The Washington Post reports:
That headline hints to a bureaucracy error or the usual cronyism. But there is some serious and maybe sinister background and a longer story.
Is the DoD hiring new personal for Abu Ghraib or the Salvador option?
From the WaPo piece (all following emph. mine):
The Air Force, under pressure from the Pentagon, committed a "gross error" last year when it rushed to sign a no-bid contract for advisers to help plan and implement Iraq’s national elections and draft its constitution, the Government Accountability Office has ruled.
New York-based REEP Inc., a private translation company also known as Operational Support Services, was awarded two contracts worth more than $45 million. The firm was tasked with finding bilingual speakers "committed to a democratic Iraq" as part of a program a Pentagon official hoped would create "a nudge toward democracy," the report said.
Hmm, the Air Force not buying jets or jet fuel but "democracy commitment". Why would they do that?
Paul D. Wolfowitz, then deputy defense secretary, "determined that the success of the United States war effort" required experts in "reconstruction and governance," the report said. Wolfowitz sought to enable 50 to 75 [Iraqi Reconstruction and Development] Council members to operate independently throughout the country, according to the report. The program originally called for "Western oriented individuals of Iraqi background" but was later changed to Iraqis with U.S. citizenship.
…
The duties of the advisers include "advising government ministers,
planning for and implementation of elections, drafting of
constitutional documents, advising neighborhood, municipal and national
councils and public services, training of security forced and details,"
according to the report.
$45 million to find and enable some Iraqi expats to advise in Iraq is an awful lot of money. These must be quite special people with expensive skills to justify that pay grade.
More information on the Air Force contract with REEP is in the original GAO decision.
The contract was initiated by Wolfowitz, but the Pentagon man to push it was Victor A.D. Rostow, Special Assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (at that time Douglas Feith), and son of the late neocon Eugene Rostow (pdf).
First Rostow tried to channel the contract through some low level folks of the Air Force’s Center for Environmental Excellence. When the leadership of that center woke up, they rejected the plot.
The Air Force, under pressure from above, found other means and gave a sole-source contract about bilingual-bicultural advisor-subject matter experts to REEP without the usual bid process. Later it issued a second sole-source follow up contract that runs from December 2005 to July 2006 and increases the number of experts to 200.
To justify the newer contract they claimed, cited in the GAO document, that REEP Inc was:
the only provider of subject matter experts with the requisite cultural
competences and linguist skills. While there are a number of other providers of linguists (Titan Corp.) and linguists with security clearances, none of these providers have mined the Iraqi heritage
community with a view to finding and deploying individuals with skills required by the MNF-I CAC. . . . They are the only provider having [deleted]. They are the only provider that can perform the contract without significant additional start-up costs and recruitment delays.
Do you also wonder about that "[deleted]"?
The Office of the Secretary of Defense also justified the need by pointing to shortages within the Civil Affairs Command. Part of that command’s task is "foreign internal defense operations, unconventional warfare operations and direct action missions".
What is the [deleted] capability of REEP Inc to provide Civil Affair experts in "reconstruction and governance"? Why did Rostow channel that contract through the Air Force? Why not push this through the official budget or through special operations and have a competitive bid?
REEP Inc does a lot of language training and offers tours to old battlefields. But the also answer to Why Choose Us?
REEP also provides specialized training services we are currently contracted to provide nineteen highly specialized instructors to support the US Army Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion (SERE) School at Ft Bragg NC as well as Special Forces instructors in such areas as operations, intelligence, force protection, unconventional warfare and base operations.
Currently REEP Inc is urgently looking for "Counter Intelligence Agents":
There is a unique opportunity to serve the United States as an Interrogator, Counter Intelligence Agent and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Analyst as part of a rebuilding effort in Iraq. [REEP] hopes to gain Middle-Eastern language speakers to help with this effort.
There is no other job offer at REEP’s site that fits the GAO investigated contracts like the above.
I do not have answers to the questions I asked above, but this story stinks. The GAO report only came about, because Rostow called someone at the Air Force Environmental Center of Excellence to get a contract done for democracy advisors. That person did not manage to get done what Rostow asked. It escalated from there. GAO does not seem to ask why this was done at all. That, I think is the real question and Congress should look into this.
A combination of SERE training, counter intelligence agents and creepy contracts should raise some big red flags.
From a recent NYT/IHT piece:
The Pentagon appears to have flipped SERE’s teachings on their head, mining the program not for resistance techniques but for interrogation methods. At a June 2004 briefing, the chief of the U.S. Southern Command, General James T. Hill, said a team from Guantánamo went "up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques" for "high-profile, high-value" detainees.
…
By bringing SERE tactics and the Guantánamo model onto the battlefield, the Pentagon opened a Pandora’s box of potential abuse.