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A U.S. State Department official said that Washington had earmarked $35 million to recruit and train a new army in Liberia and Dyncorp was ready to start the project within the next few weeks.
Franklin Willis, a former official with the Coalition Provision Authority, told the Senate Democratic Policy Commmittee that after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq was "like the Wild West -- awash in $100 bills." One contractor, Custer Battles, was paid with $2 million in fresh U.S. bills, stuffed into a gunnysack, he said.
The prospect of supplying the nation with the world's fifth-largest military budget is enough to make any European defense contractor take notice. Beijing's defense outlay has been growing by 10% to 12% a year for the past decade, to an estimated $151 billion.
The U.S. government hired South-African mercenaries as bodyguards and police trainers. The contract later proved embarrassing when two of the former bodyguards were arrested in Zimbabwe on charges of plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea.
There are new allegations that heavily armed private security contractors in Iraq are brutalizing Iraqi civilians. In an exclusive interview, four former security contractors told NBC News that they watched as innocent Iraqi civilians were fired upon, and one crushed by a truck. The contractors worked for an American company paid by U.S. taxpayers. The Army is looking into the allegations.
just two weeks after an audit by the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction found inadequate oversight of unauthorized contracts and a loss of $9 billion in Iraqi funds, a witness told Democrats on Capitol Hill said key decisions by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq enabled contractors to bilk billions in reconstruction funds.
With South African mercenaries having shown up in civil wars in Sierra Leone, Angola, Ivory Coast, Papua New Guinea, and, now being active in Iraq, South Africa will review tough new laws to try to dissuade citizens from becoming embroiled in war zones.
The U.N. oil-for-food program chief under scrutiny for alleged corruption and mismanagement blocked a proposed audit of his office around the same time he's accused of soliciting lucrative oil deals from Iraq, according to investigators.
DaimlerChrysler announced plans Wednesday to produce a version of the German military vehicle, the Unimog, for sale in the United States, with production planned to begin in January.
Despite extensive media coverage of the kidnappings, beheadings and suicide attacks on civilian workers, one in ten applicants for jobs with the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, remain willing to take those well-paying truck driver, food service, laundry and maintenance positions in Iraq.
The Army Corps has set aside as much as $1.47 billion for explosives-demolition contracts with 10 private companies. Neither Zapata Engineering nor the Army Corps of Engineers would reveal exact salaries, but the first one-year contract the company received in September 2003 totaled $3.8 million for five management positions in Iraq.
Former associates say Ryan Manelick had told Army investigators looking into a fellow contractor's disappearance that large sums of money were being paid in kickbacks to a U.S. Army officer in Iraq in return for doling out lucrative contracts. Two months later Ryan Manelick was shot dead.
U.S. officials in postwar Iraq paid a contractor by stuffing $2 million worth of crisp bills into his gunnysack and routinely made cash payments around Baghdad from a pickup truck, a former official with the U.S. occupation government says.
Republican senators who have mauled the United Nations in its handling Iraqi oil revenues went strangely quiet over the news that the Coalition Provisional Authority saw $8.8 billion go absent without leave in just 14 months. It is 55,000 times as much as Mr Sevan is alleged to have been paid.
The difference between Kroll and DynCorps, two private security companies is night and day. Kroll was like commuting to the office. We generally obeyed simple traffic laws. A trip with DynCorps is the proverbial "E-ticket" ride.
In a little-noticed shift, for-profit outfits have replaced the Pentagon as the chief trainers of the country's fledging police force. Just over 700 contractors -- more than previously disclosed -- are now training more than half the Iraqi Police Service.
"Private soldiers" have been operating in a legal limbo, with precious few rules governing their activities. However, a handful of legal cases in the U.S. are beginning to define the legal boundaries under which these companies can operate.
O Globo newspaper says that more than 500 Brazilians have been hired as mercenaries to watch US military facilities in Iraq and the Brazilian Labor Ministry will investigate whether there were irregularities or not in the employment of Brazilians.
The Balkans Web site has articles and commentary by about 50 journalists who are said to have be paid by European Command through a private contractor, Anteon Corp., an information technology company based in Fairfax.