US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

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Sionnach Glic
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US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Sionnach Glic »

Just.....wow. I didn't have a high opinion of mercenaries even before Afghanistan was invaded, but I didn't expect them to be getting involved in shit like this.
WikiLeaks: Texas Company Helped Pimp Little Boys To Stoned Afghan Cops

DynCorp: WikiLeaks is not kind
​Another international conflict, another horrific taxpayer-funded sex scandal for DynCorp, the private security contractor tasked with training the Afghan police.

While the company is officially based in the DC area, most of its business is managed on a satellite campus at Alliance Airport north of Fort Worth. And if one of the diplomatic cables from the WikiLeaks archive is to be believed, boy howdy, are their doings in Afghanistan shady.

The Afghanistan cable (dated June 24, 2009) discusses a meeting between Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and US assistant ambassador Joseph Mussomeli. Prime among Atmar's concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.

Many of DynCorp's employees are ex-Green Berets and veterans of other elite units, and the company was commissioned by the US government to provide training for the Afghani police. According to most reports, over 95 percent of its $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers. And in Kunduz province, according to the leaked cable, that money was flowing to drug dealers and pimps. Pimps of children, to be more precise. (The exact type of drug was never specified.)

Since this is Afghanistan, you probably already knew this wasn't a kegger. Instead, this DynCorp soiree was a bacha bazi ("boy-play") party, much like the ones uncovered earlier this year by Frontline.

For those that can't or won't click the link, bacha bazi is a pre-Islamic Afghan tradition that was banned by the Taliban. Bacha boys are eight- to 15-years-old. They put on make-up, tie bells to their feet and slip into scanty women's clothing, and then, to the whine of a harmonium and wailing vocals, they dance seductively to smoky roomfuls of leering older men.

After the show is over, their services are auctioned off to the highest bidder, who will sometimes purchase a boy outright. And by services, we mean anal sex: The State Department has called bacha bazi a "widespread, culturally accepted form of male rape." (While it may be culturally accepted, it violates both Sharia law and Afghan civil code.)


For Pashtuns in the South of Afghanistan, there is no shame in having a little boy lover; on the contrary, it is a matter of pride. Those who can afford the most attractive boy are the players in their world, the OG's of places like Kandahar and Khost. On the Frontline video, ridiculously macho warrior guys brag about their young boyfriends utterly without shame.

So perhaps in the evil world of Realpolitik, in which there is apparently no moral compass US private contractors won't smash to smithereens, it made sense for DynCorp to drug up some Pashtun police recruits and turn them loose on a bunch of little boys. But according to the leaked document, Atmar, the Afghani interior minister, was terrified this story would catch a reporter's ear.

He urged the US State Department to shut down a reporter he heard was snooping around, and was horrified that a rumored videotape of the party might surface. He predicted that any story about the party would "endanger lives." He said that his government had arrested two Afghan police and nine Afghan civilians on charges of "purchasing a service from a child" in connection with the party, but that he was worried about the image of their "foreign mentors," by which he apparently meant DynCorp. American diplomats told him to chill. They apparently had a better handle on our media than Atmar, because when a report of the party finally did emerge, it was neutered to the point of near-falsehood.

The UK Guardian picks up the tale:

US diplomats cautioned against an "overreaction" and said that approaching the journalist involved would only make the story worse.
"A widely-anticipated newspaper article on the Kunduz scandal has not appeared but, if there is too much noise that may prompt the journalist to publish," the cable said.
The strategy appeared to work when an article was published in July by the Washington Post about the incident, which made little of the affair, saying it was an incident of "questionable management oversight" in which foreign DynCorp workers "hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party".


A tribal dance? Could illegal strip clubs stateside possibly try that one out? "Naw, those are not full-contact lap-dances, Mr. Vice Cop. Krystal and Lexxis are just performing an ancient Cherokee fertility dance. See those buck-skin thongs on and those feathers in their hair?"

As we mentioned, this isn't DynCorp's first brush with the sex-slavery game. Back in Bosnia in 1999, US policewoman Kathryn Bolkovac was fired from DynCorp after blowing the whistle on a sex-slave ring operating on one of our bases there. DynCorp's employees were accused of raping and peddling girls as young as 12 from countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The company was forced to settle lawsuits against Bolkovac (whose story was recently told in the feature film The Whistleblower) and another man who informed authorities about DynCorp's sex ring.

There's your tax dollars at work, Joe Six-Pack. Maybe now you won't get so worked up about the fact that KPFT gets about ten percent of its funding from the government and uses some of it to air Al-Jazeera.
Unbelievable.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

...

Awww... shit.

Now I am not sure if I am against Wikileak. I mean, that kind of stuff is heavy. REALLY heavy. That's exactly the kind of thing that needed to be published, revealed, whistleblowed.


:bangwall:

Head, I'm for WikiLeak, Tails, I'm against.

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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Tsukiyumi »

That's my thought on it: this is the only sort of thing they should be publishing. Things that are obviously wrong. Not the names or locations of our informants, or lists of sensitive facilities.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

Tsukiyumi wrote:That's my thought on it: this is the only sort of thing they should be publishing. Things that are obviously wrong. Not the names or locations of our informants, or lists of sensitive facilities.
The thing is, this is big. I do mean, BIG. If they had came up with just that kind of news, many people would have dismissed it as slander.

By first establishing that what they publish isn't rubbish, with the diplomatic leaks/other stuff, and having the US government pretty much confirm that the information is genuine, they can come out with that kind of scandal without anybody in a position to deny the validity of the information.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Tyyr »

No, sorry. They can build their credibility without doing what they've been doing. If anything their blatant disregard for exercising any judgment, including their figurehead claiming to be squirreling away really juicy secrets just in case someone comes after him undermines their credibility. If they want credibility they release things like this and then work to back them up, substantiate them, and that brings credibility.

Why do we still do business with these shits? Ok, even if it is a local custom that doesn't mean we need to take part in it or encourage it.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

Tyyr wrote:No, sorry. They can build their credibility without doing what they've been doing. If anything their blatant disregard for exercising any judgment, including their figurehead claiming to be squirreling away really juicy secrets just in case someone comes after him undermines their credibility. If they want credibility they release things like this and then work to back them up, substantiate them, and that brings credibility.

Why do we still do business with these shits? Ok, even if it is a local custom that doesn't mean we need to take part in it or encourage it.
All right. I guess I was grasping at straws. I mean, anyone who publishes that kind of information is doing something right. maybe I was hoping it was part of a bigger plan? :roll:
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Reliant121 »

I cant help but feel this couldnt have come at a better time, as this is something that genuinely deserves to be leaked. In a face of wild secrets that invalidate the safety of a lot of country's personnel, this little civil revelation from wiki leaks certainly does come quite timely.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Tyyr »

I'm fairly certain that Wikileaks is run by totally irresponsible dumbasses who seem to think that any secret is a horrible thing. In their crusade to expose every secret for nebulously defined and poorly thought out reasons they are bound to stumble upon things that really do need to see the public eye in between their bouts of putting informants and troops lives at risk while souring mid-east relations to inflate their e-peens.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Mikey »

It's got nothing to do with Assanges twisted version of right and wrong, and all to do with his "Hey, look at me!" complex. Now, I agree that this particular story is one that needed attention; but that's not why he published it.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Teaos »

In a way I understand what wikileaks does, they are fighting against the gross over classification of information, far far more than at any other time by orders of magnitude. Now they have obviously gone to the extreme of un classifying everything, Probably a bad move, but they do it for a good means. Is it a necessary evil... hard to say until the smoke has cleared.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by stitch626 »

Actually, they care nothing for the "greater good" of unclassifying stuff. They just want everyone to know that they have the power to decide who knows what, and that they decide who gets information.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

stitch626 wrote:Actually, they care nothing for the "greater good" of unclassifying stuff. They just want everyone to know that they have the power to decide who knows what, and that they decide who gets information.
I think the situation is a little more complex than just deciding if they are egoists or idealists.

Probably a healthy mix of both, as pretty much every "big mover" in the history of mankind have been.
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Let's see how much evil WikiLeak has achieved on the long run, and then let's compare to how much good it has done. Why they did it might be irrelevant, and might differ a lot from people to people within the whole WikiLeak network.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by Mikey »

The long run has nothing to do with anything. Whether or not Wikileaks does good or ill is irrelevant - the fact remains that the only reason Wikileaks exists is so Assange can say "Look at me! Look what I can do!" Any results from what they do are purely coincidental.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by SolkaTruesilver »

Mikey wrote:The long run has nothing to do with anything. Whether or not Wikileaks does good or ill is irrelevant - the fact remains that the only reason Wikileaks exists is so Assange can say "Look at me! Look what I can do!" Any results from what they do are purely coincidental.
While I don't disagree there is a healthy dose of this attitude, maybe he also genuinely believe he is doing a good thing?

I don't think we can intrinsicly know the man's psyche just by sitting on our computer chairs.
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Re: US Mercs Involved In Child Prostitution In Afghanistan

Post by stitch626 »

He withholds potentially world war quality information and threatens to release it if he gets taken to trial. His psyche is extremely easy to get, even from our computer chairs.
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