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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (262637)	4/24/2008 9:05:33 PM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

No, this is a bad and dangerous precedent. It is also ridiculously expensive. The military have complained about it as well. ----------- Contractors in Iraq Have Become U.S. Crutch By Walter Pincus Monday, August 20, 2007; A13 When years from now historians and government officials reexamine precedents set by the U.S. experience in Iraq, many "firsts" are likely to pop up. One still playing out is the extraordinarily wide use of private contractors. A Congressional Research Service report published last month titled "Private Security Contractors in Iraq: Background, Legal Status, and Other Issues," puts it this way: "Iraq appears to be the first case where the U.S. government has used private contractors extensively for protecting persons and property in potentially hostile or hostile situations where host country security forces are absent or deficient." Only estimates are available for the total employment by contractors in Iraq that perform "functions once carried by the U.S. military," according to the study. Testimony at an April 2007 congressional hearing gave the impressive figure of 127,000 as the number working in Iraq under Defense Department contracts. Breakdowns don't exist, but one Pentagon official said less than 20 percent were American. CIA and the Pentagon intelligence agencies have hired contractors in Iraq, but the tasks and the funds involved are secret. Surge or no surge, the work that contractors do there remains highly dangerous. The study reports that private contractors risk death and injury handling security for convoys that carry gasoline, oil and all sorts of supplies and equipment into and around Iraq. It quotes U.S. Army Corps of Engineers data that show "an increasing proportion of registered supply convoys has been attacked." In the first 18 weeks of 2007, 14.7 percent of the convoys were struck, according to the data, while only 5.5 percent were hit in 2005. Earlier this month, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) reported that Labor Department figures show 1,001 civilian contractors had died in Iraq as of June 30, 2007. While U.S. contractors have provided personal security to officials in other conflict zones, those in Iraq are now being used in all aspects of the struggle because, as the CRS report says, doing otherwise would require policymakers "to contemplate an increase in the number of U.S. troops, perhaps increasing incentives to attract volunteers or re-instituting the draft." But the expanded contractor use has evoked new attention to a 1995 criticism of the practice. According to the study, a Defense Department Commission on Roles and Missions found then that depending on contractors was detrimental and that it kept the Pentagon "from building and maintaining capacity needed for strategic or other important missions." An advertisement last week on IntelligenceCareers.com illustrates part of the problem. It seeks an "Intelligence Analyst" to work in Iraq for a Dayton, Ohio-based outfit called MacAulay-Brown, or MacB, which in turn is a subcontractor to the giant Lockheed Martin information technology group. The client is Counterintelligence Field Activity, the Defense Department's newest intelligence arm, which is responsible for coordinating force protection for the military services inside the United States and abroad. The capabilities required for the job include "CI Analysis, related Intelligence Analysis experience, or similar CI/Intelligence community experience." The employee, the ad says, would work in Baghdad supporting CIFA's participation in the Strategic Intelligence Directorate to counter foreign intelligence and terrorist activities. That directorate, which includes members of Navy, Air Force and Army security units, will "recruit informants, investigate terrorist attacks, process evidence from raids, and interrogate detainees," according to the ad. MacB analysts also support other major U.S. military outfits in Iraq, the ad says, analyzing captured documents and supporting counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations while using "our extensive understanding of Iraqi former regime forces, current government elements, and insurgent and terrorist factions affecting the present security situation into intelligence products for national-level special projects." MacB is needed now because the military did not foresee the need to do this work itself 12 years ago.

To: TimF who wrote (262637)	4/24/2008 9:07:17 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

"American commanders have a more specific military complaint, as well: They say the security contractors complicate American combat operations, in part because local commanders sometimes do not even know of armed official convoys moving through their areas. Mr. Gates said this month that 30 percent of the calls for help from security contractors had come from convoys that the military did not know were on the road." nytimes.com

To: TimF who wrote (262637)	4/24/2008 9:10:14 PM
From: geode00	Respond to of 281500

CAYMAN ISLANDS - Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation's top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven. When Texas pipe-fitter Danny Langford applied for unemployment compensation after being let go by Service Employers International Inc., he was rejected, he was told, because he worked for a foreign company. More than 21,000 people working for KBR in Iraq - including about 10,500 Americans - are listed as employees of two companies that exist in a computer file on the fourth floor of a building on a palm-studded boulevard here in the Caribbean. Neither company has an office or phone number in the Cayman Islands. The Defense Department has known since at least 2004 that KBR was avoiding taxes by declaring its American workers as employees of Cayman Islands shell companies, and officials said the move allowed KBR to perform the work more cheaply, saving Defense dollars. But the use of the loophole results in a significantly greater loss of revenue to the government as a whole, particularly to the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. And the creation of shell companies in places such as the Cayman Islands to avoid taxes has long been attacked by members of Congress. A Globe survey found that the practice is unusual enough that only one other ma jor contractor in Iraq said it does something similar. "Failing to contribute to Social Security and Medicare thousands of times over isn't shielding the taxpayers they claim to protect, it's costing our citizens in the name of short-term corporate greed," said Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee who has introduced legislation to close loopholes for companies registering overseas. With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor. The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq's oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.... boston.com