Private Military Contractors - Data Dump

[Jan Klimkowski]

Cerberus Capital Management, eh?

CCM is involved in all sorts of nefarious activity - from Madoff to gutting car firms and their "finance" arms, eg Chrysler and GM.

However, as if to prove that being a Dark Lord and self-styled Master Of The Universe requires connections rather than a brain, Dan Quayle "runs" one of CCM's "international arms".

[Ed Jewett]

Training Special Ops to Handle Civilian Contrators In “Persistent Conflict”

21 04 2010 Operational contracting support adds capabilities for

special ops Soldiers

By Sgt. Tony Hawkins, USASOC PAO

Photo credit Sgt. Tony Hawkins Lt. Col. Dennis McGowan, commander, 905th Contingency Contracting Battalion, speaks to U.S. Army Special Operations Command Soldiers in the Operational Contracting Support Course at Fort Bragg, N.C. The training was sponsored by the 9th Psychological Operations Battalion.


FORT BRAGG, N.C. (USASOC News Service) — More than 50 U.S. Army Special Operations Command Soldiers finished up a new two-week contracting support course designed to enlighten them on procedures for establishing and managing contracts in a deployed environment.
The Operational Contracting Support Course, normally designed to train brigade staff officers in contracting support planning and management, was taught to psychological operations, civil affairs and special forces Soldiers in two classes over a two-week period.
Retired Lt. Col. Robert Gould, a former contracting officer and the instructor of the course, came from the Army Logistics University at Fort Lee, Va., at the request of the 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) to present the information to the USASOC Soldiers.
“This course is not for contracting officers, but instead for the brigade-level staff officers of operational units, or any other individuals who may handle contracts,” Gould said. “Of course, we had to tailor it somewhat to the USASOC audience, to gear it for smaller four or five-man teams.”
Many of the students in the course, which was the first of its kind taught to USASOC Soldiers, were part of military information support teams. These teams, which usually consist of four Soldiers or less, deploy independently to foreign nations and work alongside the U.S. State Department in embassies around the world.
“These Soldiers are taught how to integrate contracting into their military decision-making process,” he said. “So at the end of the day, the need for contracting isn’t a surprise and will be an integrated effort which was planned for, not a last minute idea.”
Gould said the course is gaining momentum. So far he has instructed nine classes graduating around 150 people from the course. Week one consists of classroom instruction, and during week two, students participate in a hands-on practical training exercise.
“This course was created in response to the Gansler Commission back in 2007,” Gould said. “Once these Soldiers graduate, they are capable of doing everything from writing a statement of work and filling out funding documents, to managing contracts and contracting officer representatives.”
Once these Soldiers graduate the course and head overseas, they should not feel alone when it comes to contracting support, said Lt. Col. Dennis McGowan, the commander of the 905th Contingency Contracting Battalion.
Contingency contracting teams of the 905th are aligned to USASOC for the purpose of providing operational contracting support and training. The unit is increasing in capability and has been gaining visibility throughout USASOC since it stood up in October 2009.
The 905th is a subordinate command of the U.S. Army Expeditionary Contracting Command.
“Every single day we’re answering the phone with an issue here or there,” McGowan said. “The Army makes contracted support available to units, but we’ve never taught them the specifics of how to use it.”
That’s where the importance of OCSC comes in.
“This would be good training for any USASOC Soldier directly involved in contracts, whether they’re Special Forces, Civil Affairs or PSYOP,” he said. “Much of the time the end result of civil affairs and PSYOP missions is brought to bear through contracting. For example, television or radio airtime, or hard copy products for the PSYOP guys, or some sort of construction project for civil affairs.”
“Our Soldiers and teams often deploy to austere environments where the support structure is extremely limited, and contracting is a vital means in assisting with our development and distribution of PSYOP products to support the mission,” said Col. Carl Phillips, the 4th Psychological Operations Group commander.
With such new information being presented to the Soldiers, who often rely on specific U.S. embassy procedures to establish contracts, there were bound to be questions.
“The biggest question I get is, ‘How do I get contracting support?” McGowan said.
His advice was to try and solve the problem locally first, as nothing happens in a country without the U.S. ambassador’s approval. However, he assured all of the students he is just a phone call or an email away.
“The 905th is USASOC’s operational contracting support provider and advocate,” he said. “We may not always be the ones to provide your support, but we will find the right contracting office to support you. We will make sure USASOC receives the operation contracting support they need.”
As McGowan and Gould begin to receive positive feedback from the students and others within the PSYOP community, there is interest in incorporating some of the contracting support training into the psychological operations advanced individual training at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School.
“The lessons in this course are incredibly valuable and given the nature of our mission, should at least be introduced in the pipeline,” said Capt. Sherri Fazzio, a tactical PSYOP team leader from 9th Psychological Operating Battalion and one of the students in the course.
With word spreading about the importance of the course, McGowan said it is likely OCSC will become an annual or even bi-annual training opportunity for USASOC Soldiers.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Hmm - seems the course was heavy on psyops and sub-contracting dirty work, and light on ethics and morality. :deal:

[Ed Jewett]

Just arrived to occupy space on my bookshelf
until I get one of those round tuits:

"Standard Operating Procedure"

"author and journalist Gourevitch and documentary filmmaker Morris have compiled the complete story of Abu Ghraib"

http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/1594201323/

and

"Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing"

Tim Shorrock's book on the use of proivate contractors in the US intelligence businesss

http://www.amazon.com/Spies-Hire-Secret-...0743282248


Be patient, or inquire.

[Ed Jewett]

DynCorp Running “Counter-Narcotics” Missions Along Pakistan/Afghanistan Border

May 3rd, 2010 Counter-Narcotics. *wink*
Via: Wired:
The airspace along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border is pretty crowded these days: Along with U.S., Afghan and Pakistani military missions, the CIA is running its own covert drone ops. Less well known, but perhaps equally controversial, is the State Department’s counter-narcotics air force, staffed by mercenaries.
A recently released State Department Inspector General report, however, gave an unusually detailed look at the size and scope of these operations. The report fills in more details about America’s growing and undeclared war in Pakistan.
The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (known by the abbreviation INL) operates an air wing of around 14 aircraft in Afghanistan and another 17 in Pakistan. The aircraft help monitor the border, fly crop-eradication and interdiction missions, and move equipment and personnel around the region.
These kinds of missions aren’t new: The State Department has similar Air Wing programs in Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru. Perhaps more importantly, the State Department has outsourced much of this mission. The INL’s air wing in Afghanistan and Pakistan is operated by private military company DynCorp, and the presence of U.S. contractors in Pakistan has proven extremely controversial (the released IG report, not surprisingly, was originally marked “sensitive but unclassified”).

[Magda Hassan]

Well, that's a change from running a prostitution and slave trafficking mission in Eastern Europe. But knowing Dynacorp I am yet to be convinced it is COUNTER-narcotic.

[Ed Jewett]

Torture

APA Scrubs Web Pages Linking Organization to CIA Torture Workshops

By Jeffrey Kaye
The Public Record
May 17th, 2010


Like a modern-day Ministry of Truth, the American Psychological Association (APA) has scrubbed the webpage describing “deception scenarios” workshops that were part of a conference it conducted with the CIA and Rand Corporation on July 17-18, 2003. In addition, the APA erased the link to the page, and even all mention of its existence, from another story at its July 2003 Science Policy Insider News website that briefly described the conference.
In May 2007, in an article at Daily Kos, I noted that the workshops were describing “new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees.” Quoting from the APA’s description (and note, the link is to an archived version of the webpage; emphasis is added):

• How do we find out if the informant has knowledge of which s/he is not aware?
  
• How important are differential power and status between witness and officer?
  
• What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?….
  
• What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?
  

In August 2007, in a landmark article at Vanity Fair, journalist Katherine Eban revealed that SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were participants at the APA/CIA/Rand affair. Mitchell and Jessen have since been linked with the implementation of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” in 2001-2002.
Just last November, in an article at Firedoglake, I recalled the issue of the 2003 conference and asked Who Will Investigate CIA/RAND/APA Torture “Workshop”? I wrote at that time:

The APA and CIA have a very long history of working together on interrogation techniques, in particular on sensory deprivation and use of drugs like LSD and mescaline in interrogations, and other methods of breaking down the mind and the body of prisoners.
Use of drugs to influence interrogations, in addition to sensory deprivation, distortion and overload or bombardment were signal techniques in a decades-long interrogation research program that came to be known by its most famous moniker, MKULTRA (although these torture techniques were studied and tested by the CIA even earlier, in its 1950s projects Bluebird and Artichoke). Such techniques were codified by the early 1960s in a CIA Counterinsurgency Interrogation Manual, also known by its codename, KUBARK.

The story on the APA/CIA/Rand workshop received a good deal of dissemination on the Internet, and one can imagine that the description of the abusive techniques explored there were an embarrassment to the honchos of the APA, who strive to maintain an organizational aura of liberalism and scientific respectability, while at the same time selling its wares to the Defense Department and intelligence agencies in promoting the “war on terror” and “homeland security.”
The URL for the former webpage — www.apa.org/ppo/issues/deceptscenarios.html — now brings up a message that “the page is not available.” A search of the APA site and a Google search does not retrieve a link to the original page, which can now be accessed, thankfully, only through a web archive search engine.
The same is true for the webpage for the APA’s July 2003 “Spin” newsletter, which has a story entitled “APA Works with CIA and RAND to Hold Science of Deception Workshop”. Listed at the end of the story is a link telling readers to “View the thematic scenarios from the workshop.” (See archived version.) The old URL — www.apa.org/ppo/spin/703.html– brings up another “page not available” message. However, the bulk of the webpage now resides at a new address — www.apa.org/about/gr/science/spin/2003/07/also-issue.aspx — with the former link now missing from the story.
While the scrubbing of the page describing truth drugs and sensory overload could be attributed to some normal archiving decision, or the victim of a web do-over (and APA does appear to have redesigned their site), the excision of the text and link to the site on the referring page cannot be an accident.
What is APA up to?
Recently, APA has made some noises about finally respecting the decision of its membership in a September 2008 referendum that decisively repudiated “the APA leadership’s long-standing policy encouraging psychologist participation in interrogations and other activities in military and CIA detention facilities that have repeatedly been found to violate international law and the Constitution.” The referendum voted to prohibit psychologist participation in settings where human rights violations take place. This policy took dead aim against use of psychologists in the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (or BSCTs) used at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
To date, however, the referendum has had no effect, although the Public Interest Task Force for the APA recently has told APA members involved in passage of the referendum that it is gathering information on offending sites in order to implement the new policy, over a year and a half since the vote on the referendum took place. I will hope, though I have little trust, that APA will take the necessary steps.
But APA has a history of bad faith on such issues. Recently, they rewrote a problematic section of their ethical code, dubbed the Nuremberg loophole by some, which allowed psychologists to violate their ethical rules if done to comply with “law, regulations, or other governing legal authority.” As Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) described it, “The new language restores the 1992 version of the code, which prohibits use of the standard ‘to justify or defend violating human rights.’”
But PHR also noted:

Section 1.02 was inserted into the APA ethics code in August 2002, and was used by both the APA and the Bush Administration to allow the participation of psychologists in the “enhanced interrogation” program, in which detainees were systematically abused and tortured under the supervision of health professionals. PHR is calling for the APA to also reform section 8.05 of the 2002 ethics code, which allows research on human subjects without their consent if such research comports with law or regulations.

Section 8.05 allows psychologists to dispense with the use of informed consent in research experiments where “permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations.” The use of informed consent guarantees the voluntary participation of human subjects in research done upon them, and is considered a bedrock of ethical research.
The gyrations of the APA remind one of the razzle-dazzle misdirection of the Obama administration, which trumpets “transparency,” but recently told the Supreme Court to turn down Maher Arar’s appeal of his rendition-torture lawsuit. In addition, President Obama’s own secret black site prisons have now been revealed, over a year since Obama made a big deal out of closing down the CIA black sites. When it comes to hiding the crime of torture, the U.S. government and its contracting agencies have made a fetish out of secrecy, and the promise of an end to torture after the hideous Bush/Cheney years is revealed to be a chimera.
This report was originally published at Firedoglake.
Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com


http://pubrecord.org/torture/7646/scrubs...ganization

[Ed Jewett]

Mergers & Acquisitions

Cerberus to Buy DynCorp for $1.5 Billion

April 12, 2010, 9:54 am
DynCorp International, the private military contractor, said on Monday it has agreed to sell itself to Cerberus Capital Management for $1.5 billion, as the private equity industry continues to return to its core business of deal-making.
Cerberus will pay $17.55 a share for DynCorp, a 49 percent premium to Friday’s closing price of $11.75. DynCorp now has 28 days under a “go-shop” provision within the deal agreement to find a higher and better offer.
While DynCorp has continued to win new contracts from the federal government, it has also been the subject of controversy over the years for its assignments in Iraq.
“I believe that under this partnership with Cerberus, DynCorp International will be able to build on our extensive heritage and successful performance to continue to achieve our growth objectives,” William L. Ballhaus, DynCorp’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Importantly, this transaction is a major milestone for DynCorp International’s continued leadership in serving our customers and supporting U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.”
Cerberus is no stranger to companies with ties to the military: it owns Freedom Group, one of the biggest assemblages of gun manufacturers. Freedom is in the process of going public.
As part of the transaction, Veritas Capital, DynCorp’s biggest shareholder and its onetime financial sponsor, has agreed to vote its 34.9 percent stake in favor of the Cerberus deal.
As the credit markets have roared back to life, banks have resumed making loans to finance private equity firms, bringing back a fee-laden business (albeit one that hurt them during the financial crisis). Cerberus has received financing commitments from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank.
DynCorp was advised by Goldman Sachs and the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, while its board was advised by the law firm Richards, Layton & Finger.
Cerberus was advised by Evercore Partners, the aforementioned lenders and the law firms Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and Jenner & Block.
Go to DynCorp Press Release via Business Wire »

[Ed Jewett]

Intel Nominee James R. Clapper Helped Enrich Contractors as ’Spy for Hire’

11th June 2010

By Muriel Kane
Raw Story | June 10, 2010

The chickens-for-checkups candidate may have lost in this week’s Nevada primary, but now the country has a potential Director of National Intelligence whose ability to garner federal money for private contractors once caused him to be compared to Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Sanders.
When retired Air Force Lieut. General James R. Clapper was between federal jobs in 2006, he was appointed to the board of directors of a company that had received a $500 million contract from the agency he’d previously headed. The vice president of the firm boasted at the time to journalist Tim Shorrock, “It’s like hiring Colonel Sanders if you’re selling fried chicken.”
Clapper’s nomination to serve as the Obama administration’s next DNI has focused the spotlight on a man who is praised by his supporters for his many years of intelligence experience but who is equally well known for being part of a “revolving door” system in which he has shuttled between government service and working for private intelligence contractors who depend on government contracts.
Clapper has for many years been a solid although relatively undistinguished member of the old boys’ network of intelligence professionals. Since 2007, he has held the post of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a position to which he was appointed as part of a shake-up which followed Donald Rumsfeld’s departure as Defense Secretary on December 18, 2006 after the Democrats had taken back control of Congress.
But Clapper has also spent many years deeply embedded in a system where former top military officers alternate between federal jobs, in which they are responsible for handing out lucrative contracts to private contractors, and lobbying on behalf of the same private contractors to obtain those federal contracts.
According to Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, the 2007 shakeup that brought Clapper back into the Pentagon put an end to “the corrosive rivalry between the Pentagon and the CIA” but “for the contractors, however, nothing changed.”
“Gates and Clapper continued to fund the expensive programs in netcentric warfare and information technology started by their predecessors,” Shorrock explains. “One sign of the continuity was the Pentagon’s record spending on secret research and development.”
Prior to his retirement from the Air Force in 1995, Clapper had been in the military for over 32 years, concluding his career with four years as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He then spent the next six years holding executive positions in three successive companies where, according to SourceWatch, “his focus was on the intelligence community as a client.”
In August 2001, Clapper was appointed as director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, later renamed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). It was while holding that position that he made the claim — for which he is now being mocked — that satellite imagery had “led him to believe that illicit weapons material ‘unquestionably’ had been moved out of Iraq.”
Clapper clashed with Rumsfeld, however, by telling him the NGA could function just as well under the Director of National Intelligence as under the Pentagon, and according to Shorrock that was why he was let go in June 2006. Clapper then spent several months working for yet another military contractor, DeticaDFI, before being appointed Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence in April 2007, following Rumsfeld’s resignation.
The potential for conflicts of interest resulting from this alternation between public and private service has earned Clapper the attention of the National Corruption Index (NCI), which describes itself as dedicated to revealing the “substructure of ingrained conflicts of interest, subtly understood quid pro quos and malfeasance/dereliction at the nation’s most vital command posts.”
Clapper’s profile at the NCI website notes that just five months after he left DeticaDFI in 2007, “DeticaDFI was one of 11 contractors chosen by Clapper’s office to share in a five-year contract worth $250 million.”
In addition, according to NCI, as head of the NGA, “Clapper oversaw a program giving a single private contractor $500 million to design, build and launch a next-generation spy satellite. In 2006, he joined the winning company’s board of directors.”
According to Shorrock, that firm was GeoEye, the company whose vice president, Mark E. Brender, said of his decision to bring Clapper on board, “It’s like hiring Colonel Sanders if you’re selling fried chicken.”
The three firms in Virginia that Clapper had worked for between 1995 and 2001 also enjoyed profitable dealings with the federal government during his tenure. In the late 90s, the end of the Cold War was prompting defense contractors to move their corporate headquarters to the Washington, DC suburbs and engage in active lobbying efforts, and all three of Clapper’s employers appear to have been particularly successful at that game.
The first, the Vredenburg IT group, became the beneficiary of an executive order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 to accelerate the declassification of National Security Agency documents.
The second, Booz Allen Hamilton, has employed so many former intelligence officers that it is sometimes described as “the shadow intelligence community.” Admiral Mike McConnell, who headed the National Security Agency while Clapper was running the DIA in the early 90s, joined Booz Allen at about the same time as Clapper did, in 1996. Booz Allen won its first multi-million dollar contract on the Total Information Awareness project the following year.
Clapper’s longest stint was with the firm of SRA International, which he joined in 1998. In 1999, SRA was awarded an estimated $22 million task order by the General Service Administration “to provide systems integration services to the Army’s Force Management Support Agency.”
At the same time that he was with SRA, Clapper became president of the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA), the trade group for intelligence contractors, which has since renamed itself the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA). “Reading through the lists of speakers at past SASA events is a voyage through the revolving door,” Shorrock notes.
In 2006, in addition to his positions with DeticaDFI and on the board of GeoEye, Clapper held a professorship in the practice of intelligence at Georgetown University, funded by INSA.
When Clapper returned to the Pentagon in 2007, however, he was praised as a consummate intelligence professional. National Journal correspondent Shane Harris, for example, described the shake-up which had begun with Rumsfeld’s resignation as “the return of the grown-up.” Harris saw the turnover as something approaching a coup d’etat by the professional spymasters against Rumsfeld and the Neocons, under whose leadership the Pentagon had waged an ongoing war against the CIA.
“After two years of turnover and uncertainty in the top ranks of the U.S. intelligence establishment,” Harris wrote, “which saw such outsiders as a former congressman and a career ambassador elevated to high posts, four of their own are now in control or soon will be.”
The four high-level intelligence professionals to whom Harris referred were former CIA Director Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, former National Security Agency director Mike McConnell as Director of National Intelligence, another former NSA director, Michael Hayden, as head of the CIA, and James Clapper, who became both an undersecretary in the Defense Department and McConnell’s chief adviser on military intelligence.
Harris described all four men as “professionally close” to one another and noted that “while McConnell was leading the NSA in the early 1990s, Clapper was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Gates was head of the CIA. … Also, when McConnell was the military official in charge of intelligence for Operation Desert Storm, Clapper was the assistant chief of staff for Air Force intelligence and played a leading role in coordinating the air war.”
Michael Hayden and Mike McConnell both left the government after the election of Barack Obama, with McConnell returning to his former job at Booz Allen Hamilton. It was the new administration’s decision, however, that in order to provide continuity, “Defense Secretary Robert Gates will be staying on in the top Pentagon job, for at least the first year of the Obama administration.”
A year and a half later, however, Gates shows no signs of leaving, while Clapper — described by Shorrock as Gates’ partner in bestowing “record spending on secret research and development” upon private contractors — is in line for a far more prominent and powerful position as DNI.
http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0610/dni-nom...ntractors/



http://www.antifascistencyclopedia.com/a...e%E2%80%99

[Austin Kelley]

Private Contractors and Covert Wars in Latin America

June 12, 2010

By Cyril Mychalejko
Source: Upside Down World


U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) threatened to issue subpoenas against the U.S. Defense and State Departments last month if they continue to refuse to accurately account for billions of dollars spent on private contractors assisting Washington in the 'war on drugs' in Latin America. But McCaskill's concerns raise broader questions about oversight and transparency of a controversial industry and its ever expanding role in Washington's foreign policy.

"We asked for this information from the State Department and the Defense Department (DoD) more than three months ago. Despite our repeated requests, neither Department has been able to answer our questions yet," said U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill at a Senate hearing on May 20.

The Defense Department, which could only provide an estimate of how much of $5.3 billion it spent on counternarcotics operations in the last decade, actually outsourced what turned out to be an incomplete audit to a private contractor.

Contractors such as DynCorp and Northrop Grumman working in South and Central America are paid to spray drug crops, work with foreign militaries and police, offer intelligence and operational support, and conduct public relations assignments.

McCaskill, who said "there is almost no transparency," added that she "will not hesitate to use subpoenas."

Meanwhile, the United Nations is pushing for a new international convention to regulate Private Military and Security Companies (PMSC's).

"This industry, which deals with heavy weaponry in conflict zones is less regulated than the toy industry," said José Luis Gómez del Prado, chair of the UN's Working Group on the use of mercenaries, in April.

The Working Group, worried about the "increased privatization of war and security," urged Washington last August to allow more public oversight with its use of PSMC's, especially those contracted by U.S. intelligence agencies.

One requirement included in the proposed legal framework for PMSC's would be the termination of immunity agreements covering private security personnel. This would affect Washington's controversial new base agreement with Colombia which grants diplomatic immunity to US military personnel and private defense contractors.

William F. Wechsler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics and Global Threats, used his testimony at the Senate to connect the 'war on drugs' with the 'war on terrorism.'

"Terrorists associated with Islamic Radical Groups (IRGs), as well as narcoterrorist groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), operate sophisticated networks designed to move not only weapons, drugs, and other materials, but people as well. A wealth of intelligence reporting has linked many IRG members to both drug trafficking and alien smuggling. The DoD, through extensively coordinated projects with Federal law enforcement agencies, has developed collaborative and effective methods for detecting, and monitoring, the movement of illegal drugs," said Wechsler. "Such trafficking, in which terrorists with transnational reach commonly engage, is a present and growing danger to the security of the United States, our forces abroad, and our allies."

This should cause particular concern in the region given President Obama's expansion of covert special forces operations in the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Furthermore, contractors that are working in intelligence gathering could be shielded from public or Congressional oversight due to potentially classified designations to their operations.

Unfortunately, McCaskill's tough stance with the Defense and State Departments is more a matter of fiscal concern rather than operational mission. She believes that private contractors' "efforts are crucial to the success of the United States' mission in Latin America."

There needs to be both national and global efforts to legally reign in an industry which was recently exposed for teaching torture to Mexican Police just a day after the 'war on drugs' was officially expanded in Mexico through the Merida Initiative, a joint security agreement between the U.S. and Mexico.

To think that the toy industry is more heavily regulated is no laughing matter.


Cyril Mychalejko is an editor at http://www.UpsideDownWorld.org.




From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/private-c...mychalejko