| I want to say that this in unbelievable, but I can't. I absolutely believe it because I know what a shambles eight years of war, waged on the cheap and using the national credit card and with mercenaries filling the holes left when the military was "downsized," "privatized"and emaciated, and what that has ultimately done to our readiness. So I guess I have to go with unacceptable and unconscionable.
What is it that has me chewing nails and spitting rust, you ask?
A whistleblower who worked for a company that holds contracts worth over a billion dollars to supply translators to the military in Afghanistan has come forward and spilled the beans: over 1/4 of the translators the company has provided can't speak the Afghan languages, but were sent to the battlefield anyway.
"I determined that someone -- and I didn't know [who] at that time -- was changing the grades from blanks or zeros to passing grades," said Paul Funk, who used to oversee the screening of Afghan linguists for the Columbus, Ohio-based contractor, Mission Essential Personnel. "Many who failed were marked as being passed."
After being asked about the allegations, U.S. Army officials confirmed to ABC News they are investigating the company.
Funk outlined his claims in a whistleblower lawsuit unsealed earlier this year against Mission Essential Personnel, saying the company turned a blind eye to cheating on language exams taken over the phone and hired applicants even though they failed to meet the language standards set by the Army and spelled out in the company's contract. He alleges that 28 percent of the linguists hired between November 2007 and June 2008 failed to meet the government's language requirements. The company has contested those claims in court, and this week rejected them as false in an interview with ABC News.
For the entirety of the war in Afghanistan, civilians have done the bulk of the translating. I know what you're going to say...Don't we have DLI (the Defense Languages Institute) to train military personnel as linguists? Well, we're supposed to. But apparently during the Bush administration, someone saw an opportunity for a friend or relative to get in on the war-profiteer bucks that seemed to flow non-stop, even as troops in iraq had to up-armor their own Humvees with scrap metal and bulletproof glass that they scavenged from landfills and Rummy told them to fuck off, they were the army he had, not the army he wished he had.
A good interpreter is as important as a weapon that doesn't jam and sturdy body armor. Without a capable interpreter, soldiers can't glean information that might keep them alive. The whistleblower relates instances of messages being passed off to soldiers as they make their way through a settlement or village that there is an ambush waiting for them up the road that they walked right into because their interpreter couldn't interpret.
That is outrageous. It is inexcusable. And it is exactly the sort of war profiteering that is costing you and me, as taxpayers, billions of dollars. Maybe the deficit hysterics ought to look at the military contracts that have been bleeding the treasury dry for the entire duration of the wars. |
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