Today, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security will hold hearings on the alleged gang rape of former KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones by her fellow KBR employees in Iraq. If true, this young woman's rape case is twice the tragedy: first the rape and then the lack of legal jurisdiction to criminally prosecute the rapists.

This is another unintended consequence of contracting out the logistics and security of this war to private companies. This has placed US citizens and foreign national civilians in peril in a war zone with little protection. The on-going lack of accountability of KBR and other contractors has set up this "anything goes" atmosphere which has resulted in greatly inflated bills, denying of vital supplies to soldiers who are not near bases, and, in the case of KBR, a brazen willingness to threaten work stoppages in the middle of a war zone. Once this case broke, another woman who worked for KBR claimed that women could not advance in the company unless they slept their way to promotions. The sad reality is that the Army and the DOD have been willing, up to this point, to tolerate this behavior.

In researching my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, I had troops coming back from Iraq telling me stories that set the stage for this type of attitude and behavior. Consider the observations of one officer in the book at the very beginning of the war:

In addition to the logistics problems, Lamberth also discovered that some KBR managers who had been in Kosovo with the contractor had brought their Balkan girlfriends with them to Kuwait. Lamberth saw the influx of women at the Khalifa resort and managed to talk to some of them. They told him they were on KBR's payroll as "logistics coordinators" and "administrative assistants." Some of the women also bragged to Lamberth they took two-hour lunches and were able to go shopping using contractor-leased vehicles. Occasionally, Lamberth observed, they would track down a part, but mostly they would be at the Khalifa pool or shopping downtown. Lamberth complained to KBR managers about the issue, but was told to keep it to himself.

This kind of attitude on the part of KBR and their employees set the stage for the case that the subcommittee will hear today. Ms. Jones' only current recourse is to sue KBR in civil court. Scott Horton, an attorney who has been following the gaps in the law concerning contractors, will testify to the committee about the legal hole that the DOD has allowed itself to fall into concerning the contractors. Because the Army has contracted out so many of its vital logistics and services, it has become a monetary and legal hostage to KBR and other contractors. Meanwhile, KBR is billing the government approximately a half a billion a month for services in Iraq.

KBR will be able to afford their legal defense. According to the Associated Press, "Last month, KBR said its third-quarter profit surged from a year ago in part from its military contracts in Iraq, but its energy and chemicals arm posted flat results." This is the war that feeds them and they will spend whatever is necessary on attorneys and lobbyists to keep the money flowing. It is estimated that their contract, called LOGCAP III, has accrued $26 billion dollars.

Meanwhile, as the scandals against contractors continue to grow, the DOD is shackled to KBR and these other contractors because they can't relieve KBR and others of their logistics work. Furthermore, the commands of the Army that used to do these tasks have atrophied. According to the Center for Public Integrity, "U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan have grown more than 50 percent annually, from $11 billion in 2004 to almost $17 billion in 2005 and more than $25 billion in 2006."

In the face of that amount of contract growth, even when troop levels have barely changed, who cares about disposable employees and a case of rape? Especially since if they lose, KBR will only have to pay a civil fine....that is just the cost of doing very good business. If any managers or officers in the company faced criminal neglect charges, you might have gotten their attention, but right now they are in the driver's seat. Let's hope that the DOD and the Congress will be outraged enough about the possibility of this gang rape of a young woman not being prosecuted to do something to interject accountability in the current situation. After that, maybe they will also get serious about the flood of unaccountable money.

Dina Rasor

Right now, Iraq's parliament is considering removing immunity from US security contractors or possibly all US contractor personnel. Some contractor employees have told the Los Angeles Times that they would stay and work anyway. Want to bet our troops lives on it? After the Iraqi police throw the first US contractor employee into the lovely Iraqi prison system, there could be an employee flight out of Iraq.

How do I know this? Contractor employees have left vital posts before when danger loomed. Consider this incident, which is explored in my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Result of Privatizing War. KBR and other contractor truck drivers quit their job or refused to cross the border from Kuwait into Iraq when one of the KBR convoys was ambushed in April 2004. Employees were killed and KBR truck driver Tommy Hamill was kidnapped and showed up on the nightly news with a gun in his face. This incident ground the truck convoys, carrying vital supplies for the troops, to a virtual halt and lasted long enough that even government people in the Green Zone had to start rationing food.

If Iraq does eliminate immunity and a contactor employee does get thrown in Iraqi jail, there could be a crippling flight of employee personnel out of the country in rapid order. The companies will tell you that they can get foreign nationals to stay and do the work. There are a larger number of them than Americans in many of these jobs. But the supervisory management people, who are mostly American, could leave and the logistics and security of the US forces could be put a great risk, right when people think that we may have turned a corner in Iraq.

Why would this happen? Because the employees have the constitutional right to quit their job and go home. Even though Congress passed a law to put the DOD contractors under the military's Uniform Code of Military Justice, many military attorneys believe that it won't pass a constitutional test. They believe that because the contractors have not taken the same oath as the armed service personnel, they have not voluntarily given up their constitutional right to quit a job. Is the DOD realistically going to criminally go after American citizens that quit their job in Iraq and go home? It is unlikely, legally or politically, that the government would go that far.

So this has been the Achilles' heel in using contractors to such a large extent in Iraq. If this American worker flight home grew big enough, the troops face lack of all logistics and no one to feed them. The Army would have to scramble to find enough military people to get the trucks through, and the personnel are just not there. The bigger problem is that the insurgency could see this as a weakness and an opening for them to attack the troops and the bases.

The contractors will tell you that they would find the personnel to do the job. But KBR is advertising for 942 job openings in Iraq today on their website. Do you really think that they could replace all the people who would decide that that they don't want to risk an Iraqi jail experience?

The Army was warned about this for years. A 1991 DOD Inspector General Report warned about the problems that the services could have if the contractors would leave or not work in emergency situations. This report says that the problem was exposed in a 1988 DOD Inspector General report but firm plans had not been established. The report also warned that a DOD instruction written in 1990 (updated in 1996) was not being followed. Section 4.4 of that instruction states:

For situations where the cognizant DoD Component Commander has a reasonable doubt
about the continuation of essential services during crisis situations by the incumbent contractor, the Commander shall prepare a contingency plan for obtaining the essential service from alternate sources (military, DoD civilian, host-nation, other contractor(s)).

At the beginning of the war, in June 2003, the Government Accountability Office warned in a report that the commanders did not have back up plans, as required in the instruction above, on what to do if the contractors did not stay in a hostile area.

This could be a ticking time bomb for the military in Iraq. Now that a KBR employee alleges that she has been raped and the US government has not prosecuted anyone and the Iraq parliament is posed to strip the immunity for contractors and expose them to Iraqi jails, there may be more and more employee flight out of Iraq.

If the situation in Iraq would turn sour (there was a new triple car bombing this morning) and contractors start to get killed in large groups, the military is ill prepared to replace the contractors that could come streaming home. Since the Army has contracted out so much of its logistics, their own logistics arm has atrophied. Not a good place to be in a volatile place such as Iraq.

Dina Rasor

Here we go again.

On December 6, the DOD Inspector General released a report showing that the military has lost track of about a billion dollars of equipment that they supplied to the Iraqi Security Forces. Here is another outrage on the war and even the most optimistic of people will agree that some of that equipment probably made its way to the insurgency and was used on American troops.

People are angry now and politicians are reacting to these stories with promises of reform. But where was the outrage at the beginning of the war? I had it because I was researching my book on contractors and the Iraq war. But other than Rep. Henry Waxman, who was just the ranking minority with no committee at the beginning of the war, very few in Congress or the media cared. There was such a sense of cheerleading from our leaders and the media at that time, I could not get any reporters to pay attention to a similar war outrage. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a 2003 report found that while transporting US equipment to Kuwait for the Iraq invasion, the DOD could not account for $1.2 billion of the equipment. In other words, over a billion dollars of equipment, including jeeps, radios and other sensitive equipment, was lost somewhere from leaving the US and traveling to a Kuwaiti staging area.

In this 2003 report, the GAO talked about how the equipment was stored in Kuwait in large open areas with little oversight or security. So we were getting ready to launch a war and allowed a huge portion of our equipment, including radios with our sensitive frequencies, to be stolen and passed on to unknown groups. When I hit reporters with this GAO report and the facts of mismanagement and possible corruption, several of them told me that they would like to write about these problems but their editors wouldn't buy it. Nobody wanted to be the first to report such unpleasantness while they were gearing up to go with the troops and watch the great victory. The Congress, which was controlled then by the Republican Party, also didn't seem to worry about these GAO reports that were coming out every few months. I believe that this lack of oversight and care at the beginning of the war set the stage for the contractors and the Iraq government to believe that the DOD wasn't serious about any oversight and it was open season on the US government money.

We are now going to continue to get horror story after horror story until the media and the public are numb about it. But the media and the Congress can't say that they didn't know -- it was under their noses all the time.

But what do we do now? For all the fraud done by contractors in the past, there is the qui tam False Claims Act law that can allow the government to go back and try to recoup some of the money. If you want to know more about it, click here. To stop what is currently going on, the media and the Congress have to be relentless in exposing the fraud, no matter where the path leads and the public has to be fed up enough to start demanding reforms. That is what happened in the 1980s with the spare parts scandals (remember the $7600 coffee brewer and the $436 hammer?) which lead to reforms (now defunct) and an actual freeze on the DOD budget in the middle of the Reagan military buildup. Things won't change unless the outrage becomes high enough that the editors are willing to run story after story, the Congress is willing to have hearing after hearing (covered by the media) and the public is willing to buttonhole every politician in Congress and complain or write a letter. Who will go first? Whoever is willing can become a hero for the country.

Dina Rasor