Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed Martin
by Pratap
Chatterjee
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert
town of
going not as prisoners, but as
their interrogators, walking a legalistic
tightrope stretched across the
Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up,
they got a $2,000 check from a
company that is rapidly becoming one of
the key employers in the world of
intelligence: Lockheed Martin, the
world's biggest military company,
based in
Before deployment to
Road to mingle with the soldiers and government civilian
workers at the
welcome briefing that takes place
every Sunday. There they get a
government-issued duffel bag,
filled with basic items for working in the
war in the
Land Warrior chemical masks. After
a week of orientation and medical
processing, they fly to
destinations --
Cropper, a prison at
near Nasariyah.
Known in the intelligence community as "97 Echoes"
(97E is the official
classification number for the
interrogator course taught at military
colleges including
side-by-side with military
interrogators conducting question-and-answer
sessions using 17 officially
sanctioned techniques, ranging from "love of
comrades" to "fear up
harsh." Their subjects will be the tens of
thousands of men thrown into United
States-run military jails on
suspicion of links to terrorism.
The rules that govern all interrogators, both contract and
military, are
currently open to broad
interpretation. Today there is much legal
wrangling about where to draw the
line between harsh treatment and
torture. An amendment to the latest
military spending bill introduced by
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, explicitly bars
the use of
torture on anyone in Unites States
custody. His amendment was recently
approved by a 90 to 9 votes in the
United States Senate and is currently
being negotiated in
"conference" by both Houses of Congress this week
before going to President Bush.
McCain is fighting off Vice President
Dick Cheney's suggestion that Central Intelligence Agency
counter-terrorism agents working
overseas be exempted from the torture
ban.
Sytex
Jobs for this new breed of interrogators typically begin
with a phone
call or e-mail to retired
Lieutenant Colonel Marc Michaelis, in the
quaint old flour milling town of
Michaelis, who is the main point
of contact for new interrogators, came
to Lockheed in February after it acquired
his former employer Sytex in a
$462 million takeover. Sytex was founded 1988 by Sydney Martin, a
management graduate of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
dabbles in collecting old Danish
and Irish coins. In its first year, the
Pennsylvania-based company earned $1,500. By 2004, according
to
Congressional Quarterly, Sytex was
providing "personnel and technology
solutions to government customers
including the Pentagon's Northern
Command, the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, and
the Department
of Homeland Security." Its
revenues had reached $425 million.
The bottom line was undoubtedly improved by the boom in
hiring contract
interrogators that began just weeks
after the
on the
Michaelis advertised job openings
for 120 new "intelligence analysts"
ranging from Arab linguists to
counterintelligence and information
warfare specialists. The private
contractors would work at
At the same time, Lockheed Martin, then a completely
different company,
was also interested in entering
this lucrative new business of
intelligence contracting. It bought
up Affiliated Computer Services
(ACS), a small company with a General Services
Administration (GSA)
technology contract issued in
Lockheed used GSA to employ private interrogators at
office in
The issue of private contractors in interrogation did not
come to light
until mid-2004, when a military
investigation revealed that several
interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison were civilian employees of CACI.
The contract to the Virginia-based company was also issued
by the
Department of Interior's
throw from the headquarters of the
Army's main interrogation school.
(CACI did not actually bid on the original contract, but
like Lockheed in
did. The Fairfax, Virginia-based
firm provided interrogators to the
Pentagon in August 2003 under a GSA contract for information
technology
services.)
Scandal at Abu Ghraib
One of the CACI interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz,
was accused of
involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal that broke in May
2004. It was soon revealed that Stefanowicz,
who was trained as a
satellite image analyst, had
received no formal training in military
interrogation, which involves
instruction in the Geneva Conventions on
human rights.
A subsequent report in July 2004 by Lieutenant General Paul Mikolashek,
on behalf of the Army Inspector
General, found that a third of the
interrogators supplied in
interrogation methods and policies.
The same report mentioned that of the
four contract interrogators
employed by Sytex in
only two had received military
interrogation training, and the other two,
who were former police officers,
had not.
It also emerged that no one knew what laws applied to
private contractors
who engaged in torture in
to any legal authority or
disciplinary procedures. When the media began
to question the role of the private
contractors and the legality of their
presence under unrelated
information technology contracts from
non-military agencies, the Pentagon
swiftly issued sole-source ("no bid")
military contracts to CACI and
Lockheed.
That CACI contract expired at the end of September this
year. But before
the company opted not to renew its
contract, the company was already
working with Sytex
as a sub-contractor to supply new personnel to
interrogate prisoners.
No new contractor in either
announced to date, but Major
Matthew McLaughlin, a spokesperson for
all interrogator type services for
the Department of Defense. They work
their contracts (writ large) from
an office which operates out of Fort
Web Recruiting
Sytex, and thus Lockheed after the
takeover, appears to have subsequently
emerged as one of the biggest
recruiters of private interrogators. In
June alone, Sytex advertised for
11 new interrogators for
July the company sought 23 interrogators for
been seeking experienced report
writers and program managers who have
worked in military interrogations
in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation
Enduring Freedom, former
Ads on several websites frequented by current and former
military
personnel offered a $70,000 to
$90,000 salary, a $2,000 sign-up bonus,
$1,000 for a mid-tour break, and a $2,000 bonus for
completing the normal
six month deployment. Those
returning for a second tour get double
bonuses at the beginning and end of
their stints. In return, the
employees are expected to work as
necessary-- up to 14 hours a day, 7
days a week. (The companies,
however, get to bill the military up to $200
an hour for this work, according to
Cherif Bassiouni, the
former United
Nations Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights
in
"Sytex is one of our best
customers," says Bill Golden, a former military
intelligence analyst with 20 years
Army experience, who now runs
IntelligenceCareers.com, one of the biggest intelligence employment
websites in the business.
"They are the main company hiring 97E workers
today."
Golden attributes the current boom in private contract
interrogators to
poor military planning over the
last decade. "The military worked as hard
as it could to create a brain drain
by moving qualified intelligence
people into other jobs, who then
quit. As a result by
there was no one left who had a
clue. Now they are rushing to catch up
and create 9,000 new specialists,
but it takes at least five years to
become really experienced. What we
have now is a nursery full of babies
in the army."
Yet even by 2003, just 237 new interrogators were graduated
from the
intelligence school at
Anteon, has contracted with the
base to provide private instructors to
increase the number of qualified
interrogators completing intelligence
courses to 1,000 a year in 2006.
(See related article)
The scope of contracts for companies like Anteon and Sytex are difficult
to determine because they have
never been made public. Asked about the
details of the interrogation
contracts, Lockheed declined to comment.
Joseph Wagovich, a spokesman for
the company's information technology
division that includes Sytex, initially told CorpWatch
that the company
had only a minor role in the
interrogation business and that the company
had wrapped up its interrogation
contract on
that Lockheed was still supplying
other kinds of "intelligence analysts"
on the Cuban base.
Sytex itself also likes to keep a
low profile. "Most of the law
enforcement organizations, as well
as the other surreptitious
organizations we may be supporting,
would just as soon not see their
names in print," Ralph Palmieri Junior, the company's Chief Operating
Officer told Congressional Quarterly in 2004.
Running the
Even without all the specifics, it is clear that Lockheed is
supplying
the
addition providing interrogators,
it is currently seeking retired Army
majors or lieutenant colonels to
develop short- and long-range planning
at the biggest
Also being courted for work in
military's secure communications
systems.
On the materiel side, Lockheed's Keyhole and Lacrosse
satellites beam
images from the war back to the
military; its U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird
spy planes, F-16, F/A-22 jet
fighters, and F-117 stealth attack fighters
were used to "shock and
awe" the Iraqis at the start of the
and ground troops employed its
Hellfire air-to-ground missiles and the
Javelin portable missiles in the invasion
of Fallujah last year.
The company's reach and influence go far beyond the
military. A
Times profile of the company in 2004 opened with the
sentence: "Lockheed
Martin doesn't run the
breathtakingly big part of
it."
"Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest
military
contractor, has built a formidable
information-technology empire that now
stretches from the Pentagon to the
Post Office. It sorts your mail and
totals your taxes. It cuts Social
Security checks and counts the United
States census. It runs space
flights and monitors air traffic. To make
all that happen, Lockheed writes
more computer code than Microsoft"
writes Tim Weiner.
The national security reporter for the New York Times
explains how
Lockheed gets its business: "Men who have worked,
lobbied and lawyered
for Lockheed hold the posts of
secretary of the Navy, secretary of
transportation, director of the
national nuclear weapons complex, and
director of the national spy
satellite agency."
"Giving one company this much power in matters of war
and peace is as
dangerous as it is
undemocratic," says Bill Hartung, senior fellow
at the
World Policy Institute in
profit from every level of the war
on terror from targeting to
intervention, and from occupation
to interrogation.
Failed Experiment?
Apart from the monoply on
war-related contracts to one single
corporation, the increased
outsourcing of interrogation to private
contractors raises questions of
accountability and of enforcement of
regulations designed for the
military.
Human rights groups are openly critical of this new trend.
"The Army's
use of contract interrogators has
to date been a failed experiment,"
Deborah Pearlstein told CorpWatch.
"Based on the Pentagon's own
investigations and other reports
that are already public, it seems clear
that contractors are less well
trained, less well controlled, and harder
to hold accountable for things that
go wrong than are regular troops."
Pearlstein, who is the director of the U.S. Law and Security
Program at
Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee on Human
Rights), warned
that "unless and until
contract interrogators can be brought at the very
least up to the standards of
training and discipline expected of our
uniformed soldiers, the
their services."
Former interrogators have a more nuanced opinion. "The
problem is not the
use of civilian contractors,"
one former Army interrogator with over ten
years of field experience, wrote in
an e-mail to CorpWatch. "What is
necessary is an active means of
supervision and oversight on ALL of our
assets in the field...not just the
civilian ones. If you take a look at
many of the investigations of the
military intelligence activities, you
will find just as many uniformed
individuals breaking the law as
contractors. I am more interested
in providing proper guidance, training,
supervision and oversight to ALL of
our intelligence people."
But Susan Burke, a lawyer for Iraqi prisoners who say they
were tortured
at Abu Ghraib,
challenges the legality of using private contractors for
interrogation. "Interrogation
has always been considered an inherently
governmental function for obvious
reasons. It is irresponsible and
dangerous to use contractors in
such settings given that there is a long
history of repeated human rights
abuses by contractors." The Philadephia
attorney charges that the use of
private contractors is illegal. "The
United States Congress has passed laws (the Federal
Acquisition
Regulations) that prevent the executive branch from
delegating
"inherently governmental
functions" to private parties."
BOX: Spy Cameras Meet Lie Detectors
Peter Rosenfeld designs technology that allow computers to
interpret what
a cameras "sees." Now,
robotics expert for Advanced Technology Labs, a
division of Lockheed Martin in
expertise to the imprecise science
of interrogation.
His latest assignment is a three year project with Professor
Dimitris
Metaxas of Rutgers University to
use cameras and a special computer
program to track subjects' eyes,
lips, shoulders, and hands movements to
determine if they are lying.
Metaxas and Rosenfeld's work is
paid for by a $3.5 million grant made in
August by the Department of Homeland
Security, which runs the
immigration and border security
system among a myriad other tasks.
Lockheed Martin's Rosenfeld is supplying three-dimensional
sensor
technology for the project, while
volunteers.
The government has used polygraphs for more than 50 years to
track blood
pressure and heart rate, but most
experts believe that these "lie
detectors" are inaccurate at
least 50 percent of the time and that a
trained liar can easily fool the
machine.
The next steps in lie detection draw heavily from the work
of
psychologists including Paul Ekman, a professor at the University of
years tracking the facial and body
signals that people make when they
answer questions. Early studies
indicated, for example, that people
looked to their left when recalling
the past but to the right when making
up a story about prior events.
Today Ekman and Metaxas are getting millions of dollars from the multiple
military agencies to study the
fleeting facial expressions and casual
gestures that many observers do not
notice, but that the scientists hope
can help them develop more
sophisticated lie detectors.
"Micro-expressions and micro-gestures are a lot harder
to mask and they
do not vary among cultures and
races," Metaxas told the Daily Targus, the
confidently."
Pratap Chatterjee
is Managing Editor/Project Director of CorpWatch.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1104-23.htm