The Other Paravant Scandal

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


When salacious details emerge about run-amok contractors, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture—the reason why these scandals keep happening and happening and happening. So what’s the big picture, you ask? Great question. Let me tell you. In military parlance, oversight is FUBAR. (If you don’t know what that means, look it up.) And the Paravant/Blackwater scandal I’ve been reporting on for the past few days is a perfect case study in what happens when oversight goes AWOL. Yes, the firm’s personnel acted recklessly and knowingly violated military regulations—even the company acknowledges that—but no one bothered to stop them, to enforce the rules in place. As an investigation by Sen. Carl Levin’s armed services committee documents, there was mass confusion about who was actually responsible for monitoring Paravant on the ground.

Ultimately Paravant had a contract with Raytheon. Raytheon had a contract with the Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation. PEO STRI, headquartered in Orlando, Florida and without a rep on the ground, says it relied on a Dutch military officer attached to NATO’s Combined Security Training Center-Afghanistan. That officer’s supervisor told Levin’s committee he had “no idea” why anyone would think this officer was responsible for Paravant—in fact, he knew of no one at CSTC-A who was. And things got even more ridiculous from there.

From Levin’s opening statement at yesterday’s hearing:

Emails from late April 2009 show that approximately six months into the contract, there was still confusion about oversight of Paravant personnel. When issues arose about a shortage of contractor personnel performing at one training site and concerns were raised as to whether they were performing up to U.S. Army standards, the Chief of the Afghan National Army Training & Education (CJ7) at CSTC-A said that Brian McCracken, who had recently moved from Paravant to Raytheon, would be responsible for monitoring Paravant and would be coordinating oversight of the contracts. Until his arrival in Afghanistan in late April 2009, no one from Raytheon had been stationed in country to monitor Paravant, apparently resulting in months of inadequate supervision.

To recap: The military thought a former Paravant and current Raytheon employee—and an individual at least partially responsible for Paravant’s rule-breaking in regards to weapons—was an appropriate source of oversight. It’s easy to pile on Blackwater, Paravant, Raytheon, and other wayward contractors. The hard part is figuring out once and for all how to fix the broken oversight system that has allowed contractor abuses to repeatedly undercut US foreign policy objectives.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate