Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed Martin
by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
November 4th, 2005
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert town of El
Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons. They
were going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a
legalistic tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for
signing up, they got a $2,000 check from a company that is rapidly
becoming one of the key employers in the world of intelligence:
Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest military company, based in
Bethesda, Maryland.
Before deployment to Iraq, they assemble in Building 503 on Pleasanton
Road to mingle with the soldiers and government civilian workers at the
welcome briefing that takes place every Sunday. There they get a
government-issued duffel bag, filled with basic items for working in
the war in the Middle East: cargo pants, tactical shirts, Kevlar
helmets and Land Warrior chemical masks. After a week of orientation
and medical processing, they fly to Tampa, Florida, and onto their
final work destinations -- Iraq's infamous prisons including Abu
Ghraib, Camp Cropper, a prison at Baghdad International Airport, and
Camp Whitehorse, near Nasariyah.
Known in the intelligence community as "97 Echoes" (97E is the official
classification number for the interrogator course taught at military
colleges including Fort Huachuca, Arizona), these contractors will work
side-by-side with military interrogators conducting question-and-answer
sessions using 17 officially sanctioned techniques, ranging from "love
of comrades" to "fear up harsh." Their subjects will be the tens of
thousands of men thrown into United States-run military jails on
suspicion of links to terrorism.
The rules that govern all interrogators, both contract and military,
are currently open to broad interpretation. Today there is much legal
wrangling about where to draw the line between harsh treatment and
torture. An amendment to the latest military spending bill introduced
by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, explicitly bars the use
of torture on anyone in Unites States custody. His amendment was
recently approved by a 90 to 9 votes in the United States Senate and is
currently being negotiated in "conference" by both Houses of Congress
this week before going to President Bush. McCain is fighting off Vice
President ***** Cheney's suggestion that Central Intelligence Agency
counter-terrorism agents working overseas be exempted from the torture
ban.
Sytex
Jobs for this new breed of interrogators typically begin with a phone
call or email to retired Lieutenant Colonel Marc Michaelis, in the
quaint old flour milling town of Ellicott City, on the banks of the
Patapsco River in Maryland, about an hour's drive from Washington DC.
Michaelis, who is the main point of contact for new interrogators, came
to Lockheed in February after it acquired his former employer Sytex in
a $462 million takeover. Sytex was founded 1988 by Sydney Martin, a
management graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
dabbles in collecting old Danish and Irish coins. In its first year,
the Pennsylvania-based company earned $1,500. By 2004, according to
Congressional Quarterly, Sytex was providing "personnel and technology
solutions to government customers including the Pentagon's Northern
Command, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, and the
Department of Homeland Security." Its revenues had reached $425
million.
The bottom line was undoubtedly improved by the boom in hiring contract
interrogators that began just weeks after the September 11, 2001
attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Armed with new Pentagon
contracts, Michaelis advertised job openings for 120 new "intelligence
analysts" ranging from Arab linguists to counterintelligence and
information warfare specialists. The private contractors would work at
Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and at the United States Special Operations
Command in Tampa, Florida.
At the same time, Lockheed Martin, then a completely different company,
was also interested in entering this lucrative new business of
intelligence contracting. It bought up Affiliated Computer Services
(ACS), a small company with a General Services Administration (GSA)
technology contract issued in Kansas City, Missouri. In November 2002,
Lockheed used GSA to employ private interrogators at Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. The contract was then transferred to a Department of Interior
office in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
The issue of private contractors in interrogation did not come to light
until mid-2004, when a military investigation revealed that several
interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison were civilian employees of CACI.
The contract to the Virginia-based company was also issued by the
Department of Interior's Sierra Vista, Arizona office, located a
stone's throw from the headquarters of the Army's main interrogation
school.
(CACI did not actually bid on the original contract, but like Lockheed
in Guantanamo, it had bought another company--Premier Technology
Group-which did. The Fairfax, Virginia-based firm provided
interrogators to the Pentagon in August 2003 under a GSA contract for
information technology services.)
Scandal at Abu Ghraib
One of the CACI interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, was accused of
involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal that broke in May
2004. It was soon revealed that Stefanowicz, who was trained as a
satellite image analyst, had received no formal training in military
interrogation, which involves instruction in the Geneva Conventions on
human rights.
A subsequent report in July 2004 by Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek,
on behalf of the Army Inspector General, found that a third of the
interrogators supplied in Iraq by CACI had not been trained in military
interrogation methods and policies. The same report mentioned that of
the four contract interrogators employed by Sytex in Bagram,
Afghanistan, only two had received military interrogation training, and
the other two, who were former police officers, had not.
It also emerged that no one knew what laws applied to private
contractors who engaged in torture in Iraq or whether they were in fact
accountable to any legal authority or disciplinary procedures. When the
media began to question the role of the private contractors and the
legality of their presence under unrelated information technology
contracts from non-military agencies, the Pentagon swiftly issued
sole-source ("no bid") military contracts to CACI and Lockheed.
That CACI contract expired at the end of September this year. But
before the company opted not to renew its contract, the company was
already working with Sytex as a sub-contractor to supply new personnel
to interrogate prisoners.
No new contractor in either Iraq or Afghanistan has been made
officially announced to date, but Major Matthew McLaughlin, a
spokesperson for United States Central Command at MacDill Air Force
Base in Tampa, Florida, told CorpWatch: "The Army is the executive
agent for contracting all interrogator type services for the Department
of Defense. They work their contracts (writ large) from an office which
operates out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia."
Web Recruiting
Sytex, and thus Lockheed after the takeover, appears to have
subsequently emerged as one of the biggest recruiters of private
interrogators. In June alone, Sytex advertised for 11 new interrogators
for Iraq, and in July the company sought 23 interrogators for
Afghanistan. It has also been seeking experienced report writers and
program managers who have worked in military interrogations in
Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, former Yugoslavia,
or the Persian Gulf War.
Ads on several websites frequented by current and former military
personnel offered a $70,000 to $90,000 salary, a $2,000 sign-up bonus,
$1,000 for a mid-tour break, and a $2,000 bonus for completing the
normal six month deployment. Those returning for a second tour get
double bonuses at the beginning and end of their stints. In return, the
employees are expected to work as necessary-- up to 14 hours a day, 7
days a week. (The companies, however, get to bill the military up to
$200 an hour for this work, according to Cherif Bassiouni, the former
United Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in
Afghanistan.)
"Sytex is one of our best customers," says Bill Golden, a former
military intelligence analyst with 20 years Army experience, who now
runs IntelligenceCareers.com, one of the biggest intelligence
employment websites in the business. "They are the main company hiring
97E workers today."
Golden attributes the current boom in private contract interrogators to
poor military planning over the last decade. "The military worked as
hard as it could to create a brain drain by moving qualified
intelligence people into other jobs, who then quit. As a result by
September 11, 2001, there was no one left who had a clue. Now they are
rushing to catch up and create 9,000 new specialists, but it takes at
least five years to become really experienced. What we have now is a
nursery full of babies in the army."
Yet even by 2003, just 237 new interrogators were graduated from the
intelligence school at Fort Huachuca. Today, a Virginia-based company,
Anteon, has contracted with the base to provide private instructors to
increase the number of qualified interrogators completing intelligence
courses to 1,000 a year in 2006. (See related article)
The scope of contracts for companies like Anteon and Sytex are
difficult to determine because they have never been made public. Asked
about the details of the interrogation contracts, Lockheed declined to
comment. Joseph Wagovich, a spokesman for the company's information
technology division that includes Sytex, initially told CorpWatch that
the company had only a minor role in the interrogation business and
that the company had wrapped up its interrogation contract on
Guantanamo. But he confirmed that Lockheed was still supplying other
kinds of "intelligence analysts" on the Cuban base.
Sytex itself also likes to keep a low profile. "Most of the law
enforcement organizations, as well as the other surreptitious
organizations we may be supporting, would just as soon not see their
names in print," Ralph Palmieri Junior, the company's Chief Operating
Officer told Congressional Quarterly in 2004.
Running the United States?
Even without all the specifics, it is clear that Lockheed is supplying
the U.S. war in Iraq with a vast range of both personnel and materiel.
In addition providing interrogators, it is currently seeking retired
Army majors or lieutenant colonels to develop short- and long-range
planning at the biggest U.S. base in Iraq: Camp Anaconda, in Balad,
northern Iraq. Also being courted for work in Iraq are "red switch"
experts to run the military's secure communications systems.
On the materiel side, Lockheed's Keyhole and Lacrosse satellites beam
images from the war back to the military; its U-2 and the SR-71
Blackbird spy planes, F-16, F/A-22 jet fighters, and F-117 stealth
attack fighters were used to "shock and awe" the Iraqis at the start of
the US invasion; and ground troops employed its Hellfire air-to-ground
missiles and the Javelin portable missiles in the invasion of Fallujah
last year.
The company's reach and influence go far beyond the military. A New
York Times profile of the company in 2004 opened with the sentence:
"Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a
breathtakingly big part of it."
"Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military
contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that
now stretches from the Pentagon to the Post Office. It sorts your mail
and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the
United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic.
To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than
Microsoft" writes Tim Weiner.
The national security reporter for the New York Times explains how
Lockheed gets its business: "Men who have worked, lobbied and lawyered
for Lockheed hold the posts of secretary of the Navy, secretary of
transportation, director of the national nuclear weapons complex, and
director of the national spy satellite agency."
"Giving one company this much power in matters of war and peace is as
dangerous as it is undemocratic," says Bill Hartung, senior fellow at
the World Policy Institute in New York. "Lockheed Martin is now
positioned to profit from every level of the war on terror from
targeting to intervention, and from occupation to interrogation.
Failed Experiment?
Apart from the monoply on war-related contracts to one single
corporation, the increased outsourcing of interrogation to private
contractors raises questions of accountability and of enforcement of
regulations designed for the military.
Human rights groups are openly critical of this new trend. "The Army's
use of contract interrogators has to date been a failed experiment,"
Deborah Pearlstein told CorpWatch. "Based on the Pentagon's own
investigations and other reports that are already public, it seems
clear that contractors are less well trained, less well controlled, and
harder to hold accountable for things that go wrong than are regular
troops." Pearlstein, who is the director of the U.S. Law and Security
Program at Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee on Human
Rights), warned that "unless and until contract interrogators can be
brought at the very least up to the standards of training and
discipline expected of our uniformed soldiers, the United States may
well be better off without their services."
Former interrogators have a more nuanced opinion. "The problem is not
the use of civilian contractors," one former Army interrogator with
over ten years of field experience, wrote in an email to CorpWatch.
"What is necessary is an active means of supervision and oversight on
ALL of our assets in the field...not just the civilian ones. If you
take a look at many of the investigations of the military intelligence
activities, you will find just as many uniformed individuals breaking
the law as contractors. I am more interested in providing proper
guidance, training, supervision and oversight to ALL of our
intelligence people."
But Susan Burke, a lawyer for Iraqi prisoners who say they were
tortured at Abu Ghraib, challenges the legality of using private
contractors for interrogation. "Interrogation has always been
considered an inherently governmental function for obvious reasons. It
is irresponsible and dangerous to use contractors in such settings
given that there is a long history of repeated human rights abuses by
contractors." The Philadephia attorney charges that the use of private
contractors is illegal. "The United States Congress has passed laws
(the Federal Acquisition Regulations) that prevent the executive branch
from delegating "inherently governmental functions" to private
parties."
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12757
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