....personel employed by Lockheed Martin.
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Meet the New Interrogators: Lockheed Martin
by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
November 4th, 2005
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert town of El Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons. They were going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a legalistic tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up, they got a $2,000 check from a company that is rapidly becoming one of the key employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed Martin, the world's biggest military company, based in Bethesda, Maryland.
Before deployment to Iraq, they assemble in Building 503 on Pleasanton Road to mingle with the soldiers and government civilian workers at the welcome briefing that takes place every Sunday. There they get a government-issued duffel bag, filled with basic items for working in the war in the Middle East: cargo pants, tactical shirts, Kevlar helmets and Land Warrior chemical masks. After a week of orientation and medical processing, they fly to Tampa, Florida, and onto their final work destinations -- Iraq's infamous prisons including Abu Ghraib, Camp Cropper, a prison at Baghdad International Airport, and Camp Whitehorse, near Nasariyah.
Known in the intelligence community as "97 Echoes" (97E is the official classification number for the interrogator course taught at military colleges including Fort Huachuca, Arizona), these contractors will work side-by-side with military interrogators conducting question-and-answer sessions using 17 officially sanctioned techniques, ranging from "love of comrades" to "fear up harsh." Their subjects will be the tens of thousands of men thrown into United States-run military jails on suspicion of links to terrorism.
The rules that govern all interrogators, both contract and military, are currently open to broad interpretation. Today there is much legal wrangling about where to draw the line between harsh treatment and torture. An amendment to the latest military spending bill introduced by Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, explicitly bars the use of torture on anyone in Unites States custody. His amendment was recently approved by a 90 to 9 votes in the United States Senate and is currently being negotiated in "conference" by both Houses of Congress this week before going to President Bush. McCain is fighting off Vice President Dick Cheney's suggestion that Central Intelligence Agency counter-terrorism agents working overseas be exempted from the torture ban.
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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12757http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0903-02.htm