The men who ask the
questions By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON - Dozens converged this summer
on the US high desert town of El Paso, Texas, en
route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons.
They were going not as prisoners, but as
interrogators, walking a legal tightrope that
stretches across the Geneva Conventions. Just for
signing up, they got a US$2,000 check from a
company that is rapidly becoming one of the key
employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed
Martin.
After a week of orientation and
medical processing, they flew to Tampa, Florida,
and on to their final destinations - Iraq's infamous
prisons, including Abu Ghraib,
Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport
and Camp Whitehorse near the southern Iraqi town
of Nasariyah.
Known in the intelligence
community as "97 Echoes" (97E is the official
classification number for the interrogator course
taught at military colleges), these civilian
contractors work side-by-side with military
interrogators using 17 officially sanctioned
techniques, ranging from "love of comrades" to
"fear up harsh" - violently throwing detainees to
the ground. Their subjects will be the tens of
thousands of men and women put into United
States-run military jails on suspicion of links to
terrorism.
Jobs for this new breed of
interrogators typically begin with a phone call or
email to retired Lieutenant Colonel Marc
Michaelis, in the quaint flour-milling town of
Ellicott City, Maryland, about an hour's drive
from Washington.
Michaelis, who is the
main point of contact for new interrogators, came
to Lockheed in February after it acquired his
former employer, Sytex, in a $462 million
takeover.
Lockheed/Sytex appears to have
emerged as one of the biggest recruiters of
private interrogators. In June alone, Sytex
advertised for 11 new interrogators for Iraq, and
in July the company sought 23 interrogators for
Afghanistan.
Ads on several websites
frequented by current and former military
personnel offered an annual salary of
$70,000-$90,000, a $2,000 sign-up bonus, $1,000
for a mid-tour break and a $2,000-dollar bonus for
completing the normal six-month deployment.
Those returning for a second tour get
double bonuses at the beginning and end of their
stints. In return, the employees are expected to
work as necessary - up to 14 hours a day, seven
days a week.
The issue of private
contractors conducting interrogations first came
to light in mid-2004, when a military
investigation revealed that several interrogators
at the Abu Ghraib prison were civilian employees
of a Virginia-based company called CACI.
It emerged that no one knew what laws
applied to private contractors who engaged in
torture in Iraq, or whether they were in fact
accountable to any legal authority or disciplinary
procedures.
When the media began to
question the role of the private contractors and
the legality of their presence under unrelated
information technology contracts from non-military
agencies, the Pentagon swiftly issued sole-source
("no bid") military contracts to CACI and
Lockheed.
Human-rights groups are openly
critical of this new trend. "The army's use of
contract interrogators has to date been a failed
experiment," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of
the US Law and Security program at Human Rights
First.
"Based on the Pentagon's own
investigations and other reports that are already
public, it seems clear that contractors are less
well-trained, less well-controlled and harder to
hold accountable for things that go wrong than are
regular troops."
She warned, "Unless and
until contract interrogators can be brought at the
very least up to the standards of training and
discipline expected of our uniformed soldiers, the
United States may well be better off without their
services."
Former interrogators have a
more nuanced opinion. "The problem is not the use
of civilian contractors," one former army
interrogator with more than 10 years of field
experience said in an email. "What is necessary is
an active means of supervision and oversight on
all of our assets in the field ... not just the
civilian ones.
"If you take a look at many
of the investigations of the military intelligence
activities, you will find just as many uniformed
individuals breaking the law as contractors."
But Susan Burke, a lawyer for Iraqi
prisoners who say they were tortured at Abu
Ghraib, challenges the legality of using private
contractors for interrogation.
"Interrogation has always been considered
an inherently governmental function for obvious
reasons," she said. "It is irresponsible and
dangerous to use contractors in such settings,
given that there is a long history of repeated
human rights abuses by contractors."
The
Philadelphia attorney charges that the use of
private contractors is illegal. "The United States
Congress has passed laws [the Federal Acquisition
Regulations] that prevent the executive branch
from delegating 'inherently governmental
functions' to private parties," Burke explained.
Asked about the details of the
interrogation contracts, Lockheed declined to
comment. Joseph Wagovich, a spokesman for the
company's information technology division that
includes Sytex, initially said the company had
only a minor role in the interrogation business
and that it had wrapped up its interrogation
contract for Guantanamo Bay, an American naval
base in Cuba.
But he confirmed that
Lockheed was still supplying other kinds of
"intelligence analysts" to the base, which is also
used as a prison for suspected terrorists.
Sytex likes to keep a low profile. "Most
of the law enforcement organizations, as well as
the other surreptitious organizations we may be
supporting, would just as soon not see their names
in print," Ralph Palmieri Jr, the company's chief
operating officer, told the Congressional
Quarterly in 2004.
The company's reach and
influence go far beyond the military. A New York
Times profile of the company in 2004 opened with:
"Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States.
But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of
it."
"Over the last decade, Lockheed, the
nation's largest military contractor, has built a
formidable information-technology empire that now
stretches from the Pentagon to the Post Office,"
wrote Tim Weiner. "It sorts your mail and totals
your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and
counts the United States census. It runs space
flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that
happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than
Microsoft."
The national security reporter
for the New York Times explained how Lockheed gets
its business: "Men who have worked, lobbied and
lawyered for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary
of the navy, secretary of transportation, director
of the national nuclear weapons complex and
director of the national spy satellite agency."
Bill Hartung, senior fellow at the World
Policy Institute in New York, believes that,
"Giving one company this much power in matters of
war and peace is as dangerous as it is
undemocratic."
Lockheed Martin is now
positioned to profit from every level of the "war
on terror", from targeting to intervention and
from occupation to interrogation.
Pratap Chatterjee is the
managing editor of CorpWatch.
