USIS

Beginning in May 2004, U.S. authorities contracted with USIS to create commando teams for the Iraqi police, called Emergency Response Units. New ERU recruits were expected to live alongside their USIS trainers at Camp Dublin, near the Baghdad International Airport. The non-sectarian force is supposed “to respond to national-level law enforcement emergencies. The four-week training runs recruits through SWAT-type emergency response training focusing on terrorist incidents, kidnappings, hostage negotiations, explosive ordnance, high-risk searches, high-risk assets, weapons of mass destruction, and other national-level law enforcement emergencies” according to the Pentagon.

This early ERU training was conducted under a $64.5 million no-bid contract issued by U.S. officials, but paid for out of Iraqi oil revenues. Today, the USIS contract, which has been renewed twice, is paid for with Pentagon (and thus U.S. taxpayer) funds.

Once trained, the ERUs were quickly dispatched to “lead” counter-insurgency operations beside U.S. forces, often in combat zones. “They conduct their missions with us on the sidelines,” Lieutenant Voss, the ERU program head, told The Advisor, a newspaper published by the U.S. military security training program in Baghdad.

The ERU initial training has come under fire for alleged human rights abuses. In the spring of 2005, Colonel Ted Westhusing, a military ethics expert from Oklahoma who was in charge of the USIS contract, received an anonymous four-page letter accusing USIS of deliberately reducing the number of trainers to increase its profit margin. Westhusing was supervising the ERU program at the time. The letter, which was eventually released to Texas journalist Robert Bryce earlier this year under the Freedom of Information Act, detailed two incidents in which USIS contractors allegedly witnessed or participated in killing Iraqis during the assault on Fallujah in 2004. “ERU Mentors [USIS contractors] are conducting real world ops [operations]. They shot their weapons and killed Iraqis,” wrote the whistle-blower. “(Name deleted) was telling me how many Iraqis he had killed until I told him to shut the hell up. I was appalled by this. I have talked to the Mentors and am told that if they don’t go with the Iraqis the Iraqis won’t fight.”

Worried that “it would put his contract at risk," an unnamed USIS manager did not report the accusations to the U.S. military supervisors according to a November 2005 investigative article by T. Christian Miller in the Los Angeles Times.

On receipt of the letter, Westhusing reported the allegations to his superiors, but told them that he believed USIS was complying with the terms of its contract. U.S. officials investigated and found "no contractual violations," and “these allegations to be unfounded.”

But over the next few months Westhusing became increasingly dissatisfied with the company. In June 2005, he attended a meeting in Iraq in which he angrily complained of "his dislike of the contractors, [who] were paid too much money by the government," according to Miller’s sources.

Shortly after Westhusing had left the meeting, a USIS employee discovered the colonel lying on the floor in a trailer in a pool of blood, a single gunshot wound to the head. A note discovered by the body, in Westhusing's handwriting, pointed to suicide: "I cannot support a msn [mission] that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars. I am sullied," it says. "I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored. Death before being dishonored any more."

The contract to provide commando training in Iraq was a departure for USIS, which had no previous involvement in security training. And it was just the first of several government projects that USIS took over from federal agencies. In September 2006, USIS won a contract to provide the staffing for around-the-clock watch operations at towers erected by Boeing in the Arizona desert to monitor the Mexican border for the U.S. government. Its task is “to detect, identify, classify, and respond to and resolve illegal entry attempts at our land borders with Mexico and Canada." Although USIS will not take the place of the Border Patrol agents, who are federal employees, the Virginia-based company plays a role in the selection of agents through its contract to do background checks on them.

A year later, in July 2007, USIS won a contract to provide the data, software and analysts to track the estimated 550,000 “fugitive aliens” in the U.S.