Blowing of whistles

A new article by me!

When Baghdad fell in 2003, Robert Isakson saw an opportunity. He took his disaster relief company to Iraq to work under another Coalition Provisional Authority contractor, a firm eerily named Custer Battles, after its founders Scott Custer and Mike Battles. Isakson brought over 10 years of experience to help Custer Battles build military bases and other large facilities.

Within a few weeks, however, his Custer Battles colleagues had run him out of town at gunpoint. According to Isakson, Custer Battles' goons rounded up his team and dumped them outside the Green Zone, presumably hoping they'd be killed. The men survived the ordeal by paying a taxi driver several hundred dollars to hustle them from Baghdad, through Fallujah, and all the way into the safety of Jordan.

Isakson's sin had been threatening to inform government officials of Custer Battles' plan to fib its way into a windfall. The firm had secured a sweet deal with the Coalition Provisional Authority—it was getting reimbursed for its expenses at 125 percent of cost. Not satisfied with that haul, Custer Battles repeatedly pressured Isakson to inflate his receipts. When he threatened to squeal, the firm tried to lose him in the violent chaos that had enabled its profiteering in the first place.

Isakson's ordeal aside, he's one of the lucky ones. "He had a contract," says his lawyer Alan Grayson, "and he had the resources to take action and defend his rights." He's now litigating a $10 million fraud suit. But Isakson and others like him are on their own if they see something fishy and want to report it. The existing whistleblower laws don't do much for government employees, but they offer almost no protection to the legions of employees working for government contractors—an army of more than 18,000 companies in Iraq alone, including hundreds of security firms like the now infamous Blackwater.

The Blackwater situation is especially troublesome because the mercenaries themselves--all hypothetical whistleblowers--are independent contractors themselves. That gives them even less protection.