.

First there was "Blackwater" the video game, rolled out this fall, in which players pretend to be security operators battling warlords in a fictional North African town.

The game received, to put it kindly, a less-than-favorable response from hard-core gamers. "I have never played anything so bad," one reviewer said. "It made me want to channel Darth Vader and force choke the developers."

Undaunted, Prince has now licensed the name to a California-based tactical gear company, DPx Gear, which has set up a website to sell off the remaining inventory of Blackwater-themed merchandise from the pre-Academi era.

"BLACKWATER IS BACK," the website proclaims in green lettering on a black background. Over the next few months, it promises, a whole new series of "tactical hard, soft and electronic goods" bearing the distinctive Blackwater logo -- a bear paw in a gunsight -- will be rolled out.

DPx is owned by Robert Young Pelton, an adventure writer who wrote a book about the private military industry.

Prince put so much of himself into building the Blackwater name, he couldn't let it go, Pelton said in an interview. Besides, he added, the brand has achieved "global awareness" and has great marketing value.

"It's an unusual brand, because people love it or hate it," Pelton said. "It's like a huge line in the sand."

Prince has acquired more than two dozen trademarks for a variety of new Blackwater-themed products including T-shirts, gym bags and toy guns.

Some will be high-end "James Bond stuff" like folding knives and armored briefcases, Pelton said. Also in the works: a graphic novel telling "the inside story of Blackwater."

Wright conceded that Prince's merchandising operation complicates his job.

"Certainly, one of the reasons we're rebranding the company is, we do want that separation from the old name," he said. "And I think that over time, as we focus on the things we need to focus on -- and that's providing superb service in the field and an environment of accountability and openness and governance -- and as he does what he does, we're just going to get that natural separation. Of course it's a concern, but we're managing that every day."

Another Blackwater legacy Wright must manage is leftover litigation from the Prince era.

In addition to the criminal charges still facing four former Blackwater guards, several civil lawsuits were spawned by the 2007 shooting incident in Baghdad that got the company booted from Iraq. One case, brought in Alexandria on behalf of more than 60 Iraqis killed or wounded in that and other incidents, was settled for an undisclosed sum two years ago.

A similar case filed in Raleigh, N.C., is still dragging on.

Another Alexandria case, brought by two former employees who alleged that the company overbilled the government for security work in Iraq and Afghanistan, was decided in Blackwater's favor in August. But it has been appealed. The company claims to have already spent more than $9 million in legal fees and costs on that case alone.

In still another case, a class-action suit filed in Washington, a group of former Blackwater security workers alleges that the company improperly classified them as independent contractors rather than as employees, depriving them of benefits to which they were entitled. They are seeking $240 million in damages.

Wright said litigation is an inescapable part of the business.

"There's always legal issues," he said. "We're no different than any other company."

In Moyock, a new Academi sign now adorns the entrance to the training compound at the end of Puddin Ridge Road. There's no trace of the old bear-paw logo.

The sprawling complex on the edge of the Dismal Swamp includes dozens of firing ranges, three ship-boarding simulators, a three-mile tactical driving track, 25 classrooms and several explosive training ranges.

In addition to preparing its own security teams, Academi has training contracts with several federal agencies, principally the State Department, the Navy and the Coast Guard. It also provides training to a variety of state and local law enforcement agencies and foreign military personnel.

Jeff Nelson, owner of Grimm's Sandwich Shack on the outskirts of the compound, said he hasn't noticed any fall-off in his business since the company changed hands.

"We love all those guys," he said. "We have a strong base of loyal customers from there."

Tina Hocutt, the manager of the sandwich shop, said she can hear the blasts from the explosive ranges at her home 12 miles away, but she doesn't mind a bit.

"They've helped the economy of Moyock," she said. "They brought a lot of jobs."

The new name doesn't seem to have sunk in yet among the locals. To most, it's still Blackwater.

"It's going to be hard to get away from that name," said Hocutt's husband, Mark. "It can make you or destroy you."

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