[MORE IRAQ / ABU GHRAIB][THE-SIGNAL.COM]

Opportunities Abound in the 'Other' U.S. Army (the Private One)

Commentary By Leon Worden
 Signal Multimedia Editor

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

*MEDIA—MANDATORY CREDIT: The Signal newspaper of Santa Clarita, Calif.

Titan translator at work
An Iraqi interpreter who works for Titan Corp. helps a U.S. soldier, right, to inspect a man's identity papers while an Iraqi soldier, left, looks on at a checkpoint near Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, on May 5. This translator uses a cap, sunglasses and a scarf to conceal his identity.  (AP Photo/Jacob Silberberg)
I
was going to write another column about the ongoing privatization of the American military but decided instead to let this little string of obscure news items and press releases — all from within the past month — speak for itself.
* * *
    News item: The all-volunteer U.S. Army, which hasn't missed an annual recruiting goal since Bill Clinton was in office, missed its recruiting goal in April and expects to miss it again this month. Year-to-date, Army recruiting is off by 15 percent. The Marines missed their goal in April for the fourth consecutive month. At least 51 U.S. troops were killed in April.
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    News item: The Army has been violating a 1994 Pentagon directive barring women from combat roles by stationing them in forward support companies (FSCs) that often end up in combat situations, said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. A subcommittee voted to prohibit the Army from assigning women to FSCs, but Hunter's full committee backed off, instead telling the Army to get congressional approval before placing women in any new combat roles. Thirty-four female soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Civilian contractor deaths
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    Press release: Know how to run a government? The Afghanistan Reconstruction Group needs a few good private-sector experts to set up departments of education, energy, health, economic development, telecommunications and water. You'll answer to former Army Secretary-turned-private contractor Martin Hoffman, who runs ARG for the Pentagon. Visit www.dod.gov/afghanistan to sign up.
    (Santa Clarita sent a team of city officials to Indonesia two years ago to teach the Indonesians about planning. As they were leaving, Jemaah Islamiyah, Indonesia's al-Qaida affiliate, bombed the back of the parliament building. How about Afghanistan, Ken? Uncle Sam wants YOU.)
* * *
    News item: The Pentagon's Special Inspector General for Iraq, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., has opened a criminal probe after auditors couldn't account for $119.9 million in Iraqi reconstruction funds. Of that amount, $7.2 million had disappeared all together and $89.4 million lacked proper documentation. In one case, two field agents responsible for disbursing cash reportedly left Iraq with $1.5 million. A month earlier, Pentagon audits showed more than $200 million in questionable costs under a no-bid Halliburton contract for delivering fuel to Iraqis.
* * *
    Report to Congress: As Iraqi insurgents stepped up their attacks in the summer of 2003, the Army needed more actionable intelligence in a hurry. It turned to the Interior Department, which had a contract for information technology — software systems — from CACI International Inc. of Virginia. Under the Interior Department contract, the Army ordered $66 million worth of a different kind of intelligence system from CACI: human.
    On April 29 the Government Accountability Office determined that there were multiple "breakdowns" in the procurement process. The Army shouldn't have used Interior's IT contract to send CACI interrogators to Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, the GAO report said.
    For its part, CACI said the GAO "failed to fully acknowledge the impact of the urgent, wartime and combat-related circumstances upon the contracting practices used by the Army and (Interior)." An August 2004 Army investigation linked three CACI interrogators to prisoner abuse.
* * *
    Press release: Two weeks before Newsweek apologized for saying interrogators defiled the Koran at Guantánamo Bay, Penguin Press issued a similar apology. "Inside the Wire," a new book by Erik Saar, an Army sergeant who had supervised linguists translating for interrogators at Gitmo, and coauthor Viveca Novak, "erroneously states that civilian interrogators hired through an Army contract with CACI were at Guantánamo Bay," Penguin said. CACI has repeatedly said its interrogators are only in Iraq, not in Afghanistan or Cuba.
* * *
    Press release: A new Pentagon white paper recommends "immediate and long-term engagement by public, private and government agencies to improve the nation's foreign language and cultural competency." The report documents the findings of a National Language Conference held in Maryland in June.
    (China trade conference at College of the Canyons in 2005; paramilitary linguist conference in '06?)
* * *
    News items: Titan Corp., the San Diego intelligence company that sent Canyon Country resident and Iraqi expatriate John B. Israel to Abu Ghraib prison in the fall of 2003, has hired other Iraqi expatriates as actors to portray insurgents, protesters and soccer players in mock towns on Army bases in California and Texas. The exercises are designed to better prepare troops for what they'll face in Iraq. Civilian contractor deaths
* * *
    News item: Of Titan's 4,700 translators on the ground in Iraq at any given time, at least 52 have been killed in action. Most were indigenous Iraqis; 12 were Americans.
    (Titan spokesman Wil Williams doesn't like to talk about it — I've asked him — but it's probably not too big a stretch for me to postulate that to people like Williams, the unauthorized actions of one or two renegade Titan translators at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 pale in comparison to the deaths of his people in the field.)
* * *
    Financial wire: CACI's third-quarter profits skyrocketed by 37 percent to $21.6 million on the growth of its defense- and intelligence-related business. Titan, whose takeover by Lockheed last year was derailed by a government investigation of bribery, is reportedly back in buyout talks — this time with L-3 Communications Holdings, a defense intelligence contractor in New York. Since pleading guilty March 1 to bribing a foreign government (Benin) from 1999 to 2001, Titan won a new $19.9 million Navy contract, won a NASA award for excellence, and posted record first-quarter revenues of $559 million, a 23-percent jump.

    Leon Worden is The Signal's opinion and multimedia editor.


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