Jobs in Iraq Info Page 65
200,000
Employees Awaiting Clearance to Work for Military
ASHINGTON, May 11 - A government investigation shows that even as the military has grown more reliant on private contractors to serve in highly sensitive positions in Iraq, the Pentagon has a backlog of nearly 200,000 people working for those and other contractors who are still awaiting security clearances.
In Congressional testimony last October, Charles S. Abell, principal deputy under secretary of defense for personnel, acknowledged that some contract employees were being sent to Iraq before they had received their security clearances because of "our rush to meet the requirements, the mere numerical requirements." He added that clearances were granted "as time permitted." The report, made public last week, shows that the average time required to grant a security clearance has increased by more than two months since 2001, as the government has grown more reliant on contract employees. One reason is that an increasing number of contractors are required to hold ''top secret'' clearances, meaning they will be entrusted with highly sensitive information. Processing those clearances takes much more time than the ''secret'' clearances that most contract employees hold. Tens of thousands of employees of private companies are working for the military under contract in Iraq. In a letter this week to Representative Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disclosed that 20,000 private employees are working in Iraq in the security field alone. Private contractors, for example, guard L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq. The number of private contractors in Iraq working in all fields is not known. But only those who might need to work with classified information would require a security clearance. Among them are intelligence analysts, interrogators and some translators. Many companies hiring employees for those sorts of jobs in Iraq refuse to take on anyone who does not already have clearance; some companies pay a substantial premium to those applicants who hold one. Still, those clearances must be renewed. A top secret clearance must be renewed every five years, meaning that someone who left a government job up to five years ago would still have a valid clearance. But the former employees have to submit paperwork for a reinvestigation when applying for a sensitive job in Iraq or elsewhere. The report, by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, shows that as of March 31, the military had a backlog of 61,000 reinvestigations, and the wait for those was likely to be as long as for the others - more than a year. Spokesmen for the military intelligence office at the Pentagon, which manages security clearances, declined to respond to requests for comment on the report. Mr. Rumsfeld, in Congressional testimony on Friday, acknowledged that 37 interrogators were at work at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where the prisoner abuses occurred, and 27 of them worked for CACI, a private company. One of those interrogators, Steven Stefanowicz, was implicated in the abuses. A classified government report, a copy of which was received by The New York Times, on the abuses indicated that Mr. Stefanowicz did hold a security clearance. But the other contractor implicated, John Israel, a translator who worked with the interrogators, held no clearance of any kind. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the commander in charge of military jails in Iraq, said last week that Mr. Stefanowicz remained at work at the prison but was no longer "actively involved in investigations." Instead, he is assigned to "administrative duties," the general said. He added that he believed that Mr. Israel "is not with us any longer." Mr. Israel worked for a subcontractor of the Titan Corporation of San Diego. A spokesman for Titan would not name the subcontractor. From:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/12/politics/12back.html?ei
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