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Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed Martin
by Pratap Chatterjee
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12757
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 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."
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