Dyncorp, The Private Military Corporation At The Heart Of Foreign Policy Scandal

by Elizabeth Vos, Disobedient Media:

Over ten years ago, Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney asked Donald Rumsfeld during a hearing on the proposed 2006 Department for Defense Budget:

“Mr. Secretary, is it policy of the U.S. government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls? That’s my first question.”

McKinney’s query, broadcast on C-SPAN, received few solid answers.

Cynthia McKinney is not the only legislator who has asked questions about the role and funding of U.S. paramilitary organizations. Janice Schakowsky, a Democrat Representative of Chicago was quoted by The New York Times:

The New York Times article described the essential problem of the government using private contractors like Dyncorp: “Outsourcing military missions also lets the Pentagon do things Congress might not approve… while the Pentagon has secrets, it also fundamentally recognizes that it is a public institution. Not so the contractors, whose first allegiance is to their shareholders.”

Dan Baum wrote in his 2003 article Guns For Hire: “DynCorp offers the military an alternative to itself.”

Cynthia McKinney served six terms in the United States House of Representatives. She left the Democratic Party in 2008, and ran as the Presidential candidate of the Green Party of the United States.

In addition to its paramilitary endeavors in the field, Dyncorp has placed heavy emphasis on IT. It became heavily involved in the software industry in the 1990’s under the leadership of Paul Lombardi. In 2003, Dyncorp was acquired by “Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC),” primarily a software firm providing services such as: “various cloud offerings, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), private cloud solutions, CloudMail and Storage as a Service (SaaS).”

Dyncorp’s early emphasis on IT while under the leadership of Lombardi and CSC may explain part of Cynthia McKinney’s question for Donald Rumsfeld. She demanded on record to be told who had received IT contracts at the DOD and other departments which had “lost” trillions of dollars. McKinney asked during the Department of Defense Budget hearing:

“My second question, Mr. Secretary, is, who has the contract today to make those systems communicate with each other? How long have they had those contracts? And how much have the taxpayers paid for them?”

McKinney’s question was answered by Ms. Tina Jonas, who refused to give names on the record. Ms Jonas served as the “chief financial officer and assistant director of the Finance Division,” of the FBI before she was “nominated by President Bush to be the undersecretary of defense at the Department of Defense.” She has also held leading positions in numerous private companies associated with aerospace and defense.

CSC has also been investigated for fraud, with Margaret Hodge describing it as a “rotten company providing a hopeless system.”

In 2010, Dyncorp International became a subsidiary of Cerberus in a deal valued at $1.5 billion. Cerberus’ founder has been described as “a notable backer of Republican candidates… [who] served on Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council.”

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