Donald Trump and Bush’s, Blair’s mercenaries

This video from the USA says about itself:

DYNCORP CHILD SEX TRAFFICKING WHISTLEBLOWER KATHRYN BOLKOVAC

6 February 2017

This lecture is by former Nebraska policewoman, Kathryn Bolkovac. She served as a U.N. peacekeeper. Ms. Bolkovac discusses her story of human trafficking, and other topics with Tanya Domi, whose reporting broke this story. Kathryn Bolkovac’s post was with the International Police Task Force which was arranged by DynCorp Aerospace. She was assigned to run the IPTF office that investigates sex trafficking, domestic abuse and sexual assault to support the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.

But once she arrived in Sarajevo, she discovered military officers involved in human trafficking and forced prostitution, with links to private mercenary contractors, the UN, and the U.S. State Department.

After bringing this evidence to light, Bolkovac was successively demoted, threatened with bodily harm, fired, and ultimately forced to flee the country under cover of darkness—bringing the incriminating documents with her.

Thanks to the evidence she collected, she won a lawsuit against DynCorp, publicly exposing their human rights violations.

Her story, recounted in the book The *Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman’s Fight for Justice*, later become the Hollywood feature film “The Whistleblower”.

By Solomon Hughes in Britain:

Bush‘s and Blair‘s hired goons inspired Trump

Friday 18th August 2017

Struggling with his predecessors’ wars, Trump is seeking advice from a very dodgy mercenary firm, writes SOLOMON HUGHES

US PRESIDENT Donald Trump has turned to the men behind DynCorp International, a private military company with a history of scandal for key security advice. Trump turning to the private-military company men for foreign policy advice is alarming.

But it also shows he has a lot in common with former US president George W Bush — and our own Tony Blair.

DynCorp describes itself as “a leading global government solutions provider in support of the US and allied stability objectives.”

Behind this bland management-speak is a military firm. But unlike traditional arms firms, it specialises in supplying people rather than things.

DynCorp supplies staff who carry guns and fly warplanes in the US “war on terror” and “war on drugs.” It is what came to be known as a “private military company” in the 2000s, but would have previously been called mercenaries.

The corp is owned by an investment firm called Cerberus Capital Management. A military company owned by a private equity firm named after the terrifying three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell might be a bit of a red light to some. But not Trump. He has turned to two of its men for advice.

Cerberus founder and boss Steve Feinberg has strong Republican Party links. Feinberg hired Dan Quayle, the US vice-president under George W Bush with a reputation for being dim, to help run Cerberus Capital.

Feinberg is a big Republican donor too. Just before the election he gave nearly $1 million to Rebuild America Now, a committee which funded anti-Hillary Clinton and pro-Trump election ads.

According to the New York Times, Trump is, on recommendation of his “chief strategist” Steve Bannon and his son-in-law and “senior adviser” Jared Kushner, looking to Feinberg for advice on how to deal with the ongoing, and still failing, US intervention in Afghanistan.

Trump’s chief of staff — his top employee and right-hand man — General John F Kelly also worked for DynCorp. Kelly was a marine corps general, who in January 2017 became the secretary of homeland security, before becoming Trump’s chief of staff in July. However, like many other retired generals, Kelly was also an arms industry lobbyist. Through much of 2016 Kelly was an “adviser” to DynCorp, earning $166,000 while working for the firm.

With all these DynCorp-linked men helping him, Trump is unsurprisingly leaning towards using more private military contractors like DynCorp to run the US mission in Afghanistan. But they could bring scandal.

The real boom in the new mercenary firms came with the Iraq war, but DynCorp was in the business before then.

I first became aware of DynCorp in 2001. The United Nations created a police force in post-war Bosnia led by member nations.

The United States hired DynCorp to supply its officers, mostly hiring US police officers and sheriffs — some with a bad record.

One of the officers, a very brave and principled woman called Kathryn Bolkovac, saw something wrong. There is a lot of prostitution during and after war, but when Bolkovac investigated she found many UN police officers — including British and US ones — were using or even trafficking prostitutes.

Bolkovac raised this with DynCorp, but it tried to shut her up and sacked her. Because the DynCorp contract was run through Aldershot, Bolkovac fought back with a successful employment tribunal case in Britain.

She won her “whistleblower” case, exposing DynCorp’s willingness to cover up corruption and sexual exploitation on its contracts.

But her exposure did not stop DynCorp getting work out of the “war on terror.”

In 2004 DynCorp was given a £1 billion contract to train Iraq’s post-war police force. US auditors found in 2007 that the company’s police training contract was completely mismanaged and probably marred by fraud.

Weird DynCorp behaviour included building an unauthorised Olympic-style swimming pool for Iraqi police top brass, while a police training college was so shoddily built that it showered sewage on the heads of lower ranked officers. Regardless of this, in 2008 DynCorp was given a $99m contract to train the still struggling Iraqi army.

Despite the expensive training, the army never performed well.

Faced with the failing DynCorp-trained army, the Iraqi government relied on sectarian militias to supplement it, which was a bad result all round. DynCorp also won contracts to train the police in post-invasion Afghanistan. As well as facing similar accusations of waste and incompetence, DynCorp staff outraged locals by allegedly taking drugs and hiring “dancing boys”.

DynCorp also supplied security guards for former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, leading to a scandal when some guards were found drunk with a prostitute.

Despite the terrible, and sometimes dangerous, performance by DynCorp and other private military companies, it got huge contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Both Bush and Blair were happy with the use of private military contractors because they were keen on privatisation. They were also happy to disguise how large an armed force was needed in Iraq and Afghanistan by using private contractors to supplement our military.

In general the British tended to use British private military firms like ArmorGroup (now part of G4S). But the country has also given contracts to DynCorp as well. Babcock-DynCorp, a joint venture with a British firm, got some multi-million Ministry of Defence contracts. Our ex-top brass did work for the firm as well. In 2014 Baron Richards, former UK chief of defence staff worked as a DynCorp consultant.

But on the whole, the US firm did most of its work for the US. The Iraq and Afghan operations relied heavily on private contractors. They were also some of the most disastrous military adventures for decades.

But with Trump turning to DynCorp’s men for advice on Afghanistan, the contracts and disasters look set to continue.

One of the problems we have is that as long as these big private firms get contracts from war, there is a big powerful business lobby ready to argue war is an easy option.

Trump turning to this military-industrial complex for advice is very bad, but it also follows in the tradition both of Bush and Blair.

Ecuadorean farmers against DynCorp mercenaries

This video from Britain says about itself:

More US militants to help Saudi Arabia’s massacre in Yemen

24 March 2016

The first batch of mercenaries from the private US military firm DynCorp has arrived in the Yemeni city of Aden to replace paid militants from another American company.

Under a USD-3-billion contract between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and DynCorp, mercenaries from the company are to be deployed to Yemen, where UAE forces are fighting against the Yemeni army and Popular Committees on Saudi orders, Khabar News Agency quoted an official with Yemeni Defense Ministry as saying.

DynCorp International is a USA-based private military contractor. Begun as an aviation company, the company also provides flight operations support, training and mentoring, international … Wikipedia

Headquarters: McLean, Virginia, United States, CEO: James E. Geisler, Founded: 1946, Parent organization: Cerberus Capital Management.

Subsidiaries: DYNCORP INTERNATIONAL OF NIGERIA LLC. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the first group of the mercenaries recently arrived in the port city of Aden to replace those of Blackwater, a notorious American group now renamed Academi. He added that the new militants included special naval forces, who entered the port of Ras Omran southwest of Aden. DynCorp is a rival of Blackwater, which hires mercenaries and sends them to fight in foreign countries on paid missions.

Blackwater had decided to withdraw from Bab-el-Mandeb region after the Yemeni forces inflicted heavy losses on them. The UAE was forced to bring in the new mercenaries from DynCorp for the same reason. Yemen has been under military attack by Saudi Arabia since late March last year. At least 8,400 people have been killed so far in the aggression and 16,015 others sustained injuries. The strikes have also taken a heavy toll on the impoverished country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools, and factories.

From daily The Morning Star in Britain:

Ecuador small farmers’ day in US court over crop spraying comes closer

Wednesday 5th April 2017

MORE than 2,000 Ecuadorean small farmers began a joint legal action against US military contractor DynCorp on Monday, claiming that it unlawfully invaded Ecuador in 2000 and sprayed farms with toxic chemicals.

International Rights Advocates (IRA), representing the farmers before a jury at Washington District Court, hailed the trial as a positive step.

The group has been trying to take DynCorp to court since 2001 in the face of numerous attempts by the transnational to dismiss the case.

“This is an historic case — a finding against DynCorp will bring justice to the Ecuadorean farmers, who have been waiting a long time to have their day in court,” said IRA executive director Terry Collingsworth.

“A jury will finally get the chance to hear the evidence that DynCorp aerially sprayed a toxic poison that was designed to kill hardy coca plants on thousands of Ecuadorean farms and killed their crops, their animals and caused untold misery for the farmers and their families.”

For the Ecuadorean farmers and their supporters, the trial is long overdue.

Former president Bill Clinton awarded $1 billion in military aid to then Colombian president Andres Pastrana, launching Plan Colombia.

The military campaign was allegedly intended to combat drug traffickers but was directed against the Farc liberation movement and poor rural communities seen as supporting the left-wing guerillas.

DynCorp was hired as part of Plan Colombia to carry out aerial spraying of Colombian farms with glyphosate to eliminate coca crops.

The plaintiffs claim, however, that DynCorp illegally entered northern Ecuador, spraying and causing serious damage to local crops, animals and residents’ health.

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CSC corporation’s torture flights scandal

This 24 January 2018 video from the USA is called Dyncorp, The Private Military Corporation At The Heart Of Foreign Policy Scandal.

From Computer Weekly in Britain:

NHS seeks explanation over CSC role in ‘torture flights’

Mark Ballard

Monday 30 July 2012 12:15

The Department of Health is seeking an explanation from CSC over allegations the supplier was involved in the illegal rendition of European citizens in the US “war on terror”.

CSC has been accused of organising the flights of people between secret prisons where they were alleged in some cases to have been tortured.

“We are concerned by these allegations and plan to seek clarification from CSC,” said the Department for Health in a statement to Computer Weekly.

The department and the UK Cabinet Office are in the middle of protracted negotiations with CSC over its failure to deliver IT systems to the NHS National Programme for IT. The coalition government had been trying to scrap the NHS programme but has been unable to renegotiate the contract with CSC. A resolution is expected in August – although previous deadlines for an agreement have been missed.

Human rights charity Reprieve is writing to CSC customers after it unearthed documents it claims prove the IT supplier managed rendition flights for the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Invoices allegedly show CSC was contracted to charter flights in one case, where the CIA transported German citizen Khaled El-Masri after his abduction from Europe and secret imprisonment in Afghanistan.

But other CSC customers are choosing to disregard the allegations.

“It’s not our policy to comment on things like that,” said a spokesman for ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer, which outsourced its IT to CSC in July 2011.

Transport for London (TfL), which in January renewed a CSC contract on which it has spent £100m since 2006, said: “TfL was not aware of the allegations made against CSC.”

Reprieve has written to TfL and its chairman, London mayor Boris Johnson. TfL has so far declined the opportunity to respond to further questions from Computer Weekly.

A spokesman for Royal Mail, which has outsourced its IT to CSC since 2003, said: “We do not comment on our commercial relationships with our customers and suppliers.”

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said it had sought an explanation from CSC after giving it a seven-year, £400m contract in April to run the British Service Personnel and Veterans Agency system, which handles approximately £14bn in pay and pensions every year.

The procurement process included a “good standing” assessment, to tell if bidders had committed criminal offences or acts of grave professional misconduct that might bar them from working with UK armed forces.

An MoD spokesman said: “We looked for assurances from CSC following these allegations from Reprieve.

“They provided an assurance that CSC has a robust corporate responsibility programme that includes an affirmative human rights statement.”

The MoD was led to believe the allegations centred on DynCorp, a company CSC acquired in 2003 and sold in 2005.

Dr Crofton Black, a researcher for Reprieve, said the charity had discovered invoices connecting CSC with likely rendition flights up to mid-2006, after it sold DynCorp.

CSC acquired DynCorp along with 40 subsidiaries and 26,000 staff for $950m in 2003. CSC subsequently won a contract to supply DynCorp security personnel to support the US invasion of Iraq and became the fourth largest contractor to occupying US forces. But CSC sold part of DynCorp subsidiary DynPort for $850m after it was rebuked by the US State Department for the aggressive behaviour of its guards protecting Afghan leader Hamid Karzai.

CSC remained the 92nd largest contractor in Iraq after the sale and retained parts of DynCorp including DynPort, which produces biological warfare vaccines under contract to the Ministry of Defence and US Department of Defense.

Reprieve claims CSC also retained its rendition contracts.

CSC said in a statement that it retained the name DynCorp but subsumed its retained divisions, particularly DynCorp Technical Services, which became CSC Applied Technologies, and provides security and operates test ranges for US military bases. Other DynCorp subsidiaries were sold or discontinued.

USA: How should we mark the 10th anniversary of the effort by the Bush administration to justify torture? By ensuring it never happens again: here.

Secret trials to cover up Britain’s role in torture: here.

DynCorp mercenaries pimped children to policemen

This video from the USA about Afghanistan is called DynCorp, US tax funds child prostitution – Operation Leakspin.

Another video from the USA, which used to be on YouTube but is not anymore, says about itself:

Frontline- Afghan’s “Bacha Bazi” (PREVIEW)

FRONTLINE- In the midst of war and endemic poverty, an ancient tradition has re-emerged across Afghanistan: Hundreds of boys are being lured off the streets with promises of a new life, many unaware their fate is to be used for entertainment and sex.

See the whole sickening FRONTLINE REPORT HERE.

From Tanjug news agency in Serbia:

Afghanistan: U.S. company pimped boys

9 December 2010 | 12:13

LONDON — Employees of privately-owned U.S. company DynCorp, employed to train Afghan forces, were pimping boys to policemen, WikiLeaks has revealed.

According to WikiLeaks, policemen often used to take drugs and sexually abuse boys.

DynCorp was involved in “hiring” young Afghans to entertain policemen at private parties in the province of Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.

Boys aged eight to 15 were doing a “traditional dance” that had been banned by the Taliban.

Wearing make up and women’s clothing, the boys danced seductively in front of older, often intoxicated men, read the documents published by The Guardian.

After the show, the boys were auctioned off to the highest bidder and then sexually abused.

Afghanistan demands that contractors and private security companies be brought under much tighter government control. However, the U.S. embassy was legally incapable of honoring its request that the U.S. military should assume authority over training centers managed by DynCorp.

Two Afghan policemen and nine other Afghans were arrested as part of investigations into a crime described as “purchasing a service from a child”, which the cable said was against both sharia law and the civil code.

In a meeting with the assistant U.S. ambassador, Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar pointed out that the incident should be “quashed” and warned that the story would “endanger lives” and was particularly concerned that a video of the incident might be made public.

DynCorp is also known to the Serbian public. In 2005 it won a tender for construction of a cargo terminal at the Belgrade airport but it informed the Serbian government that was giving up on the project in November of 2006.

See also here.

DynCorp and Stallion endanger base with lax security in Afghanistan: here.

From the Washington Examiner in the USA:

Defense contractor DynCorp reaps two-thirds of State Dept.’s Afghanistan reconstruction dollars

April 25, 2014

Michal Conger

A single defense contractor — one that has faced allegations of poor performance — raked in more than two-thirds of the $4 billion the State Department has spent rebuilding Afghanistan in recent years, a government watchdog says.

DynCorp International, a Virginia-based company that is one of the federal government’s largest contractors, won $2.8 billion in State Department contracts between 2002 and last year, primarily to train and equip law enforcement and counter-narcotics forces in the war-torn country, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

PAE Government Services, another Northern Virginia company sometimes grouped with DynCorp as “private military contractors” or PMCs, received the second-largest piece of State’s Afghanistan pie. It won slightly less than $600 million in contracts, less than a quarter of DynCorp’s share.

“It is a problem that companies like DynCorp — with a fairly extensive track record of contract performance problems and other ethical lapses in Afghanistan — are getting such a large share of State’s reconstruction money,” said Neil Gordon, an investigator with Washington nonprofit Project on Government Oversight (POGO).

DynCorp, which employs 25,000 people worldwide, has provided a wide range of services for the U.S. government in southwest Asia, including construction and security. The international press reported in 2002 that the firm’s employees were serving as bodyguards to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, a claim not mentioned in SIGAR’s review.

At the same time, the company has been the subject of several allegations of poor work or misconduct in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

The Army paid DynCorp nearly $73 million in 2010 for construction work at an Afghani army base in Kunduz Province that SIGAR said was substandard, including “major structural failures” of buildings. However, SIGAR closed its investigation into the matter in March with no findings of wrongdoing on DynCorp’s part.

The firm said it did its best in less-than-ideal conditions before turning over the facility in early 2011, before the SIGAR investigation began.

“The company did everything possible – including providing work at no cost to the government – to deliver in challenging and unusual circumstances. In the end, [DynCorp International] completed the work but received only a partial payment, taking a total company loss of $26,306,672 for the two phases of the contract,” a spokeswoman told the Washington Examiner.

DynCorp has also been involved in several false claims settlements with the federal government for law enforcement and counter-narcotics services in the Middle East and South America, according to POGO.

The company didn’t comment on POGO’s records.

Despite those issues, DynCorp was the 23rd-largest federal defense contractor in 2011, according to POGO, which works to expose misconduct and corruption in government. More than two-thirds of the company’s $3.7 billion in revenue in 2012 came from federal contracts, both military and civilian, according to an analysis by Federal Computer Week magazine.

All told, the top five recipients — DynCorp, PAE, Civilian Police International, Omran Consulting and an Afghan nongovernmental organization — were awarded 87 percent, or $3.5 billion, of State’s Afghanistan largesse. Each received at least $20 million in contracts.

By contrast, the other 766 contractors averaged about $676,000 each. State’s contracts included tasks ranging from building Afghan army barracks to training for police and counter-narcotics agents, providing humanitarian aid, removing land mines and helping with economic development.

Many major defense contractors have settlements and lawsuits on their records similar to those of DynCorp. Lockheed Martin, for instance — the nation’s largest defense contractor and PAE Government Services’ parent company until a few years ago — has 59 mentions in POGO’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, compared to DynCorp’s 10. Boeing has 47, and Raytheon has 22.

But such problems shouldn’t be “a cost of doing business” with major federal contractors, Gordon said.

About one-third of major federal contractors have zero or one mentions in the database, he noted.

“By law, the federal government should only be doing business with ‘responsible contractors,’ or those with satisfactory records of past performance, integrity, and business ethics,” Gordon said.

“The two major causes for this state of affairs are governmental overreliance on contractors, and the pernicious influence of the revolving door between the government and large companies like DynCorp.”

The company’s board of directors includes retired Marine Corps Gen. Michael Hagee, the former Marine commandant, and retired Army Gen. John Tilelli. Michael Thibault, a former head of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan and a former official at the Defense Contract Audit Agency, took a vice president’s job at DynCorp in 2011, according to press reports from the time.

The company, which opened a new global headquarters earlier this year in Tysons Corner, Va., in the Washington suburbs, was bought four years ago for $1.5 billion by Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm whose varied holdings also include the Albertson’s grocery store chain, the production company that made the movie “Get Him to the Greek” and the firearms manufacturer Remington. Cerebus is in the process of also buying the Safeway grocery store chain.

Related articles

• DynCorp Targets U.K. as Afghan Work Unwinds
• More Than 2/3rds of Afghanistan Reconstruction Money Has Gone to One Company
• Afghanistan Special Investigator Drops Hammer On State Department Waste
• DynCorp Wins Big Pentagon Contract Despite “Unsatisfactory” Rating
• SIGAR Slams Army Corps for Letting DynCorp Walk Off the Job
• The Real Winner of the Afghan War Is This Shady Military Contractor
• DynCorp-Gate: How State Dept. Wasted Billions On Afghan Reconstruction – 28 April 2014

DynCorp mercenaries profit from Afghanistan escalation

This video from the USA about Afghanistan is called DynCorp, US tax funds child prostitution – Operation Leakspin.

From Reuters:

DynCorp sees growth in Afghanistan business

Wed Dec 2, 2009

* Defense contractor sees upside from Afghan troop surge

…

* Shares up 7 pct

ATLANTA – Defense contractor DynCorp International Inc (DCP.N) said on Wednesday it expects to gain more business in Afghanistan as U.S. troop levels rise there.

“We expect to see relatively steady growth in our business in Afghanistan largely because we have a pretty broad portfolio of services at work in the country today,” DynCorp Chief Executive Bill Ballhaus said during a Credit Suisse conference that was broadcast over the Internet.

DynCorp, a government services provider to the U.S. Department of Defense and State Department, was chosen earlier this year to support U.S. troops in the southern part of Afghanistan under the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP.

Ballhaus said his company, which provides police training as well as dining and other logistics services, was well-positioned to support U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to send more troops to Afghanistan.

At the same time, he added that DynCorp expected increased business in Iraq as it expands into new services, even as troop levels decline there.

…

Shares of DynCorp came under pressure last month after a Kuwaiti food supplier that was a subcontractor to the company was indicted on allegations that it overcharged the United States. The case deals with issues prior to DynCorp’s relationship with the supplier.

Additionally, DynCorp disclosed in a November regulatory filing that certain payments, which it believed totaled about $300,000, had been “made to expedite the issuance of a limited number of visas and licenses from foreign government agencies,” potentially violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. …

DynCorp shares rose 92 cents, or 7 percent, to $14.05 on the New York Stock Exchange late Wednesday afternoon.

DynCorp (DCP) Awarded $232.4M Mentoring and Training Contract in Afghanistan by U.S. Army: here.

The Numbers Behind the Troop Increase via Dollars & Sense blog by Dollars and Sense on 12/2/09: here.

Obama’s “exit strategy” promises nothing but war without end.

Obama and Afghanistan: What A Downer: here.

Here is a horrifying fact about the human cost of the costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: The suicide rate among active duty soldiers has doubled since 2001. Officials talk of a near epidemic as they warn that the pace of suicides among soldiers and Marines is likely to top last year’s tally of 182 active duty members: here.

Gates: Afghanistan surge could require more than 30,000 troops: here.

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