***** NYT September 19, 2002
U.S. Company to Take Over Karzai Safety
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 - The State Department plans to hire a private company to help protect President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, a job currently handled by American Special Operations soldiers.
The plan has come under fire from senior lawmakers in Congress who argued that protecting Mr. Karzai is too important to be entrusted to a private contractor. Two members of Mr. Karzai's cabinet have been murdered this year and the president himself was the target of an assassination attempt earlier this month....
The State Department announced last month, before the assassination attempt against Mr. Karzai, that its Diplomatic Security Service would take over responsibility for protecting Mr. Karzai from the military. At the time, administration officials argued that diplomatic security agents were better suited than soldiers for protecting a head of state.
But today Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said the department needed to hire an outside firm because its security agents do not have the proper training or weaponry to deal with the kinds of combat conditions that exist in Afghanistan.
"Diplomatic Security Service is a civilian law enforcement and security service," Mr. Boucher told reporters. "It operates in an environment where the rule of law governs; that is not necessarily the situation in Afghanistan."...
One firm the State Department is considering hiring is DynCorp of Reston, Va. The company has numerous government contracts, including ones for recruitment of retired police officers for United Nations peacekeeping operations in Bosnia and pilots for American-financed counterdrug operations in Colombia.
A former employee of a DynCorp unit sued the company last year, asserting that she had been unfairly fired after complaining that United Nations police officers and DynCorp employees frequented brothels in Bosnia at a time when the United Nations was attempting to eliminate prostitution rings. A British court ruled in her favor last month. DynCorp has said it fired the employee for misconduct.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/19/international/asia/19SECU.html> *****
***** Outside the law
Pending lawsuits allege that U.S. military contractors on duty in Bosnia bought and "owned" young women. But the accused men have never been -- and will never be -- brought to justice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Robert Capps
June 26, 2002 | Ben Johnston recoiled in horror when he heard one of his fellow helicopter mechanics at a U.S. Army base near Tuzla, Bosnia, brag one day in early 2000: "My girl's not a day over 12."
The man who uttered the statement -- a man in his 60s, by Johnston's estimate -- was not talking fondly about his granddaughter or daughter or another relative. He was bragging about the preteen he had purchased from a local brothel. Johnston, who'd gone to work as a civilian contractor mechanic for DynCorp Inc. after a six-year stint in the Army, had worked on helicopters for years, and he'd heard a lot of hangar talk. But never anything like this.
More and more often in those months, the talk among his co-workers had turned to boasts about owning prostitutes -- how young they were, how good they were in bed, how much they cost. And it wasn't just boasting: Johnston often saw co-workers out on the streets of Dubrave, the closest town to the base, with the young female consorts that inspired their braggadocio. They'd bring them to company functions, and on one occasion, Johnston says, over to his house for dinner. Occasionally he'd see the young girls riding bikes and playing with other children, with their "owners" standing by, watching.
But the bragging about a 12-year-old sex slave pushed Johnston over the edge. "I had to do something," he says. "There were kids involved."
So Johnston says he complained to managers at DynCorp, the Reston, Va.-based company that had hired him to be a mechanic at the U.S. Army's Camp Comanche in Bosnia, and to the Army Criminal Investigation Command (known by the acronym CID). In the end, two DynCorp employees would be fired for the activities Johnston complained about -- including site supervisor John Hirtz -- but not before Johnston himself lost his job. And nobody would face criminal charges of any kind for their involvement with the young prostitutes.
Now Johnston is suing DynCorp in a Tarrant County, Texas, courtroom, in a case that is set to go to trial in mid-July. He is claiming he was fired for blowing the whistle on his co-workers' role in the sex trade, and is seeking unspecified monetary damages. And he is not alone. A second wrongful termination suit filed in the U.K. by a former DynCorp employee contracted to the United Nations to be part of the U.N.'s International Police Task Force in Bosnia charges that she was sacked for implicating DynCorp employees who participated in forced prostitution in the Balkans. In that case, which will likely reach a conclusion in the next several weeks, former officer Kathryn Bolkovac contends that other task-force officers frequented brothels staffed by women forced into prostitution.
The scope of the problem is stunning, says Martina Vandenberg, a women's rights researcher with Human Rights Watch, and in a 1999 tour of Bosnia, she saw little effort to stop it. "I found that Bosnia was absolutely littered with brothels and those brothels were full of trafficked women," she said. "We're talking about women sold as chattel for $600 to $700, with all the rights of ownership attaching."...
<http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/06/26/bosnia/> *****
***** Crime without punishment
Investigators knew employees for U.S. military contractors in Bosnia bought women as sex slaves. But because of legal loopholes and bureaucratic confusion, no one was prosecuted.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Robert Capps
June 27, 2002 | In early 2000, the U.S. Army received information that private contractors working at a base near Tuzla, Bosnia, were purchasing women from local brothels. Some of the women may have been as young as 12, and some were being held as sex slaves, the sources alleged.
Investigations by the Bosnian police and the U.S. Army confirmed the gist of those reports, turning up significant evidence of wrongdoing by at least seven men -- including at least one supervisor -- employed by Reston, Va.-based DynCorp. Despite those findings, no one ever faced criminal charges or prosecution in either Bosnia or the United States.
The investigation at Camp Comanche in Bosnia is at the heart of a lawsuit filed by former DynCorp mechanic Ben Johnston, who says DynCorp wrongfully fired him for assisting the Army Criminal Investigation Command in its probe of the camp. The investigation and its results, along with allegations made in a similar whistleblower lawsuit against DynCorp in the U.K., have brought to light a critical loophole in efforts to police the shadowy world of private military firms, a booming industry that's now worth almost $100 billion a year.
Thanks to a combination of factors -- the jurisdictional conflicts of American law, the immunity provided to these contractors by international treaties, and the underdeveloped police agencies in host countries -- many crimes committed by private military personnel while based overseas will likely go unpunished, just as they did in Bosnia.
"You have a situation where employees of these companies can commit serious crimes and the only enforcement we have against them is the law of the marketplace," says Peter W. Singer, an Olin fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has studied the companies for seven years. "That's proven to be insufficient."
These private military firms were thrust into the international spotlight in April 2001, when Aviation Development Corp. was involved in the accidental downing of a missionary plane in Peru. Aviation Development, on contract with the CIA to look for drug traffickers, may have misidentified the missionary's plane as a drug transport, which was then shot down by the Peruvian military. According to media reports, the United States has paid an undisclosed sum to the family of Veronica and Charity Bowers, who were killed in the incident, and to the Baptist missionary group they belonged to, but stopped short of admitting culpability. Aviation Development has never publicly accepted responsibility, and the U.S. government has never publicly accused the company of wrongdoing.
Another incident, covered in great detail last March in the Los Angeles Times, implicates the private military company AirScan in planning and executing a 1998 attack by Colombian military forces against local rebels, which may have resulted in the accidental bombing of a small Colombian town. At the time, AirScan was under contract to Oxy Petroleum to track rebels who might threaten Oxy's pipeline. Eleven adults and seven children were killed when a bomb exploded in the town of Santo Domingo, and according to the Times no one has been held accountable for their deaths. The Colombian military denies it bombed the town during the attack. AirScan denied involvement, according to the Times.
Critics say those cases and others show how private companies are in effect being used to distance the U.S. government from messy international conflicts. Although no Americans were directly accused of criminal wrongdoing in Peru or Colombia, the incidents underscore the troubling lack of accountability applied to the companies, they say.
The Peru incident helped provoke one of those critics, U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., to introduce a bill in April 2001 that would have stopped government funding for private military companies in the Andean region. But no action has been taken on the bill. Ed Soyster, a spokesman for military contractor MPRI, says such critics are wrong. As the U.S. military shrinks its forces, he says, private companies will be needed to fill the gap with an array of support services -- from providing mechanical services and building military bases to training foreign armies. "The idea that somehow there's no accountability because the government paid a company" to do a job, instead of doing that job itself, doesn't hold up, Soyster says. "It won't hold up with the media. It won't hold up with the courts." Employees of MPRI are held accountable by the local laws of whatever country they're in, he says. If there is a breakdown in prosecuting criminal behavior, that breakdown is the problem of that government. After all, Soyster says, a company doesn't have the power to arrest people, try them or send them to jail....
<http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/06/27/military/> ***** -- Yoshie
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