By the way, I am not alone in this.

I interviewed Arab speaking accountant, with U.S. citizenship, recently. He works at local military bases in Kuwait and he concurred that he and other accountants are also made ill by all the fraud and waste they have witnessed over the past half decade.

TRANSLATORS INC.

Chatterjee has written elsewhere about the waste in spending carried out by the logistics arms of outsourced military contracting.

For example, he recently shared that the Manhattan- and San Diego based "L-3/Titan is now probably the second largest employer in Iraq (after Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former Halliburton subsidiary) with almost 7,000 translators and more than 300 intelligence specialists. . . . Unfortunately, a number of the personnel hired by L-3 and Titan have been barely competent and several have been indicted for criminal acts."

According to Chatterjee, "L-3/Titan's work has been criticized harshly by the military for poor performance and it has lost its biggest contract - but company executives recently cut a deal with the winning bidder and the military to keep part of the work."

Amazingly, Chatterjee continues, "[R]eports suggest that the company also provides intelligence services such as translation to more secretive agencies like the Counter intelligence Field Activity (CFA) and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which have also been affected."

By the way, Chatterjee explains, his research is fairly accurate as his Corp Watch team "has been fortunate to draw directly from the experiences of numerous military and civilian interrogators and translators who have come forward as anonymous whistle-blowers. The U.S. military has responded to some information requests on the financial details of the contract, but L-3 officials have failed to return repeated email and phone requests to discuss their work over the last two years. The military has refused to discuss the actual implementation of the contract. 'We're not going to talk about intelligence contracts,' Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, spokesman for the Multi-National Force Command in Baghdad, told Corp Watch."

Due to L-3's silence on the Corp Watch team's report, it was appropriate that Democracy Now invite a former employee of L-3 to speak out.

Marwan Mawiri tells of how he was hired by L-3/Titan, He explains that "it was a very simple conversation for less than a minute. In less than a minute's conversation, my Arabic language skill was tested, my English language skill was tested, and I passed. And that was the case with hundreds of hired in-or that were hired in the US. And when we got to Washington, D.C., and we started going through the hiring process, you know, I was shocked and surprised that many of the people they hired inside the United States, if you were just to give them a simple Arabic language test or an English language test to see how proficient they are in translations, they will not pass. I mean, we literally had people who needed help filling out their employment application. We needed-you know, I was helping some of the people they hired to fill out their, you know, background investigation application."

In short, this is the kind of hiring process used for hiring front-line interpreters for the U.S. military by Titan (which was more recently incorporated into L-3).

Juan Gonzalez of DN asked Marwan Mawari about his training in Iraq.

Mawari responded that he was given no training in Iraq, "No training what to expect in Iraq. No training what the field work going to look like. No training on how you should be translating in a proper manner. No training even how to deal with simple things when it comes to, you know, what if you had issues and problems, you know-and what was most shocking is, even the site manager or the so-called site manager they had, you know, in the field, were unskilled, unqualified. I mean, some of these people literally had no experience even in managing more than three, four, five people. One of the site managers we dealt with was a truck driver."

The pay packet at that time for translators was up to $100,000 in 2003 in Iraq.

Since then, over 200 translators have been killed in Iraq.

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