contractors

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.

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 at the U.S. Embassy in [...]

TWI’s own Spencer Ackerman appeared on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” Wednesday to discuss Afghanistan, contractors, and the shocking scandal that has recently come to light. In case you missed it, here’s the video (after the jump).

While the government’s use of private security contractors has garnered no end of criticism, the highest-profile blunders and abuses have come from companies that work not for the Pentagon, but for the State Department.

I wondered yesterday whether and how Gen. Stanley McChrystal would incorporate private security companies into his population-protection mission in Afghanistan. A post from Nathan Hodge, who’s in Afghanistan right now for Danger Room, highlights an area where such coordination is particularly necessary: the roads.
Roads are everything in Afghanistan, precisely because there are so few of [...]

More from the White House’s letter objecting to certain provisions in the fiscal 2010 defense authorization. I thought this deserved to be quoted in full:
Interrogation Duties:  The Administration objects to section 823 in its current form, which would prohibit contractor personnel from interrogating persons detained during or in the aftermath of hostilities under any circumstances.  [...]

Department of professional jealosy: Danger Room’s Nathan Hodge is in Kabul, about to do some reporting about Afghanistan’s “summer of the surge,” with an emphasis on who’s taking up the civilian side of the mission, like staffing the Provincial Reconstruction Teams. So far, Nathan’s just seeing jacked contractors hanging around the airport but it’s early [...]

This is my favorite rejection under the Freedom of Information Act ever.
In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the [...]

As the Wall Street bailout nears its first anniversary, a risky aspect of the financial rescue has flown largely under the radar.

In February, TWI’s Daphne Eviatar called attention to the weak protections in the federal economic stimulus bill for whistleblowers who expose contracting fraud. At the time, Daphne wrote:
[T]he stimulus bill fails to adequately protect employees of government contractors, who are in the best position to blow the whistle on fraud and abuse of taxpayer money. [...]