The imperial Pentagon

Rumsfeld and his minions are treating Congress as if it's on a need-to-know basis about Iraq -- from the number of private contractors there to how taxpayers' money is being spent to our military strategy.

By Robert Schlesinger

May 20, 2004 | The two companies -- CACI and Titan -- implicated so far in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal are notably missing from a list submitted earlier this month to Congress by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld of private security companies operating in Iraq.

On April 2 -- after a skirmish in Fallujah, Iraq, left four Blackwater employees dead, but before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke -- Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Rumsfeld asking about the private security companies in Iraq: "Specifically I would like to know which firms are operating in Iraq, how many personnel each firm has there, which specific functions they are performing, how much they are being paid, and from which appropriations accounts."

A month later, on May 4, Rumsfeld responded with generic information. The Coalition Provisional Authority has paid $147 million to eight companies, he reported, and he offered a "current listing of known PSCs." Sixty firms were listed, but CACI and Titan were not among them. Also missing from the list were companies like the Vinnell Corp., MPRI International, SAIC, Eagle Group and WorldWide Language Resources, which are involved in training the new Iraqi Army, according to a Web site set up by the Department of Commerce.

Since the prisoner abuse scandal first broke at the end of April, members of Congress have been trying to understand exactly what these independent contractors are doing in Iraq. But questions remain unanswered concerning precisely what contractors did at Abu Ghraib and what they still do in other U.S.-run prisons, to whom they are responsible and, more broadly, what they are doing on such critical missions as counterintelligence. Congress has received only a trickle of information from the Pentagon, and this information is often incomplete if not outright deceptive, according to members of Congress and their staffs.

Rep. Skelton is not alone in receiving sketchy or misleading information about the contractors from the Pentagon. Another House member asked the Pentagon for the general disposition of private security forces in Iraq -- how many and where, roughly speaking. (Because the list is classified, the member cannot be named.) The member's office got back a detailed roster of around 900 private security firm employees, but none were associated with well-known firms like Blackwater and Kellogg, Brown and Root (a Halliburton subsidiary), and roughly one-third were non-U.S. citizens. This figure contrasts greatly with 20,000 contractors -- Rumsfeld's often cited number -- at large in the country.

Next page: Some of the sketchy information the Pentagon has provided is almost worse than no information