The complaint was filed this Jan. 31 in U.S. District Court in Oregon by former ICI vice president and co-owner Danny O’Brien and his wife, Lorrie, who live in Lakewood, Wash. The lawsuit names Boquist; his wife, Peggy; and their business partner, Marcus Hines of Arizona, as defendants.

The complaint says Boquist forced the O’Briens out of the firm, ICI Wyoming, at the end of last year, following a disagreement over the direction of the company.

After Boquist forced the O’Briens out, the complaint says, the company’s bookkeeper resigned. The bookkeeper, lawsuit says, then provided the O’Briens with evidence that Boquist and his wife had been secretly diverting money from the firm to other projects, including a new company they had started in 2008 called Powder River Cartridge Company, LLC.

Through this new company, the complaint says, “the Boquists directed thousands of dollars of revenue generated by ICI Wyoming to their own use and without [the O'Briens'] knowledge or consent, including but not limited to political campaign contributions for causes supported or advocated by Defendant Brian Boquist, in his capacity as an Oregon State Senator.”

I followed up this news in another article for WW, which explained in greater detail how Boquist makes his money, but I never heard back from any of the plaintiffs. Nick R. Martin at Talking Points Memo also followed up, but succeeded only in obtaining a cryptic comment from Boquist’s wife.

Sell moral responsibility

The mass surveillance industry is a large one — estimates now put the global market at $5 billion per year. The businesspeople getting rich from the crackdown industry don’t often talk to the media, but some of the few who do can seem less than concerned about their potential role in their clients’ violence.

Jerry Lucas is the president of Telestragies Inc, the company that runs ISS World, the trade show circuit (also known as the “Wiretapper’s Ball”) that brings these companies and their clients together. Asked by the Guardian in November if he would be comfortable knowing that regimes in Zimbabwe and North Korea were purchasing the technology from his trade shows, he responded, “That’s just not my job to determine who’s a bad country and who’s a good country.” He added, “That’s not our business, we’re not politicians … we’re a for-profit company. Our business is bringing governments together who want to buy this technology.”

• Read more at The Atlantic

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“The fact that half of the contractors experienced revenue growth continues a long-term trend that government contractors are far less vulnerable than commercial companies to recessions or slow growth in the overall economy,” said retired Vice Adm. Lewis (Lou) Crenshaw Jr., Grant Thornton LLP’s National Aerospace and Defense practice leader. “However, the 29 percent of companies experiencing revenue reductions is the highest percentage reported in several surveys, which may indicate that the government’s efforts to reduce deficits are having a negative impact on contractor revenue.”

• Read more at Govpro

“Afghans themselves see corruption as pervasive; it affects nearly every aspect of their lives and leads to security concerns, limited economic development, and human rights abuses…”

“[A] large majority of Afghans (76%) see corruption as a major problem in the country; only 5% said it was not a problem…

Corruption frequently affects Afghans in their daily life: 56% saw it as a major daily problem…”

Assuming this survey is accurate, that works out to roughly 17.3 million Afghans who personally deal with corruption on a daily basis.

Also assuming, as the survey indicates, that perceived corruption in Afghanistan takes the form of bribery about 17 percent of the time, one can venture a wild, unscientific guessestimate of the number of bribes that Afghans are asked to pay every year.

That number is just north of 1 billion, or approximately 3 million bribes a day.

I can hear the statisticians screaming. These are huge assumptions. Trying to put a number on bribery in one of the world’s most corrupt countries using a public opinion survey is about as reliable as asking teenagers how often they masturbate. But the surveys do give some sense of scale.

All the information above is quoted from a report released today by U.S. military auditors. The report, a quarterly update from the Office of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, also offers some numbers on the work it did to tackle that corruption problem during the last three months of 2011.

Here are a few “accomplishments” the office thought noteworthy:

• completed three audits…
• participated in investigations that resulted in two individuals sentenced for bribery…
• referred 40 individuals and companies for suspension and debarment
• opened 20 new investigations…

SIGAR, as this auditing office is known, has a staff of 133. That’s clearly not enough to cover a war that’s costing U.S. taxpayers more than $2 billion a week. And many government and military auditors are honest, dedicated people doing the best they can in a bureaucracy that can bring tremendous pressure to bear against them.

That said, even the most cash-strapped, podunk county prosecutor’s office would be embarrassed by these numbers. Three audits completed. Two bribery convictions. Three million bribes a day.

No wonder “Afghans also said that ISAF and international development partners need to play larger roles in efforts to address the problem.”

The report is titled “10 Years of Reconstruction,” as though what it contains were somehow worth celebrating. In it, the word failure appears 7 times. The word progress appears 81 times.

What the auditors, however well-meaning, cannot say is that the International Security Assistance Force—which brings boatloads of American dollars into the country, and tries to make legitimate statesmen out of guys who are essentially gang leaders—plays a large role in enabling corruption in Afghanistan.

To wit, here’s another “important development” the report offers as a sign of progress:

[T]he MoM awarded China National Petroleum Corporation International (CNPC) the rights to develop three oil blocks in the Amu Darya Basin in the north. The MoM estimated that the basin contains more than 80 million barrels of crude oil reserves, plus a potential of 80 million barrels in yet-to-be discovered reserves. CNPC agreed to pay the government a 15% royalty and has partnered with Watan Oil and Gas Afghanistan Ltd. to begin production within a year.

The U.S. Army banned Watan Oil and Gas from receiving contracts a full two years ago for—you guessed it—corruption! Its security affiliate, Watan Risk Management, is affiliated with some notorious relatives of the U.S.-backed President, Hamid Karzai. Now that the Chinese are paying them, instead of the Americans, everything is presumably above-board.

Progress!

Sell formalities

President Barack Obama’s administration has been delaying its planned $53 million arms sale to Bahrain due to human rights concerns and congressional opposition, but this week administration officials told several congressional offices that they will move forward with a new and different package of arms sales — without any formal notification to the public.

The congressional offices that led the charge to oppose the original Bahrain arms sales package are upset that the State Department has decided to move forward with the new package. The opposition to Bahrain arms sales is led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA), and also includes Senate Foreign Relations Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee chairman Robert Casey (D-PA), Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-IL), and Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), and Marco Rubio (R-FL).

Wyden and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) have each introduced a resolution in their respective chambers to prevent the U.S. government from going through with the original sale, which would have included 44 armored, high-mobility Humvees and over 300 advanced missiles.

• Read more at Foreign Policy

You can read POGO’s report online here. A couple of years ago, while living in New Mexico, I wrote a primer on this project for the Santa Fe Reporter, which remains online here.

It seems odd, doesn’t it? How did a $6 billion nuclear weapons program—a program, as POGO notes, that seems at odds with Obama’s stated nukes policy—slip by without mention during the recent debate over military spending? Aren’t nuclear weapons, after all, the constant preoccupation of all foreign and national security thought—not just within the U.S., but around the world?

In the shallowest sense, the omission is understandable, considering how amazing it is that there was such a debate at all, given the militaristic drift of the past decade.

But ultimately I believe there’s one overarching reason why you’ve probably heard little to nothing about this project: Language. Specifically, the language of obfuscation.

The nuke lab in question will be run by the Department of Energy, not the Department of Defense. This is a longstanding bureaucratic fact of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, but nonetheless similar to the shell game whereby the costs of American private security contractors in Iraq shifted to the Department of State prior the withdrawal of military ground forces.

It’s also not called a nuke lab. Instead, it’s euphemistically described as a “chemistry and metallurgy” facility—still awake?—and a “replacement” one at that. So it’s not even really new, you see!

I could be wrong, of course. It could be that Americans really do care about the development of nuclear weapons—just not their own.

Buy maquiladora

In the past five to 10 years, more than 50 aerospace and defense companies have started operations in Baja California, according to Mexico’s trade ministry. Most of them are American, and they produce everything from electronic components to steel bolts for commercial and military aircraft.

These companies employ more than 10,000 high-tech workers, many of them engineers, technicians and software developers. The companies choose this region for its proximity to the US and to western ports catering to Asian markets.

But the main reason they come here is simple: the cost of even highly skilled labor is roughly half of what it is in the United States. In San Diego, a senior aerospace engineer makes on average $90,000. In Tijuana, an engineer with similar skills earns $35,000 to $45,000.

• Read more at The World

Buy private registration

Any drone flying over 400 feet needs a certification or authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration, part of the DOT. But there is currently no information available to the public about who specifically has obtained these authorizations or for what purposes. EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act request in April of 2011 for records of unmanned aircraft activities, but the DOT so far has failed to provide the information.

“Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans’ movements and activities,” said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Lynch. “As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens.”

• Read more at EFF

Buy bulletproof glass

The Taliban have announced that they intend to open an office in Qatar as part of a process that could lead to peace negotiations to end the war in Afghanistan. Turkey had been the Afghanistan government’s original preferred location for an office, and the Turkish government was on board, too. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai also proposed Saudi Arabia to host the office, but the Taliban refused.

• Read more at EurasiaNet

Buy Ford tough

Ford Motor Co. is leading a push by commercial-truck makers to challenge defense contractors for a potential $54 billion in work replacing U.S. military Humvees with blast-proof all-terrain vehicles.

The Army and Marine Corps plan to open competition Jan. 20 in the second development phase for their Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. Truck manufacturers Ford, Navistar International Corp. and Oshkosh Corp. may take on teams led by defense companies General Dynamics Corp., Lockheed Martin Corp. and BAE Systems Plc that won the three first-stage contracts.

Congress added language to this year’s defense spending bill prodding the military to embrace “off-the-shelf technology demonstrated by industry” to develop vehicles that can better protect troops from improvised explosive devices. Ford has met with aides on Capitol Hill and Pentagon officials to pitch its case for building the battle-ready trucks and bypassing the usual acquisition process.

• Read more at BusinessWeek

Sell human capital

The 194 schools that are actually run by the Pentagon have their own problems. The iWatchNews investigation found that three in four Pentagon-run schools are either beyond repair or would require extensive renovation to meet minimum standards. But the Pentagon has already made plans to renovate or replace 134 of those schools with the worst problems over the next five years.

• Read more at iWatch News

Buy a happy face

Defense contractor Raytheon Co. received two contracts worth a total of $212.8 million to make the Evolved Seasparrow Missile, with an option for $33 million in additional work.

One of the contracts for the missiles is from the U.S. Navy. The other is to make supply parts for missiles that will be made by Japan’s Mitsubishi Electric Corp. for the Japanese Ministry of Defense.

• Read more at CBS News

Buy victims

Days after the last U.S. troops left Iraq, a federal appeals court ended a lawsuit over an episode that produced one of the more disturbing images of the war: the grisly killings of four Blackwater security contractors and the hanging of a pair of their bodies from a bridge in Fallujah.

Families of the victims reached a confidential settlement with the company’s corporate successor, Arlington, Va.-based Academi, and the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the suit last week. The settlement was first reported Friday by The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Va.

• Read more at Boston Globe

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Two provisions in the 2012 Defense Authorization Bill directly impact defense contractors. One applies to a contractor pay cap to all contract employees, and the other puts more responsibility on contractors to stop counterfeit electronic parts.

The bill prohibits contractors from charging more than $690,000 for the salary of any of its employees. That incremental pay cap, had previously only applied to a contractor’s top five executives.

• Read more at Federal News Radio

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A top executive at Lockheed Martin recently worked with lobbyists for Bahrain to place an Op-Ed defending the nation’s embattled regime in the Washington Times — but the newspaper did not reveal the role of the regime’s lobbyists to its readers. Hence they did not know that the pro-Bahrain opinion column they were reading was published at the behest of … Bahrain, an oil-rich kingdom of 1.2 million people that has been rocked by popular protests since early 2011.

The episode is a glimpse into the usually hidden world of how Washington’s Op-Ed pages, which are prized real estate for those with interests before the U.S. government, are shaped. It also shows how Lockheed gave an assist to a major client — Bahrain has bought hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons from the company over the years – as it faces widespread criticism for human rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters.

• Read more at Salon

Buy Brazil

It looks like the battle over supplying the Afghan air force with new planes is going to heat up.

First, Flight Global is reporting the latest:

A $355 million contract award by the US Air Force to prime contractor Sierra Nevada for 20 Embraer EMB-314 Super Tucanos on 30 December faces legal and political challenges from ousted bidder Hawker Beechcraft.

• Read more at Ottawa Citizen

TAPI, as the pipeline is known, ought to be called TBD. It’s been a Big Oil dream since the mid-1990s, and a decade’s-long American military presence in the region has brought it no closer to reality. The Afghan news outfit Killid Media reported yesterday that “Little has happened on the TAPI natural gas project involving four countries a year after [an] agreement was signed by the governments.”

Planners are promising the project could be in operation by 2016. … Work which was delayed by security concerns will start from early 2012 and finish in two years…

Are the pipeline planners scheduling based on the projected 2014 timeline for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, or vice-versa? Does it matter? Either way, there are signs that the U.S. government is doubling down on the project as Pakistani leaders have indicated they might prefer a competing pipeline proposed to connect Pakistan and a U.S. adversary, Iran.

Pakistan’s Express Tribune reports:

Addressing students of Lahore University of Management Sciences…US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter had termed Pakistan-Iran gas pipeline deal unfeasible. A viable alternative, in his view, was the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan- Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project via Afghanistan. …

Sources inform The Express Tribune that the Export-Import Bank (EIB) of the United States as well as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), an “independent” US agency, have offered Pakistan financing for TAPI.

The U.S. is also the key shareholder in the Asian Development Bank, another financing agency for TAPI, as W.I.B. noted previously.

But promises of more American dollars may ring hollow, as the following letter in a prominent English-language Pakistani newspaper about the competing pipeline projects suggests.

“Pakistan,” the letter begins, will “not take any dictation from anyone.”

The gas pipeline project with Iran is a lifeline for us for overcoming the energy crisis. The US energy team…came up with a strange demand that Pakistan should abandon this project and instead offered assistance for the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project (TAPI) as an alternative option. …

Washington has already successfully persuaded India to jump out of the deal, leaving Iran and Pakistan to implement the project. It is an undeniable fact that Pakistan has no cheaper and safer option than getting the Iranian gas. The laying of the pipeline on our side of the border must be taken up immediately, since Iran has already constructed their part of the pipeline up to Pakistani border. Any effort to undo this vital project would be a criminal act against national interests.

Catch that? While the American-backed pipeline might be done in two years’ time, the Iranian-backed pipeline is already built up to the border with Pakistan, just waiting for the hookup.

Happy New Year!

Buy magnifying glasses

Federal agencies have proposed blocking 1,006 companies and individuals from contracting so far this year, as well as asking a judge to ban a unit of food-processing giant Cargill Inc. of Minneapolis, in a process known as debarment. That is 16 percent more than the 868 contractors that governmental agencies proposed to block in all of 2010, and only 70 fewer than the 1,076 contractors that U.S. agencies sought to debar under Bush from 2005 to 2008, according to the General Services Administration.

• Read more at San Francisco Chronicle

Buy first-person shooters

The British military has had to radically improve some of its simulated training war games to keep the attention of recruits who have grown up in the Playstation and Xbox generation, a Ministry of Defence scientist has admitted.

Troops are so used to playing high-quality commercial games set in combat zones that they tend to lose concentration unless the MoD simulations look equally realistic. This has become an important issue at the MoD, which is increasingly turning to digital simulations to help prepare soldiers for duty.

Thousands of troops sent to Afghanistan have been trained on Virtual Battlespace2, a spin-off from a commercial game that can, for instance, test their responses when they come under mortar attack from insurgents.

• Read more at Guardian

Buy resolution

New helicopter-style drones with 1.8 gigapixel colour cameras are being developed by the US Army.

The army said the technology promised “an unprecedented capability to track and monitor activity on the ground”.

A statement added that three of the sensor-equipped drones were due to go into service in Afghanistan in either May or June.

Boeing built the first drones, but other firms can bid to manufacture others.

• Read more at BBC

Buy airspace

U.S. officials say the Obama administration is poised to announce the sale of nearly $30 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia.

Officials say the deal will send 84 new fighter jets and upgrades for 70 more, for a total of $29.4 billion.

• Read more at Associated Press

Buy Nippon

The government seeks to relax the ban to allow Japanese firms to participate arms development and production projects with other countries.

The move is designed to revitalize the domestic defense industry and cut defense spending.

• Read more at RIA Novosti

Sell second chances

A private Canadian security contractor guarding a U.S. army base near Kandahar fired, then re-hired, an Afghan man who went on to attack a group of unarmed American soldiers inside the military compound, killing two and wounding four.

The deadly rampage by the Afghan employee of Toronto-based Tundra Strategies occurred in March at the Canadian-built Forward Operating Base Frontenac, but details of the attack – which ended when the rogue security guard was killed by return fire from U.S. troops – have only emerged this week.

The key finding in a newly released U.S. army probe of the attack is that Tundra officials had fired the Afghan man from another base in July 2010 after receiving unconfirmed reports that he had talked about killing coalition soldiers.

The army report, dated April 14, found that the guard, Shir Ahmed, had been re-hired in March after Tundra failed to properly document the 2010 firing and because of “vague and confusing” vetting protocols within the U.S. military.

• Read more at Times & Transcript

Buy solidarity

More than 350 employees of defense contractor URS Federal Services at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have voted to join the Machinists union.

• Read more at Seattle Times