Reply #19: Pete and Repeat [View All]

[BrotherBuzz]

I think I posted this to you on the other thread, but I think it's a good summary and bears repeating.

www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/163052.html

DynCorp Disgrace

<snip>

Johnston was on the ground and saw firsthand what the military was complaining about. "My main
problem," he explains, "was with the kids, but I wasn't too happy with them ripping off the
government, either. DynCorp is just as immoral and elite as possible, and any rule they can break they
do. There was this one guy who would hide parts so we would have to wait for parts and, when the
military would question why it was taking so long, he'd pull out the part and say 'Hey, you need to
install this.' They'd have us replace windows in helicopters that weren't bad just to get paid. They
had one kid, James Harlin, over there who was right out of high school and he didn't even know the
names and purposes of the basic tools. Soldiers that are paid $18,000 a year know more than this kid,
but this is the way they grease their pockets. What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a
warm body Ñ that's the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don't do an eight-hour day, they'll sign you in
for it because that's how they bill the government. It's a total fraud."

Remember, Johnston was fired by this company. He laughs bitterly recalling the work habits of a
DynCorp employee in Bosnia who "weighed 400 pounds and would stick cheeseburgers in his pockets
and eat them while he worked. The problem was he would literally fall asleep every five minutes. One
time he fell asleep with a torch in his hand and burned a hole through the plastic on an aircraft." This
same man, according to Johnston, "owned a girl who couldn't have been more than 14 years old. It's
a sick sight anyway to see any grown man with a child, but to see some 45-year-old man who weighs
400 pounds with a little girl, it just makes you sick." It is precisely these allegations that Johnston
believes got him fired.

Johnston reports that he had been in Bosnia only a few days when he became aware of misbehavior
in which many of his DynCorp colleagues were involved. He tells INSIGHT, "I noticed there were
problems as soon as I got there, and I tried to be covert because I knew it was a rougher crowd than
I'd ever dealt with. It's not like I don't drink or anything, but DynCorp employees would come to work
drunk. A DynCorp van would pick us up every morning and you could smell the alcohol on them. There
were big-time drinking issues. I always told these guys what I thought of what they were doing, and I
guess they just thought I was a self-righteous fool or something, but I didn't care what they
thought."

The mix of drunkenness and working on multimillion-dollar aircraft upon which the lives of U.S. military
personnel depended was a serious enough issue, but Johnston drew the line when it came to buying
young girls and women as sex slaves. "I heard talk about the prostitution right away, but it took some
time before I understood that they were buying these girls. I'd tell them that it was wrong and that it
was no different than slavery Ñ that you can't buy women. But they'd buy the women's passports
and they owned them and would sell them to each other."

<lots more!>
www.insightmag.com/main.cfm/include/detail/storyid/163052.html

The Bush* plan in all things: Privatize the profits and Socialize the costs.