前陣子美國軍方又傳出虐待囚犯的醜聞, 這篇文章揭露了醜聞的背後所涉及的利益. 自從2003年開始, 亦即布殊成為統總之後幾年, 情報機關私營化, 政府把訓練特務和執行審問的工作外判給私營機構, 以致特務人數大增(兩年之間大增十幾倍), 而這些私營機構因為不用向公眾負責, 所以每次出現違反人權的醜聞, 軍方就可以推卸責任. 更重要的是, 這些外判工序所涉及的金錢交易都是好幾百億美國, 布殊家族與特務機構的關係之深已是公開的秘密, 營私化後, 這些錢都直接落入其關係網的口袋裡!!!
這文章所揭露的事可謂驚心動魄, 即使布殊落台, 政府與私營化特務機關的關係已定, 民主黨亦很難改變美國的軍事制度. 要維持著這些軍事利益, 美國難以避免地會繼續成為全球和平的最大威脅, 因為只有不斷地製造恐懼, 才能養活這些人和機構...
Intelligence, Inc.
By Pratap Chatterjee
Just an hour north of the Mexican border, at the base of the cloud-capped Huachuca Mountains in southern Arizona, lies a military base with a long history of covert military action. In its early days as a military fort, it was the location of the capture of Geronimo, the last Apache warrior to resist the United States. More recently, Fort Huachuca housed the training of many of the interrogators who worked in the prisons of Cuba's Guantanamo Bay and Iraq's now infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
In 2003, just 237 interrogators graduated from the United States Army Intelligence Center, headquartered at the fort. Today, plans call for quadrupling the number of qualified interrogators to 1,000 a year by 2006 and the number of soldiers trained in basic intelligence skills to 7,000. This is an astronomical increase, far beyond the current capabilities of the center.
While military contracting for construction or weapons manufacturing is nothing new, the privatization of intelligence instruction is a new and rapidly expanding sector that came about less than four years ago. One estimate in Mother Jones magazine, compiled from interviews with military experts, suggests that as much 50 percent of the $40 billion given annually to the 15 intelligence agencies in the United States is now spent on private contractors.
James Bamford, the author of The Puzzle Palace (an expose of the National Security Agency which is now used as a textbook at the Defense Intelligence College), is worried about this new trend. "While there is nothing inherently wrong with the intelligence community working closely with private industry," he wrote in The New York Times, "there is the potential for trouble unless the union is closely monitored. Because the issue is hidden under heavy layers of secrecy, it is impossible for even Congress to get accurate figures on just how much money and how many people are involved."
In an interview, Bamford told us he is concerned about the cost of privatization. "After spending millions of dollars training people, taxpayers are having to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies."
Among experts, especially those who have worked in the intelligence business, there is growing concern that privatization also means the government has less control over its own operations and that the costs of privatization may outweigh its benefits.
A Booming Business
Among the private contractors cashing in on the privatization boom is Virginia-based Anteon International Corp., which has grown tenfold in the last decade. The company has become one of the nation's primary contractors for intelligence sharing, intelligence training and video game warfare simulators. One of Anteon's offices is located on the Huachuca base itself, while the second sits a mile away on Main Street, in a bright, freshly-painted pink building, sandwiched between Enterprise Rent-A-Car, with whom it shares a parking lot, and Filiberto's Mexican restaurant.
Although Anteon first came into existence in 1976, its profits really began to soar 20 years later, when former investment banker Frederick Iseman bought the company assets for a mere $48 million. Today, Anteon's annual revenues exceed a billion dollars and its share price has jumped from its initial public offering of $18 to $36 in the last three years.
Iseman, who admits he knew nothing about military contracting before he bought the company (his other investments range from orange juice to waste management), says he realized he needed connections to expand on the business. So he recruited a group of highly-placed former military officials to his board, ranging from William Perry, former head of the Pentagon, to Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bill Clinton.
The company is shy about revealing the nature of its work for the military. "We are an information technology systems integrator," says Mark Meudt, spokesman for Anteon. "Roughly 90 percent of our work is for the federal government and the rest is for other governments or sub-contracts with other companies that have federal contracts." Meudt refused to comment on any of the intelligence contracts at Fort Huachuca, but estimated that a fifth of the company's work is in simulation training for the military.
Today the company holds a master contract to teach a wide variety of courses for the Initial Entry Training (IET) in the intelligence school: ranging from the basic course to the more specialized Advanced Individual Training (AIT) courses such as counter-intelligence training, interrogation, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence and signal identification.
Traditionally, these IET and AIT jobs were handled by two battalions of the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade based at Fort Huachuca: the 305th and 309th (a third battalion, the 344th, conducts similar training in Texas). Today the tasks of teaching — from drawing up the curriculum to the final exams for the students — still take place on the military base, but many are conducted by instructors from the private companies.
Classes are held in a big pink H-shaped building in the northwest quadrant of Fort Huachuca with a red-tiled roof, named Nicholson Hall after an American intelligence officer who was shot and killed by Soviet sentries in East Germany in 1985.
New students approaching the building must pass under a steel blue ribbon over the main entrance, emblazoned with the words: "Through these gates, pass the leaders of Military Intelligence." Also known as Building 81505, the windows on the structure are painted a light green to prevent the casual visitor from seeing in.
"Instructors ... portray human intelligence sources in a variety of role playing scenarios, in diversified settings and environments, such as practical, situational and field training exercises and tests," reads a description of jobs completed on the web site of ISIS, one of Anteon's sub-contractors.
In addition, these instructors "conduct post-role verbal critiques ... complete written evaluations of student performance ... grade student reports ... and perform duties as team leaders for 6-12 student teams." In short, private companies have taken over the training of the nation's spies and interrogators.
Mysterious Contracts
The myriad intelligence contracts are typically vague about exactly what the contractor's work will involve. In fact, many contracts read as if they are for entirely unrelated services. A great number of the contracts signed at Fort Huachuca are officially for "information technology," but in reality have been used to fund intelligence work — more specifically, the hiring of civilian interrogators to work directly in Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq.
At least one was administered by the staff in Building 22208, an unremarkable old military office on the southeastern edge of the Brown Parade Field in the heart of the fort, which hosts the Department of Interior, Directorate of Contracting. This civilian agency holds a technology contract for a company named Premier Technology.
Soon after the contract was issued, however, Premier was bought up by another Virginia company named CACI International Inc., which used the original contract to hire private interrogators to work in Abu Ghraib prison.
A similar technology contract deal was pulled by Maryland-based Lockheed Martin Corporation, which bought up a small company named Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS) with a Department of Interior technology contract, and then used the contract to employ private interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Titan Corporation, which describes itself as "a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and services for National Security," was also awarded contracts that were used to provide services atAbu Ghraib prison. Although not signed at Fort Huachuca, these contracts supplied the prison with translators, who have also been implicated in the prison abuse.
Most of the translators hired by Titan did not have security clearances. At least one, Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, had actually failed out of Fort Huachuca's intelligence school (and later pled guilty to mishandling classified information and making false statements), while CACI employees were drafted to do intelligence tasks that they had never been trained to do. Stephen Stephanowicz is a good example. He was trained at the base to inspect satellite pictures, but worked as an interrogator and is now being sued in federal court for allegedly humiliating, torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners detained by U.S. authorities.
These are the concerns that weigh heavily on the minds of experts, who monitor the shadowy world of interrogation and intelligence.
"As was made clear by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, involving private contractors in sensitive intelligence operations can lead to disaster," Bamford wrote in his New York Times op-ed. "And the potential for disaster only grows when not just the agents on the ground, but their supervisors and controllers back at headquarters, are working for some private company."
Bob Baer, the former CIA Middle East specialist and author of the book See No Evil, says the same phenomenon is happening within his former agency. "After 1997, practically all training is done by contractors," he says. "The CIA is even hiring contractors as station chiefs in other countries.
"I think it was by default — to get around personnel limits and to get rid of severance problems," Baer adds. "But these companies don't vet people, you cannot keep track of who they are working for and of course they are not efficient. They have lower standards. Their job is to make money, and so they will tell you whatever you want to hear. It's called 'customer satisfaction' — you want a convertible, you get a convertible."
Part of the problem with hiring private contractors, Baer believes, is the lack of checks and balances. "Now if you ask a private company to produce a report on Afghan opium production, they will produce the report, but it might not be the truth. If you ask a CIA nitwit to write the report, he will care about getting it right, although he will probably get it wrong. But at least his motivation is correct."
A related article, printed in WorldNetDaily in January 2002, quoted a source on the base saying that many of the instructors were "a bunch of soldier's housewives, most who have never been in the Army [and who do not] even meet the minimum requirements set forth in the hiring guidelines for the contract." These instructors, the source said, "are married to the student [course] graders, who will assure that no student complains that the teaching is not up to par."
There are also a number of ways for small, start-up contractors to enter the fray – some by qualifying as disadvantaged minority enterprises, but most by poaching military personnel straight off the base and paying them higher salaries or tapping into the market of retired intelligence officers.
Take Castillo Technologies, founded by Alan Castillo, a former Marine. He registered as a disadvantaged business owner (he is Latino), so that he could snap up federal contracts to supply intelligence trainers at Fort Huachuca, after quitting his job at Motorola in 2000.
Likewise, ISIS — named after the Egyptian goddess of fertility and motherhood — was founded by Janice Walker, is headquartered in Sierra Vista and promotes itself as a woman-owned business. Walker recently hired Steve Manigault, who worked for the 304th battalion, to go back and work at the same battalion as a contractor. Walker offers military battalions a quick and easy way to hire her company to work on the base for a variety of tasks — from environmental impact assessments to database management — using what is known as a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA), a government license to get contracts without competitive bidding.
Neil Garra is an example of someone who was hired after retirement. Garra worked off and on the base for over a decade of his military career, beginning as a military instructor in 1989, rising to vice deputy director of the Battle Laboratory on the base in 1999, before retiring in 2000. Today he has his own small business, named S2 Company, which takes on sub-contracts to design war game simulations.
Walker and Garra return neither phone calls nor emails requesting their comment on the contracts. Castillo spoke briefly with us over the phone, but hung up when asked about his new intelligence contracts.
In Denial
Today, Fort Huachuca is still smarting under the attention brought by the Abu Ghraib scandals. And officials at the fort are reluctant to talk openly about whether privatization has anything to do with the problems that have come to light.
The United States Training and Doctrine Command, the umbrella organization for all military training, agreed to answer questions from us about the Anteon contracts, but has yet to provide any answers, despite two months of phone calls and email communication. "We are waiting for the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade to give us the information, but we cannot provide you with any timeline as to when that might be," says Tanja Linton, the spokeswomen for Fort Huachuca.
Meanwhile, the revolving door between intelligence training, the battlegrounds of the Middle East, and private business continues to spin. Gen. James "Spider" Marks, who was commander of the base when news of the scandals broke last April, told National Public Radio last May: "I'm disgusted by (the Abu Ghraib scandal) just like you are, and those aren't interrogation techniques. That's a bunch of rogue soldiers conducting evil acts."
But like many of his former interrogators, Marks too quit the military last fall to take a job in the lucrative private intelligence business – he become the senior vice president of intelligence and security for a company named McNeil Technologies Inc..
Visitors to the base today will notice that there is a blank spot at the entrance gates where the picture of Marks used to hang — it has not been replaced with the picture of his successor, Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast.
That's because Fast is being investigated for her role in Iraq, where she supervised two Army intelligence officers implicated in the scandal — Col. Thomas M. Pappas and Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, both with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which operated the Abu Ghraib prison. Official investigations allege that Fast was notified of abuses in the prisons but did nothing about them. Only time will tell whether there's a job waiting for her in the private sector as well.
Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of Iraq Inc. (Seven Stories Press, September 2004). This story was produced under the George Washington Williams Fellowship for Journalists of Color, a project sponsored by the Independent Press Association.