Cynthia McKinney Grills Rumsfeld On Dyncorp, missing pentagon $$$, 911 wargames

[align=center]http://prisonplanet.com/articles/mar...nneygrills.htm[/align]

[align=left]it's about time someone stands up to these criminals and exposes them.[/align]


[align=center]Representative Cynthia McKinney Grills Rumsfeld On Dyncorp Sex Rings, Missing Pentagon Trillions & 9/11 Wargames[/align]
[align=center]C-Span | March 24 2005[/align]

[align=center]Rumseld and Myers forced to shuffle uncomfortably and fumble for words as McKinney gets in their face about three issues seldom mentioned in official circles. [/align]

[align=center]From a reader: Here is a Video of Representative Cynthia McKinney's Exchange on the House Hearing on FY06 Dept. of DefenseBudget, March 11th, 2005.[/align]

[align=center]Watch how McKinney asks questions about Dyncorp slave rings, the 3 trillion missing from the pentagon and the 911 wargames.[/align]

[align=center]Notice the faces Rumsfeld, Myers, Jones, Hunter and others make!![/align]

http://archive.salon.com/news/featur.../06/26/bosnia/

Outside the law
Pending lawsuits allege that U.S. military contractors on duty in Bosnia bought and "owned" young women. But the accused men have never been -- and will never be -- brought to justice.

Editor's note: The first of two parts. Read Part 2

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By Robert Capps



June 26, 2002 | Ben Johnston recoiled in horror when he heard one of his fellow helicopter mechanics at a U.S. Army base near Tuzla, Bosnia, brag one day in early 2000: "My girl's not a day over 12."

The man who uttered the statement -- a man in his 60s, by Johnston's estimate -- was not talking fondly about his granddaughter or daughter or another relative. He was bragging about the preteen he had purchased from a local brothel. Johnston, who'd gone to work as a civilian contractor mechanic for DynCorp Inc. after a six-year stint in the Army, had worked on helicopters for years, and he'd heard a lot of hangar talk. But never anything like this.


More and more often in those months, the talk among his co-workers had turned to boasts about owning prostitutes -- how young they were, how good they were in bed, how much they cost. And it wasn't just boasting: Johnston often saw co-workers out on the streets of Dubrave, the closest town to the base, with the young female consorts that inspired their braggadocio. They'd bring them to company functions, and on one occasion, Johnston says, over to his house for dinner. Occasionally he'd see the young girls riding bikes and playing with other children, with their "owners" standing by, watching.

But the bragging about a 12-year-old sex slave pushed Johnston over the edge. "I had to do something," he says. "There were kids involved."














So Johnston says he complained to managers at DynCorp, the Reston, Va.-based company that had hired him to be a mechanic at the U.S. Army's Camp Comanche in Bosnia, and to the Army Criminal Investigation Command (known by the acronym CID). In the end, two DynCorp employees would be fired for the activities Johnston complained about -- including site supervisor John Hirtz -- but not before Johnston himself lost his job. And nobody would face criminal charges of any kind for their involvement with the young prostitutes.

Now Johnston is suing DynCorp in a Tarrant County, Texas, courtroom, in a case that is set to go to trial in mid-July. He is claiming he was fired for blowing the whistle on his co-workers' role in the sex trade, and is seeking unspecified monetary damages. And he is not alone. A second wrongful termination suit filed in the U.K. by a former DynCorp employee contracted to the United Nations to be part of the U.N.'s International Police Task Force in Bosnia charges that she was sacked for implicating DynCorp employees who participated in forced prostitution in the Balkans. In that case, which will likely reach a conclusion in the next several weeks, former officer Kathryn Bolkovac contends that other task-force officers frequented brothels staffed by women forced into prostitution.

The scope of the problem is stunning, says Martina Vandenberg, a women's rights researcher with Human Rights Watch, and in a 1999 tour of Bosnia, she saw little effort to stop it. "I found that Bosnia was absolutely littered with brothels and those brothels were full of trafficked women," she said. "We're talking about women sold as chattel for $600 to $700, with all the rights of ownership attaching."

DynCorp declined to comment on the suits, citing the pending legal action. But after a February 2000 story by Insight Magazine, a sister publication of the Washington Times, the company mounted a vigorous defense on its Web site, insisting that it cooperated with the government's investigation and fired employees who were involved.

"The behavior described in the (Insight) article is intolerable and illegal and is something the company does not tolerate," the posting says. "The Company has always been diligent in deterring, detecting, and disciplining any and all employee behavior that falls outside the Company's stated policies, or could be perceived as violating the law."

Further, DynCorp asserted that Johnston was not terminated for participating in an Army investigation, as the company did not even know that Johnston had gone to CID at the time of his firing. The posting did not directly address the Bolkovac case.

But the lawsuits are raising larger questions about the role and the accountability of the growing number of private military contractors working overseas. These firms -- often referred to as private military companies or private military firms -- provide an assortment of services to the armed forces and the U.S. government as well as foreign governments and international organizations, and it's a rapidly growing business. In addition to mechanic units such as the one Johnston joined, DynCorp provides communications and weapons specialists to U.S. forces, crop eradication pilots to the State Department for use in South America, and police officers to the U.N.

DynCorp has a lot of company in this booming field. Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton -- of which Vice President Dick Cheney is a former CEO -- is another major player. The company has run or currently runs U.S. military bases in such far-flung locations as Georgia, Uzbekistan, Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia and the Balkans. Some companies actually train foreign forces. The firm MPRI, which boasted to the Los Angeles Times that it has "more generals per square foot than the Pentagon," is in line for the contract to train the new Afghan army. As America continues its broad war against terror, these and other similar companies will be deployed to the Philippines, Afghanistan and anywhere else American, U.N. or NATO troops are sent.

In just 10 years, the private military industry has grown from a handful of companies to hundreds, with its income rising from millions of dollars a year to an estimated $100 billion a year, says Peter W. Singer, an Olin fellow with the Brookings Institution who has spent the last seven years studying the field.

But with their growing influence come new questions about their role. Are they monitored well enough, and by whom? In countries without a solid civic, military or police infrastructure, whether Bosnia or Afghanistan, who can police them? Are they above the law, or acting as the law themselves? Critics contend that these companies often operate without oversight in distant and developing countries and aren't subject to the scrutiny conventional military operations receive. Problems, they say, are inevitable.

Attempts by Salon to have such concerns addressed by the U.S. government highlight the lack of accountability. The Department of Defense refused to answer questions about contractor accountability, referring them instead to the specific branch of service that holds a given contract. The Army was unable to find someone knowledgeable on the topic to be interviewed. The State Department failed to return phone calls on the matter.

The Air Force did respond to questions, but only to say that the contractors themselves are responsible for their employees. Lt. Col. David Talley of Air Force public affairs said that when it comes to contractors, the Air Force is concerned with whether the contract is carried out, not with the behavior of individual employees.

Ben Johnston's story of the way DynCorp officials and staff took advantage of the lawlessness of postwar Bosnia is a cautionary tale about the lack of accountability enjoyed by these private companies working on behalf of the U.S. military.


continued........

Yeah that really made him squirm.


I hope someone brings those assholes to justice.

I bet I know exactly what was going through their minds at the time.

"Aw shit, How the hell did we not totally bury all the evidence...."