So Mother Jones has a story by Daniel Schulman about Americans acting like assholes in Afghanistan. Lots of bad behavior, incriminating pictures. Go ahead and see. The company involved here is Wackenhut.
Wackenhut and the CIA go way back. This information comes from 1992, you know, Last Century stuff:
It is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut enjoys with the federal government. It is close. When it comes to security matters, Wackenhut in many respects “is” the government. In 1991, a third of the company’s $600- million in revenues came from the federal government, and another large chunk from companies that themselves work for the government, such as Westinghouse.
Wackenhut is the largest single company supplying security to U.S. embassies overseas; several of the 13 embassies it guards have been in important hotbeds of espionage, such as Chile, Greece and El Salvador.
It also guards nearly all the most strategic government facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oil pipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River plutonium plant and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the federal government in other ways as well.
While early boards of directors included such prominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker; General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current and recent members of the board have included much of the country’s recent national-security directorate:
former FBI director Clarence Kelley
former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci
former Defense Intelligence Agency director General Joseph Carroll
former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley
former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley
acting chairman of President Bush’s foreign- intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman
Before his appointment as Reagan’s CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut’s outside legal counsel.
The company has 30,000 armed employees on its payroll. We wanted to know more about this special relationship; but the government was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for an explanation of how one company got the security contracts for nearly all of America’s most strategic installations have gone unanswered.
Similarly, efforts to get the State Department to explain whether embassy contracts were awarded arbitrarily or through competitive bidding were fruitless; essentially, the State Department said, “Some of both.”
Wackenhut’s competitors - who, understandably, asked not to be quoted by name - have their own version.
“All those contracts;” said one security-firm executive, “are just another way to pay Wackenhut for their clandestine help.”
And what is the nature of that help?
“It is known throughout the industry,” said retired FBI special agent William Hinshaw, “that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut.”
OK, fine, good enough. It took me about thirty seconds to find this information. It does not surprise me that a company like Wackenhut would use techniques that result in a working environment of fear and coercion:
Multiple guards say this deviant hazing has created a climate of fear and coercion, with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted, or even fired. The result is an environment that is dangerous and volatile. Some guards have reported barricading themselves in their rooms for fear that those carrying out the hazing will harm them physically. Others have reported that AGNA management has begun to conduct a witch hunt to identify employees who have provided information about this atmosphere to POGO.
That would be standard operating procedure, advanced mind-fucking, for a CIA-affiliated organization, as anyone paying attention knows.
Not that it shouldn’t be exposed. Yes, by all means, let’s have it. But why now, when this has been going on for a long long time?
I mean, it’s a little distracting all of a sudden, with these pictures and everything. Kinda like a limited hangout or something….
[ding]
UPDATE: There are more DOD defense contractors in Afghanistan than uniformed US military personnel.
Contractors provide essential logistical, translation and other services, while offering increased flexibility. But they also pose management challenges in monitoring performance and preventing fraud. In the worst cases, “abuses and crimes committed by armed private security contractors and interrogators against local nationals may have undermined U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the CRS report noted.
Um, yeah. Guess so.
