[Peace-discuss] Blackwater-Response to Guest Editioral/Buzz Questions Provost's Sincerity

[Roger Epperson]

Article 1:

PTI’s Tom Dempsey – Martyr? Or Just Another Unethical
Cop?
by nightwatch  (Published at the IMC site)

I cribbed the headline from the News-Gazette story
about the Blackwater mercenaries on the front of their
Aug. 12 Sunday Commentary section. It just doesn’t
seem logically possible that anyone who takes a job as
a mercenary could be considered a “martyr.” They’re
doing that job for the money, not for any higher
principles. If they want to get involved in a war
based on personal principles, they could have stayed
in the military or police work in the first place. I
don’t mean to suggest that most of our service members
or police are martyrs either, but at least on a
personal level, a few of them might qualify as
martyrs. Like most citizens, I would prefer that we
have fewer dead martyrs and better public policy. The
Police Training Institute director, Tom Dempsey, now
in the employ of the same mercenary outfit, certainly
doesn’t qualify as a martyr, although he does his best
to spin his involvement in a growing conflict of
interest between Blackwater and the University of
Illinois as a noble cause in a guest commentary a few
pages later.
Dempsey claims in his News-Gazette guest commentary
that “I declined until recently [to respond to news
reports] out of deference to university officials and
to Blackwater, whose policy it is not to disclose
specific information regarding contracts.” Dempsey
words this in such a way as to imply to the reader
that it is “university officials” also don’t want to
disclose contract information. In fact, it is the
obligation of university officials to forthrightly
disclose contract information to the public. Sure,
Blackwater wants to keep its often questionable
practices secret. Right here we can see that Dempsey
is more interested in doing Blackwater’s bidding than
in serving the public interest, which is his
obligation as the director of PTI. Clearly, Dempsey’s
grasp of ethical behavior is partial at best and
possibly even downright deceptive.
Dempsey states, as he has several times since the
Associated Press first revealed his apparent conflict
of interest, that he was not actually in the employ of
Blackwater when he signed the memorandum of
understanding (MOU) agreement in May tying the
University of Illinois' PTI and Blackwater together.
That requires further investigation beyond taking
Dempsey’s word for it to confirm that was in fact the
case, but let’s just assume that he is telling the
truth about that. He still has significant ethical
problems whether or not he is telling the truth on
that specific point.
Dempsey goes on to state that his “temporary
employment” by Blackwater in Afghanistan occurred
after the MOU was signed. However, he also confirms
that “Discussion concerning the current project I am
involved in began long before the MOU was approved by
the board of trustees.” Here is where his argument
really starts to break down. The law governing ethical
behavior by state employees applies, not just to
direct violations of conflict of interest, but is
designed to help state employees to avoid even the
appearance of conflict of interest. Clearly, once he
states that his discussions about his “summer job”
with Blackwater began before the signing of the MOU he
negotiated, it leaves open the question that
Blackwater and he had worked out a quid pro quo about
the Blackwater contract he is now working under in
Afghanistan. Maybe he wasn’t actually in Blackwater’s
employ at the time the MOU was signed, as he states.
But one can’t help but wonder, since he does indicate
he’d begun discussions about his Afghanistan contract
before then, that those discussion almost certainly
included something about how much he would be paid and
how to pull it off without attracting attention to
this obvious conflict of interest and commitment.
This problematic formulation of Dempsey’s is further
reinforced when he claims that he “submitted the
required Report of Non-University Activity” and his
vacation request to travel to Afghanistan to work for
Blackwater for university approval. Both were
approved, as he states, but other reporting indicates
that those approving his requests knew nothing about
the MOU he’d previously negotiated between PTI and
Blackwater, which then became his vacation employer.
Given that the university, for whatever reason, had
decided to suppress information about the
PTI/Blackwater MOU, the officials who approved his
Report of Non-University Activity and vacation were
certainly not aware of the possible chicanery already
afoot. Dempsey also needs to take some responsibility
for this oversight, since the ethical thing to do
would have been full disclosure, which he apparently
did not do in those requests. Moreover, it also seems
that the investigation of Dempsey should include who
else among the university administration or on the
Board of Trustees facilitated the secrecy about the
MOU that prevailed before the Associated Press blew
the cover off this mess. If the MOU had been openly
disclosed, Dempsey might have thought twice about his
vacation job or the officials who approved his
requests might have denied them as inappropriate.
Dempsey also avoids the biggest question of all, even
if he is pure as the driven snow up to this point.
How, after being employed by Blackwater, can he return
to his position as director of PTI and then administer
the MOU he signed between the university and
Blackwater, once having been employed by them? There
can be no doubt that such a situation will place him
quite squarely into a conflict of interest.
Dempsey goes on to emphasize the noble nature of his
work as part of a team, which included a U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency retiree and others with
“international narcotics experience” in Afghanistan.
Ironically, it is the DEA’s training and facilitation
that often sets local nationals up in positions of
power. In nearly every case in which the DEA or its
contractors provide such boosts to the careers of
local “drug war” officials, it also facilitates their
corruption, as these officials then are plied with
bribes to influence them to look the other way in
relation to major drug traffickers. 
The prisons of Afghanistan, like those in Colombia,
Lebanon, Pakistan, and even the United States itself,
will soon be filled with lower level “mules” and other
bit part players, as such U.S. “drug war” assistance
is unlikely to have much effect on the level of drug
trafficking or on the major players involved. In fact,
such work in Afghanistan has been disrupted by the
ongoing war (that Blackwater also profits from), which
has actually led to a vast expansion of opium
production, even though the country was already the
source of 90% of the world’s opium prior to the 2001
U.S. invasion. Once again, the “drug war” has proven
to be a great jobs program for white males looking for
a lucrative position, but a total failure as public
policy. In fact, until Iraq came along, the "drug war"
was the most costly lost U.S. war since Vietnam. Is it
any wonder that the foremost advocates of the “drug
war” are the mostly white police and prison guards who
benefit from the job security it provides them, even
as it fosters the violence of blackmarkets and acts as
a price support mechanism for organized crime?
Returning to Illinois, why should we care? It’s
because PTI provides a significant source of the
state-required training for many of those recruited by
local police departments. No officer can remain
employed in an Illinois police department unless they
complete such training in a timely manner. PTI also
writes much of the curriculum for the other police
training schools that supplement its own direct police
training role in Illinois. Yet the director of PTI
seems fairly clueless about state ethics requirements,
which require not only that he have no direct conflict
of interest – which may or may not be the case,
pending a full investigation of Dempsey’s story – but
also require that even the appearance of a conflict of
interest be avoided. It’s seems clear that Tom Dempsey
has not met that standard nor is he capable of
assuring the public that he can convey the necessity
of ethical conduct to the officers he is responsible
for training. It is also obvious that Dempsey cannot
return to resume his directorship of PTI now that he
has both signed a MOU with and been employed by the
Blackwater mercenary corporation. Dempsey has brought
into question whether the Illinois police officers
trained under his watch have a proper grasp of what is
– and is not – ethical behavior. The fish always rots
from the head. For him to continue as director of PTI
would only exacerbate existing questions about the
ethics of those doing police work in Illinois.
For background on this, see: University of Illinois
PTI, Blackwater -- "Conflict of Commitment"?


Article 2:

Tatyana Safronova
Issue date: 8/2/07 Section: Daily Illini
 

"We don't want our name associated with a firm that is
controversial," University of Illinois Provost Linda
Katehi told the Chicago Tribune in a July 31 article.

The topic of interest in the article was the
University's involvement with the military contractor
Blackwater. According to the Tribune, the director of
the police-training institute at the University, Tom
Dempsey, signed an agreement with Blackwater in May to
share resources and exchange students between the
institute and the company. 

How controversial is Blackwater? In March 2004, four
of its employees were ambushed, mutilated and burned
in Fallujah, Iraq. Two of the bodies were hung from a
bridge still known as Blackwater Bridge, and the
families of the dead contractors are suing the company
over wrongful death. According to CNN.com, in a
February congressional hearing, the company's Baghdad
manager wrote an e-mail to company executives revealed
that the manager's employees were understaffed. The
warning e-mail was sent one day before the ambush.

A March article from Time Magazine claims that the
suing families believe that in a hurry to impress
potential employers, Blackwater put together a shoddy
delivery, its drivers lacking everything from proper
ammunition and armor to road maps. 

This controversy leads me to question the sincerity
behind Katehi's words. It's surely noble to claim that
you want nothing to do with controversy, but how can
our University agree with the provost when the
University was associated with the Coca-Cola Company
for ten years until the contract expired in June?
Despite claims from human rights activists that
Coca-Cola was draining people's water for use in its
bottling plants, despite claims of violence against
its employees in Columbia, despite calls to cancel the
contract from student groups like Students Against
Sweatshops, the University waited until the contract
ran out in June and an apparently more profitable
alternative became available. Now, instead of an
exclusive contract with Coke on the University Campus,
there is an exclusive contract with Pepsi for the
entire state guaranteed to earn almost 1.5 million
dollars per year. And who knows what we'll find out
about Pepsi.

The Tribune article says that a partnership between
Blackwater and the University could allow the company
to "become part of the primary training process for
law enforcement." And although neither party stands to
make money from the partnership, in the end, this may
be just another shoddy operation for Blackwater and
another embarrassing partnership for the University of
Illinois.





       
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