International Security

Walter Pincus at WaPo reports on the new “cyber-range” in the 2010 Defense budget. The “National Cyber Range” (yet to be created) would test the strength and vulnerabilities of government cyber systems against outside experts. DARPA is the owner of this test program now but is supposed to turn it over to another (to be determined) government agency within two years. Given that the DOD is admittedly very short on cyber expertise, hopefully these exercises will highlight not only hardware, software, and partner/contractor network problems but also human resource weaknesses.

Pincus add that currently, DOD is thick with network test beds, “creating an environment of excessive duplication and waste.” No surprise there.

Would love to be a fly on the wall for the “offensive attack” efforts in the cyber test range.

Here’s a link to the DOD Cyber Crime Center and info on its annual conference:

The…Conference annually draws over 800 participants from federal agencies, the law enforcement community, and those from the defense investigative organizations whose primary missions are combating computer criminal and terrorist activities. Leaders from government and industry address cyber-crime topics such as intrusion investigations, cyber-crime law, digital forensics, and information assurance as well as the research, development, testing and evaluation of digital forensic tools. The goal of the conference is to address current trends in cyber crime and those of the future.

It seems that the USA Today,  AP, and The Billings (Montana) Gazette are the only MSM to cover this story (ok, not quite true). Some unknown CA outfit, the American Police Force (APF) (how generic can they be?) shows up in Montana to take over an empty prison with 464 beds. Its first story, “What is the American Police Force and what is it doing in Montana?” ran October 1.  The next story, “Montana Attorney General probes secretive American Police Force” was up the next day. Rumors are out there that APF is really Blackwater/Xe. But I don’t see any comment from Blackwater hunter, Jeremy Scahill, so I’m skeptical about the Blackwater connection (if Scahill doesn’t see it…)

The story so far sounds like a bad Twilight Zone episode: big money, an empty prison out in nowhere, alleged terrorists (Quantanamo prisoners) may be sent there, shady company characters, staff lured from the public sector to work and shill for the company…or, it could just be a twisted, dark version of State and Main.

The AP and the Gazette reported that:

Michael Hilton, the apparent founder of APF who claims to be a military veteran, has a lengthy criminal record and has served time in prison in California.

Not reassuring.

Perhaps one of the best comments so far has come from the governor of Montana as he “ridiculed the idea of a secret government plot, saying: “I think a low-level card shark is not going to rise to the level to get some kind of government defense contract.”" He obviously doesn’t remember the green 22 year old guy who supplied bad ammo to the military in Afghanistan for $300M or the two characters from Custer Battles early in OIF.

TPM Muckraker ran a brief piece on how the town of Hardin has put out press material to allay local fears that “there are no commandos in the streets” there. This seems unnecessary. Montana folks are hardier than that; they don’t scare that easily, right? I mean, just because the American Police Force company image (below)  looks like a major swat team…

An article in TIME magazine today continues the coverage of the sorry private security situation at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. First there were the photos of security contractors behaving ingloriously and the scathing report of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) and its letter to Sec. of State Clinton. Yesterday (9/10) Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent detailed the ArmorGroup contract

former senior company officials said ArmorGroup was aware of widespread fraud; intentional use of non-English speaking guards to save money at the expense of embassy security; operations of a shell corporation in order to win contracts intended only for American companies; and even involvement in prostitution — and that the State Department knew about at least some of the company’s illicit practices.

In a follow-up story today, Ackerman quotes the communications director, Leslie Philips, for Sen. Lieberman’s government affairs committee, on what they knew and how long State has known of these issues

Concerns about this contract had been raised long before the meeting [between Gorman, other whistleblowers, and the staff, which occurred November 7, 2007], and the State Department was communicating its concerns to the contractor. The concerns dealt with issues such as the inadequate number of guards at the embassy, high turnover among guards, and the guards’ inadequate English-speaking abilities. None of the concerns involved the sexual malfeasance and other inappropriate behavior that has most recently been reported.

The blog, Diplopundit, has some information as well and fills in the org. chart at State vis-a-vis diplomatic security a bit on this

Ultimately, [the undersecretary for] Management and Diplomatic Security [departments] are the ones on the line here. One oversees administration including contracts and the other has oversight on the ground through the Regional Security Office. Of course, on the ground Regional Security Officers report directly to the Deputy Chief of Mission or the Deputy Ambassador, who then reports directly to the US Ambassador. So this thing is going to ricochet through multiple offices and cubicles before this is over.

POGO urges the military to assume supervision of the embassy’s private security contractors (PSCs). In Iraq, it wasn’t until SecDef Gates pushed the Memo of Agreement through after Blackwater’s debacle at Nisoor Square in Sept. ‘07 that DOD and State really got on the same page there and serious incidents involving State’s PSCs decreased to zero.

Contractors are leery of coming under military command and control (C2) but POGO’s recommendation has some merit. The two reasons why soldiers don’t do this static protection work for the Embassy — (1) it’s not in the military’s remit to do so and (2) they don’t have the personnel.  With all the on-going and pained debate about getting more civilian help and State personnel on reconstruction teams around Afghanistan, it’s a sad statement about State that they can’t even fill their security jobs at the Embassy properly and that this is not a new conundrum for them. Private security is State’s Achilles’ heel.

Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist, gets another day in court.

The NYT reports

There is no question whom she held responsible for the carnage [in Chechnya]: the Russian Army and Mr. Putin. On the day she was killed with four shots from a silenced pistol, she was about to deliver a major report to her newspaper on torture in Chechnya.

This isn’t a retrial of the men acquitted (none of whom was the shooter). The Russian court ordered investigators to start over. If nothing else, this keeps her story alive.

I’ve been following this story from POGO to Danger Room since it broke earlier this week.  Having written my master’s thesis on DOS’ private security in Iraq, I have to say I am taken aback at how willfully resistant State is to fixing these kind of problems with their private security. You’d think after the huge public debacle in Nisoor Sq., a new administration that took a dim view of the heavy use of contractors, and a new Sec. of State who vowed to diminish the reliance on contractors — this kind of idiocy wouldn’t be happening.

And State has extended the airlift contract to Blackwater/Xe’s firm in Iraq this month in spite of promising to end it and operating there without a license.

Not to mention the grave allegations  made public in August in the lawsuit about Blackwater in Iraq and Eric Prince’s alleged threats to former contractors.

I know life is more complicated these days and there are layers of contracts and the military is stretched thin and State seems impotent and rudderless, but I ask: is America just not able to reform at any level any more?

A couple of excerpts from my interview for IA-Forum with James Cockayne on his new book, Beyond Market Forces: Regulating the Global Security Industry.

When I asked him about private security in Afghanistan and possible lessons from Iraq, he replied

I think there are important lessons from Iraq for us in Afghanistan. The various actors in Afghanistan have been thinking about those for some time. Both Iraq and Afghanistan were involved in the development of the Montreux Document, which is an international document that sets out some good practices in this area. But there are also very significant differences, one of them being the very active presence of a large number of coalition and NATO forces on the ground, some of which take quite a different approach to private security companies as does the United States military. Indigenous solutions, reflected in Afghan legislation, are probably more likely to provide a lasting solution than a treaty-based or bilaterally-negotiated solution as we saw in Iraq.

As for how the Montreux Document (on regulating private security companies) has progressed since it was signed last Sept. by 17 countries, he offered several examples. One of them:

I was sitting in my office a couple of months ago when an old friend, who’s now an ambassador of an unnamed country in Pakistan, rang me up to give me a hard time because that country had been in the process of hiring a private security company in Pakistan to provide close protection to its diplomats, and it had to essentially, I was told, start the whole hiring process all over again because their legal department had said, “hang on, you need to follow this thing called Montreux Document.” So I asked this person, “well, what did you think; what was the net outcome of following that process?” They said, “look, we ended up hiring the same company that we thought we were going to hire anyway, but the due diligence that we forced to conduct as a result actually gave us a much higher degree of confidence about the nature of the services this company was providing, its background history, and the types of individuals it was likely to hire and deploy on the ground. So we ended up with a much higher degree of confidence about the contract than we would otherwise have had.” And that’s exactly how this document is supposed to work. So that was very encouraging to hear.

Here’s Foreign Policy’s list of the top 100 Twitterers on foreign policy.

(Mirror photo)

It’s been a good year for US and UK snipers. After camping on a roof for three days, Cpl. Chris Reynolds took his shot and

“the bullet flew 1,853 metres before hitting its target, a warlord known as Mula.”

A Thai Court has refused to extradite the notorious arms dealer, Victor Bout,  aka “Merchant of Death”, to the U.S.  to stand trial on terrorism charges. He is described by the NYT as

a Russian businessman and suspected global arms trafficker accused of agreeing to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to agents posing as Colombian rebels intending to kill American pilots patrolling in the drug war.

It is said he would deliver or transport almost anything for the right price. He was a pilot in the former Soviet air force, speaks several languages, and goes by various identities.  Alledgedly, he was also involved in rendition flights. UPI reported in 2007 that he has aided both the Taliban and the U.S. against them over time.  He claims he merely runs a legitimate air cargo business.

Victor Bout at the Thai courthouse this week. (Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters)

The Boston Globe reports that the DOD has decided no one can be held responsible for the death of Staff Sergeant Ryan Maseth in January. He was killed because the shower system he was using was not grounded. The DOD found

KBR did not ground equipment during installation or report improperly grounded equipment during maintenance, nor did it have standard operating procedures for inspections.

And yet, no one is responsible? These electrocutions happened to several soldiers over a period of years in Iraq. And yet, no one is responsible? Even a novice plumber knows better than these KBR subcontractors who did this shoddy and negligent work. During an earlier investigation, the Army concluded KBR

had failed to ensure that qualified electricians and plumbers worked on the building where Maseth died.

Shame on the DOD for not doing the right thing and pressing charges.

This is not “supporting our troops”.