“Is there any meaning to the rule of law when the US governmental apparatus sole sources contracts to enforce the rule of law to a corporation that has demonstrated a clear tolerance for lawlessness?”
Catherine Austin-Fitts, journalist, commenting on the decision to award DynCorp up to $500MM on Sole Source to "Police" Iraq.
If we were to visit California-based Computer Sciences Corporation website (csc.com) we might be forgiven for thinking this is a financial services company humbly dedicated to bettering the world as well as its investors. Unfortunately the low key nature of the site design masks the true meaning of this fortune 500 corporation and its cosy relationship to the U.S. Federal government. The corporation currently holds contracts with more than 40 federal agencies including the Pentagon, State Department, Drug Enforcement Administration, Department of Energy and the Justice Department. The giant government contractor bought Dyncorp on March 7th 2003, creating “a company that ranks as one of the top information technology and outsourcing services providers to the U.S. federal government.” The revenues from the federal sector alone were estimated to be around $6 billion at the end of the fiscal year of 2003 with projections of in excess of $14.5 billion at the end of 2004. 2005 saw a steady increase in profits due to its monopoly on US Government contracts as its primary sector which is now expanding into Europe. This net profit was more than $810.2 million during fiscal year 2005, an increase of 56% over 2004.1 The purchase of Dyncorp not only saved its bacon but allowed it to claim the dubious honour of being the third largest IT services provider behind Lockheed Martin and second place provider EDS Corp. CSC Chief Executive Van B. Honeycutt gave a wonderful example of the art of masking with his comments on why the Dyncorp merger went ahead:
DynCorp, with approximately 98 percent of its total revenue coming from the U.S. federal government, complements our overall federal business, allowing a great breadth of end-to-end solutions and significantly increasing our exposure to the growth area of federal government, IT and functional outsourcing…’ […]It sounds reasonable enough if we don’t think about what this actually means. “The growth area of federal government” and “U.S. National Security” is intimately linked to the “War on Terrorism,” numerous examples of human rights abuses and the dismantling of the constitution from within.
“The capabilities of the new federal sector organization will allow CSC to provide more comprehensive services and solutions to our government customers,…’ […]
‘Now that the U.S. Homeland Security Department is in place, the resources and security expertise of CSC, coupled with those of DynCorp, will position us extremely well as the federal government expands and accelerates its efforts to enhance U.S. national security.’ 2
When the United States created the Office of Homeland Security, CSC chairman Van B. Honeycutt was one of the first advisers to the new agency having already handled the position of Chair of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC) under President Clinton. Effectively, the corporation is an extension of the government and its policies, with an incestual exchange of employees and profit, which the website tenderly calls “client intimate organizations.” With its headquarters in Reston, Virginia, close to the CIA, and Pentagon there is no doubt that Dyncorp has a deeply intimate connection that is mutually binding.
Prior to the merger, DynCorp was among the largest employee-owned technology and out sourcing firms headquartered in the United States, with approximately 26,000 employees in some 550 locations throughout the world. According to CSC “the U.S. Department of Defense represented 49 percent of DynCorp's revenue in 2001, which before the merger netted 2.3 billion.
The number of lawsuits and scandals hitting Dyncorp range from allegations of sex trafficking to a variety of human rights abuses and black operations involving drugs and military targets. This is largely due to the hiring of former CIA and Special Operations military personnel. One would think that the screening of employees would have been stepped up following so much bad publicity. Yet why should they worry when the biggest contractors are the US government and its formidable war machine driven by the arms industry itself? Logistical and IT services may well be part of the civilised PR of Dyncorp CSC but in reality, the true sector definition of this corporation should be categorized as “private mercenaries” which allows operations to be sub-contracted to the bidder that is most ideologically and professionally sound. It also conveniently abdicates responsibility for the US army and civilian deaths while avoiding unnecessary media spotlights. Outsourcing their wars beyond the prying eyes of press and congress is an effective way to ensure policy and regime change.
Secrecy is obviously an important part of the company’s rules. If employees happen to get rubbed out on their various covert “missions” then the paper trail is sparse or non-existent. Janet Wineriter, a spokeswoman at DynCorp’s headquarters frequently tells the media that she cannot discuss the company’s operations because of its contractual obligations to its client - the state department. When this fails then black-outs are affected. Information regarding the real activities of these private mercenaries is purposely obscure and shielded from investigations. The last people they want to inform are congress or the public. As a recent Guardian article stated: “Today’s mercenaries in the drug war are provided by private companies selling a service and are used as a matter of course by both the state and defence.”3
Dyncorp has little to do with “Information Systems, Information Technology Outsourcing and Technical Services” though this certainly plays a part in extending its monopolistic war games. Controlling and monitoring information systems for federal agencies such as the FBI, DOJ and SEC, are within the corporation’s primary remit which is rather handy should any “impropriety” surface – which of course is the name of the game. Subversion and corruption is endorsed and legitimized via a corporate and federal relationship that gives the Cosa Nostra a run for its money.
Pan Colombia
“The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.” - William Blum
The Free Trade agreements of the Americas walked over the remains of long dead economies of South America, hacked off at the roots by years of U.S. interventionism and later under the auspices of the IMF and World Bank. The colonization is on schedule and Dyncorp CSC is right in the thick of it to ensure its completion. The U.S. $1.3 billion Plan Colombia was but one example, where critics say that the corporation was/is involved in “counter insurgency” operations in the war on drugs as well as the monopolization and control of oil interests in the region. Paramilitaries and mercenaries are co-mingling in a mix of dirty interests. The corporation’s activities also extend into Bolivia and Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil and Panama where it is also carries out drug interdiction, transport, reconnaissance, search and rescue missions, medical evacuation and aircraft maintenance.
The Free Trade agreements of the Americas walked over the remains of long dead economies of South America, hacked off at the roots by years of U.S. interventionism and later under the auspices of the IMF and World Bank. The colonization is on schedule and Dyncorp CSC is right in the thick of it to ensure its completion. The U.S. $1.3 billion Plan Colombia was but one example, where critics say that the corporation was/is involved in “counter insurgency” operations in the war on drugs as well as the monopolization and control of oil interests in the region. Paramilitaries and mercenaries are co-mingling in a mix of dirty interests. The corporation’s activities also extend into Bolivia and Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Brazil and Panama where it is also carries out drug interdiction, transport, reconnaissance, search and rescue missions, medical evacuation and aircraft maintenance.
Civilians in Colombia have become the prime targets as rapacious parties compete for territory. The murder of peasants is common place if they do not respond to threats and intimidation to leave lucrative land targeted for mining, oil exploration and agriculture. Harken continues to rake in the cash on the backs of dead civilians in the Magdalena Valley, with help from the World Bank's International Finance Corporation preparing the way.
Paramilitaries protect corporate interests in the region. Death squads are in operation on behalf of U.S. oil companies and political parties, which are closely entwined in a network of intelligence agencies with the CIA as the guiding hand. After all, Colombia is both the leading recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere and one of the worst violator of human rights. Connection?
“Plan Colombia” was inflicted on the country by the Clinton administration over six years ago. The $1.3 billion aid package which was mostly military aid to Colombia and its neighbours, was to usher in “peace, prosperity, and the strengthening of the state”4 by proposing a principally military strategy to stop illicit drug cultivation and trafficking. The plan was to be carried out by providing military assistance to the Colombian armed forces and police, and the creation of three anti-narcotics army battalions. However, aside from a slight drop in cocoa plant production, it did none of those things. What it actually did was to build on the destabilisation in the region thanks to 1990s US policies and to “increase the dispersion and proliferation of organized crime and the expansion and intensification of political crime and guerrilla warfare.”5
Since the implementation of the Plan “politically motivated killings have increased dramatically” and where “counter-narcotics operations in Plan Colombia fail[ed] to target drugs cultivation in areas under long-standing paramilitary control.”6 After a whopping expenditure of $4.72 billion from 2000-2006 with $3.84 billion (81%) going to Colombia’s military and police forces, things have only got worse. The reason being, over 50 percent of Colombia’s land is owned by paramilitaries, the monopoly of which is drawn from the paramilitary control of members of Colombia’s Congress at around 30 percent. It suggests that the CIA, true to its colours, wished to gain control of an important financial resource rather than to decrease its influence in any genuine way.
Dyncorp is not the only one slicing into the pie. AirScan, based in Rockledge, Florida, provides high-tec air surveillance and is responsible for patrolling the Colombian jungle with Cessna Skymaster electronic surveillance planes, spotting cocoa plantations and guerrilla threats to the Cano Limon oil pipeline. Military Professional Resources Inc. based in Alexandria, Virginia provides a consultancy service run by former US generals. Its mercenaries were responsible for training the Colombian Army and police officers. An Alabma company working out of the Maxwell Air-force base, Aviation Development Corporation (ADC) flies Cessna spotter planes for the CIA in Peru and Colombia to help target aircraft used by drug smugglers.
It was this latter company that caused a brief headache for the PR branches protecting the so called “drug war” when a small plane carrying US missionaries was shot down in Peru by a military pilot killing a young woman and her seven-month-old baby girl. The missionaries’ plane was first spotted by a US Cessna Citation surveillance plane piloted not by US military pilots but by private contractors hired by ADC. This echoed the shooting down of a Dyncorp helicopter in and the subsequent rescue of its pilots by their own search and rescue teams which culminated in a shoot-out with the rebel Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Nothing like a spot of Hollywood intrigue to keep the shareholders happy.
Another minor glitch in the well-oiled wheels of its operations was discovered in late 2001 when The Nation online journal managed to obtain a document of a monthly DEA intelligence report from May 2000 in which officers of Colombia's National Police force intercepted a US-bound Federal Express package at Bogota’s El Dorado International Airport:
The parcel ‘contained two (2) small bottles of a thick liquid’ that ‘had the same consistency as motor oil.’ The communiqué goes on to report that the liquid substance "tested positive for heroin’ and that the ‘alleged heroin laced liquid weighed approximately 250 grams.’ […]According to DynCorp spokeswoman Janet Wineriter, the viscous liquid that the Colombians tested was not, in fact, laced with heroin; it was simply "oil samples of major aircraft components’ that DynCorp technicians are required to take and send to the US ‘on a periodic basis.’7While the package was traced back to an unnamed employee of Dyncorp who was sending it on to the Andean operations headquarters at Patrick Air Force Base, Florida, the government and Dyncorp were tight-lipped regarding details as to why this was the result of faulty testing equipment and an entirely innocent mistake. After an awkward tossing of the piping hot potato between the US Embassy, the Colombian National Police Force (CNP) the DEA and the Colombian State Department (and of course Dyncorp) the problem was shoved under a decidedly rank carpet courtesy of the CNP whose forensic unit decided it prudent not to pursue the matter.
The testing equipment called NARCOTEX was, to all intents and purposes, also found to be bogus by the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s Drug Recognition Experts. They could find no evidence of drug technology with that name. A token military doffing of its hat towards those that were intent on its eradication, was all that was needed.
Notes
1 Data Monitor /Computer Wire / www.computerwire.com/ 2005
2 ‘CSC and DynCorp Combine to Create Federal IT Powerhouse’ – www.csc.com/
3 ‘A Plane is Shot Down and the US Proxy War on Drugs Unravels’ by Julian Borger, The Guardian, June 2, 2001.
4 The Center for International Policy’s Colombia Project www.ciponline.org/ The Plan Colombia (Copy obtained from the Colombian Embassy to the United States, October 1999.) ‘Plan Colombia: Plan For Peace, Prosperity, and the Strengthening of the State.’
5 Drug Trafficking, Political Violence and US Policy in Colombia in the 1990s Dr. Bruce Michael Bagley, Professor of International Studies, School of International Studies, University of Miami, CIDE ciencias socials, www.cide.edu/
6 ‘Colombia: Stoking the fires of conflict’ Amnesty International, Terror Trade Times, 2001.
7 ‘DynCorp's Drug Problem’ by Jason Vest, The Nation, July 3, 2001.
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