CorpWatch: Intelligence Contractor Wasn't Pleased When We Showed up at its Shareholder's Meet

via AlterNet's PEEK:



Intelligence Contractor Wasn't Pleased When We Showed up at its Shareholder's Meet

Posted by Tonya Hennessey, CorpWatch at 9:24 AM on May 10, 2008.

We were shareholders, but apparently not the right kind.



A funny thing happened on the way to exercising my presumed right, as a shareholder, to attend yesterday's annual shareholder meeting of private military contractor L-3 Communications, held at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Manhattan's financial district.

I was one of a group including a translator, Marwan Mawiri, who worked for a year and 1⁄2 for Titan, now an L-3 subsidiary, in Iraq. Marwan has witnessed first-hand numerous problems with the way interrogation and translation contracting is being handled in Iraq - a practice that may be putting at substantial risk the national security and lives of the Iraqi people, of U.S. and multinational troops, officials and contractors, and of the United States itself.

The problem is clear: inadequate and downright bad vetting and hiring practices for analysts, interrogators and linguists. Indeed, the U.S. military has recently canceled Titan's translation contract due to poor practices along with waste, fraud and abuse.

What is also crystal clear is that the war in Iraq can neither be won, effectively prosecuted, nor competently withdrawn from until these problems are solved and until proper oversight is in place.

If people hired to translate in critical battlefield and other situations are not even fluent in at least Arabic and English; if screeners monitoring the entry and exit of people to U.S. military bases at times have no more qualification and training than having been a baggage screener at a U.S. airline (see CorpWatch's new report: "Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq"); if interrogators are not qualified, experienced and trained to the highest standards possible, how can we ensure that we avoid future travesties due to bad intelligence? Such as the bad intelligence around the supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program (which was, of course, Bush/Cheney and neocon-driven, not L-3-driven), that got the U.S. into this war in the first place? (And remember, even when U.S. soldiers start coming home from Iraq, large numbers of private contractors will stay, making proper oversight all the more crucial.) ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/85008/