Contractors

State Dept: No One Touched 'Dancing Boy' At DynCorp Party

Rachel Slajda | December 9, 2010, 3:48PM

A still from Frontline's documentary on dancing boys.

Of the Wikileaks cache of diplomatic cables, one of the most potentially salacious is about the entertainment at a party thrown by DynCorp, a U.S. contractor training Afghan police, in April 2009. A 17-year-old boy was hired to dance.

In Afghanistan, hiring "dancing boys" is a long-held practice in which Afghan men hire young men and boys to dress like girls and dance at weddings and other parties. They don't hire girls, because in Afghan society men and women don't mix socially.

The dancing is one thing. But there are other practices associated with the dancing boys. As detailed in a Frontline documentary earlier this year, the boys are sometimes brought to hotels after the parties and prostituted. In some cases, their families sell them to warlords and other prominent Afghanis.

The implication in some of the stories being published now, thanks to the cable just released by Wikileaks, is that the boy hired by DynCorp was likely abused. The cable recounts a meeting in which the then interior minister of Afghanistan begs U.S. diplomats for help keeping the story out of the press, worried, he said, that lives would be in danger.

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DynCorp International Inc.

IG: Single Staffer Assigned To Oversee $2.5 Billion Dyncorp Iraq Contract

Justin Elliott | January 25, 2010, 9:33AM

Iraqi police officers stand at attention

It's hardly news that U.S. government contracts in Iraq have been a mess of fraud, abuse, and lax oversight for years. But a new Inspector General report that reveals the State Department assigned just one oversight officer to a $2.5 billion police training contract still manages to shock.

The report (.pdf) released today by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction is the second study in the past few years that showed lax or nonexistent oversight on the large police training contract of Virginia-based Dyncorp.

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War In Afghanistan

Stock Analyst: Obama's Surge Good News For Security Contractor

Justin Elliott | December 3, 2009, 6:33PM

DynCorp instructor with police recruits in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan, June 2008.

The White House isn't sure if Obama will be hiring more private contractors for the Afghan war -- there are currently 104,100 in the country -- but one financial analyst thinks it's a go. Reports the AP:

Engineering and construction firm Fluor Corp. and contractor DynCorp International Inc. stand to benefit from the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, an analyst said Thursday.

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