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U.S. Firms Secretly Bid to Uphold Law in Iraq

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Times Staff Writer

A subsidiary of El Segundo-based Computer Sciences Corp. is among a handful of U.S. defense contractors secretly invited to submit bids for a long-term contract to rebuild Iraq’s national police force, prisons and judiciary, according to State Department officials.

Similar confidential invitations to other companies for Iraq reconstruction work triggered criticism from lawmakers and activists who fear the lack of open bidding could be costly to taxpayers. Three U.S. senators introduced legislation last week to require federal agencies to publicly justify any closed bidding for work in Iraq.

The CSC subsidiary, DynCorp of Reston, Va., already is recruiting 150 current and former U.S. law enforcement officers for Iraq under an International Police Missions contract first awarded in 1996 for work in the Balkans, State Department officials said. CSC acquired DynCorp last month.

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The new contract DynCorp is seeking would be far more extensive, providing as many as 1,000 advisors to recruit, retrain and reequip Iraq’s national police and prison staffs, State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher said Thursday.

Congress set aside an initial $25 million for the State Department to fund the project under the supplemental war-spending bill President Bush signed Wednesday, but the job is likely to balloon to as much as $200 million in the months and perhaps years ahead, another State Department official said.

That official, who asked not to be identified, said the new contract would, in effect, replace the one DynCorp has held for the last seven years and could be expanded to include law enforcement missions in other nations in the years ahead.

The police, prisons and judiciary contract is one in a series exempted from the U.S. government’s usual requirement for “full and open competition.” In all cases, the government has cited the need for speed and national security considerations in explaining its departure from normal federal contracting rules.

DynCorp was among just a few companies quietly invited late last month to bid on the Iraqi law enforcement contract. The State Department official called the process “a limited competition” that was born of urgency, adding that only contractors that had done similar work for the State Department elsewhere were invited.

The official confirmed that DynCorp was among them but declined to name the other bidders. “There were just three or four,” the official said.

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Doug Brooks, a defense industry analyst who heads the Washington-based International Peace Operations Assn., an industry group that advocates privatizing peacekeeping operations, said the State Department’s decision to limit the bidding to a few companies wasn’t surprising.

“They need a lot of services fast, so they turn to a few big companies that have done the work before,” Brooks said. “Whether they do it cheapest or best is, of course, another matter.”

Some defense industry analysts questioned the department’s choice of DynCorp for the preliminary recruitments for Iraq. In the Balkans three years ago, several DynCorp employees were implicated in incidents involving the trafficking of women and a sex-for-hire scandal.

A State Department official said the department and DynCorp have taken aggressive measures since then to prevent such problems. CSC spokesman Mike Dickerson stressed that most of the employees implicated were working on an aviation maintenance contract in Bosnia, not the police mission. He said the Army’s criminal investigation unit cleared DynCorp of any corporate wrongdoing and praised the company for firing the employees involved.

That hasn’t satisfied some critics.

“Since you already have a population in Iraq that is highly suspicious of us and our motives, do you really want someone with DynCorp’s baggage doing this sort of work there?” asked David Isenberg, a senior analyst in the Washington office of the British American Security Information Council, a research organization.

Since 1996, DynCorp’s contract for the Balkans has been expanded to include police-training and advisory missions in East Timor and Afghanistan -- work that has brought the company about $300 million in revenue, Dickerson said.

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The State Department used the same contract to ask DynCorp to begin recruiting the first 150 U.S. police, prison and judicial personnel for Iraq on April 1.

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