Montgomery McFate, Sock Puppet and Agent of Misfortune

After seeing multiple "hits" on our site from people looking specifically for information on one "Montgomery McFate," I decided to log in tonight and come up with some more information on her. Turns out, others have been doing that very same thing.

This should confirm many allegations that have been circulating concerning the role of Montgomery McFate as a spy, who in part traded on her credentials as an anthropologist. It should serve, on the other hand, as a wake-up call to those anthropologists who, perhaps a little young and naive, are not quite aware of what they are dealing with when dealing with McFate, who has made a career as a spy and recently puts on sockpuppet performances as her own best friend on blogs, calling herself “Dee,” the former “Pentagon Diva” with her anonymous blog that was pulled down as soon as news of the identity of the author was circulated more widely.

All I can say to that is, wow.

Almost exactly like our "pal", the "unknown soldier," Pentagon Diva's blog is gone, baby gone. Here's what's left, and I'm getting a screen shot for posterity:


You have to acknowledge the question though--was this really her? I don't know. But if you want to talk about a thickening plot, this has everything you're looking for if it's true.

The blog in question was called, childishly enough, "I luv a man in a uniform" and others noticed it had disappeared as well.

One of the things that I have a hard time believing is that the United States Institute of Peace is going to keep her profile up much longer as well:

A cultural anthropologist by training, Montgomery McFate’s work emphasizes the importance of sociocultural knowledge in the formation of national security priorities. Before joining the Joint Advanced Warfighting Program at the Institute for Defense Analyses, she served as an American Academy for the Advancement of Science fellow at the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR). She was awarded a Distinguished Public Service Award by the Secretary of the Navy for her work at ONR. McFate also worked at RAND as a social scientist, at the law firm of Baker and McKenzie in San Francisco as a litigation associate, and as a consultant to various government agencies.

She has published in the Journal of Conflict Studies, Military Review, and Joint Forces Quarterly, and has held grants from the National Science Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and Smith-Richardson Foundation, among others. She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University.

Publications:

"Does Culture Matter? The Military Utility of Cultural Knowledge," Joint Forces Quarterly (No . 38, 2005).
"Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship," Military Review (March/April, 2005).

Would you want to be associated with someone like this? That's up to that organization to decide.

Given her activities, does that cast any doubt on the veracity of her work? Perhaps. But if I were someone at the USIP, and I knew there was a double-dealing person who masqueraded as the "Pentagon Diva" and wrote mash notes on her blog to people like David Kilcullen, well, I'd be a little fucking nervous about who she was really working for and what she was up to. One of the posts she wrote on her now-deleted blog had a picture of Kilcullen getting smooched by some women. Oh, how much poorer are we that we have lost it for an eternity.

The reason why I think this matters is that when people are spying on others, their ethical reasons for doing so should be examined. Is it to make money? Is it to keep the country safe? Is it to gain an unfair advantage?

In the case of McFate's mother-in-law, as Mother Jones expertly explained, it was the infiltration of Mary McFate Sapone into gun control organizations on behalf of the National Rifle Association that caught the attention of many people who, while not in favor of gun control per se, nor the efforts of any of the organizations on either side of the divide, were simply outraged that this kind of thing was done.

With regards to Montgomery McFate, we see her as a professional researcher and writer, as a reputed sockpuppet, as purportedly the now-defunct blogger "Pentagon Diva," and someone associated with the USIP, as well as other entities and organizations. We know she applied anthropology to the Iraq insurgency, in a controversial manner, and had a hand in some of the work done on behalf of the US Army:

The concept for the current Human terrain System was suggested by Montgomery McFate Ph.D., J.D., and Andrea Jackson as described in their article, "an Organizational Solution for DoD's Cultural Knowledge Needs," Military Review (July-august 2005): 1821. Most of the practical work to implement the concept under the title Human terrain System was done by Cpt Don Smith, U.S. Army reserve, of the Foreign Military Studies Office, between July 2005 and August 2006. Under this concept, "human terrain" can be defined as the human population and society in the operational environment (area of operations) as defined and characterized by sociocultural, anthropologic, and ethnographic data and other non-geophysical information about that human population and society. Human terrain information is open-source derived, unclassified, referenced (geospatially, relationally, and temporally) information. It includes the situational roles, goals, relationships, and rules of behavior of an operationally relevant group or individual.

You can check out McFate's work here. I don't find anything original in what she's saying--her work merely extends the understanding gained, rather too late, during the Vietnam War that basically said that if you don't fucking understand why the enemy is fighting you, you'll never get him to stop fighting you. Her work is full of obvious conclusions about how important it is to understand the enemy. In a world where the military all but flushed the lessons learned from the Vietnam War down the collective mental toilet, the regurgitation of these theories by an academic is something easy and cleanly broken from the past to grab onto. She has no taint of having been a company commander in the shit, you see. She's not a David Hackworth-type, and gristled veteran who could explain (and did, before his untimely demise) why the US Army was unable to effectively fight a counterinsurgency. Had the military institutionalized and dealt with the lessons learned from Vietnam in a proper academic way--that is, taught it, retained experts on it, and rewarded the men who were most knowledgeable about it rather than stigmatize them (as it did with Hackworth), no one would care to read anything by McFate. Human terrain mapping is common sense, and the practitioners of "understanding the enemy" should have already been doing that. McFate's arrival with these ideas in the midst of the Iraq war merely exposed the fact that quite a few pseudo-smart people weren't doing their job, you see. So she became a star. A star that has now fallen?

Given all of that, why would anyone trust this person? Who is she really working for? How could anyone claim she has any credibility at this point? Or academic standing, for that matter?

Some of You People Weren't Answering Those E-mails...

When bad things happen to good people:

The owner of a multimillion-dollar home on Foxhall Road in northwest D.C. was evicted on Monday.

The homeowner, Oladipo Aina, is a Nigerian-born CEO of a company called "The Potentional Millionaires Investment Club International." His business card says he is a foreclosure specialist.

Workers emptied the contents of the five-bedroom, 5,000-square foot home onto the sidewalk Monday.

Federal marshals looked on as two Rolls Royces were towed from the driveway.

"I am not afraid," Aina said.

Bank records show Aina and his associates in October were served with a 30-day notice to quit and vacate because another owner had purchase the home in a foreclosure sale.

"They are lying," Aina said.

Chairs, furniture and bags of personal effects took up nearly half a city block, causing people who live in the neighborhood to stop and stare.

Now, before you start to feel sorry for him...

Aina has 24 hours to move his positions. He said he's been railroaded.

"I have 30,000 acres of emerald mines worth billions," he said. He said the mines are located in Zambia.

Aina said he will move into an $8 million home in McLean as soon as he can get the people living there to move out.

I guess that settles that. Wanna bet the E-mails asking you, the most dearest one, to help transfer some funds from the Central Bank of the Ivory Coast to a Swiss bank account are "interrupted" until Aina can get his Internet access turned back on?

Army Auditing Iraq Contracts for Fraud

A 105mm M1 Abrams tank, outside the
Tank-Army Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM)
Detroit Arsenal, Warren, MI

On Monday, ten specially trained auditors, criminal investigators and acquisitions experts will descend on the Tank-Army Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) north of Detroit to begin an audit of a sampling of approximately 6000 contracts worth $2.8 billion issued by an Army office in Kuwait that has been identified as a hotbed of corruption.

The office in question, located at Camp Arifjan, buys supplies and gear to support American G.I.'s as they rotate in and out of Iraq. Nearly two dozen Army, military and civilian employees have been charged with accepting bribes and kickbacks, and $15 million has changed hands. Depending on what the investigators discover, the number of individuals charged will likely grow. Currently the Army Criminal Investigations Command has 83 ongoing corruption investigations relating to contract fraud.

The highest profile corruption case to be charged so far involves Army Maj. John Cockerham, who stands accused of bribery, conspiracy, money laundering and obstruction. Prosecutors charge that Cockerham, in concert with his wife and sister, took at least $9.6 million in bribes in 2004 and 2005 during the time he was a contract officer in Kuwait.

Some of the red flags that have been raised include contracts awarded to vendors outside the usual competitive bidding process and contracts that went through the motions of the bidding process, then were awarded to the highest rather than the lowest bids. In other instances, what was purchased was not what was delivered.

"Is there anything in there that might indicate to us that there might be some potential fraudulent activity?" Jeffrey Parsons, director of contracting at Army Materiel Command, said in an AP interview. "If there are patterns that we start to identify, then we're going to do further review."

Contracts with significant problems will be forwarded to the Army Audit Agency and the Army Criminal Investigation Command. If there's credible evidence of wrongdoing, the FBI and prosecutors from the U.S. Justice Department are called in.

In Warren, Mich., home to a large Army acquisition center, the contracting review team will examine 314 of the Kuwait contracts, each worth more than $25,000 and issued between 2003 and 2006.

In Kuwait, a separate team of 10 at Camp Arifjan is already going through 339 contracts of lesser value and awarded during the same time period, according to Army Materiel Command at Fort Belvoir, Va.

Both reviews are to be finished before the end of the year.

Preliminary results of an investigation into the contracts coming out of Camp Arifjan in 2007 has wrapped up, and the investigators uncovered numerous problems with the office, including high staff turnover, slip-shod record keeping, inadequate staffing, and lack of oversight. Those personnel problems, coupled with billions of dollars of war funding, create an environment where corruption, malfeasance and misconduct find fertile soil.

The investigative teams in both Michigan and Kuwait will be reviewing paper records, but they will also be using data-mining techniques to search electronically stored data for signs of wrongdoing. "Do we have contractors with different names but the same address?" Parsons said. "That would cause some suspicion." He also indicated that the investigators would be relying on tips provided by individuals familiar with the imperfect process.

If a contractor and an acquisitions officer conspire to break the rules for personal gain, uncovering the corruption can be extremely difficult. "You can have a contract file that is pristine - all the documentation is there," Parsons said. "Just going through the contract files doesn't necessarily give you 100 percent assurance that something else might not have been going on."

Beating the checks and balances in the federal procurement process is a difficult trick to pull off, requiring attention to detail and precise planning. It takes someone schooled in the system to know how to evade it. Unfortunately, the Army had some very smart "bad apples" who knew how to pull it off.

The 6000 contracts that came from the office in Kuwait spawned 18,000 transactions for myriad support items, from laundry and warehouse services to bottled water and food. Every transaction presented an opportunity for fraud to be committed.

In 2005, two Lt. Generals who were top commanders in Iraq, Steven Whitcomb and John Vines, became so concerned about allegations of corruption that they pushed for the Criminal Investigation Command to establish field offices in Iraq and Kuwait.

The Army investigating the allegations of fraud, abuse, bribery, corruption and kickbacks is a good start, but it is time to take a page from history. It is time for a reprise of the Truman Committee.

In 1940, as World War II gripped the globe and United States involvement in the conflict became more and more likely, the United States appropriated $10 Billion in defense contracts in preparation for that eventuality.

Early in 1941, reports of malfeasance and abuses by the contractors reached Missouri Senator Harry S Truman, and the news did not sit well with WW I Infantry Captain “Give ‘em Hell Harry.” In typical Truman fashion, he set out to seek the truth, not by summoning “experts” but by embarking on a 10,000 mile tour of military installations. On this fact-finding tour, he discovered that the companies that received the contracts were clustered in the east, with a mere handful divvying up most of the largesse. He also discovered that they were receiving a fixed-profit, regardless of performance.

He returned to the Senate convinced that the defense efforts of the United States were being undermined by waste and corruption, and he proposed the notion of a special Senate committee that would investigate the National Defense Program.

President Roosevelt was convinced to let Truman head up the committee, being sympathetic to the President and his administration. The President was assured that the committee would not be too much trouble, as it would only be allotted $15,000 to investigate billions in defense contracts.

The Truman Committee was created by unanimous Senate decree on 01 March 1941. Over the next three years, with Senator Truman at the helm, the committee held hundreds of hearings, traveled thousands of miles to conduct field inspections, and saved millions of dollars in cost over-runs. Senator Truman was not shy about threatening executives with prison time as he whacked greedy corporate snouts out of the public trough.

Before Claire McCaskill announced her Senate bid, I was encouraging her to run for the Class I seat that Truman once held, and touting her background as our state auditor and as a tough prosecutor as reasons she should run and reasons we should vote for her, because the Iraq fiasco needed a good auditing, in the spirit of Harry Truman.

During her campaign, she seized on my the idea of a modern day Truman Committee to investigate waste, fraud and corruption in the reconstruction of Iraq. During a speech in Harry S Truman’s hometown of Independence last year, she spoke admiringly of the former President and his diligence in reining in war profiteers. "He was fearless. He uncovered enormous undeserved profits. I believe we need a new Truman Committee. I will fight for such a committee.”

Less than a year after she was elected, and a mere nine months after taking her seat, she is very close to bringing the notion to fruition. The Senate recently agreed to a plan from Senators McCaskill and Webb to get a handle on the Pentagon’s scattershot method of awarding private contracts for work in Iraq. It was added to the Defense Authorization Bill for 2008.

The audits that get underway on Monday certainly underscore the need for the oversight body that would be created from the legislation offered by Webb and McCaskill. In fact, they demand it.

Oh for the good old days of $500 hammers and $600 toilet seats!

Those 1980’s abuses of the American taxpayer seem downright quaint in comparrison. What were they thinking, marking up the price of the goods themselves? The real profit margin is in fraudulent shipping and handling! (Pikers!)

A South Carolina defense contractor pleaded guilty yesterday to bilking the Pentagon out of $20.5 million over nearly 10 years by adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of shipping spare parts such as metal washers and lamps. The parts were bound for key military installations, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan. In one instance, in 2006, the government paid C&D Distributors $998,798 in transportation costs for shipping two 19-cent washers. Charlene Corley, 47, co-owner of C&D Distributors, used the money to pay for luxury homes, cars, plastic surgery and jewelry, according to court documents.

"It is a troubling case because the fraud took place during a time of war," said Kevin McDonald, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the District of South Carolina. The $20 million "that could have gone to assist our military was diverted and used in a fraudulent manner for excessive personal enjoyment."

C&D billed the Pentagon for materials and shipping separately, and they received payment on 112 of the fraudulent invoices submitted before the scam was uncovered. Among the abuses of your checkbook and mine was a $445,640 shipping invoice for an elbow pipe that cost less than ten dollars, and six machine screws worth a total of $59.94 were shipped at a cost of $403,436.

But there is even more salacious detail…C&D was owned and operated by twin sisters, and one of them committed suicide last fall after being questioned by investigators. The surviving sister is trying to make sure that most of the blame is shifted to her former womb-mate in an effort to reduce her prison time.

"We do not dispute that we participated and benefited in and from the conspiracy," Harris said. "We have, however, always maintained that her sister was the primary actor in this fraud, the primary beneficiary of this fraud, and unfortunately she is not here to today to assist us in distinguishing their roles in the fraud."

And this, boys and girls, is why we need oversight!