An obscure Army contracting office with ties to the private security firm Blackwater has formally lost control of a lucrative contract to train Afghan police, the Pentagon and U.S. military officials in Afghanistan confirmed to TWI.
[Security1] The office, known as the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office or CNTPO, came under More…
According to the AP, federal prosecutors are exploring whether to indict former Blackwater executives for illegally stockpiling weapons at the private security giant’s Moyock, N.C., headquarters. The AP reports that those execs might have obtained “the official letterhead of a local sheriff to create a false justification for buying” 22 More…
The private security company, renamed Xe Services, objects to my use of the verb “stole” to refer to the guns it got from the U.S. military in Afghanistan in 2008. A letter from its general counsel reads, in part:
Xe Services LLC disagrees with several statements and opinions in
A statement just released by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), whose Senate Armed Services Committee discovered widespread fraud in Blackwater’s previous Afghanistan contract, reacting to the news that the Government Accountability Office has, for the moment, scotched a bid for training Afghan police that could have gone to the More…
As I reported last week, the Government Accountability Office has been reviewing for months a protest against a contract to train the Afghan police that Blackwater sought to win, even after Blackwater essentially stole weaponry intended for those selfsame Afghan cops. Today, the GAO’s acting general counsel, Lynn H. Gibson, More…
This is Michael D. Furlong, a strategic planner for the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command based in Texas. According to a baroque story in today’s New York Times, Furlong is under criminal investigation for diverting money from a program that hired contractors to gather information about Afghanistan and Pakistan More…
On Feb. 23, I broke a story about how the Senate Armed Services Committee determined that Blackwater employees in Afghanistan signed for hundreds of AK-47s and pistols using the name “Eric Cartman,” evidently a reference to the popular “South Park” character.
On March 17 — which Dave Weigel tells More…
For more on the systemic failures in contracting that contribute to firms like Blackwater getting more and more security contracts after, like, killing civilians and stealing guns, check out Scott Amey’s recent testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Amey, the general counsel for the More…
By March 24, the private security corporation formerly known as Blackwater — last seen in Afghanistan shooting civilians and stealing weapons intended for the Afghan police — may win a new Defense Department contract to train the Afghan police. And nearly no one in the government wants to own More…
Laura Rozen at Politico beat me to this, but today Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, released letters he sent to Attorney General Eric Holder and Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking them to review Feb. 24 testimony from ex-Blackwater executives and Army officials More…
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