Intelligence, Inc. Military Interrogation Training Gets Privatized By Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch March 7, 2005 Just an hour north of the Mexican border, at the base of the cloud-capped Huachuca Mountains, lies a military base with a long history of covert military action. In its early days as a military fort, it was the location of the capture of Geronimo, the last Apache warrior to resist the United States. More recently, Fort Huachuca housed the training of many of the interrogators who worked in the prisons of Cuba's Guantanamo Bay and Iraq's now infamous Abu Ghraib. In 2003, just 237 interrogators graduated from the United States Army Intelligence Center, headquartered at the fort. Today, because of the war on terrorism, there are plans to quadruple the number of qualified interrogators to 1,000 a year by 2006 and the number of soldiers trained in basic intelligence skills to 7,000. This is an astronomical increase, far beyond the current capabilities of the fort. Enter private contractors like Virginia-based Anteon, which has grown tenfold in the last decade. The company has become one of the nation's primary contractors for intelligence sharing, intelligence training and video game warfare simulators. One of Anteon's offices is located on the Huachuca base, itself, while the second sits a mile away on Main Street, in a bright, freshly-painted pink building, sandwiched between Enterprise Rent-A-Car, with whom it shares a parking lot, and Filiberto's Mexican restaurant. While military contracting for construction or weapons manufacturing is decades, if not centuries, old the privatization of intelligence instruction is a new and rapidly expanding sector that came about less than four years ago. One estimate in Mother Jones magazine, compiled from interviews wiith military experts, suggests that as much 50 percent of the $40 billion budget given to the 15 intelligence agencies in the United States is now spent on private contractors. Teaching for Profit Although Anteon first came into existence in 1976, its profits really began to soar twenty years later, when former investment banker Frederick Iseman bought the company assets for a mere $48 million. Today Anteon's annual revenues exceed a billion dollars and its share price has jumped from it's initial public $18 to $36 in the last three years. Iseman, who admits he knew nothing about military contracting before he bought the company (his other investments range from orange juice to waste management), says he realized he needed connections to expand on the business. So, he recruited a group of highly-placed former military officials to his board ranging from William Perry, former head of the Pentagon, to Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, under Bill Clinton. "We are an information technology systems integrator," Mark Meudt, director of corporate communications for Anteon, told CorpWatch. "Roughly 90 percent of our work is for the federal government and the rest is for other governments or sub-contracts with other companies that have federal contracts." Meudt refused to comment on any of the intelligence contracts at Fort Huachuca but estimated that a fifth of the company's work is in simulation training for the military. (See box) Today the company holds a master contract to teach a wide variety of courses for the Initial Entry Training (IET) in the intelligence school: ranging from the basic course which is titled 96B, to the more specialized Advanced Individual Training (AIT) courses such as counter-intelligence training (97B), interrogation (97E), signals intelligence (98C), electronic intelligence (98J) and signal identification (98K). Traditionally these IET and AIT jobs were handled by two battalions of the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade based at Fort Huachuca: the 305th and 309th (a third battalion, the 344th, conducts similar training in Texas). Today the tasks of teaching - from drawing up the curriculum to the final exams for the students - still take place on the military base, but many are conducted by the private instructors. War Games Classes are held at Nicholson Hall, a big pink H-shaped building in the northwest quadrant of Fort Huachuca with a red tiled roof, named after an American intelligence officer who was shot and killed by Soviet sentries in East Germany in 1985. New students approaching the building must pass under a steel blue ribbon over the main entrance, emblazoned with the words: "Through these gates, pass the leaders of Military Intelligence." Also known as building number 81505, the windows on the structure are painted a light green to prevent the casual visitor from seeing in. "Instructors�portray human intelligence sources in a variety of role playing scenarios, in diversified settings and environments, such as practical, situational and field training exercises and tests," reads a description of jobs completed on the website of Isis, one of Anteon's sub-contractors. In addition, these instructors "conduct post-role verbal critiques... complete written evaluations of student performance...grade student reports...and perform duties as team leaders for 6-12 student teams." For example, one of the private intelligence contractors recenty designed a war game simulations to test intelligence skills of students in the fictitious country of Kazar, a "former" province in the Federal Republic of Slavia, in the face of "Gordian" and "Skandian" paramilitary forces. Mysterious Contracts The myriad intelligence contracts are typically vague about exactly what the contractor's work will involve. In fact, many contracts read as if they are for entirely unrelated services. A great number of the contracts signed at Fort Huachuca are officially for "information technology" but in reality have been used to fund intelligence work -- more specifically, the hiring of civilian interrogators to work directly in Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq. At least one was administered by the staff in Building 22208, an unremarkable old military office, on the south eastern edge of the Brown Parade Field in the heart of the Fort, which hosts the Department of Interior, Directorate of Contracting. This civilian agency holds a technology contract for a company named Premier Technology. Soon after the contract was issued, however, Premier was bought up by another Virginia company named CACI, which used the original contract to hire private interrogators to work in Abu Ghraib prison. A similar technology contract scam was pulled by Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, which bought up a small company named Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) with a Department of Interior technology contract, and then used the contract to employ private interrogators into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The Titan Corporation, which describes itself as, "a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and services for National Security," was also awarded contracts that were used in Abu Ghraib. Although not signed at Fort Huachuca, these contracts supplied the prison with translators, who have also been implicated in the prison abuse. Most of the translators hired by Titan did not have security clearances. At least one (Ahmed Fathy Mehalba) had actually failed out of Fort Huachuca's intelligence school while CACI hires were drafted to do intelligence tasks that they had never been trained to do. Stephen Stephanowicz is a good example. He was trained at the base to inspect satellite pictures, but worked as an interrogator and is now being sued for allegedly humiliating, torturing and abusing prisoners detained by U.S. authorities. These are the concerns that weigh heavily on the minds of experts, who monitor the shadowy world of interrogation and intelligence. James Bamford, whose book "The Puzzle Palace," (which began as an expose about the National Security Agency, an ultra-secret government spy agency, but is now used as a textbook at the Defense Intelligence College), is especially worried. "As was made clear by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, involving private contractors in sensitive intelligence operations can lead to disaster," Bamford wrote recently in an New York Times op-ed. "And the potential for disaster only grows when not just the agents on the ground, but their supervisors and controllers back at headquarters, are working for some private company." "While there is nothing inherently wrong with the intelligence community working closely with private industry," he added, "there is the potential for trouble unless the union is closely monitored. Because the issue is hidden under heavy layers of secrecy, it is impossible for even Congress to get accurate figures on just how much money [is being spent] and how many people are involved." Another major problem with privatizing intelligence, Bamford told CorpWatch, is cost. "After spending millions of dollars training people, taxpayers are having to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies." Bob Baer, the former CIA Middle East specialist and author of the book See No Evil, says the same phenomenon is happening within his former agency. "After 1997, practically all training is done by contractors," he says. "The CIA is even hiring contractors as station chiefs in other countries." "I think it was by default -- to get around personnel limits and to get rid of severance problems. But these companies don't vet people, you cannot keep track of who they are working for and of course they are not efficient. They have lower standards," he told CorpWatch. "Their job is to make money and so they will tell you whatever you want to hear." Baer adds. "It's called "customer satisfaction" you want a convertible, you get a convertible." Part of the problem with hiring private contractors, Baer believes, is the lack of checks and balances. "Now if you ask a private company to produce a report on Afghan opium production, they will produce the report, but it might not be the truth. If you ask a CIA nitwit to write the report, he will care about getting it right, although he will probably get it wrong. But at least his motivation is correct," A related article, printed in WorldNet Daily in 2002, quoted a source on the base saying that many of the instructors were, "a bunch of soldier's housewives, most who have never been in the Army [and who do not] even meet the minimum requirements set forth in the hiring guidelines for the contract." These instructors, the article said, "are married to the student [course] graders, who will assure that no student complains that the teaching is not up to par." Minority Businesses There are also a number of legal loopholes providing for small, start-up contractors to enter the fray. These new companies build expertise by poaching military personnel straight off the base and paying them higher salaries or tapping into the market of retired intelligence officers. Take Castillo Technologies, founded by Alan Castillo, a former Marine. He registered as a disadvantaged business owner (he is Latino), so that he could snap up federal contracts to supply intelligence trainers at Fort Huachuca, after quitting his job at Motorola in 2000. Likewise, Isis -- named after the Egyptian goddess of fertility and motherhood -- was founded by Janice Walker, is headquartered in Sierra Vista and promotes itself as a woman-owned business. Walker recently hired Steve Manigault, who worked for the 304th battalion, to go back and work at the same battalion as a contractor. Walker offers military battalions on the base a quick and easy way to hire her company to work on the base for a variety of tasks -- from environmental impact assessments to database management - using what is known as a Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) - a government license to get contracts without competitive bidding. Neil Garra is an example of someone who was hired after retirement. Garra worked off and on the base for over a decade of his military career, beginning as a military instructor in 1989, rising to vice deputy director of the Battle Laboratory on the base in 1999, before retiring in 2000. Today he has his own small business, named S2, which takes on sub-contracts to design war game simulations. Walker and Garra return neither phone calls nor emails requesting their comment on the contracts. Castillo spoke briefly with CorpWatch, but hung up when asked about his new intelligence contracts. The United States Training and Doctrine Command, the umbrella organization for all military training, agreed to answer questions from CorpWatch about the Anteon contracts, but has yet to provide any answers, despite two months of phone calls and email communication. "We are waiting for the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade to give us the information but we cannot provide you with any timeline as to when that might be," says Tanja Linton, the spokeswomen for Fort Huachuca. In Denial Today Fort Huachuca is still smarting under the attention brought by the Abu Ghraib scandals. Yet the revolving door between intelligence training, the battlegrounds of the Middle East, and private business continues to spin. James "Spider" Marks, who was commander of the base when news of the scandals broke last April, recently said: "We train our soldiers to do what's right. I'm disgusted (by the Abu Ghraib allegations). It's simply not how we train." But like many of his former interrogators, Marks too quit the military last fall to take a job in the lucrative private intelligence business - he become the senior vice president of intelligence and security for a company named McNeil Technologies. Visitors to the base today will notice that there is a blank spot at the entrance gates where the picture of Marks used to hang - it has not been replaced with the picture of his successor, Major General Barbara Fast. That's because Fast is being investigated for her role in Iraq, where she supervised two Army intelligence officers implicated in the scandal -- Col. Thomas M. Pappas and Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, both with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which operated the Abu Ghraib prison. Official investigations allege that Fast was notified of abuses in the prisons but did nothing about them. Only time will tell whether there's a job waiting for her in the private sector, as well. Box: Video Games & Alien Ids Business for Anteon is also thriving far from the gates of Fort Huachuca. For example the company has a contract to build fake villages where soldiers can practice urban warfare. Called Military Operations on Urban Terrain, or MOUT sites, these units cost millions of dollars apiece and are scattered around bases like Fort Irwin in California and Fort Polk in Louisiana, as well as overseas in countries such as Korea and Kuwait. The smallest is really just a converted shipping container and the largest has an airfield and a sewer from which the enemy can attack. Thousands of sensors, embedded in the units, determine where a soldier has been hit with infrared shots. Inside the units, high-speed roman candles mimic the flash of gunshots; canned sound effects give the impression of helicopters and barking dogs; and even the smell of apple pie or rotting corpses. "It's like Hollywood," Kampf told USA Today, except that he claims that Anteon's version is saving American lives. "I'm sleeping well at night, even after watching CNN." The company also recently won a $118 million contract to recruit new soldiers for the entire United States Army, process the new recruits and give them credentials. Kampf believes that the hottest new business is providing identification cards to foreign visitors to the United States, which it is already doing for Mexican and Canadian citizens who have to cross into the United States daily across the two borders. "We have already issued 20 million laser-made cards under the border-crossing program - we are talking about $4 billion to $10 billion to issue not just cards but systems in every port of entry," Kampf told the Federal Times. And today the company is merging the border identification work with the military training - in October 2004 the company set up shop at the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park on Tucson's Southeast Side. "They are going to create and deploy curriculum used by border defense and Homeland Security," John Grabo, the park's director of marketing of marketing international programs told the Tucscon Citizen. RELATED ARTICLE: Former interrogation contractor speaks out By Pratap Chattterjee Torin Nelson has worked in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq. An expert interrogator, he was hired by Virginia-based CACI to work at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, during the time that prisoners were subjected to numerous human rights abuses,. Trained at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona (see "Intelligence Inc.") in interrogation techniques, he has spoken out against these abuses, but believes firmly that interrogation is a military necessity and can be conducted in a humane manner. "I wanted to defend my profession because what I saw in the media was a lot of mistaken conjecture, erroneous stuff. The abuses in Abu Ghraib were an anathema to mission accomplishment," Nelson told CorpWatch in a phone interview from his home in Salt Lake City, Utah. He explained that the Bible of interrogation techniques is Army manual FM 34/52, although a new manual is now in the works. Students learn 17 methods of interrogation with names like Direct Approach, Silence, Repetition, Rapid Fire, Pride & Ego Up, Pride & Ego Down to Fear Up Mild and Fear Up Harsh. Fear Up Harsh is the most heavy-handed and involves yelling, calling the subject a liar and banging one's fist on the table. Fear Up Mild might involve pulling out a file and reciting the information in a calm voice, details of where they were caught, the charges of carrying weapons while not in uniform, or the possibility of being tried for treason. "Pride & Ego Down is revealing that you know that they were caught in an embarrassing situation such as dressed in women's clothing or without firing their weapon, while the colleagues were killed. You might make fun of them or you might promise to erase it from the record. More often that not, you use Pride & Ego Up, because your subject is shattered emotionally, so you build up their morale, say you acted like a hero, better than even the generals. In Rapid Fire, you might have two or three interrogators asking questions simultaneously. But it was pounded into our heads that you never abuse a prisoner. We had to learn the Geneva Conventions, it was part of our manual." "At no time are we allowed to have physical contact. And I personally believe that Fear Up Harsh does not really work. Good interrogation is not about bright lights, tell us where you were techniques. No, that's from a B grade spy novel. Good interrogation is about professional questioning and proper reporting up the chain of command. It is all about building rapport, and if you do it well, you never have to use abusive techniques. We need to be viewed as the solution not as a source of problems. If you play it right, you should never be the bad guy. We manipulate people but we do not coerce them," says Nelson. After the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center happened, Nelson was activated in August 2002 to go to Guantanamo Bay where he spent six months until February 2003. He was a sergeant working in Camp X Ray and in October he heard of government plans to use harsher techniques such as "sleep management" and "meal management" in Camp Delta. "The FBI told them it wouldn't work and I agree with them but they got permission from the Secretary of Defence. They created a Special Projects team drawn from different battalions, and used techniques like 20 hours of interrogation and 20 hours of sleep, playing loud rock music," says Nelson. "I thought it was a waste of time but I didn't say anything about it because I was just a sergeant and could not criticize a colonel." "Today there are two schools of thought: the new school which believes that the ends justify the means and the old school, which I believe in, which is that the means justify the ends. I believe that you should build up trust or dependency where your subject believes that you will go to bat for them and you should do that. Whether or not higher-ups grant your requests is upto them and a good interrogator should never promise what they cannot deliver. So you say you will go to bat for them but no more." In February 2003, he returned to the States to get ready for the Iraq war and was deployed during the March 2003 invasion. He left Iraq in July and quit the military because he was disillusioned with the way the war was going. "Higher-ups with less experience were making piss-poor decisions instead of listening to lower-ranking more experienced people," he says. Soon he got a job at CACI and was posted to Abu Ghraib, which was turned into a prison, because all the other sites were overflowing. Nelson explained that half of of the 30 interrogators in Abu Ghraib were civilian and the rest were military. "Perhaps a third had no formal training, some had related training like Stephen Stephanowicz who trained as an analyst but not as an interrogator," he says. Nelson was one of many prison officials that testified to Major General Antonio Taguba, who wrote a fifty-three-page classified internal army report on the conduct of civilian and military interrogators. This was later leaked to the media by Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker in May 2004 creating an international uproar. According to the Taguba report, Stephanowicz, a CACI interrogator, "made a false statement to the investigation team regarding the locations of his interrogations, the activities during his interrogations, and his knowledge of abuses." Further, investigators found Stephanowicz encouraged military police to terrorize inmates, and "clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse." Adel Nakhla, a subcontractor to Titan, another civilian contractor in Abu Ghraib which provided translators for the interrogations, was one of the guards shown in the infamous Abu Ghraib photos. Standing over several naked prisoners stacked in a pile, he is reaching down, his hand shown on or near a prisoner's neck. Nakhla, a big, burly man, claims he was not forceful. "I held the detainee's foot. Not in any powerful way." Another report, written by the Red Cross, revealed that investigators had found naked prisoners covering themselves with packages from ready-to-eat military rations, and being subjected to "deliberate physical violence and verbal abuse." Prisoners were found to be incoherent, anxious, and even suicidal, with abnormal symptoms "provoked by the interrogation period and methods." The document stated that prison authorities "could not explain" the lack of clothing for prisoners and "could not provide clarification" about other mistreatment of prisoners). Nelson decided to leave at the end of January 2004 when other CACI staff became hostile to him after it became obvious he had told the truth to Taguba. One CACI person told him that he was effectively dead to him and he better watch his back. By this time also, Nelson realized that the American interrogators were interviewing the wrong people. "I told Tom (the CACI project manager) that the country was going to hell in a hand basket and the American military was not doing a damn thing about it," says Nelson. Since his return, Nelson has written a book called "American Interrogator." about how to do interrogation correctly, but is yet to find a publisher. He also spent time in Washington DC trying to drum up interest in a Congress-sponsored committee of experienced professionals like himself (but not generals or politicians) to critique and overhaul at the system of military training, recruitment and management of operations. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> DonorsChoose. A simple way to provide underprivileged children resources often lacking in public schools. 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