Former employees of ArmorGroup, the private security company that holds a State Department contract to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, unveiled new allegations against the besieged contractor a week after photographic evidence emerged of its guards engaged in physical and sexual harassment. In a press conference revolving around an More…
As an addendum to this post, I see Ian Kelly, a spokesman for the State Department, had this exchange with a reporter today over the propriety of the department’s response to the Project on Government Oversight, which gave State a welter of information about contractor ArmorGroup’s abuses in Kabul:
James Gordon, the former director of operations for the North American branch of ArmorGroup — the State Department contractor accused of physical and sexual harassment while hired to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul — plans to file a wrongful termination lawsuit against the company, according to a press More…
The very unamused people at the Project on Government Oversight, which broke the story of ArmorGroup’s out-of-control security guards at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, have been trying to get some answers from the State Department about how it is that years’ worth of complaints from inside the department More…
At a House Oversight subcommittee hearing on Afghanistan, the State Department’s inspector general, Howard Geisel, made his first public comments about ArmorGroup, the State Department security contractor accused of physical and sexual harassment. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) asked Geisel, whose office has opened an investigation into the oversight More…
A private security company hired to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul lost its contract with the State Department in 2007 over the failure of its guards to speak English, according to two senior diplomats who worked in the embassy at that time. Yet ArmorGroup, which was hired by the More…
The AP in Kabul reports that the U.S. Embassy there has cashiered eight of the ArmorGroup security contractors accused of “lewd behavior and sexual misconduct,” as well as ArmorGroup’s in-country management team.
This smells more like crisis management than accountability. For one thing, as the Project on Government More…
It’s still unclear exactly when the State Department’s inspector general began its inquiry into department contractor ArmorGroup’s apparent physical and sexual harrasment at the U.S. embassy in Kabul. Spokesman Ian Kelly said yesterday that the department has known about the latest allegations from the much-criticized company for “ten More…
The Project on Government Oversight has just learned that one of its sources for exposing apparent acts of physical and sexual harassment by a State Department security contractor has been fired in an act of retaliation. A just-issued press release:
One of the whistleblowers who helped expose the guard scandal
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly came out of the box yesterday with a strong statement. The State Department takes the allegations of impropriety on the part of ArmorGroup, the security company State hired to protect the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, so seriously that the Office of the Inspector General More…
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