The Shadow Forces?

The following paragraph is excerpted from Sean Penn's account of his late 2003 trip to Iraq (also covered here). As background, the renowned actor was recounting his unexpected encounter with individuals that he says claimed to be DynCorp employees, then adds, apropos of nothing in his story (other than a delusional "movie star's" sense of being in a thriller):

As an aside, DynCorp personnel, contracted to the U.N. police who served in Bosnia, were accused of buying and selling prostitutes, including girls as young as 12 years old. When several DynCorp employees were also accused of videotaping the rape of one of the women, employee Kathy Bolkovac blew the whistle on the alleged sex ring and was immediately dismissed from the company. DynCorp is a "top 25" government contractor, which posted $2.3 billion in revenues in 2002, according to Business Week. It is DynCorp employees who are the security force for the new Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. Former CIA Director James Woolsey is a primary stockholder.

As my own aside: this is deplorable behavior, for which the death penalty is too good. I will not make light of it, but perhaps Mr. Penn could some day provide details as to the outcome of this rape case? Apparently there's an abundance of evidence, but the only documented action I can find is that a British court found in favor of a DynCorp employee in a wrongful termination suit, and an out-of-court settlement was reached with another individual for the same reasons - wrongful termination. Was this some Clinton-era sex scandal cover up? Why is this story cropping up on left wing chat sites now with DynCorp getting contracts in Iraq and not years ago when it happened? See here, here, here, and here.

And note this interesting spin from an article in the Observer:

DynCorp, which has donated more than ?100,000 to the Republican Party, began recruiting for a private police force in Iraq last week on behalf of the US State Department.

The awarding of such a sensitive contract to DynCorp has caused consternation in some circles over the company's policing record. A British employment tribunal recently forced DynCorp to pay ?110,000 in compensation to a UN police officer it unfairly sacked in Bosnia for whistleblowing on DynCorp colleagues involved in an illegal sex ring.

Whoops! Although stating the donations to the Republican party, the time frame of the court case is obscured to "recently". And are we to assume that DynCorp has given nothing to the Democrats?

To be fair, the Observer piece does note this:

DynCorp has also been heavily criticised over its involvement in Plan Colombia, instigated by Bill Clinton, that involves spraying vast quantities of herbicides over Colombia to kill the cocaine crop.

A group of Ecuadorean peasants have filed a class action against the company alleging that herbicides spread by DynCorp in Colombia were drifting across the border, killing legitimate crops, causing illness, and killing children. The company denies the charges.

Certainly DynCorp earned that contract from Mr. Clinton fair and square on corporate merit, and never had to offer any deal-sweetening contributions to the Democratic party.

But if DynCorp's history of raping and murdering children is true, then given that the individuals Mr. Penn encountered in Iraq merely detained him long enough to determine that his video of their building did not reveal any security information, and noting that they then returned his equipment and sent him on his way, one might assume this shadowy group is behaving a bit better under the watchdogs of the current administration.