Another international conflict, another horrific taxpayer-funded sex scandal for DynCorp, the private security contractor tasked with training the Afghan police.
While the company is officially based in the DC area, most of its business is managed on a satellite campus at Alliance Airport north of Fort Worth. And if one of the diplomatic cables from the WikiLeaks archive is to be believed, boy howdy, are their doings in Afghanistan shady.
The Afghanistan cable (dated June 24, 2009) discusses a meeting between Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and US assistant ambassador Joseph Mussomeli. Prime among Atmar's concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.
Many of DynCorp's employees are ex-Green Berets and veterans of other elite units, and the company was commissioned by the US government to provide training for the Afghani police. According to most reports, over 95 percent of its $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers.
And in Kunduz province, according to the leaked cable, that money was flowing to drug dealers and pimps. Pimps of children, to be more precise. (The exact type of drug was never specified.)
Since this is Afghanistan, you probably already knew this wasn't a kegger. Instead, this DynCorp soiree was a bacha bazi ("boy-play") party, much like the ones uncovered earlier this year by Frontline.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/dancingboys/view/
For those that can't or won't click the link, bacha bazi is a pre-Islamic Afghan tradition that was banned by the Taliban. Bacha boys are eight- to 15-years-old. They put on make-up, tie bells to their feet and slip into scanty women's clothing, and then, to the whine of a harmonium and wailing vocals, they dance seductively to smoky roomfuls of leering older men.
After the show is over, their services are auctioned off to the highest bidder, who will sometimes purchase a boy outright. And by services, we mean anal sex: The State Department has called bacha bazi a "widespread, culturally accepted form of male rape." (While it may be culturally accepted, it violates both Sharia law and Afghan civil code.)
For Pashtuns in the South of Afghanistan, there is no shame in having a little boy lover; on the contrary, it is a matter of pride. Those who can afford the most attractive boy are the players in their world, the OG's of places like Kandahar and Khost. On the Frontline video, ridiculously macho warrior guys brag about their young boyfriends utterly without shame.
So perhaps in the evil world of Realpolitik, in which there is apparently no moral compass US private contractors won't smash to smithereens, it made sense for DynCorp to drug up some Pashtun police recruits and turn them loose on a bunch of little boys. But according to the leaked document, Atmar, the Afghani interior minister, was terrified this story would catch a reporter's ear.
He urged the US State Department to shut down a reporter he heard was snooping around, and was horrified that a rumored videotape of the party might surface. He predicted that any story about the party would "endanger lives." He said that his government had arrested two Afghan police and nine Afghan civilians on charges of "purchasing a service from a child" in connection with the party, but that he was worried about the image of their "foreign mentors," by which he apparently meant DynCorp. American diplomats told him to chill. They apparently had a better handle on our media than Atmar, because when a report of the party finally did emerge, it was neutered to the point of near-falsehood.
The UK Guardian picks up the tale:
[QUOTE]US diplomats cautioned against an "overreaction" and said that approaching the journalist involved would only make the story worse.
"A widely-anticipated newspaper article on the Kunduz scandal has not appeared but, if there is too much noise that may prompt the journalist to publish," the cable said.
The strategy appeared to work when an article was published in July by the Washington Post about the incident, which made little of the affair, saying it was an incident of "questionable management oversight" in which foreign DynCorp workers "hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party".
A tribal dance? Could illegal strip clubs stateside possibly try that one out? "Naw, those are not full-contact lap-dances, Mr. Vice Cop. Krystal and Lexxis are just performing an ancient Cherokee fertility dance. See those buck-skin thongs on and those feathers in their hair?"
As we mentioned, this isn't DynCorp's first brush with the sex-slavery game. Back in Bosnia in 1999, US policewoman Kathryn Bolkovac was fired from DynCorp after blowing the whistle on a sex-slave ring operating on one of our bases there. DynCorp's employees were accused of raping and peddling girls as young as 12 from countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The company was forced to settle lawsuits against Bolkovac (whose story was recently told in the feature film The Whistleblower) and another man who informed authorities about DynCorp's sex ring.
There's your tax dollars at work, Joe Six-Pack. Maybe now you won't get so worked up about the fact that KPFT gets about ten percent of its funding from the government and uses some of it to air Al-Jazeera.
[/QUOTE]
Next,
the company's response
In the wake of our story about DynCorp's ill-fated Afghan dance party, DynCorp's vice president of communications Ashley Vanarsdall Burke has sent in an official response.
The company says that there was no truth to the allegation made in the headline "Texas Company Helped Pimp Little Boys To Stoned Afghan Cops" or several other allegations made in official cables from the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan that were publicized by WikiLeaks.
We were taken to task for not contacting them first and then Burke laid out the "facts" as the company sees them.
Burke stated that "a handful of individuals were found to have exercised extremely poor judgment and acted inappropriately. It is important to note, however, that the inaccurate and bizarre allegations contained in your story are false and recklessly irresponsible."
What really happened, according to Burke, was this:
[QUOTE] As part of an employee's going away party, a 17 year old local Afghan dancer who performed at local events such as weddings and other celebrations, was hired to perform a traditional Afghan dance. Recognizing that the situation was culturally insensitive, a site manager stopped the performance. Despite the fact that the performance was stopped, the situation was investigated. What was determined was that the leadership of the team exhibited poor judgment and were subsequently terminated. That is the whole story; no alcohol or drugs were involved, or other illegal behaviors occurred."
After the party was stopped, even though the whole thing was apparently an innocent cultural misunderstanding, the company believed that "extremely poor judgment" had been shown and felt compelled to take several actions in response. These included, in Burke's words, the following:
Thorough Investigation. A thorough investigation of the incident found extremely poor judgment by a handful of employees and managers.
Immediate
Face-to-Face Training. Directly following the incident, DynCorp International senior leadership flew in-country to provide face-to-face ethics and compliance training to personnel at each of the regional training centers.
Enhanced Program-wide Training. The leadership of this program also provided additional program-wide ethics and compliance training for all personnel, including enhanced training on the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct and reiterating program requirements for the behavior of all personnel.
Since then, and unrelated to this incident, Burke says, the company has beefed up its ethics in many ways including enhancing their code of ethics and business conduct; reviewing, revising and strengthening the company's business practices; hiring a chief compliance officer; and setting up a 24-hour hotline for whistleblowers and a training program that focuses "specifically on behaviors that support successful teams."
Burke granted that no "company can guarantee that their employees will behave perfectly at all times, under all conditions," but said that the company can guarantee that expectations will be clearly defined, employees will be trained to adhere to those expectations, and people will be held accountable. "We will also act swiftly and consistently if shortcomings are identified," which they did do in the wake of this traditional dance gone apparently awry.
We responded with some follow-up questions:
We asked Burke :If nothing untoward happened at the "traditional" dance, as you seem to imply, why then was the dance stopped? And why were such extensive investigations launched, and why were so many people terminated and/or arrested? Why have so many (commendable) steps been taken in the wake of this incident?
Burke responded thusly:" As noted in the statement, 'Recognizing that the situation was culturally insensitive, a site manager stopped the performance.'"
In response to her claim that no drugs were involved, we pointed that Hair Balls did not invent that allegation out of whole cloth, that it had been mentioned by Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar in the original cable signed by the US Ambassador. We asked Burke again if there were drugs involved, and if so, what kind, and who was using and/or purchasing them.
Burke's response: "If your second question is a reference to a cable, I cannot comment on and have no information on the contents of any cable. You would need to go to the source of the cable for clarification on that."
Although the cable went out under the name of Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, it discussed a meeting between Atmar and Eikenberry's underling Joseph Mussomeli. The source of the concern about drugs was Atmar, who has since lost his post. Since much of the leaked cable concerned Atmar's deep concern that any news about this "Kunduz DynCorp problem" would reach the media, we won't hold our breath waiting for him to elaborate on one of the more explosive allegations. [/QUOTE]
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/2010/12/wikileaks_dyncorp_responds.php
oh and if you missed it
Many of DynCorp's employees are ex-Green Berets and veterans of other elite units, and the company was commissioned by the US government to provide training for the Afghani police. According to most reports, over 95 percent of its $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers.
facepaws*
The company's contact information
http://www.dyn-intl.com/contact.aspx
GENERAL INQUIRIES
For recruitment, please visit DI Careers on this website to apply and submit a resume. Do not contact DynCorp International offices in regard to employment possibilities or recruitment inquiries.
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