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Accountability Office Urges Air Force to Re-Bid Tanker Contract
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2008 – The Government Accountability Office has recommended the Air Force reopen the bidding process for the service’s aerial refueling aircraft contract.

The GAO – the investigative arm of Congress -- made the recommendation following a review of the contract process that selected the Northrop-Grumman/EADS/Airbus consortium as the winner of the $35 billion contract in February. Boeing Company protested the decision.

The initial contract for the KC-45A tanker was for 64 aircraft at $10.6 billion.

“Our review of the record led us to conclude that the Air Force had made a number of significant errors that could have affected the outcome of what was a close competition between Boeing and Northrop Grumman. We therefore sustained Boeing’s protest,” said Michael R. Golden, the GAO’s managing associate general counsel for procurement law, in a news release.

The GAO made its determination based solely on irregularities in the contract procedures. The office did not make any judgment on the merits of the rival aircraft.

Air Force officials release a statement that says the service is reviewing the GAO’s decision that sustained portions of Boeing’s protest, and that once the review is complete, the Air Force will be in a position to determine the best course of action.

“The Air Force will do everything we can to rapidly move forward so America receives this urgently needed capability,” Sue C. Payton, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, said in the statement. “The Air Force will select the best value tanker for our nation’s defense, while being good stewards of the taxpayer dollar.

“As soon as possible, we will provide the Air Force’s way ahead,” she continued. “We appreciate the GAO’s professionalism and thoroughness in its assessment of the protest of the KC-45A source selection.”

During a media availability last week, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said it is important to start getting these new aircraft on flightlines as soon as possible. He said the tankers flying today are the same ones he flew in as an Air Force second lieutenant in 1967.

Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell said during a news conference yesterday that Pentagon officials still fully support the Air Force choice, and that the process must move forward. “This is the No. 1 acquisition priority of the Air Force,” Morrell said. “It has to be. It is 10 years overdue.”

The average age of the KC-135 tanker fleet is 47 years old. “Any further delay would be a real problem,” Morrell said.

The Air Force does not have to accept the GAO finding. By law, the service has 60 days to respond to the agency.

NYTimes.com

June 12, 2008 

Immigration Raid in Arizona Could Test New State Law

By PAUL GIBLIN

MESA, Ariz. — A raid on two busy water parks and the arrest of nine workers suspected of being illegal immigrants might become the first case to test Arizona’s new employer sanctions law.

The law, which went into effect in January, carries penalties that suspend or revoke business licenses of employers who “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants. It has yet to result in a prosecution.

The raid, which was carried out on Tuesday by Maricopa County deputies, followed a four-month investigation of hiring practices at the water parks, Golfland Sunsplash in Mesa and Waterworld Safari in Phoenix, said the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio. Both parks are owned by Golfland Entertainment Centers, which is based here and operates three parks in Arizona and six in California.

Deputies arrested the workers on charges of suspicion of identity theft and using forged documents to obtain employment.

The authorities also used search warrants to seize personnel records, which they will use to investigate whether a violation of the employer sanctions law occurred, Sheriff Arpaio said.

The director of marketing for the parks, Dave Johnson, said Golfland executives were not worried about a follow-up investigation. “We don’t think we have anything to hide,” he said.

Mr. Johnson predicted that Sheriff Arpaio would be unable to bring an employer sanctions case against the company because since January Golfland executives have used a federal database to check the immigration status of newly hired workers in the manner prescribed by the state law.

“Those who could not be confirmed as legal, they were terminated,” Mr. Johnson said.

But Sheriff Arpaio said investigators thought that as many as 104 additional employees at the parks might have used fraudulent documents or Social Security numbers to get their jobs.

“It’s not over yet,” the sheriff said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do to see if there’s more than the nine that we arrested working there.”

A former employee at Waterworld Safari provided the tip that led to the investigation, the sheriff said.

Golfland Sunsplash, Waterworld Safari and a third water park in the area employ a total of 1,100 people, Mr. Johnson said.

State Representative Russell K. Pearce, a Mesa Republican who is the father of the employer sanctions law, said the arrests sent a strong message because of Golfland Entertainment’s high profile.

“It’s about time, and it’s great,” Mr. Pearce said. “It’s kind of like the shot fired at Concord in the Revolutionary War, the shot heard around the world. This had to happen.”

Business at the water parks, meanwhile, was brisk Wednesday, as temperatures rose to 101 degrees.

NYTimes.com

June 10, 2008

Bush Orders Contractors to Vet Status of Workers

By JULIA PRESTON

President Bush has ordered federal contractors to participate in the Department of Homeland Security’s electronic system for verifying the immigration status of their workers, greatly expanding the reach of the administration’s crackdown on employers who hire illegal immigrants.

An executive order, signed by the president on Friday and announced on Monday, requires federal contractors to use the system, known as E-Verify, to check immigration status when they hire new workers or start work under government contracts.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the measure would affect at least several hundred thousand workers a year nationwide. The status checks apply to all workers.

The order expands the E-Verify program, which has been the target of criticism and lawsuits by employers’ groups and advocates for immigrants who say the Social Security database it draws upon to check workers’ status is riddled with errors that could lead to legal workers’ being fired or rejected for employment.

This is the first time that participation in the program, which Congress established in 1996 as a voluntary system, has become mandatory for any large group of employers.

As recently at 2005, the E-Verify system was a pilot program that gave employers a way to confirm that Social Security numbers and immigration information provided by new employees matched federal records. As the administration has stepped up immigration raids at work sites in the last two years, employers’ participation has grown sharply.

About 69,000 employers are now enrolled, up from about 5,900 in 2005, according to federal figures released on Monday. That is still a small fraction of the estimated 7.4 million employers in the United States. Officials estimated that as many as 200,000 contractors would be covered by the new rule.

Mr. Chertoff, at a news conference on Monday in Washington, where he and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez announced the executive order, noted that it covered major weapons and service contractors for the Defense Department, among other employers, as well as employees of subcontractors.

“It will have a huge impact,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. “This is the first time the federal government is ensuring that it will not be responsible, directly or indirectly, for hiring illegal aliens.”

Ms. Jenks said concerns about the accuracy of the Social Security database were overblown. She said many errors in the database came from women who had married and failed to notify the Social Security Administration of their name changes, and from immigrants who had become American citizens. These problems could be easily remedied with requests to Social Security or immigration agencies, she said.

But Mike Aitken, director of governmental affairs for the Society for Human Resource Management, a trade association, said the E-Verify system remained vulnerable to cheating by immigrants who used real identity documents belonging to other people. Without new money and more staff members, Mr. Aitken said, the Social Security Administration could be overwhelmed by inquiries from federal contractors.

A separate rule proposed by the administration that would use the Social Security database to verify immigration status has been blocked by a federal court in San Francisco.

“The critical point is that they should fix the database, and not do an end run around Congress’s intention that the system should be voluntary,” said Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union who helped bring the lawsuit.

Austin Bogues contributed reporting.

Air Force looking to build cyber weapons

05/14/08

Next Gov

The Air Force issued a proposal on Monday asking the technology industry to help it develop the ability to hack into an enemy’s computer systems and to conduct offensive cyber warfare, such as shutting down systems, according to internal and public documents.

In its proposal, the Air Force Research Laboratory-Rome Research Site in Rome, N.Y., said it wanted help from researchers and industry to develop technologies that would support what the lab called a dominant offensive cyber engagement.

An internal briefing from the lab’s headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio defines the engagement as the ability to “conduct full-spectrum offensive cyber/info military, leadership and infrastructure.”

The request dovetails with a similar research effort kicked off last year by the Air Force Electronic Systems Group, which asked industry to develop the technologies and capabilities needed to attack an adversary’s computer systems.

“Although it is rare to find such a public request by the Air Force, [other] governments around the world [already] have the resources, methods and systems to play in the cyberspace war zone,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer for Finjan Software Inc. in San Jose, Calif., which develops and sells secure Web gateway software.

The lab emphasized in the request that it noted the lab wants to develop the capability to gain access to remote open and closed networks and to systems that provide full control of a network for the purposes of collecting data and conducting operations to manipulate the system.

The lab wants capabilities to burrow to the core of any computer, including techniques to allow it to gain user and root-level access to fixed and mobile computers. The lab is interested in methodologies that would allow it to access all types of operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware, according to the request.

The Air Force also wants the ability to conduct these operations without being detected for a long time, so the United States could “maintain an active presence within the adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected” to collect an enemy’s sensitive and classified information.

The Air Force labels these electronic tactics “D5 effects,” to affect computers through what it calls “deceive, deny, disrupt, degrade and destroy.”

Air Force Col. Charles Williamson, in an article that appeared in the May issue of Armed Forces Journal, said the Air Force should take a “carpet bombing” approach to offensive operations in cyberspace. Williamson, staff judge advocate for the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, suggested that the service imitate hackers and develop its own force of botnets -- thousands of computers controlled by a signal source -- to attack adversaries.

The cyber warfare strategy could backfire, according to an analyst who served in a top Defense Department post. Philip Coyle, who served as assistant secretary of Defense and director of its operational test and evaluation office from 1994 to 2001, said he does not believe the Air Force has “thought through the ‘arms control’ implications of this work. Once the Air Force starts attacking . . . all hell could break loose. The Air Force is not equipped, and likely could never be equipped, to deal with retaliation from thousands or millions of hackers.

“Hopefully, this solicitation will produce some cooler heads who will help the Air Force think through these matters,” said Coyle, now senior adviser with the Center for Defense Information, a security policy research organization in Washington. “But too often the tendency is to come up with new weapons -- including cyber weapons -- without adequate regard for the question . . . ‘Where does it all end? How will our friends and allies, as well as our adversaries react to our efforts? Through our actions, are we making the threat worse?’”

The military will use caution with cyber weapons, as it has with nuclear weapons, Ben-Itzhak said. “Mostpeople trust their nation that it will not start a war or a nuclear attack for no serious reason,” he said. “They can also trust that such offensive cyberspace methods will be used for good reasons, although, just by reading [about] them, they might sound scary.”

Ben-Itzhak added that investment in offensive cyber operations -- under the theory that a good offense makes for the best defense -- won’t solve the problems the Air Force faces in combating relentless cyberattacks against its networks. “Investments in offensive methods will not save investments in defensive methods,” he said. “It is the basic of any war, including the cyber war.”

Boeing to rebuild 'virtual fence'

Revised prototype to include more input from Border Patrol

By Arthur H. Rotstein

The Associated Press

11:16 PM CDT, April 23, 2008

TUCSON, Ariz. — The government is scrapping a $20 million prototype of its highly touted "virtual fence" on the Arizona-Mexico border because the system is failing to adequately alert border patrol agents to illegal crossings, officials said.

The move comes just two months after Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced his approval of the fence built by Boeing Co. The fence consists of nine electronic surveillance towers along a 28-mile section of border southwest of Tucson.

Boeing is to replace the so-called Project 28 prototype with a series of towers equipped with communications systems, new cameras and new radar capability, officials said.

"Boeing has delivered a system that the Border Patrol currently is operating 24 hours a day," Boeing spokeswoman Deborah Bosick said. She declined further comment.

Less than a week after Chertoff accepted Project 28 on Feb. 22, the Government Accountability Office told Congress it "did not fully meet user needs and the project's design will not be used as the basis for future" developments.

A glaring shortcoming of the project was the time lag between the electronic detection of movement along the border and the transmission of a camera image to agents, the GAO reported.

The Border Patrol had little input in designing the prototype but will have more say in the final version, officials said.

Agents began using the virtual fence in December, and the towers have resulted in more than 3,000 apprehensions since, said Greg Giddens, executive director of the Secure Border Initiative program office in Washington.

But that's just a fraction of the several hundred illegal immigrants believed to cross the border daily near Tucson.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

The Washington Times

Article published Mar 31, 2008

U.S. used suspended security firm

March 31, 2008

By Jim McElhatton - Federal contracting officials signed off on millions of dollars in work last year to a Washington-area security contractor weeks after it was suspended by the General Services Administration and months before two top former executives were charged in a massive bribery and tax scam, government records show.

The largest job, for $11.6 million, authorized USProtect Corp. to guard U.S.-based Air Force installations and was signed two weeks after the company was suspended by the GSA, records show. In addition, the U.S. Marshals Service signed a six-figure modification on a contract to protect federal courthouses three days after the suspension.

The suspension over billing practices lasted about three months while the GSA weighed a recommendation from its own inspectors to debar the Silver Spring-based company. Ultimately, the GSA decided against putting USProtect on the government's blacklist of thousands of businesses and people excluded from contracts.

Experts say the situation shows that even a suspension or debarment doesn't always mean losing out on government business, and companies can continue working on existing contracts after getting suspended.

"Whether the government suspends or debars a company, it generally has no impact on the company's ongoing contracts with the government," said Steven L. Schooner, a contracting expert at George Washington University Law School. "While a lot of people find that disconcerting, the reality is that the government has missions and ongoing contracts are critical."

Ten months after the GSA lifted the suspension, USProtect has collapsed amid a financial scandal leaving hundreds of security guards it hired unable to cash their paychecks, while two former company executives and a former GSA official face prison time in an unrelated investigation. A company attorney did not return telephone calls last week and an answering machine said USProtect "has ceased operations."

In December, the company defended its performance when first questioned by The Washington Times about its operations, saying in an e-mail it had "consistently provided superior security services to a broad array of federal agencies." It said its "outstanding performance" had repeatedly been acknowledged "both formally and informally."

Marshals Service spokesman Steve Blando said agency officials would not have signed off on a contract modification with USProtect three days after the GSA's April 16 suspension order if they had known about the company's legal troubles.

However, he said, the GSA has five days to post the suspension on a government database, and so the Marshals Service only learned of it through the U.S. Attorney's Office in Maryland within days of signing the modification.

"It is the [Marshals Service] position that the suspension would have applied in this case had we been aware of it prior to signing the contract modification," Mr. Blando said. "We took the action in good faith not knowing they had been debarred."

Mr. Blando also said the sudden collapse of USProtect hasn't jeopardized security at federal buildings because new contractors have been hired to take over the company's contracts. USProtect guards are being hired by the new companies, he said.

The GSA did not respond to questions about when other agencies were notified about the suspension order, but a spokesman cited rules that said awarding contracts or adding new work to existing contracts is generally prohibited, though an agency head can provide a waiver if the award is in the public interest. However, the agencies are not required to notify the GSA about whether a waiver is issued.

The Air Force defended its decision to continue awarding work to USProtect. Spokeswoman Lt. Col. Jennifer Cassidy said the Air Force signed off on the $11.6 million modification on March 26, 2007, two days after USProtect signed the deal, and that USProtect wasn't suspended until April 16 — so the Air Force acted properly because the company wasn't excluded from contracts when contract papers were signed.

But federal contracting records available through www.usaspending.gov, an online federal clearinghouse of contract and grant awards, shows the USProtect deal with the Air Force became effective last March but was signed on May 2, two weeks after the suspension.

The Air Force deal was one of many lucrative contracts that fueled USProtect's fast rise in recent years. Records show the federal government paid the company $135.4 million in fiscal 2007, up from $815,000 in 2001 and $11.2 million in 2002.

Scott Amey, general counsel for the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that studies federal contracting practices, said USProtect isn't the only example of a company winning contracts despite a suspension or debarment.

In recent years, Mr. Amey said, a division of Boeing was able to win new work through special waivers granted by federal officials, and WorldCom had its debarment lifted.

"You can probably count on one hand the number of times a big company gets debarred," he said. "They've got better legal staffs, and there's more of a reliance on them than small businesses. It's also easier for them to fire and change management and spend money on internal compliance."

The temporary suspension wasn't the only red flag last year involving USProtect, which collapsed after a bank and two other creditors forced the company into bankruptcy.

Court records show the company settled a False Claims Act investigation in 2006 into its billing practices on a federal contract years earlier. Last fall, founder Michael Holiday and former Chief Operating Officer Richard Hudec were charged in a bribery and tax scam that U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein in Maryland called one of the biggest public corruption cases in state history.

Hudec pleaded guilty to tax evasion and concealing information from federal contracting officials, including four felony convictions. Despite his record, authorities say he was able to help broker tens of millions of dollars in contracts for the company.

Holiday, who sold the firm to Hudec's wife in 2003, pleaded guilty last year to bribing for contracts former GSA contracting official Dessie Ruth Nelson with tens of thousand of dollars and a cruise. Miss Nelson also pleaded guilty and is cooperating with investigators. Hudec, Nelson and Holiday are awaiting sentencing.

According to records previously released by the GSA and obtained by The Times, the GSA suspension was prompted by a settlement in 2006 between the Justice Department and USProtect over a false claims investigation about the company's billing practices on a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service contract in 2001 and 2002.

The INS contract called for USProtect, then known as Holiday International Security, to supply one guard for every detainee. But the Justice Department said it had evidence to show the company was supplying one guard for every two inmates while billing for the correct ratio, according to court records under the 2006 settlement. Under the settlement, USProtect denied any wrongdoing and agreed to pay $80,000.

In an April 16 letter to the company, GSA's suspension and debarment office said information "indicates that USProtect lacks the present responsibility to be a government contractor."

In response, attorneys for USProtect said it disputed the accusations and said the case stemmed from activities that took place more than five years earlier. The response also noted, "USProtect has taken concrete steps to ensure that similar events do not occur."

NYTimes.com

March 28, 2008 

Finding of Fraud Led to Suspension of Company Supplying Arms to Afghanistan

By C. J. CHIVERS and ERIC SCHMITT

When the United States Army decided this week to suspend the main supplier of munitions to Afghan security forces from future federal work, it did so after a field investigation documented what it called an act of fraud.

Last Nov. 25, the president of the company, Efraim E. Diveroli, signed papers certifying that 28 pallets of ammunition for Afghanistan had been manufactured by MFS 2000, a Hungarian company, according to the investigators’ memorandum.

Acting on a tip, the Army’s Procurement Fraud Branch visited an Afghan ammunition storage site in January after the shipment arrived. There, investigators found that ammunition certified as Hungarian was actually made in China, according to the memorandum.

Mr. Diveroli declined to comment, and has 30 days to contest this finding.

The investigators’ discovery did more than lead to his company’s suspension. The discovery placed him at risk of a federal criminal charge of fraud. And it raised questions about how Army contracting officials have been securing arms for the Pentagon’s allies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Mr. Diveroli’s company, AEY Inc. of Miami Beach, received a two-year contract in January 2007, potentially worth $298 million, to provide Afghan security forces with ammunition. At the time, Mr. Diveroli was 21.

An examination of the company’s business by The New York Times, reported on Wednesday, found that it had shipped tens of millions of decades-old Chinese cartridges to Afghanistan, almost all of them in poor packaging. AEY has also worked with middlemen and a shell company that are on a list of federal entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking and that have been accused of corruption.

Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who leads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said Thursday that the committee would hold a hearing next month to review contracts received by AEY.

“Something appears to have gone fundamentally wrong inside the Defense Department,” Mr. Waxman said in a statement. “The committee will try to find out how many taxpayer dollars were squandered and who is responsible.”

Representative Ike Skelton, the Missouri Democrat who is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said his committee would also examine military procurement and “work to ensure that such practices are eliminated and never repeated.”

In a statement, he said: “Supplying substandard equipment to the Afghan security forces can only undermine our mission there. Furthermore, the use of networks of illegal arms dealers, if this in fact occurred, undermines U.S. arms sales policy and our international reputation.”

Interviews with military officers, American officials, international arms dealers and private organizations that monitor them suggest that the problems with the Afghan contract were rooted in part in AEY’s business conduct. But they stemmed as well from how Army procurement officials write contracts and vet and supervise companies that receive them.

Nicholas Marsh, a research fellow at the International Peace Research Institute in Norway who studies the arms trade, said AEY’s work with suspicious middlemen was part of a pattern for purchases of foreign munitions for the Pentagon.

Under American law, arms dealers must notify the State Department of everyone they do business with in a given arms transfer, including middlemen, brokers, sellers and transport companies. As a practice, the State Department checks subcontractors and partners against a watch list, which is regularly updated by analysts and with information from embassies around the world.

Purchases for the Pentagon, however, are exempt from this law and practice. Middlemen have rushed into the deals, without the Pentagon’s contractors disclosing the relationships. “You see people subcontracting and subcontracting all over the place,” Mr. Marsh said. “It’s a huge mess.”

Military officers and a private arms dealer also said that insufficient quality-control standards were evident in many Army purchases of foreign arms.

Afghan and Iraqi forces principally use weapons designed by the Soviet Union. Munitions for these weapons are not typically made in the United States.

During the cold war, however, the American military and intelligence agencies studied Soviet arms and published volumes on their design, use, packaging and performance. The volumes, long ago declassified, are available in libraries in military installations.

But when the Army began buying huge batches of Communist bloc equipment, many contracting officers apparently did not refer either to such information or to the foreign standards for age limits and reliability testing.

AEY’s Afghan contract did not set an age limit for any munitions or require it to be tested. This meant that despite providing millions of cartridges more than 40 years old, Mr. Diveroli’s company was in compliance with the contract, Army contracting officials have said.

Reuben F. Johnson, an American in Ukraine who has been buying Eastern bloc equipment for the United States military since 1999, said such standards were a mark of contracting incompetence.

“The people in the U.S. Army who are responsible for issuing these solicitations are, almost to a man, completely unaware of the many volumes of data that were amassed on these systems during the cold war,” he said. (Mr. Johnson said he did not bid on any contracts that AEY was awarded.)

Not everyone has ignored those old manuals, however. For shipments of Chinese munitions, AEY removed it from its Chinese packaging and repacked it in generic brown cardboard boxes.

This step might have obscured its origins. But years ago the Defense Intelligence Agency published a detailed guide of manufacturer markings for military small-arms cartridges made around the world.

These keys enable investigators to trace a cartridge to the factory where it was made. The New York Times used these old intelligence charts last fall to show that ammunition shipped to Afghanistan by AEY was Chinese and had been made in the 1960s.

The Army’s fraud investigators, snapping pictures of what they found in January, used these same charts to show that AEY’s supposedly Hungarian munitions had come from Chinese factories, too, according to the investigators’ memorandum.

Based on this evidence, Mr. Diveroli was accused of fraud, and his company suspended.

NYTimes.com

March 27, 2008 

Supplier Under Scrutiny on Aging Arms for Afghans

By C. J. CHIVERS

This article was reported by C. J. Chivers, Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Wood and written by Mr. Chivers.

Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

This week, after repeated inquiries about AEY’s performance by The Times, the Army suspended the company from any future federal contracting, citing shipments of Chinese ammunition and claiming that Mr. Diveroli misled the Army by saying the munitions were Hungarian.

Mr. Diveroli, reached by telephone, said he was unaware of the action. The Army planned to notify his company by certified mail on Thursday, according to internal correspondence provided by a military official.

But problems with the ammunition were evident last fall in places like Nawa, Afghanistan, an outpost near the Pakistani border, where an Afghan lieutenant colonel surveyed the rifle cartridges on his police station’s dirty floor. Soon after arriving there, the cardboard boxes had split open and their contents spilled out, revealing ammunition manufactured in China in 1966.

“This is what they give us for the fighting,” said the colonel, Amanuddin, who like many Afghans has only one name. “It makes us worried, because too much of it is junk.” Ammunition as it ages over decades often becomes less powerful, reliable and accurate.

AEY is one of many previously unknown defense companies to have thrived since 2003, when the Pentagon began dispensing billions of dollars to train and equip indigenous forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its rise from obscurity once seemed to make it a successful example of the Bush administration’s promotion of private contractors as integral elements of war-fighting strategy.

But an examination of AEY’s background, through interviews in several countries, reviews of confidential government documents and the examination of some of the ammunition, suggests that Army contracting officials, under pressure to arm Afghan troops, allowed an immature company to enter the murky world of international arms dealing on the Pentagon’s behalf — and did so with minimal vetting and through a vaguely written contract with few restrictions.

In addition to this week’s suspension, AEY is under investigation by the Department of Defense’s inspector general and by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, prompted by complaints about the quality and origins of ammunition it provided, and allegations of corruption.

Mr. Diveroli, in a brief telephone interview late last year, denied any wrongdoing. “I know that my company does everything 100 percent on the up and up, and that’s all I’m concerned about,” he said.

He also suggested that his activities should be shielded from public view. “AEY is working on a moderately classified Department of Defense project,” he said. “I really don’t want to talk about the details.”

He referred questions to a lawyer, Hy Shapiro, who offered a single statement by e-mail. “While AEY continues to work very hard to fulfill its obligations under its contract with the U.S. Army, its representatives are not prepared at this time to sit and discuss the details,” he wrote.

As part of the suspension, neither Mr. Diveroli nor his company can bid on any further federal work until the Army’s allegations are resolved. But he will be allowed to provide ammunition already on order under the Afghan contract, according to internal military correspondence.

In January, American officers in Kabul, concerned about munitions from AEY, had contacted the Army’s Rock Island Arsenal, in Illinois, and raised the possibility of terminating the contract. And officials at the Army Sustainment Command, the contracting authority at the arsenal, after meeting with AEY in late February, said they were tightening the packaging standards for munitions shipped to the war.

And yet after that meeting, AEY sent another shipment of nearly one million cartridges to Afghanistan that the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan regarded as substandard. Lt. Col. David G. Johnson, the command spokesman, said that while there were no reports of ammunition misfiring, some of it was in such poor condition that the military had decided not to issue it. “Our honest answer is that the ammunition is of a quality that is less than desirable; the munitions do not appear to meet the standards that many of us are used to,” Colonel Johnson said. “We are not pleased with the way it was delivered.”

Several officials said the problems would have been avoided if the Army had written contracts and examined bidders more carefully.

Public records show that AEY’s contracts since 2004 have potentially been worth more than a third of a billion dollars. Mr. Diveroli set the value higher: he claimed to do $200 million in business each year.

Several military officers and government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the investigations, questioned how Mr. Diveroli, and a small group of men principally in their 20s and without extensive military or procurement experiences, landed so much vital government work.

“A lot of us are asking the question,” said a senior State Department official. “How did this guy get all this business?”

An Ambitious Company

The intensity of the Afghan insurgency alarmed the Pentagon in 2006, and the American unit that trains and equips Afghan forces placed a huge munitions order through an Army logistics command.

The order sought 52 types of ammunition: rifle, pistol and machine-gun cartridges, hand grenades, rockets, shotgun slugs, mortar rounds, tank ammunition and more. In all, it covered hundreds of millions of rounds. Afghan forces primarily use weapons developed in the Soviet Union. This meant that most munitions on the list could be bought only overseas.

AEY was one of 10 companies to bid by the September 2006 deadline.

Michael Diveroli, Efraim’s father, had incorporated the company in 1999, when Efraim was 13. For several years, a period when the company appeared to have limited activity, Michael Diveroli, who now operates a police supply company down the street from AEY’s office, was listed as the company’s sole executive.

In 2004, AEY listed Efraim Diveroli, then 18, as an officer with a 1 percent ownership stake.

The younger Diveroli’s munitions experience appeared to be limited to a short-lived job in Los Angeles for Botach Tactical, a military and police supply company owned by his uncle, Bar-Kochba Botach.

Mr. Diveroli cut off an interview when asked about Botach Tactical. Mr. Botach, reached by telephone, said that both Michael and Efraim Diveroli had briefly worked for him, but that after seeing the rush of federal contracts available after the wars began, they had struck out on their own.

“They just left me and took my customer base with them,” he said. “They basically said: ‘Why should we work for Botach? Let’s do it on our own.’ ”

As Efraim Diveroli arrived in Miami Beach, AEY was transforming itself by aggressively seeking security-related contracts.

It won a $126,000 award for ammunition for the Special Forces; AEY also provided ammunition or equipment in 2004 to the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Transportation Security Administration and the State Department.

By 2005, when Mr. Diveroli became AEY’s president at age 19, the company was bidding across a spectrum of government agencies and providing paramilitary equipment — weapons, helmets, ballistic vests, bomb suits, batteries and chargers for X-ray machines — for American aid to Pakistan, Bolivia and elsewhere.

It was also providing supplies to the American military in Iraq, where its business included a $5.7 million contract for rifles for Iraqi forces.

Two federal officials involved in contracting in Baghdad said AEY quickly developed a bad reputation. “They weren’t reliable, or if they did come through, they did after many excuses,” said one of them, who asked that his name be withheld because he was not authorized to speak with reporters.

By this time, pressures were emerging in Efraim Diveroli’s life. In November 2005, a young woman sought an order of protection from him in the domestic violence division of Dade County Circuit Court.

The woman eventually did not appear in court, and her allegations were never ruled on. But in court papers, the woman said that after her relationship with Mr. Diveroli ended, he stalked her and left threatening messages.

Once, according to the file, his behavior included “shoving her to the ground and refusing to allow her to leave during a verbal dispute.” Other times, she reported, Mr. Diveroli arrived at her home unannounced and intoxicated “going about the exterior, banging on windows and doors.”

The woman worried that she could not ignore him, court records said, because his behavior frightened her.

Mr. Diveroli sought court delays on national security grounds. “I am the President and only official employee of my business,” he wrote to the judge on Dec. 8, 2005. “My business is currently of great importance to the country as I am licensed Defense Contractor to the United States Government in the fight against terrorism in Iraq and I am doing my very best to provide our troops with all their equipment needs on pending critical contracts.”

As AEY’s bid for its largest government contract was being considered, Mr. Diveroli’s personal difficulties continued. On Nov. 26, 2006, the Miami Beach police were called to his condominium during an argument between him and another girlfriend. According to the police report, he had thrown her “clothes out in the hallway and told her to get out.”

A witness told the police Mr. Diveroli had dragged her back into the apartment. The police found the woman crying; she said she had not been dragged. Mr. Diveroli was not charged.

On Dec. 21, 2006, the police were called back to the condominium. Mr. Diveroli and AEY’s vice president, David M. Packouz, had just been in a fight with the valet parking attendant.

The fight began, the police said, after the attendant refused to give Mr. Diveroli his keys and Mr. Diveroli entered the garage to get them himself. A witness said Mr. Diveroli and Mr. Packouz both beat the man; police photographs showed bruises and scrapes on his face and back.

When the police searched Mr. Diveroli, they found he had a forged driver’s license that added four years to his age and made him appear old enough to buy alcohol as a minor. His birthday had been the day before.

“I don’t even need that any more,” he told the police, the report said. “I’m 21 years old.”

Mr. Diveroli was charged with simple battery, a misdemeanor, and felony possession of a stolen or forged document.

The second charge placed his business in jeopardy. Mr. Diveroli had a federal firearms license, which was required for his work. With a felony conviction, the license would be nullified.

(Mr. Packouz was charged with battery and the charge was later dropped; he declined to be interviewed. To avoid a conviction on his record, Mr. Diveroli entered a six-month diversion program for first offenders in May 2007 that spared him from standing trial.)

A relative paid Mr. Diveroli’s $1,000 bail as his bid for the Afghan contract was in its final review.

To be accepted, the company had to be, in Army parlance, “a responsible contractor,” which required an examination of its financial soundness, transport capabilities, past performance and compliance with the law and government contracting regulations.

The week after a relative paid his bail, the Banc of America Investment Services in Miami provided Mr. Diveroli a letter certifying that his company had cash on hand to begin buying munitions on a large scale. It said AEY had $5,469,668.95 in an account.

AEY was awarded the contract in January 2007. Asked why it chose AEY, the Army Sustainment Command answered in writing: “AEY’s proposal represented the best value to the government.”

Eastern Bloc Arsenals

Both the Army and AEY have treated the sources of the ammunition the company purchases as confidential matters, declining to say how and where the company obtained it, the prices paid or the quantities delivered.

But records provided by an official concerned about the company’s performance, a whistle-blower in the Balkans and an arms-trafficking researcher in Europe, as well as interviews with several people who work in state arsenals in Europe, show that AEY shopped from stocks in the old Eastern bloc, including Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania and Slovakia.

These stockpiles range from temperature-controlled bunkers to unheated warehouses packed with exposed, decaying ammunition. Some arsenals contain ammunition regarded in munitions circles as high quality. Others are scrap heaps of abandoned Soviet arms.

The Army’s contract did little to distinguish between the two.

When the United States or NATO buys munitions for themselves, the process is regulated by quality-assurance standards that cover manufacturing, packaging, storage, testing and transport.

The standards exist in part because munitions are perishable. As they age, propellants and explosives degrade, and casings are susceptible to weathering. Environmental conditions — humidity, vibration, temperature shifts — accelerate decay, making munitions less reliable.

NATO rules require ammunition to be tested methodically over its life; samples are fired through braced weapons, and muzzle velocities and accuracy are recorded.

For rifle cartridges, testing begins at age 10 years, according to Peter Courtney-Green, chief of the Ammunition Support Office of NATO’s Maintenance and Supply Agency.

The Soviet Union, which designed the ammunition that AEY bought, developed similar tests, which are still in use. But when the Army wrote its Afghan contract, it did not enforce either NATO or Russian standards. It told bidders only that the munitions must be “serviceable and issuable to all units without qualification.”

What this meant was not defined. An official at the Army Sustainment Command said that because the ammunition was for foreign weapons, and considered “nonstandard,” it only had to fit in weapons it was intended for.

“There is no specific testing request, and there is no age limit,” said Michael Hutchison, the command’s deputy director for acquisition. “As the ammunition is not standard to the U.S. inventory, the Army doesn’t possess packaging or quality standards for that ammo.”

When purchasing such munitions, Mr. Hutchison said, the Army Sustainment Command relies on standards from the “customer” — meaning the Army units in Afghanistan. And the customer, he said, did not set age or testing requirements.

With the vague standards in hand, AEY canvassed the field. One stop was Albania, a fortress state during Soviet times now trying to join NATO. Albania has huge stocks of armaments, much if it provided by China in the 1960s and 1970s.

The quality of these stockpiles vary widely, said William D. G. Hunt, a retired British ammunition technical officer who assessed the entire stock for Albania’s Ministry of Defense from 1998 to 2002. He said a military planning to use the munitions had reason to worry: at least 90 percent of the stockpile was more than 40 years old.

“If there was any procurement made for combat purposes from that stockpile, I would be very dubious about it,” he said. “I am not suggesting that all the ammunition would fail. But its performance would tail off rather dramatically. It is substandard, for sure.”

Problems with Albania’s decaying munitions were apparent earlier this month, when a depot outside Tirana, Albania’s capital, erupted in a chain of explosions, killing at least 22 people, injuring at least 300 others and destroying hundreds of homes.

Before the Army’s contractors began shopping from such depots, the West’s assessment of Albanian munitions was evident in programs it sponsored to destroy them. Through 2007, the United States had contributed $2 million to destroy excess small-caliber weapons and 2,000 tons of ammunition in Albania, according to the State Department.

A NATO program that ended last year involved 16 Western nations contributing about $10 million to destroy 8,700 tons of obsolete ammunition. The United States contributed $500,000. Among the items destroyed were 104 million 7.62 millimeter cartridges — exactly the ammunition AEY sought from the Albanian state arms export agency.

Albania offered to sell tens of millions of cartridges manufactured as long ago as 1950. For tests, a 25-year-old AEY representative was given 1,000 cartridges to fire, according to Ylli Pinari, the director of the arms export agency at the time of the sale.

No ballistic performance was recorded, he said. The rounds were fired by hand.

On that basis, AEY bought more than 100 million cartridges for the Pentagon’s order. The cartridges, according to packing lists, dated to the 1960s.

The company also hired a local businessman, Kosta Trebicka, to remove the ammunition from its wooden crates and hermetically sealed metal boxes — the standard military packaging that protects munitions from moisture and dirt, and helps ensure its reliability and ease of transport in the field.

Mr. Trebicka, in interviews, said Mr. Diveroli wanted to discard the crates and metal boxes to reduce the weight and cost of air shipments and maximize profits. Several American officials said they suspected that the packaging was removed because it bore Chinese markings and the ammunition’s age.

The Czech Connection

As the cartridges in Albania were being prepared for shipment to Afghanistan, Mr. Diveroli began seeking ammunition from the Czech Republic to fill an order for Iraq’s Interior Ministry.

In May 2007, according to two American officials, the Czech government contacted the American Embassy in Prague with a concern: AEY was buying nine million cartridges through Petr Bernatik, a Czech citizen who had been accused by Czech officials of illegal arms trafficking.

The accusations included shipments of rocket-propelled grenades in violation of an international embargo to Congo, and illegal shipments of firearms to Slovakia.

Mr. Bernatik had publicly denied both accusations. But they were deemed credible enough in Washington that he was listed on the Defense Trade Controls watch list, according to one of the American officials.

This list, maintained by the State Department, is used to prevent American dealers from engaging suspicious traders in their business, in part to prevent legal arms companies from enriching or legitimizing black-market networks.

AEY has never been implicated in black-market sales. But the Czech government, which had discretion over the sale, asked the American Embassy if it wanted Mr. Bernatik involved in AEY’s deals, according to the two American officials, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to share the contents of diplomatic discussions.

The United States did not try to block the transaction, one of the American officials said, in part because equipping Iraq was in the United States’ interest, and also because Mr. Bernatik had been accused, not convicted.

On May 7, 2007, the Czech government issued an export license. Mr. Bernatik, in a telephone interview, said he arranged seven flights to Iraq for AEY last year. “We have a normal business collaboration,” he said.

A Mysterious Middleman

The international arms business operates partly in the light and partly in shadows, and is littered with short-lived shell companies, middlemen and official corruption. Governments have tried to regulate it more closely for years, with limited success.

As Mr. Diveroli began to fill the Army’s huge orders, he was entering a shadowy world, and in his brief interview he suggested that he was aware that corruption could intrude on his dealings in Albania. “What goes on in the Albanian Ministry of Defense?” he said. “Who’s clean? Who’s dirty? Don’t want to know about it.”

The way AEY’s business was structured, Mr. Diveroli, at least officially, did not deal directly with Albanian officials. Instead, a middleman company registered in Cyprus, Evdin Ltd., bought the ammunition and sold it to his company.

The local packager involved in the deal, Mr. Trebicka, said that he suspected that Evdin’s purpose was to divert money to Albanian officials.

The purchases, Mr. Trebicka said, were a flip: Albania sold ammunition to Evdin for $22 per 1,000 rounds, he said, and Evdin sold it to AEY for much more. The difference, he said he suspected, was shared with Albanian officials, including Mr. Pinari, then the head of the arms export agency, and the defense minister at the time, Fatmir Mediu.

(Mr. Mediu resigned last week after the ammunition depot explosions; Mr. Pinari was arrested.) The Albanian government has been infuriated by Mr. Trebicka’s allegations. Sali Berisha, the prime minister, Mr. Mediu and Mr. Pinari all denied involvement in kickbacks. But Mr. Trebicka said that after he raised his concerns about Evdin with the Defense Ministry, his company was forced from the repackaging contract.

On June 11, 2007, Mr. Trebicka and Mr. Diveroli commiserated by phone about problems with doing business in Albania. Mr. Trebicka surreptitiously recorded the conversation, and later gave the audio files to American investigators.

The conversation, he said, showed that the American company was aware of corruption in its dealings in Albania and that Heinrich Thomet, a Swiss arms dealer, was behind Evdin.

In the recordings, which Mr. Trebicka shared with The Times, Mr. Diveroli suggests that Mr. Thomet, called “Henri,” was acting as the middleman.

“Pinari needs a guy like Henri in the middle to take care of him and his buddies, which is none of my business,” Mr. Diveroli said. “I don’t want to know about that business. I want to know about legitimate businesses.”

Mr. Diveroli recommended that Mr. Trebicka try to reclaim his contract by sending “one of his girls” to have sex with Mr. Pinari. He suggested that money might help, too.

“Let’s get him happy; maybe he gives you one more chance,” he said. “If he gets $20,000 from you ... ”

At the end, Mr. Diveroli appeared to lament his business with Albania. “It went up higher to the prime minister and his son,” he said. “I can’t fight this mafia. It got too big. The animals just got too out of control.”

In e-mail exchanges, Mr. Thomet denied an official role in Evdin. His involvement in the Albania deal, he said, had been in introducing Mr. Diveroli to potential partners and officials. Bogdan Choopryna, Evdin’s general manager, also said Mr. Diveroli’s allegations were not true. “We listen to the words of Mr. Diveroli, and then I am responsible for what he is saying?” he said. In addition to being an official with Evdin, Mr. Choopryna, 27, markets products for a Swiss company run by Mr. Thomet.

The dispute about Evdin’s role and who owns it remains publicly unresolved. Evdin had incorporated on Sept. 26, 2006 — the week after Mr. Diveroli bid on the Afghan contract, according to Cyprus’s registrar. The company listed its office in Larnaca, Cyprus, and its general director as Pambos Fellas.

A visit by a reporter to the address found an accounting business above a nightclub. Evdin had no office or staff there. And Mr. Fellas, who was inside, said that he was not Evdin’s general director, but “a nominee director” whose sole role was to register the company.

He had registered hundreds of such companies for a fee, he said, and knew nothing of Evdin’s business.

Some signs point back to Switzerland. Mr. Pinari initially told two reporters that he worked with Evdin via Mr. Thomet. (After a reporter told Mr. Thomet this, Mr. Pinari changed his story, referring the reporter to Mr. Fellas and Evdin’s office in Cyprus.) Mr. Diveroli also said the Cyprus company was run by a “Swiss individual.”

Mr. Thomet has been accused in the past by private groups, including Amnesty International, of arranging illegal arms transfers under a shifting portfolio of corporate names. His activities have also caused concern in Washington, where, like Mr. Bernatik, he and Evdin are on the Defense Trade Controls watch list, an American official said.

Mr. Thomet said past claims that he had engaged in illegal arms trading were caused by “false statements by former competitors.”

Hugh Griffiths, operations manager of the Arms Transfer Profile Initiative, a private organization that researches illicit arms transfers, described Mr. Thomet as a broker with contacts in former Eastern bloc countries with stockpiles and arms factories. His proximity to AEY’s purchases, Mr. Griffiths said, raised questions about whether the Pentagon was adequately vetting the business done in its name.

“Put very simply, many of the people involved in smuggling arms to Africa are also exactly the same as those involved in Pentagon-supported deals, like AEY’s shipments to Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

Under the suspension ordered Wednesday, the Army planned to continue accepting ammunition it had already ordered from AEY. As of March 21, it had ordered $155 million of munitions, according to the Army Sustainment Command.

In Afghanistan, American munitions officers are examining all of the small-arms ammunition AEY has shipped. The final shipment, which arrived in wooden crates, included loose and corroded cartridges, according to three officers. At Rock Island Arsenal, the contracting authority said it was cooperating with investigators, who have also visited Albania and Afghanistan.

And in Miami Beach, even before the suspension, AEY had lost staff members. Michael Diveroli, the company’s founder, told a reporter that he no longer had any relationship with the company. Mr. Packouz, who was AEY’s vice president, and Levi Meyer, 25, who was briefly listed as general manager, had left the company, too.

Mr. Meyer offered a statement: “I’m not involved in that mess anymore.”

C. J Chivers reported from Nawa, Afghanistan, Russia and Ukraine; Eric Schmitt from Washington and Miami Beach; and Nicholas Wood from Tirana, Albania. Reporting was contributed by Alain Delaquérière and Margot Williams from New York, James Glanz from Baghdad, and Stefanos Evripidou from Cyprus.

NYTimes.com

March 17, 2008 

Families Sue Chiquita in Deaths of 5 Men

By CARMEN GENTILE

MIAMI — Tania Julin remembers hearing the distinct sound of feet racing through the dark Panamanian forest moments before armed masked men burst through the door of the modest hut she shared with her husband.

Ms. Julin and her husband, Mark Rich, were missionaries living in a remote village just miles from the Colombian border when the gunmen — leftist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC — descended on the village.

At gunpoint, Ms. Julin was ordered to pack a bag for her husband, and then Mr. Rich and two other men, Charles David Mankin and Richard Lee Tenenoff, were marched out of their homes, flanked by the gunmen who chattered in Spanish and fired into the air.

“That was the last time we saw ours husbands,” Ms. Julin said, recalling the night of Jan. 31, 1993.

A year later, FARC rebels abducted two other missionaries, Stephen Walsh and Timothy Van Dyke. The authorities said Mr. Rich and the four other captives were killed by the rebels, though their bodies have not been recovered.

Last week, Ms. Julin, who has remarried, and the widows of the four other men filed a lawsuit against Chiquita Brands International Inc., saying the company contributed to their husbands’ deaths by financing the leftist group.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court here, seeks unspecified damages for the families of the victims affiliated with the New Tribes Mission, based in Sanford, Fla.

The 63-page complaint asserts that Chiquita provided “numerous and substantial hidden payments” to the rebels in addition to weapons and supplies. That financing, the plaintiffs say, contributed to the deaths of the five men because Chiquita had in fact supported “acts of terrorism.”

Colombia and the United States have designated FARC a terrorist organization.

Ed Loyd, a spokesman for Chiquita, which is based in Cincinnati, said payments to FARC were made during the 1990s to ensure the safety of Chiquita employees working on banana plantations near the Panamanian border, a former stronghold of the leftist guerrillas.

Later, after FARC was forced out of the region by the right-wing paramilitary force known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, Chiquita continued the practice of paying for protection.

“We always acted to protect the lives of our employees, and the threat was very real,” Mr. Loyd said.

In March 2007, the company pleaded guilty to paying $1.7 million from 1997 to 2004 to the United Self-Defense Forces — also considered terrorists by Colombia and the United States — and agreed to pay $25 million in fines. The company has since admitted to also paying FARC.

Those developments prompted Ms. Julin and the other wives to seek compensation for their loss, she said.

“It took a while to sink in what they were admitting to,” Ms. Julin said. “It was a slow realization that they played a role in my husband’s death, that one of those guns could have been used to kill my husband.”

Chiquita officials disagree. In a telephone interview, Mr. Loyd said that the lawsuit’s assertion that Chiquita armed FARC rebels was “categorically untrue” and that the company would “vigorously defend” itself against the accusations.

Gary Osen, one of several lawyers for the plaintiffs, said his clients’ lawsuit — along with at least four others accusing Chiquita of complicity in killings carried out by the rebel groups — would be brought under the civil provision of the antiterrorism law.

The law states that any United States national “injured in his or her person, property, or business by reason of an act of international terrorism” can sue for damages in any appropriate federal court “and shall recover threefold the damages he or she sustains and the cost of the suit, including attorney’s fees.”

Adam Isacson, director of the Colombia program at the Center for International Policy in Washington, said compensation for the families of the slain men was not a foregone conclusion.

“It’s not a criminal case, so will the court require Chiquita to pay the families? I don’t know,” said Mr. Isacson, who has been following the litigation.

He said Chiquita was just one of many companies doing business in Colombia that paid “protection money” to rebel groups, the price of doing business in a notoriously violent country.

Ms. Julin said she and the others who lost their husbands to FARC do not see it that way.

“Chiquita was there to make money and fund these people,” she said. “How could anybody be involved in something like this without regard to the human lives lost?”

The Washington Times

Article published Feb 28, 2008

U.S. unable to judge 'fence'

February 28, 2008

By Jerry Seper - The Department of Homeland Security spent $20 million on a "virtual fence" to better secure 28 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona but has no way to measure its effectiveness and never consulted with the field agents who will use the system before it was installed, two House subcommittees learned yesterday.

During a hearing at which some members angrily challenged department officials to say how much it will cost to secure the entire border and when that effort will be completed, U.S. Border Patrol Chief David V. Aguilar acknowledged the agency does not "have the means" to measure how many people are crossing illegally into the United States under the new system at the project site, south of Tucson.

The virtual fence, known as "Project 28," uses high-tech sensors, cameras and other technology along a 28-mile stretch of the border near Sasabe, Ariz. It has been highly touted by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

Chief Aguilar also confirmed at a joint hearing of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on border, maritime and global counterterrorism and the subcommittee on management, investigations and oversight that the $20.6 million fixed-price contract given to Boeing Co. in September did not allow discussions with the field agents on how the system would best fit their needs — a "problem" he said that needs to be fixed.

He said future projects in Yuma, Ariz., and El Paso, Texas, will include increased input from Border Patrol personnel. They are expected to be completed by the end of 2011.

His admissions came after Richard Stana, director of homeland security and justice issues at the GovernmentAccountability Office, said that after visiting the site on three occasions, GAO investigators did not know what criteria the department used to accept the project and concluded that field agents were not consulted.

He said not all of the Border Patrol agents in the Tucson sector, all part of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), have been trained on Project 28, although the system is expected to be replaced.

Mr. Stana also said a task order for the project mandated that the system be able to detect 95 percent of people crossing the border illegally, which had not been met. He said the project did not meet expectations and was not "the ultimate system" that had been envisioned.

He also said Homeland Security's goal of building 370 miles of pedestrian fences and 300 miles of vehicle barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border by the end of this year as part of the multibillion-dollar Secure Border Initiative (SBI) may be more challenging and costly than planned.

"Meeting deadlines has been difficult because of various factors including difficulties in acquiring rights to border lands," he said.

"Moreover, CBP officials are unable to estimate the total cost of pedestrian and vehicle fencing because they do not yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed, the materials to be used and the cost to acquire the land."

Gregory Giddens, executive director of SBI, said modifications were under way and the department hoped to alleviate shortfalls in Project 28 this year. He said the agency collected $2.2 million from Boeing for project delays.

But Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., New Jersey Democrat, described the delays as "unacceptable" and asked why the department did not know ahead of time that most of the property on which it plans to build a fence is privately owned.

"We are 98 yards from the goal line, which is where we started 5 1/2 years ago," said Mr. Pascrell, demanding that Homeland Security say how much it was going to cost taxpayers to secure the nation's borders. None of the three department officials at the hearing had an answer.

"After 5 1/2 years, someone should be able to answer the question without a bunch of malarkey," he said.

Rep. Mark Souder, Indiana Republican, said it was Mr. Chertoff who made Project 28 "a big deal" but the committee "can't get any figures now on how much the border fence is going to cost and when it will be done."

SBI is a multiyear, multibillion-dollar program aimed at securing the nation's borders and reducing illegal immigration.

It includes programs for a comprehensive border-protection system through a mix of pedestrian fences and vehicle barriers, along with radars, sensors, cameras and satellite phones.

Senate OK's immunity on wiretaps