[A-List] US imperialism: sub-contracted

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Contractors in Sensitive Roles, Unchecked
By JOEL BRINKLEY and JAMES GLANZ
New York Times, May 7 2004

WASHINGTON, May 6 - The military's reliance on civilians to serve as
interrogators and translators in Iraq is now so great that many people are
being sent abroad without complete background investigations or full
qualifications for the positions, government officials and industry experts
say.

Once on the job, several experts said, many of the contractors are barely
supervised.

Two contract workers have been implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison abuses,
and investigators found that one of them, a translator working with
interrogators who were trying to obtain sensitive information from Iraqi
prisoners, had no security clearance at all.

The revelations at Abu Ghraib have also led to the disclosure that private
contractors are now carrying out highly sensitive duties that until very
recently were the province of government agencies only.

Although senior Pentagon officials have long called for privatizing much of
the military's work, current and former officials say the new reliance on
contractors for intelligence and interrogation work resulted from the
unexpected demands of the war in Iraq and had not been long planned.

Kevin Hendzel, an officer with the American Translators' Association, which
represents translators nationwide, said the government's need for Arabic
translators "is so great that demand has completely outstripped supply,
draining the pipeline," so that now "people with no real qualifications are
being hired."

After a translators' association convention in December, he added, the
government quickly hired more than 2,000 people.

Ralph Williams, spokesman for the Titan Corporation, which supplies
translators in Iraq, was unapologetic about hiring bilingual people with
unlikely professional backgrounds, like taxi drivers, for positions in Iraq
and elsewhere.

"Just because he is a taxi driver does not mean he is not fluent in Arabic
and English," Mr. Williams said. One Titan translator, a former taxi driver
working at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was arrested on
charges of espionage last year. John Israel, the translator with no security
clearance implicated in the prison abuse case, worked for a Titan
subcontractor, the company said.

Mr. Hendzel said he worried that "if you just hire someone off the street,
you have a security risk and maybe even a loyalty question."

Every company official interviewed said he did not consider it his company's
responsibility to research the backgrounds of the people it hires for
government contracts.

"No, we are not in the background investigation business," J. P. London,
chief executive of CACI Inc., said in an interview Thursday. A CACI
employee, Steven Stefanowitz, was implicated in the abuse case.

Ralph Williams, spokesman for Titan, said, "It's up the government to
execute" background checks.

But in Congressional testimony last fall, Charles Abell, principal deputy
undersecretary of defense for personnel, said he believed that the
companies, including Titan, "run a background check and then, of course, the
military does a more detailed check."

But Mr. Abell added: "In our rush to meet the requirements, the mere
numerical requirements, I think folks were brought in based on those initial
checks, and the more detailed checks followed as time permitted."

Mr. Abell declined a request for an interview this week, and military
spokesmen said they could not produce records of contractors' security
clearances on Thursday.

Maj. Gen. Robert A. Harding, retired, who served in senior military
intelligence positions until three years ago and now runs a company that
supplies intelligence analysts and interrogators to the military in Iraq
said the government's appetite is now so great that almost any qualified
person can get a job."It doesn't surprise me that a lot of people are going
in with only interim checks for secret" clearances, he said.

Thomas E. White, who was secretary of the Army until April 2003 and a
leading advocate of privatization in the military said in an interview
Thursday that he was surprised when he learned this week that employees of
private companies were now involved in intelligence work, which suggests how
abruptly the trend took off.

The expansion of the contractor force is, in one sense, simply an
acceleration of a trend that first picked up speed after the end of the cold
war in the 1990's. Largely because of troop cuts, the Pentagon began
awarding contracts to private companies for logistics support, like
delivering food and fuel to troops.

In the latest phase of this privatization, the major contract was awarded to
the Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, in 2001, and was expected
to require about $100 million in work a year, said Col. Tim Considine,
deputy commander of the field support command at the Rock Island Arsenal,
which oversees the contract. Instead, costs are expected to run to some $6
billion in the 2004 fiscal year, largely because of the conflicts in Iraq
and Afghanistan, he said.

But those contracts are focused strictly on noncombat roles and do not
involve intelligence or interrogation. The use of contractors for such
positions is much more recent, security consultants and former military and
intelligence officers said.

The CACI contract at Abu Ghraib runs from Aug. 14, 2003, to Aug. 13. 2004,
according to a summary of the contract prepared by Scott Northrup, Iraq
country manager for CACI. "The interrogator conducts tactical, operational
and strategic interrogations," the summary says. It adds: "No CACI employees
are in positions of authority."

"The way the process works is that the United States government sets forth
their needs and what requirements are in terms of these skill sets," Mr.
London said. "We put together a project team and roster, if you will, of
team staff that we believe meets the terms and requirements and so on that
are set forth.

"I have every confidence that the skill sets are such that you're dealing
with experienced people to meet these interrogator requirements," he said.
"You're not talking about people that have been picked up at the bus stop."

On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, deputy commanding general for
detention operations in Iraq, praised the earlier work of civilian
interrogators in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay. Civilian interrogators
in Iraq, he said, also seemed to be meeting that standard.

But Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the Armed
Services Committee said: "There was a crash course to hire these people.
Unless we better understand what their duties and rules are, we could get in
more trouble."