By M.K. Styllinski
“The people of DynCorp International (DI) leverage our global presence and reach, international business experience, language capabilities, and deep cultural understanding to benefit every mission. We provide the highest level of professional intelligence training, collection and analysis, and mission support to meet the intelligence needs of our customers. The team also delivers flexible and rapidly-deployable, integrated security solutions to suit any situation in any part of the world.”
– Dyncorp International
The above quote can be summarised in a sentence: “We outsource American Empire”. And of course, since the Establishment in America is concerned with invading and stealing other nation’s resources under the pretext of democratic intervention, then it stands to reason that what “needs” Dyncorp is delivering to their “intelligence customers” is simply more of the same morally bankrupt dynamics employed by the World state psychopaths in power. I’m quite sure their “deep cultural understanding” helps intel operatives enormously as they find new ways to extend their reach.
Outsourcing and private security contracts have boomed over the last decade. The United Nations isn’t the only Establishment organisation to have suffered from the effects of institutional sexual abuse and expanded these pathologies via outsourced channels. A cross fertilization is taking place between Private securities companies (private armies) prisons, the military and intelligence agencies.
A revealing January 2002 article by Insight magazine’s Kelly Patricia O’Meara (below) was followed up in November of the same year with The Guardian’s piece on the American defence and security contractor DynCorp. This opend the proverbial can of beans…The corporation had branches in Salisbury, UK and dealt with the contracts of American officers working for the international police force in Bosnia. Dyncorp unfairly dismissed Kathryn Bolkovac, a UN police officer for reporting colleagues involved in the Bosnian sex trade and threatening their “lucrative contact” to supply officers to the UN mission. According to the report: “UN peacekeepers went to nightclubs where girls as young as 15 were forced to dance naked and have sex with customers, and those UN personnel and international aid workers were linked to prostitution rings in the Balkans. The employment tribunal accepted that Ms Bolkovac, an American who was employed by DynCorp and contracted to the UN, had been dismissed for whistle blowing.” [1]
‘US: DynCorp Disgrace’ by Kelly Patricia O’Meara, Insight Magazine January 14th, 2002
DynCorp had the contract to provide police officers for the 2,100-member UN international police task force in Bosnia which was supposedly created to restore law and order after the civil war. In the British tribunal Ms Bolkovac’s evidence highlighted the underground sex trade that was “thriving among the 21,000 NATO peacekeepers and thousands of international bureaucrats and aid workers” and that still remains one of the most extensive trades in the world. [2]
Dyncorp forged documents, trafficked women, aided illegal cross-border transports and tipped off sex club owners about imminent raids. Bolkovac also described how UN police, NATO troops and humanitarian, NGO employees were “regular customers.” [3] Bolkovac uncovered evidence “of girls being beaten and raped in bars by their pimps while peacekeepers stood and watched.” Even one UN policeman who was meant to be investigating the sex trade: “paid £700 to a bar owner for an underage girl who he kept captive in his apartment to use in his own prostitution racket.”[4] Ultimately, the company fired the eight employees for their alleged involvement in sex trafficking and illegal arms deals. Madeleine Rees, the head of the UN Human Rights Commission office in Sarajevo, was: “… in no doubt that trafficking in women started with the arrival of the international peacekeepers in 1992.” [5]
Again we find that where sexual abuse is occurring the police are not far behind and unfortunately on the wrong side of the law. After a two year battle at an employment tribunal court, testimony was heard that one of the most senior UN officials Dennis Laducer, Deputy Commissioner of the International Police Task Force, was found to attending one of the most notorious brothels. He was subsequently sacked and Kathryn Bolkovac finally awarded $110.000 [some reports say $173,000] in 2002, with DynCorp forced to foot the bill. [6] Inspired by the story of Bolkovac, The Whistleblower hit the cinemas in 2010. Directed by Larysa Kondracki, written by Eilis Kirwan and Kondracki with Rachel Weisz playing Bolkovac, the film is a largely fictionalised dramatization of Bolkovac’s experiences in Bosnia though with enough mixing of fact and fiction to lend teeth to the film’s central premise: that sex trafficking, rape and murder took place under the eyes of the UN and with active involvement of an outsourced security firm Dyncorp (given the moniker “DemocraCorp” in the film). The end result is a motion picture which does an admirable job of raising awareness of the problem despite senior UN officials’ attempts to belittle it and play down the facts upon which the film is based. Similarly, rather than paying attention to one woman’s courage and the appalling suffering she brought to the world’s attention, the UN allowed the shutting down of anti-trafficking initiatives by its own gender affairs chief in Bosnia even though it was deemed to be producing tangible results. The chief in question Madeline Rees was then fired by the UN for “poor performance” but took her case to a UN disputes tribunal and won. She is now General Secretary for the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Former police investigator Kathryn Bolkovac. | http://www.bolkovac.com/
One of Bolkovac’s allies during the ordeal and played by Vanessa Redgrave in the film, Rees had been the UN Officer for gender issues for many years and supported her attempts to raise awareness of what was taking place under the cover of UN humanitarian aid. Rees commented: “I went to work with large numbers of women who had been the victims of rape during the war but I ended up working as much with women who were being trafficked and raped by soldiers and police officers sent to keep the peace.” [7] She described the mechanisms by which such crimes and corruption was able to take place:
“Countries get rated by the US Trafficking in Persons report on their records in dealing with trafficking, for which you need to show results. If you don’t prosecute or repatriate enough people, your rating is downgraded, thereby your financial support. So when there were raids, the girls would be shipped home to Ukraine or wherever, probably to be retrafficked. It was a repatriation factory, run by people who had an anti-immigration approach, and didn’t want women to try to get into western Europe – no focus on the system or rights of the women. Our approach, by contrast, was slow and beginning to work, so it had to be killed off.” [8]
DVD and Poster promotion for The WhistleBlower
Former General Secretary Kofi Annan and successor Ban Ki-moon are fond of promoting the idea that these crimes are a result of a “few rotten apples” rather than the obvious endemic and systematic effects of a much deeper malaise. As Rees points out regarding the UN hierarchy: “They have to understand that this outrageous practice is endemic in the male hegemony of a militarised environment – it’s part of locker-room bravado and the high levels of testosterone in fighting armies. These crimes are perpetrated by individual men who rape and torture girls on mission, then go home to their wives. And it’ll carry on until there’s a knock at the door and they find themselves getting arrested in front of the wife and kids.” [9]
While the UN claimed to have dealt with the rotten apples and Dyncorp professed to have made a thorough and “aggressive” investigation into the crimes, the trafficking still continues right under the UN’s nose. As the film’s director stated in her address to the UN leadership at a screening which the organisation grudgingly agreed to: “I know we are going to hear a lot about what has been done since the time depicted in this film, but rhetoric only goes so far. The situation has escalated.” [10] (In 2010 sexually related allegations against U.N. military forces rose by 12 percent with some of the allegations involving minors). [11]
The UN investigator was not the first to blow the whistle on the corporation. Ben Johnson, a former Texan helicopter mechanic won his lawsuit just hours after Bolkovac where his claims included allegations of men having sex with girls as young as 12. His claims also concerned a nightclub in Bosnia frequented by DynCorp employees, where young women were sold “hourly, daily or permanently”.[12] Johnson believes Dyncorp was not only dealing in illicit arms and fraud but heavily involved in the peddling and promoting of the burgeoning sex trade that was thriving precisely because this was a war torn region.
Where there is war there is a surplus of the vulnerable and a perfect cover for trafficking. The sex slaves were ordered from Russia, Romania and the primary trafficking hub of Moldova, being imported directly by Dyncorp and the Serbian Mafia working in concert: “These guys would say ‘I gotta go to Serbia this weekend to pick up three girls.’ They talk about it and brag about how much they pay for them usually between $600 and $800. In fact, there was this one guy who had to be 60 years old who had a girl who couldn’t have been 14. DynCorp leadership was 100 % in bed with the mafia over there. I didn’t get any results from talking to DynCorp officials, so I went to Army CID and I drove around with them, pointing out everyone’s houses who owned women and weapons.’ ” [13]
Since 1998, several DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia but none have been prosecuted. All this scandal led George W. Bush to respond by creating the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) established in March 2003 “as the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security,… comprising of four integrated divisions that form a 21st century law enforcement agency with broad responsibilities for a number of key homeland security priorities.” [14] The amount of assets seized from human smugglers and human trafficking organizations totalled 27 million in 2005 and with no seizures at all for 2003. Compared to the billions of dollars circulating, this is the equivalent of loose change. Far from suggesting a major improvement, it shows a dismal response on the part of the State Department even while it cheerfully reported with no hint of irony that: “Since ICE was created, more than a dozen child sex tourists seeking to exploit children in eight separate countries have been arrested and now face justice in the US.” [15]
With sex tourism proving to be a major problem in the West we are supposed to believe that the arrest of 12 child sex tourists since 2003 is an example of “significant law enforcement progress”?
We also have the proud declaration of “investigations into human trafficking and the related crime of human smuggling, [which] have resulted in more than 5,400 arrests, 2,800 criminal indictments, and 2,300 criminal convictions.” [16] These successes were diluted by contractors and security firms which are mostly extensions of the US government.
Indeed, the corporate-security complex aggressively lobbied for provision after provision until, according to a Chicago Tribune report: “…significant aspects of the Pentagon’s proposed policy might actually do more harm than good unless they’re changed. These experts have told the Pentagon that the policy would merely formalize practices that have allowed contractors working overseas to escape punishment for involvement in trafficking, the records show.” [17] And it was probably designed that way.
Human trafficking main origin, transit, and destinations
On March 11th 2005, in a House Hearing on FY06 Department of Defence Budget hearing Senator Cynthia McKinney focused on the Dyncorp scandal, taking then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and General Carl Myers to task, in no uncertain terms. (see end of article). It was a rare opportunity to see a lone voice in politics trap Rumsfeld and place him firmly in the hot seat. The Neo-Con war hawk bridled as he was forced to listen to the facts.
Not only has the Pentagon yet to ban contractors from using forced labour, but the same corporations are being effectively rewarded for their past and present criminal behaviour, by obtaining contracts set far into the future. (As part of a consortium of bidders, the British government’s Ministry of Defence awarded the company a 60m contract to supply support services for military firing ranges. [18] With the help of lobbyists from Dyncorp and Halliburton, subsidiaries such as KBR has over 200 subcontractors carrying out the multibillion-dollar US Army contract for privatization of military support operations in the war zone. Trafficking and bonded labour appear inconsequential in the face of exorbitant profits. Yet the US military continue to deny responsibility for its out-sourcing of conflict even when there are continuing and numerous incidents that show the liability of its sub-contractors. [19]
Dyncorp represents the new breed of private contracts taking the place of traditional forces most recently employed by the United Nations itself. Once again we can see how sexual exploitation can be used as a political and corporate terrorism outside military and international law. But security firms also represent that same homogenization of the private sector funnelled into new forms of political control.
If we were to visit the California-based Computer Sciences Corporation website (csc.com) we might be forgiven for thinking this is a financial services company humbly dedicated to bettering the world as well as its investors. Unfortunately, the low key nature of the site design masks the meaning of this fortune 500 multi-national with its high-level enabling skills for U.S. Federal government. The corporation currently holds contracts with more than 40 federal agencies including the Pentagon, State Department, Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Energy and Justice Departments.
This giant government contractor bought Dyncorp on March 7th 2003, creating “a company that ranks as one of the top information technology and outsourcing services providers to the U.S. federal government.” The revenues from the federal sector alone were estimated to be around $6 billion at the end of that fiscal year, with projections in excess of $14.5 billion at the end of 2004. 2005 saw a steady increase in profits due to its monopoly on US Government contracts which are now expanding into Europe. This net profit was more than $810.2 million during fiscal year 2005, an increase of 56 percent over 2004. [20] The purchase of Dyncorp not only saved its bacon but allowed it to claim the dubious honour of being the third largest IT services provider behind Lockheed Martin and second place provider EDS Corp.
CSC Chief Executive Van B. Honeycutt gave a wonderful example of the art of masking with his comments on why the Dyncorp merger went ahead: “‘DynCorp, with approximately 98 percent of its total revenue coming from the U.S. federal government, complements our overall federal business, allowing a great breadth of end-to-end solutions and significantly increasing our exposure to the growth area of federal government, IT and functional outsourcing…” He continued: “The capabilities of the new federal sector organization will allow CSC to provide more comprehensive services and solutions to our government customers…” These “customers” are none other than the US military and the Department of Homelands Security who will apparently benefit from: “… the resources and security expertise of CSC, coupled with those of DynCorp, will position us extremely well as the federal government expands and accelerates its efforts to enhance U.S. national security.’ ” [21]
No doubt.
It sounds reasonable enough if we don’t think about what this actually means. “The growth area of federal government” and “U.S. National Security” is intimately linked to the “War on Terrorism,” numerous examples of human rights abuses and the dismantling of the constitution from within.
When the United States created the Office of Homeland Security, CSC chairman Van B. Honeycutt was one of the first advisers to the new agency having already handled the position of Chair of the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC) under President Clinton. Effectively, the corporation is an extension of the government and its policies, with an incestual exchange of employees and profit, which the website tenderly calls “client intimate organizations.” With its headquarters in Reston, Virginia, close to the CIA and the Pentagon, there is no doubt that Dyncorp has a deeply intimate (and lucrative) connection that is mutually binding.
Dyncorp contractor in Afghanistan
Prior to the merger, DynCorp was among the largest employee-owned technology and out-sourcing firms headquartered in the United States, with approximately 26,000 employees in some 550 locations throughout the world. According to CSC: “… the U.S. Department of Defense represented 49 percent of DynCorp’s revenue in 2001, which before the merger netted 2.3 billion.” [22]
During 2008–2010, CSC was heavily criticised for spending $4.39 million on lobbying and not paying any taxes which is nonetheless standard practice for most large corporations. In fact, the company received $305 million in tax rebates, on top of a profit of $1.67 billion. [23]
By the end of 2004 CSC had sold off units of Dyncorp to private equity firm Veritas Capital for $850 million. With Dyncorp International eventually dropping under the net of private equity investment firm Cerberus Capital Management $1 billion and finalised in the summer of 2010. CSC still retains the rights to the name “DynCorp” while the new company became DynCorp International now listed on the New York Stock Exchange despite receiving 96% of its more than $3 billion in annual revenues from the US federal government. [24] Dyncorp Inc. earned a whopping $2,398,874,000 from its “defence” contracts alone in 2011.
The number of lawsuits and scandals hitting Dyncorp International range from allegations of sex trafficking to a variety of human rights abuses and black operations involving drugs and military targets. This is largely due to the hiring of former Special Operations military personnel and CIA personnel. One would think that the screening of employees would have been stepped up after so much bad publicity. Yet why should they worry when the biggest contractors are the US and its war machine driven by the arms industry itself? Logistical and IT services may well be a great part of the civilised PR of Dyncorp but in reality, the real focus of this corporation could be categorized as “private mercenaries” which allows operations to be sub-contracted to the bidder that is most ideologically and professionally sound. It also conveniently abdicates responsibility for the US army and their civilian deaths while avoiding unnecessary media spotlights. Outsourcing their wars beyond the prying eyes of press and congress is an effective way to ensure the success of geo-political policies such as regime change.
Secrecy is obviously an important part of the company’s rules. If employees happen to get rubbed out on their various covert “missions” then the paper trail is as sparse as possible. Janet Wineriter, a spokeswoman at DynCorp’s headquarters frequently tells the media that she cannot discuss the company’s operations because of its contractual obligations to its client – the State Department. When this fails then black-outs are affected. Information regarding the real activities of these private mercenaries is intentionally obscure and shielded from investigations. There is no “right to know.” The last people they want to inform are Congress or the public. As a Guardian article stated “Today’s mercenaries in the drug war are provided by private companies selling a service and are used as a matter of course by both the state and defence.” [25]
Dyncorp has little to do with “Information Systems, Information Technology Outsourcing and Technical Services” though this certainly plays a part in extending its monopolistic war games. Controlling and monitoring information systems for federal agencies such as the FBI, DOJ and SEC, are within the corporation’s remit which is rather handy should any “impropriety” surface – which of course is the name of the game. Subversion and corruption is endorsed and legitimized via a corporate and federal relationship that gives the Cosa Nostra a run for its money.
Cynthia McKinney does what she does best and grills Donald Rumsfeld over Dyncorp’s activities. This is the only time we are likely to see this psychopath get hauled over the coals for any of his state-sponsored crimes.
***
Update 2017: See: BOMBSHELL: Solving The Puzzle – “It’s DynCorp behind the mass shootings you see in America”
Notes
INFRAKSHUN 
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