Military contractors retreat, counter-attack
By Pratap Chatterjee
WASHINGTON - Jerry Torres, chief executive officer of Torres Advanced
Enterprise Solutions, has a motto: "For Torres, failure is not an option." A
former member of the Green Berets, one of the elite United States Army Special
Forces, he was awarded "Executive of the Year" at the seventh annual "Greater
Washington Government Contractor Awards" in November 2009.
On Monday, Torres, whose company provides translators and armed security guards
in Iraq, was invited to testify before the Commission on Wartime Contracting
(CWC), a body created in early 2008 to investigate waste, fraud and abuse in
military contracting services in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Torres was asked to testify about his failure to obtain the required clearances
for "several hundred" Sierra Leonian armed security
guards that he had dispatched to protect Forward Operating Base Shield, a US
military base in Baghdad, in January 2010.
Torres didn't show up.
An empty chair at the witness table was placed ready for him together with a
placard with his name on it next to those for representatives of three other
companies working in Iraq - the London-based Aegis, and DynCorp and Triple
Canopy, both Virginia-based companies.
"This commission was going to ask him, under oath, why his firm agreed in
January to assume private security responsibilities at FOB Shield with several
hundred guards that had not been properly vetted and approved," said Michael
Thibault, one of the co-chairs of the commission and a former deputy director
of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.
"This commission was also going to ask Mr Torres why he personally flew to
Iraq, to FOB Shield, and strongly suggested that Torres AES be allowed to post
the unapproved guards, guards that would protect American troops, and then to
'catch-up the approval process'."
Instead, a lawyer informed the commission staff that Torres was "nervous about
appearing".
The failure of a contractor to appear for an oversight hearing into lapses was
just one example that the use of some 18,800 armed "private security
contractors" in Iraq and another 23,700 in Afghanistan to protect convoys,
diplomatic and other personnel, and military bases and other facilities in
Afghanistan and Iraq was not working.
Blackwater's (Xe's) new Afghan contract
Perhaps the most famous private military contractor in Afghanistan and Iraq -
North Carolina-based Xe, formerly known as Blackwater - was not invited to sit at the witness table
either, despite the fact that the company had been the subject of several
investigations into misconduct.
For example, in September 2007, security guards from Xe shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad's Nisour
Square.
Xe staff have also been accused of killing other private security
contractors - in December 2006 Andrew J Moonen was accused of killing a
security guard of Iraqi vice president Adel Abdul Mahdi. And as recently as May
2009, four Xe contractors were accused of killing an Afghan on the
Jalalabad road in Kabul.
Members of the commission noted with astonishment that the US State Department
had awarded Xe a US$120 million contract to guard US consulates in
Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan this past Friday.
Asked to explain why Xe was awarded the contract, Charlene R Lamb,
deputy assistant secretary for international programs at the State Department,
stated that the competitors for the contract - DynCorp and Triple Canopy -
weren't as qualified.
Yet Don Ryder of DynCorp and Ignacio Balderas of Triple Canopy testified that
they were both qualified and able to do the contract. The two men said that
they would consider lodging a formal protest at the State Department on Tuesday
after a debriefing with the government.
The choice of Xe, which has been banned by the government of Iraq, left
the commissioners with little doubt that the contract award system was flawed.
"What does it take for poor contractual performance to result in contract
termination or non-award of future contracts?" wondered Thibault.
'Inherently governmental'
At a previous hearing of the commission last week, John Nagl, president of the
Washington, DC-based Center for a New American Security, submitted a report on
the subject that explained why the government was turning to these companies:
"Simple math illuminates a major reason for the rise of contractors: The US
military simply is not large enough to handle all of the missions assigned to
it."
Yet it appears that the government does not even have the oversight capability
to police the companies that it has hired to fill the gap.
Some witnesses and experts said that by definition this work should not be
handed out to private contractors in war zones.
"Private security contractors are authorized to use deadly force to protect
American lives in a war zone and to me if anything is inherently governmental,
it's that," said commissioner Clark Kent Ervin, a former inspector general at
both the State Department and the Homeland Security Department. "We don't have
a definitional problem, we have an acknowledgement of reality problem."
Non-governmental expert Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on
Government Oversight (POGO), said: "It has become clear to POGO that the answer
is yes, PSCs [private security contractors] are performing inherently
governmental functions. A number of jobs that are not necessarily inherently
governmental in general become so when they are conducted in a combat zone. Any
operations that are critical to the success of the US government's mission in a
combat zone must be controlled by government personnel."
(This article was produced in partnership with CorpWatch - www.corpwatch.org.)
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