Category Archives: outsourcing

Romney, the 47% and Outsourcing

Mitt Romney

We learned this week, thanks to Mother Jones, that Mitt Romney, speaking at a fundraising event on May 17, 2012, said,

  • There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.
  • All right, there are 47% who are with him,
  • who are dependent upon government,
  • who believe that they are victims,
  • who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them,
  • who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.
  • That that’s an entitlement.
  • And the government should give it to them.
  • And they will vote for this president no matter what…
  • These are people who pay no income tax…
  • [M]y job is is not to worry about those people.
  • I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

But who are these 47%?

Continue reading →

CIA contractor who shot two in controversial incident in Pakistan accused in Colorado parking lot confrontation

The Associated Press reports that Raymond  Davis, the CIA contractor jailed in Pakistan after a shooting in which he shot and killed two assailants, has been charged following an altercation in a parking lot: CIA operative charged in Colo parking spot fight.

HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. (AP) — A CIA contractor freed by Pakistani authorities after the families of two men he killed in a shootout agreed to accept a $2.34 million “blood money” payment was charged Saturday in Colorado, with authorities saying he got into a fight over a shopping center parking spot.

Deputies responding to an altercation between two men outside an Einstein Bagel in Highlands Ranch, south of Denver, took Raymond Davis into custody Saturday morning, said Douglas County Sheriff’s Lt. Glenn Peitzmeier. He was charged with third-degree assault and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.

Further details on his arrest, which was first reported by KMGH-TV Channel 7 in Denver, were not immediately available.

Peitzmeier said the victim, who was not identified, refused medical treatment at the scene. Davis was freed from the Douglas County jail after posting bond, Peitzmeier said.

The Denver Post has since reported that Davis may face serious charges:  Former CIA contractor may face felony count in parking fight.

It’s easy to draw a simple inference:  Davis is bad-tempered with a short fuse, and the parking lot incident shows that he’s really a bad guy. We reject this inference for the following reasons

  1. Mr. Davis  – no matter what happened in the original incident in Pakistan, has clearly  not gotten a fair shake; he’s been used as a pawn in an international game of chicken between the United States and Pakistan, a government which contains powerful factions which, with some regularity, attack targets in India, within Pakistan, and within Afghanistan. Some of those attacks are best described as assassinations; others are, using any reasonable definition, terrorism.
  2. Because he’s merely a “contractor,” he’s entirely expendable if it suits U.S. diplomatic interests;
  3. And – again, because he’s a “contractor,” he’s not entitled to the same consideration as he would if he were an employee:  pension  or disability payments, psychological help, medical help, employment – not least the comfort and community provided by colleagues.

We don’t know what happened in the parking lot – perhaps he did do something reprehensible. But maybe not.  At a minimum, he’s entitled to a fair hearing on the Colorado charges. And whatever happened in Colorado, in moral terms, what makes him different than any other person serving abroad for CIA, the State Department, AID, or the military?

One more argument against “outsourcing” critical functions.

 

 

U.S. settles with whistleblower Bunny Greenhouse

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 Below is an excerpt from Erik Eckholm’s piece in the Times, noting the settlement of litigation between Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse and DOD for retaliatory action after her objections, in 2005, to the Halliburton/KBR no-bid contract for logistical support in Iraq. Greenhouse had been the Chief Contracting Officer for the Army Corps of Engineers. She’d previously had a perfect record of performance ratings.

More here

Her primary objections:

  • the study rationalizing the sole-source KBR contract was itself outsourced – to Halliburton/KBR, which recommended itself as the sole source;
  • Even if the contract’s premise was justified for the first few months on emergency grounds, it didn’t make sense for a multiyear, potentially indefinite contract.

Which raises the question of how much work KBR/Halliburton are doing now in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere for DOD, CIA, et cet.  We note the it’s KBR’s former CEO, and later the United States Vice President, who made famous the phrase “undisclosed location.” (For readers from Brooklyn, “undisclosed location” roughly translates to “going to the mattresses.”) KBR is currently, publicly, one of two logistics contractors in Iraq – but classified contracts are, by definition, outside the scope of public review – and for practical purposes – outside the scope of Congressional review.

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No Honor Among Profiteers

Nathan Vardi , writing on Forbes.com (and in the print edition dated August 3, 2009) ((NB: the print and on-line versions are not identical)), provides some detail on the current state of military outsourcing, and how, apparently, the relationship between two long-term friends and business partners fell apart when one shut the other out of a multi-million dollar payday.

Fire Fight/The Business of War recounts the formation of investment firm Veritas by Robert McKeon and Thomas Campbell.

In the early 1990’s, McKeon started Veritas Capital; Campbell joined him sometime thereafter.

By 1996, when they had raised $175 million for Veritas’ first private equity fund, McKeon and Campbell had taken an interest in military suppliers. To run their fund they formed a management company, with McKeon holding 62.5% and Campbell 37.5%. After some profitable defense deals they raised another $153 million fund in 2002 and split the general partnership the same way; their biggest backer was Credit Suisse ( CS – news – people ). For help navigating the defense bureaucracy, Veritas created an advisory board that included retired generals such as Barry R. McCaffrey and Anthony C. Zinni.

Vardi, in describing a 19-year relationship between McKeon and Campbell during which they vacationed together, traveled together, and had a weekly dinner – with no guests – at Harry Cipriani ((New Yorkers, and visitors, of certain social classes will recognize this as the name of a very expensive, high-status restaurant. )) Vardi reports that

They golfed together, went skeet and trap shooting, traveled together for meetings and once shared a hotel room in Mexico. [Emphasis supplied]

That this is worthy of note is in and of itself interesting. First, McKeon and Campbell were, at least some of the time, traveling on other people’s money, which they were entrusted with for investment purposes. Second, it says something about the expectations of CEOs and investment bankers that this would be regarded as a sacrifice. (Lincoln sometimes shared a bed while traveling, even after he was elected president). Third – and more damning – these men and their investors were making millions of dollars providing support services to troops who often didn’t get to sleep in a bed – much less a private hotel room.
Continue reading →

Michael Allen and Julie VanDusky of Quantitative Peace on Blackwater

Michael A. Allen and Julie VanDusky – both founders of the blog Quantitative Peace –  have published  Employing Force: The Decision to Use Private Actors in Inter-State Wars

. An excerpt:

The contemporary rise to infamy of Blackwater Worldwide and the private corporation’s misdeeds in the Iraq War has historical precedents. That is, it is not unheard of for a state to employ non-state actors to carry out traditional state activities such as the use of force – something the modern

state is supposed to have a monopoly over. In this paper, we build a game theoretic model that determines the prospects for using non-state actors in combat on behalf of the state. From this model, we hypothesize that despite the risk of agency loss by these private combatants, certain

conditions increases the likelihood of their use. Specifically, autocratic polities are predicted to have a positive influence on the employment of non-state combatants while their democratic peers will prefer to abstain from such activities. We test these hypotheses using a censored probit model for all bilateral wars from 1816-2002.

James Risen: G.I.’s Death Prompts 2 Inquiries of Iraq Electrocutions – New York Times

James Risen reported in the NY Times of March 20th:

On Jan. 2, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, a 24-year-old Green Beret from Pennsylvania, stepped into a shower at his base in the Radwaniyah Palace Complex in Baghdad and was electrocuted. Now, two months later, his death has resulted in both a Congressional investigation and a Pentagon inspector general’s inquiry into similar cases.

Reports of at least 12 deaths; Sgt. Maseth’s family has filed suit against KBR/Halliburton in the Pennsylvania state courts.

Thanks to laviolet at Daily Kos for pointing me to the Risen article; laviolet’s post is here; the Houston Chronicle also covered this story (I will add links when I can) .  Laviolet’s post has a number of other resources for those in search of more details.

James Risen, “G.I.’s Death Prompts 2 Inquiries of Iraq Electrocutions” New York Times, March 20, 2008.

Majikthise : Hurricane Katrina

Journalist and photographer Lindsay Beyerstein has an excellent blog called MajikThise

. Here’s her account of encountering Blackwater personnnel while covering Katrina (internal links omitted):

The scariest people I’ve ever met were the Blackwater guys I found clustered around a van behind a New Orleans hotel shortly after Hurricane Katrina.I saw a lot of disconcerting things during those two weeks, but the one experience that haunts me two years later was a five-minute conversation that crew.

We’d already encountered a few other Blackwater guys during our trip. One juiced up freak in mirrored sunglasses and a Blackwater bearclaw t-shirt actually lunged at our car when my colleague tried to take a picture of the hotel he was guarding. He didn’t point his weapon or yell, or do anything a rational person in a defensive posture might have done. He just grunted really loudly and tried to stick his head in our window.

Mind you, he wasn’t holding a position in an emergency. We were driving in broad daylight through downtown New Orleans with a bunch of other traffic (military and civilian).

The Blackwater dude was acting as a glorified rent-a-cop on the sidewalk, about two blocks from the main media staging area for New Orleans, which was already amply secured by US military and law enforcement.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that these Blackwater guys thought of themselves as frontline soldiers in a literal war zone, ready to use deadly force at the slightest provocation. That was an unfounded estimate, in the middle of the day in downtown New Orleans several days after the city had been secured by the legitimate authorities. Continue reading →

U.S. Contractors kill 2 Iraqi women – NY Times

The following picture, taken by Joao Silva, accompanies Andrew E. Kramer and James Glanz’s report on a recent incident in Baghdad.

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This is, necessarily, the price of our course of action. I don’t know whether or not the United States should withdraw. But it seems to me self-evidence that we’re responsible

for creating the situation. Should we stay, we need – even at greater risk, at greater cost – to treat Iraqi lives as though they were as precious as American lives. American lives that we care about, mind you – not quite like Americans who live in New Orleans, if you take my meaning.

Link to Kramer/Glanz piece .