[Bloquez l'empire!] Business Booms for Contract Interrogators

[Mary Foster]

> Business Booms for Contract Interrogators
>
> Pratap Chatterjee*
>
> http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=31058
>
> WASHINGTON, Nov 17 (IPS) - This summer, dozens of people converged in the
> high desert town of El Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in
> Iraqi prisons.
>
> They were going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a
> legalistic tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for
> signing up, they got a 2,000-dollar 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, a prison at Baghdad International
> Airport, and Camp Whitehorse, near Nasariyah.
>
> Known in the intelligence community as "97 Echoes", these contractors will
> 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 Lt. Col. Marc Michaelis, in the quaint old 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-dollar takeover.
>
> Sytex, and thus Lockheed, now 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 a 70,000-dollar to 90,000-dollar salary, a 2,000-dollar
> sign-up bonus, 1,000 dollars 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 U.S. Law and Security Programme 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 said.
>
> Pearlstein warned that "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 over 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," he said.
>
> 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. 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," she said.
>
> 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 that the company
> had only a minor role in the interrogation business and that it had
> wrapped up its interrogation contract on Guantanamo.
>
> But he confirmed that Lockheed was still supplying other kinds of
> "intelligence analysts" on the Cuban base.
>
> Sytex also likes to keep a low profile. "Most of the law enforcement
> organisations, as well as the other surreptitious organisations we may be
> supporting, would just as soon not see their names in print," Ralph
> Palmieri Junior, 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 the sentence: "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," writes 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 explains 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."
>
> He says 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.