U.S. addresses control of security companies

Pentagon officials are moving to tighten control over security contractors whose intelligence-gathering activities in Iraq are largely outside the control of U.S., military, international or Iraqi law.

Worried about the lack of oversight of the companies, and the nebulous relationship between them and the military, the Pentagon said it was moving to bring them into line.

“It’s clear that it warrants review, and we are looking at it,” Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, said yesterday after a talk at the American Enterprise Institute.

Several security firms have been used by the military and the CIA to help hunt down suspects and aid in their interrogation, former intelligence officers and lawyers have said, circumventing the normal military or civilian chain of command.

“We are trying to tighten the rules by which these people operate,” Peter W. Rodman, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.

It was important to make the companies “accountable to military people so they are properly carrying out the roles they are there for,” he said, just days before a scandal regarding the treatment of Iraqi prisoners broke in the media.

Citing an army official, Reuters news agency reported that a prisoner was killed at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad in November 2003 by a private contractor working as an interrogator for the CIA.

Pentagon, Centcom and Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF-7) officials in Baghdad said they were not able to comment on the report.

Employees of security firm CACI International — an Arlington company that advertises its intelligence gathering and analytical services — are suspected of being involved in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Pentagon officials are looking into the terms of CACI’s contract and have said action will be taken if something went wrong.

A lawyer close to the abuse case said the contract was likely a “black world” operation that fell under the purview of the CIA. The lawyer said the military was working on a secret report that deals in part with the role of private security contractors and other members of the intelligence community in prisons in Iraq.

“These are people that the military has hired to assist in investigations,” said one former senior intelligence officer involved in Iraq. He said that some of those employed are retired CIA operatives who have been brought back, usually because of their language abilities.

“I can see them being used in roles of interpreter, but anything beyond that is shocking. I think it’s disgraceful. If you can’t do it yourself, you shouldn’t be contracting it out,” he said.

The ex-intelligence officer said he doubted the military was hiring these contractors to escape accountability so much as to abbreviate the “tortuous tunnels of lawyers and decision makers all the way up the chain.”

“If you have a private firm doing this, aiding in intelligence gathering, you skip all that. Once you sign a contract, you’re done,” he said, adding that the Abu Ghraib incident was not likely to be an isolated case.

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