| |
There's
no business like security business
By David Isenberg
As they say in show business, you ain't seen nothing yet. If you thought
Afghanistan was noteworthy for the use of private military companies (PMCs)
after the fighting was over, stay tuned. The roles and opportunities for PMCs
have just gotten much bigger and more lucrative.
On April 18, Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) announced that DynCorp International,
a company it acquired this year, has been awarded a contract from the US State
Department to provide up to 1,000 civilian advisors to help the government of
Iraq organize effective civilian law enforcement and judicial and correctional
agencies. The advisors will not do law-enforcement work themselves, but are to
work within existing Iraqi structures to stand up, advise and train an Iraqi
police force.
The tax-exempt salaries being offered range from US$63,000-$74,000 a year, with
the State Department paying for housing and food. The estimated value of the
contract to CSC could be as high as $50 million for the first year, depending
on assessment of Iraqi capabilities and needs by initial advisors. The
assessment team, which will ultimately include 26 law-enforcement specialists,
is to form the administrative core of a much larger US police mission.
They will answer to retired General Jay Garner's new Office of Reconstruction
and Humanitarian Assistance, who has been appointed by the administration of US
President George W Bush to oversee Iraq's civil administration pending the
creation of an Iraqi interim authority. Garner formerly worked for L-3
Communications, which a few years ago bought up MPRI, a well-known PMC, also
headquartered in Virginia.
Officials have asked Congress to fund the $25 million law-enforcement project
and plan to seek more money - perhaps up to $250 million - to support the
effort. Some of the $25 million will be diverted from an anti-drug program for
Afghanistan. An aide to Republican congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the
House International Relations Committee, recently received assurances from Paul
Simon, a senior State Department official, that the anti-drug funds would be
quickly replenished and that DynCorp's operations in Iraq would be closely
monitored.
DynCorp, a government contractor based in Reston, Virginia, was just one of a
handful of US companies asked to bid on the contract. It has already been given
the task of recruiting an initial group of 150 former police officers that
could be quickly deployed in Iraq. The State Department recently informed Hyde
that it had decided to pay DynCorp $22 million to recruit that contingent. The
pay for those jobs will range from $46,000-$96,000 per year, with danger and
hardship pay added as warranted. Bonuses will be paid at the end of service.
Such business is not new to the company. Iraq will be the fifth foreign
destination to which DynCorp has dispatched police trainers since 1994, after
missions to Haiti, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and East Timor.
In Colombia, DynCorp has held for years a Pentagon contract, along with
Northrop Grumman and Florida-based Airscan, to provide intelligence, train
Colombian troops and spray coca crops in an attempt to reduce the supply of
cocaine.
DynCorp handles its international police program recruiting from Fort Worth,
Texas.
One former DynCorp employee who worked in Bosnia and who was interviewed for
Minnesota Public Radio's Marketplace program said, "The initial inspiration was
the money. You know, that's a pretty lucrative deal for someone that's in the
law-enforcement community to make, you know, $90,000-plus for 12 months."
The company said it would recruit advisors from the ranks of current and
retired US law-enforcement officers. The ad doesn't say anything about speaking
Arabic or familiarity with Iraqi customs, but qualifying candidates must be US
citizens with a total of 10 years of general law-enforcement experience and two
years of specialized experience, must speak English, and must have a driver's
license and a valid US passport, according to DynCorp ads.
Physical requirements for the job include running an obstacle course, dragging
an 84-kilogram dummy 24 meters in one minute, climbing a six-meter ladder while
holding a shotgun in one hand, and running 400m and up and down two flights of
stairs in two minutes and 10 seconds.
DynCorp was founded after World War II by former military officers, and before
CSC purchased it, it was the United States' 13th-largest military contractor,
with about 23,000 employees and $2.3 billion in revenue. The combined company
is among the top 10 government contractors, with nearly $14 billion in annual
revenues.
It supplies bodyguards for Afghan President Hamid Karzai and has recruited
personnel for United Nations peacekeeping missions in Haiti, East Timor and the
Balkan region. But despite its experience, DynCorp has become a lightning rod
for criticism. In Bosnia, its British subsidiary met its greatest controversy
in a scandal for allegedly hiring poorly qualified officers, failing to
discipline wrongdoers and ignoring employee involvement in sexual misconduct.
Although DynCorp fired those employees and subsequently tightened its
recruiting procedures, it suffered bad publicity, partly because the scandal
was first revealed by other DynCorp employees who were fired when they first
brought it to light.
In 2001, a Nebraska policewoman named Kathryn Bokovac, a former Omaha police
officer, filed a whistle-blower suit in Britain, where she had been recruited
by DynCorp for a UN-administered international police task force that played
the same advisory role in Bosnia now being envisaged for Iraq.
Bokovac claimed that she was demoted within days of sending e-mails disclosing
that some UN police trainers were "buying" prostitutes as sex slaves. She
blamed her firing six months later on her disclosures. DynCorp said Bokovac was
dismissed over discrepancies in time sheets that she had submitted, an
allegation she denied. In November, a British employment tribunal ruled in
Bokovac's favor, ordering DynCorp to pay her the equivalent of $165,000.
DynCorp is appealing the judgment.
But in the meantime, hoping to avoid any similar incidents in the future, US
law-enforcement personnel recruited to help reorganize Iraq's shattered police
forces must acknowledge in writing that human trafficking and involvement with
prostitution "are considered illegal by the international community and are
immoral, unethical and strictly prohibited". The new acknowledgment was
instituted in February by DynCorp.
One expert, Pete Singer of the Brookings Institution, author of the newly
published book Corporate Warriors, said on the Marketplace program,
"Often the law isn't sufficient to deal with them. They're operating in zones
where, for example, American law doesn't apply. And often the local legal
system isn't sufficiently developed enough to deal with potential crimes that
these employees commit. So, for example, of the reported crimes in the Balkans,
these, you know, fairly vicious sex crimes, in some cases, involving rape or
child prostitution, none of the DynCorp employees were ever criminally
prosecuted for them."
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact
content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication
policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
