The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

We've Seen This Video Before: Drunk Security Contractors Gone Wild

When we first heard that ABC News was working on a story about U.S. security contractors in Afghanistan getting drunk and doing drugs, we had one of those collective sighs: “Here we go again.”

The leaked cell phone video that ABC News and CNN broadcast this week showed a shirtless, staggering security manager for Jorge Scientific showing off his drunken Kung Fu and later wrestling another man. Even more troubling was a shot of the company’s chief medical officer appearing stoned out of his mind on what the report identified as the drug Ketamine.

As Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, told ABC News, the men in the video were not only endangering themselves, but also the civilians they were hired to protect.

There was other questionable behavior in investigative reporter Brian Ross’s Nightline report. Employees of Jorge Scientific, which has a $47 million contract to train Afghan police, also supposedly threw live ammo into bonfires they built outside their Kabul residence.

One of the former employees who blew the whistle on the improper behavior said, “It was like a frat house.”

Frat house antics. Drunk, shirtless contractors. Bonfires. It’s déjà vu all over again.

Three years ago, my colleagues at POGO heard similar stories from whistleblowers working for a different security contractor in Afghanistan. That contractor, ArmorGroup North America, provided security at the U.S. embassy in Kabul.

Have the Pentagon, State Department, and USAID Learned From Their Mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Dudley Moore: Do you feel you’ve learnt by your mistakes here?

Peter Cook (as Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling): I think I have, yes, and I think I can probably repeat them almost perfectly.

~British comedians Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, from “The Frog and Peach” sketch (1966)

It’s been almost a year since the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan issued its final report to Congress on the state of U.S. reconstruction efforts in those two countries. In addition to its blockbuster finding that between $31 billion and $60 billion was lost to waste and fraud, the final report, along with two earlier reports, made numerous recommendations on ways to improve contingency contracting.

Some recommendations pertained specifically to the three principal contracting agencies – the Departments of Defense (DoD) and State and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) –- and others were addressed to the executive departments in general. (A few months ago, the Project On Government Oversight blogged about the efforts of Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.) to implement some of the wartime contracting commission's recommendations to Congress. 

This week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an assessment of the extent to which the Defense and State departments, and USAID have acted on the commission's recommendations. The GAO found that DoD has taken or planned actions that directly align with about half of the contracting commission's recommendations applicable to it, while State and USAID have done so with regard to about one-third of the recommendations applicable to them. Of the remaining recommendations, the agencies took no action either because they claim existing policies or practices already address them or they just don’t agree with them.

State Department Moves to Fire Whistleblower Peter Van Buren, Denies Retaliation

By DANA LIEBELSON

This week, the State Department moved to fire former Foreign Service officer Peter Van Buren, who published a book detailing the alleged waste and abuse he witnessed in Iraq. When POGO interviewed Van Buren back in January, the State Department had suspended his security clearance indefinitely, but he was still on payroll.

State based its actions on eight charges against Van Buren outlined in a 25-page investigation, according to The Washington Post. Among many other allegations in the report, which POGO has obtained, State accused Van Buren of “posting three hyperlinks to the WikiLeaks.org website” and refusing “to answer certain questions in a compelled [State Department] administrative interview.”

Van Buren alleges that State retaliated against him for whistleblowing actions like publishing a book, doing interviews with the media—including POGO—and putting information on his personal blog.

“It saddens me to see a once-great institution, the Department of State, reduced to crude retaliation against one of its own employees for writing a blog,” Van Buren told POGO. “If I did not tell you about the waste and mismanagement of billions of your tax dollars in Iraq, who would?”

Challenges Looming in Iraq for State Dept. as Security Contractors Set to Double

By ANDRE FRANCISCO

U.S. soldiers are leaving Iraq, but as many as 18,000 contractors are staying behind to run and protect the Green Zone, the world's largest embassy complex. The contractors are being overseen by the State Department, which does not have a good history of contract oversight. POGO Investigator Jake Wiens lays out some of POGO's worries in the video above, and POGO Senior Writer Beth Schulman's op-ed on Other Words delves into the possibility of coming problems with contractors in Iraq.

If the past is prologue, we should be nervous. The State Department's track record managing overseas contractors ranges from spotty to downright awful. As Americans focus more on the 2012 elections and other domestic concerns, it would be far too easy to ignore the glaring need for oversight in Iraq.

A bipartisan study by the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan found that the U.S. government did a terrible job of managing private contractors in conflict zones. "At least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion, has been lost to contract waste and fraud in America's contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan," the commission reported to Congress last fall. "Much more will turn into waste as attention to continuing operations wanes, as U.S. support for projects and programs in Iraq and Afghanistan declines, and as those efforts are revealed as unsustainable."

POGO will continue to closely watch both the contractors and those who oversee them to highlight problems that arise.

Andre Francisco is POGO's Online Producer

Follow @andrefrancisco

Interview: Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren on Reconstruction Failures in Iraq

By DANA LIEBELSON

The U.S. wasted billions upon billions of dollars in Iraq on poor contracting practices, but very few insiders are willing to talk about it. Foreign Service Officer Peter Van Buren is an exception.

Van Buren served with the Foreign Service for over two decades and worked as a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) leader in Iraq. In September 2011, he released a book about his experiences, titled: We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. After the book’s publication, the State Department suspended Van Buren’s security clearance indefinitely.

POGO interviewed Van Buren about the contracting waste he witnessed in Iraq, the mistakes the U.S. is still making in Afghanistan, and of course, whistleblower protections.

POGO: Can you give me some examples of the kind of waste and incompetence you witnessed?

PVB: I had one contractor…who  hadn’t had a performance review in five years, but had stayed on, because there was no one else. I’m not just going to sit down and accept things when they are not right. So I decided to write a realistic evaluation. But the contract was renewed anyway against my advice, the reason being, he only had one negative evaluation—mine. 

Another good example is our interpreters, who were largely employees of a subcontractor, an Alaskan Native-owned company. Most of the ‘terps’ were Iraqi-Americans recruited from the Detroit or Chicago areas. They tended to fall in two groups—they were so Americanized, they could speak only childhood Arabic, or they had very little English capability. They were fraudulently presented to the U.S. as skilled, but they weren’t.

Finally, there was the general problem that I wasn’t adequately contacted to see how projects were going. Take, for example, a meat factory the U.S.  was supposed to be operating in Iraq. When we stopped by the factory, we found out that the contractor who’d taken ownership of it had sold it off almost immediately. The second guy who was supposed to run it couldn’t make any money, so he moved to Dubai. When we arrived, there were six Sunni families squatting in the factory. And we were still paying the security guard for the plant. He wasn’t there either. 

State Department Refuses to Cooperate in Audit, Criticized for Handling of Iraqi Police Program

By DANA LIEBELSON

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) managed to release an audit on the State Department's poor handling of the Iraqi police force program on Monday, despite the agency's aggressive attempts to stonewall the investigation. According to the critical report, the Department has no specific plan to effectively assess the Iraqi police program as the U.S. pulls out of Iraq.  

The State Department (DoS) has refused to make life easy for the SIGIR. The Washington Times reported in June that DoS was blocking inspectors from assessing the State’s multi-billion dollar Iraqi police training program.   

In a hearing with the Commission on Wartime Contracting, Patrick Kennedy, DoS’s Under Secretary of State for Management, justified the decision by claiming SIGIR didn’t have jurisdiction for the investigation. He said, “SIGIR is perfectly free…to audit the reconstruction activities in Iraq. They are not free to audit the base element of the State Department. That is within the jurisdiction of three other entities.”

Stuart Bowen, the SIGIR himself, begged to differ. He told The Times, “It is simply a misapprehension to conclude that our jurisdiction only applies to bricks-and-mortar reconstruction. To the contrary, Congress charged us with overseeing the expenditure of funds in Iraq.”

Interview: Kathryn Bolkovac of "The Whistleblower" on Human Trafficking Scandal, New Film

Kathryn Bolkovac

By DANA LIEBELSON

In "The Whistleblower," which airs this weekend at POGO's Whistleblower Film Series in Silver Spring, Maryland, Rachel Weisz plays a U.N. peacekeeper who exposes a sex trafficking ring among her colleagues in Bosnia.

The movie is based on Kathryn Bolkovac (find the trailer below the jump), the real-life whistleblower who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia in 1999. She was fired by her employer, DynCorp, after alleging that her fellow U.N. peacekeepers were complicit in the rape and trafficking of underage girls. In 2002, a British employment tribunal ruled that she was unfairly dismissed.

DynCorp continues to do billions of dollars of business abroad with the U.S. government. POGO interviewed Bolkovac over email about whistleblower protections, the untold side of the scandal and the Hollywood portrayal of the story.

POGO: We've heard a lot about your role in sparking investigations into DynCorp and U.N. officers for sex trafficking. What's the one aspect of this story that people are missing?

State Dept. IG Finds Waste and Mismanagement on Afghanistan Contract

By NEIL GORDON

The Commission on Wartime Contracting (CWC) may be history, but the need for a contingency operations watchdog of the CWC's caliber will never go away. In fact, just as the CWC was closing up shop last week, the State Department Inspector General released a report finding problems on a $12 million contract in Afghanistan.

The State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) awarded a contract to DynCorp International to provide operations and maintenance support services at Camp Falcon in Kabul, Afghanistan. Under the contract, DynCorp provides almost everything needed to sustain the camp, including food, laundry and medical services, pest control, electric power generation, sewage and sanitation, and security. While the Inspector General determined that, in general, DynCorp “adequately” operates and maintains the camp, the report found weaknesses in DynCorp’s performance of food, fuel operations, and static security guard services.

First, the report found that INL overpaid DynCorp as much as $940,000 for meals. Although DynCorp’s cost proposal to INL established a daily rate per person for meals, the subcontractor charged DynCorp per meal rather than per person. DynCorp, in turn, invoiced INL at the higher per meal rate. The overcharges were caused in part by INL’s two in-country contracting officers, who were “spread too thinly” to be able to adequately review and approve all purchases.

Kabul Attack Underlines Importance of Embassy Security

By JAKE WIENS

Armed with rockets and machine guns, a group of militants yesterday launched a sophisticated attack on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul from a partially constructed building about half a mile away, reports the New York Times.

The attack comes just months after two separate attacks rocked Afghanistan’s capital. The first was a June attack on the famed Inter-Continental Hotel, which reportedly claimed the lives of at least 10 people. Following that attack, at least nine people were killed and dozens more were injured when Taliban militants, dressed as Afghan women, detonated car bombs at the British Council on Afghanistan’s Independence Day in late August.

Although no embassy personnel were harmed during today’s attack on the Embassy, the brazen midday assault, coupled with the previous attacks, is a reminder that security of the Embassy remains paramount.

Wikileaks Cable: Kuwait Lobbied State Dept. on Behalf of Contractor that Bungled U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

 
By JAKE WIENS

A newly released cable by the anti-secrecy group Wikileaks shows that the government of Kuwait repeatedly lobbied the State Department on behalf of First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting Company (First Kuwaiti), the company responsible for bungling the construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

The cable, sent in May 2008, includes the text of a diplomatic note from the Kuwaiti Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Secretary of State. The diplomatic note cites Kuwait’s strong relationship with the U.S. Government, including its “critical support to the war in Iraq,” before raising concerns about the “unfounded allegations” that had been voiced by Members of Congress and the press involving First Kuwaiti.

The diplomatic note called on the State Department for assistance in rehabilitating First Kuwaiti’s “public reputation and resolving completely all pending investigations of the company as soon as possible.”

Diplomatic Cover: Did the State Dept. Facilitate "Extraordinary Rendition"?

And Who the Heck is "Terry A. Hogan"?

By ADAM ZAGORIN

Kidnapping is a crime. So when Italian authorities discovered that terrorism suspect Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, otherwise known as Abu Omar, had been snatched from the streets of Milan and flown away in a CIA-chartered jet to Egypt, they held a highly publicized trial.

That trial, replete with lurid testimony about the victim’s alleged torture after his abduction in broad daylight, grabbed headlines around the world, focusing attention on the agency’s so-called “extraordinary rendition program.” The trial resulted in the 2009 conviction in Italy of 23 Americans, all but one were CIA agents who had fled the country to avoid prosecution.

Now it turns out that a State Department officer supposedly named “Terry A. Hogan” wrote at least seventeen letters on official letterhead informing foreign authorities that the rendition flights and “accompanying personnel are under contract to the US government.” The letters describe the flights as “Global Support to US Embassies worldwide,” an apparent falsehood that gave plane crews cover in airports from Europe to the Middle East, also permitting greater latitude in their flight plans.

The letters were discovered in the file of a commercial dispute adjudicated in New York state court between 2007 and 2011, involving an aircraft broker and Richmor, a leasing company with planes used by the CIA.

Court testimony showed the letters were provided to Richmor by DynCorp, a defense contractor that apparently served as an agency intermediary in arranging the flights.

The Hogan letters pose intriguing, if unanswered questions. For one thing,  there is no record of “Terry A. Hogan” in the State Department’s internal personnel database, according to an official, nor was there in a 2004 directory cited by the Associated Press.

Wartime Contracting Commission Report Forecasts Major Challenges for State Department

By JAKE WIENS

Much of the coverage of the Commission on Wartime Contracting's (CWC) final report has focused on the staggering estimates of the amount of taxpayer dollars lost to waste in contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the report doesn’t just play Monday morning quarterback--it also identifies looming, "foreseeable" problems and provides recommendations to stave them off. One of those problems involves the coming expansion of the State Department’s role in Iraq following the withdrawal of the military at the end of this year.

After the military's withdrawal, the State Department will take on what the CWC has described as many "military-like tasks: and vastly expand its presence in the region. The State Department's expanded role will include a large number of new functions, ranging from air transport to pest control. And many of these functions will likely be contracted out.   

Speaking of this transition, the report notes that: 

Expanding and sustaining State’s presence in Iraq would be a huge undertaking in the best of circumstances. But circumstances are not the best, or even good. Iraq is a heavily damaged country confronting challenges that include a dynamic insurgency and substantial turmoil in the region.

To help meet the security concerns associated with this challenge, State will rely heavily on the use of private security contractors, more than doubling the number it currently oversees. As POGO has written previously, State’s history of overseeing its current cadre of private security contractors doesn’t inspire much confidence in their ability to manage a much larger group.