Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Documents expose private security firms

Recently disclosed documents have spilled the beans on the activities of US security contractors, revealing offenses committed by more than 200 security contract employees in different countries.


The documents obtained by the Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act highlighted previously kept secret offences committed by personnel working under a broad State Department security services contract in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries between 2004 and 2008.

The security service contracts were shared by private security firms such as DynCorp of Falls Church, Va., Triple Canopy of Reston, Va., and Blackwater Worldwide -- now called Xe Services of Moyock, NC.

Most of the incidents included excessive drinking, drug use, sexual misconduct, and mishandling of weapons -- all of which are considered violations of corporate and US policies.

In one incident on September 9, 2005, five DynCorp International security guards assigned to protect Afghan President Hamid Karzai returned to their compound drunk at 2 in the morning, accompanied by a prostitute.

Less than a week later, three of the same five guards got drunk in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight to Thailand.

Afghanistan's deputy director for elections and a foreign diplomat were also present in the airport lounge.

Such incidents are widely viewed as damaging the US reputation which is already accused of launching a privatized war in the Middle East.

Kabul has confirmed the presence of 52 foreign private security companies, including the notorious American security firm Xe Services.

Karzai has ordered all security companies to be disbanded by the end of this year.

Most of the security contractors are believed to have close ties with Afghan warlords and are also accused of contributing to the rising number of civilian casualties in the country.

Blackwater killings: 'US at fault'

Private security company, now known as Xe Services, says responsibilty for 2007 Iraq killings lies with US government.

The security company formerly known as Blackwater has told a US federal judge that the US government, and not the company itself, should be held accountable for a 2007 shooting by its contractors that killed 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square in Baghdad.

Lawyers for the company, now known as Xe Services, argued in court on Thursday that Blackwater contractors were essentially acting as employees of the US government because they were providing security to State Department personnel.

The North Carolina-based company and several of its contractors are seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit that was filed on behalf of three people killed in the shooting: Ali Kinani, Abrahem Abed Al Mafraje and Mahde Sahab Naser Shamake. The lawsuit accuses the parties of wrongful death and negligence, and seeks punitive damages.

But attorney Andrew Pincus argued the sensitive nature of providing security in a war zone required the kind of oversight the government normally reserves for its own employees, as opposed to the duties performed by other types of contractors.

'Not food service'

"This isn't food service, where we can sort of leave it to the chefs," he said.

Lawyers for both the plaintiffs and the government disputed the contractors' argument, saying the practical effect of transferring the focus of the lawsuit to the federal government would be its dismissal.

The federal government is exempt from such lawsuits.

Judge Terrence W. Boyle did not immediately rule on the motions in the case, but said the most important issue seems to be whether the government is ultimately responsible for the actions of its contractors.

"If the government can cut the cord and let that drift off into space, that's one world," he said. "But it's a different world if the government has to be held accountable."

In separate motions, lawyers for Blackwater and the contractors argued they cannot be sued by foreigners for something that happened in a foreign country governed by foreign law. They also argue that Iraqi law prohibits such lawsuits.

Prosecutors say the contractors unleashed an unprovoked attack on civilians using machine guns and grenades.

The five men were initially charged with manslaughter for their role in the 2007 Nisoor Square shooting, which strained relations between Baghdad and Washington.

A year ago, however, a federal judge dismissed those charges, citing missteps by the government.

A sixth contractor, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty in the criminal case.

He filed a separate defense in the civil lawsuit, arguing that the federal court in North Carolina has no jurisdiction to hear the case.

Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services in March, saying its brand had been tarnished by its work in Iraq. The company settled a separate series of federal lawsuits earlier this year connected to the Nisour Square shooting and other controversial incidents in Iraq.

Change in ownership

In addition to the change in name, Xe Services has also sought to distance itself from its controversial founder, Erik Prince.

The former Navy Seal resigned from his post as the company's CEO in March 2009, but stayed on as chairman.

The controversy over allegations of murder and bribery have continued, and the company has been looking for new ownership.

In 2009, Blackwater was barred from Iraqfor "excessive force". US government documents released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks in October revealed another 14 incidents, in addition to the Nisour Square shooting, in which Blackwater shot at civilians in Iraq.

Despite its record, a front company for Xe was awarded another lucrative contract by the US government in recent months.

Contractors behaving badly mean headaches for US

WASHINGTON (AP) — At two in the morning on Sept. 9, 2005, five DynCorp International security guards assigned to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's protective detail returned to their compound drunk, with a prostitute in tow. Less than a week later, three of these same guards got drunk again, this time in the VIP lounge of the Kabul airport while awaiting a flight to Thailand.

"They had been intoxicated, loud and obnoxious," according to an internal company report of the incident, which noted that Afghanistan's deputy director for elections and a foreign diplomat were also in the lounge. "Complaints were made regarding the situation." DynCorp fired the three guards.

Such episodes represent the headaches that U.S. contractors can cause in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They are indispensable to the State Department's mission overseas, handling security, transportation, construction, food service and more. But when hired hands behave badly — or break the law — they cast a cloud over the American presence.

Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad State Department security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va., Triple Canopy of Reston, Va., and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide — Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.

Most of the infractions, which include excessive drinking, drug use, sexual misconduct, and mishandling weapons, were violations of corporate and U.S. policies that probably went unnoticed by ordinary Afghans and Iraqis. But other offenses played out in public, undermining U.S. efforts in both countries and raising questions about how carefully job candidates are screened.

Despite complaints from foreign capitals about reckless behavior and heavy-handed tactics, U.S. contractors are more important than ever.

In Iraq, the departure of U.S. combat forces has left a security and logistics support vacuum to be filled by the private sector. In testimony to the independent Wartime Contracting Commission in June, a State Department official said as many as 7,000 security contractors — more than double the current number — will be needed to guard the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and other offices across Iraq.

Karzai had to back away from the Friday deadline he had set to ban security contractors after Western diplomats said the move threatened the completion of billions of dollars worth of critical reconstruction projects that need to be protected from insurgent attacks.

In 2009, DynCorp employees working under a separate State Department contract to train Afghan police would be the source of more trouble. A diplomatic report disclosed by the WikiLeaks organization described a panicked Afghan minister urging U.S. officials to stop The Washington Post from running a story about DynCorp workers who had hired an Afghan teenage boy to dance at a company party. Videotape of the event showed more than a dozen DynCorp workers cheering the teenage dancer on as he moved around a single employee sitting on a chair, according to the Post story, which ran in July 2009.

Interior Minister Hanif Atmar claimed the embarrassing publicity could cause a backlash in Afghanistan and "endanger lives."

DynCorp is one of the department's most prominent vendors. More than one-third of the company's $3.1 billion in 2009 revenues came from State Department contracts for armed security, law enforcement training and aviation services, according to the company's latest annual report. The police training contract alone is valued at $651 million.

DynCorp fired four senior managers for the dancing episode, which it said was "culturally inappropriate" and reflected poor judgment by the employees.

"No company can guarantee that their employees will behave perfectly at all times, under all conditions," DynCorp spokeswoman Ashley Burke said. "What we can guarantee is that we will clearly define expectations, train our employees according to those expectations and hold people accountable for their behaviors."

U.S. contractors have sought to improve their reputation through advocacy groups such as the Professional Services Council and the International Stability Operations Association, both based in Washington. In Geneva last month, more than 50 companies that work in war zones signed an international code of conduct to improve openness and accountability.

Ignacio Balderas, Triple Canopy's chief executive officer, said his company will push to ensure the code gains worldwide acceptance "and becomes an integral part of how the industry operates."

But reversing entrenched attitudes isn't easy. In a telling assessment of how U.S. contractors are viewed, Atmar, who Karzai dismissed as interior minister in June, reported that "these contractor companies do not have many friends."

The documents obtained by AP help to show why.

In March 2008, Blackwater guards forced an Afghan soldier to the ground and handcuffed him after he refused to let their vehicle pass through a checkpoint at the Kabul airport because they didn't have proper identification. A 13-page report by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul describes a tense confrontation between the Blackwater personnel and Afghan troops that could have resulted in a gun battle.

The confrontation caused "significant damage" to the embassy's reputation with the Afghan National Army, the report said. The embassy ordered the firing of the two Blackwater guards it said were most responsible.

In early 2006, when U.S. authorities were stressing the importance of cultural sensitivity in Iraq, a Blackwater contractor was openly hostile to Iraqis, according to a company record. During a detail at Iraq's ministry of water, he refused to shake hands with the ministry's chief of security, accusing the Iraqi official of being "part of the (expletive) Mahdi militia," a reference to a paramilitary force loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

A month later, the same employee repeatedly disrupted a class on Iraqi culture, accusing the instructor of "spreading propaganda." He was fired after that for being "unable to act professionally" toward the Iraqis, State Department employees, and co-workers, according to the document.

In March 2005, a fired Blackwater contractor who was in a hotel in Jordan awaiting a flight back to the U.S. ignored a supervisor's order to stay in his room until his plane was ready to leave. He got drunk and fought with several Jordanians, spit at and tore down a picture of Jordan's King Abdullah, and was arrested. Blackwater managers escorted him from the jail to the airport.

Blackwater eventually lost its license to operate as guardian of U.S. diplomats in Iraq after its security guards were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.

In a written statement, Xe said it maintains high standards of conduct. When company policy is violated, "disciplinary actions are taken up to and including termination from employment," the company said.

On Friday, the investment group USTC Holdings announced it had bought Xe in a deal that includes the company's training facility in North Carolina. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

More examples of contractor headaches at a glance

By The Associated Press

-- Documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act describe previously undisclosed offenses committed by more than 200 contract employees of the State Department in Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries between 2004 and 2008. They were working under a broad security services contract shared by DynCorp of Falls Church, Va.; Triple Canopy of Reston, Va.; and the company formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide - Xe Services of Moyock, N.C.

Some examples of the offenses:

-In March 2006, two guards working for Triple Canopy were involved a gunfight outside a club called the Soft Lady in Petionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, according to a report of the incident.

They went to the bar to meet friends. In keeping with the club's policy, they locked their weapons inside their vehicle. Once inside, an unknown man with a gun confronted one of the Triple Canopy guards and shot him at least twice before running from the club. The uninjured guard helped his partner to their vehicle outside, where they came under fire "from an unknown number of assailants shooting from behind two parked cars," the report said. The guards now had access to their own weapons and they returned fire. Once they did, the attackers took off.

The injured Triple Canopy guard was taken to the hospital, where he survived, according to the report. Both men were ordered out of the country and barred from working on the security contract for unprofessional conduct and lack of judgment.

-An unidentified weapon was "test fired" by a Blackwater aircraft in January 2005 near the home of an Iraqi official, who is not named in the records describing the incident. U.S. officials in Baghdad ordered the pilot and the aircraft's gunner dismissed. Several months later, however, Fred Piry, then a senior State Department official, reinstated both contractors "after a careful review of the incident." The records don't say what information caused Piry to reverse the earlier decision.

-In March 2008, three DynCorp employees in Iraq were fired after a flare was shot from their vehicle at a truck being driven by Kurdish Peshmerga forces. An inquiry by the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad found that the use of the flare was justified in stopping the truck, which was being driven erratically. But the employees were sacked because they initially lied to investigators, claiming they hadn't shot the flare or witnessed anyone else doing so

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Blackwater Founder in Deal to Sell Company

By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and BEN PROTESS

Erik D. Prince, founder of the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, has reached a deal to sell his embattled firm to a small group of investors based in Los Angeles who have close ties to Mr. Prince, according to people briefed on the deal.

Blackwater, now called Xe Services, was once the United States’ go-to contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been under intense pressure since 2007, when Blackwater guards were accused of killing 17 civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The company, its executives and personnel have faced civil lawsuits, criminal charges and congressional investigations surrounding accusations of murder and bribery. In April, federal prosecutors announced weapons charges against five former senior Blackwater executives, including its former president.

The sale, which is expected to be announced on Friday, came after the State Department threatened to stop awarding contracts to the company as long as Mr. Prince owned the firm, people involved in the discussions said. These people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the confidential talks. The sale is intended to help shake the stigma associated with its ownership under Mr. Prince.

Yet questions remain about Mr. Prince’s continuing relationship with the company. While he is expected to step down from any management or operational role, he will have a financial interest in the company’s future, according to people briefed on the negotiations. As part of the deal, he will be paid an “earn out,” or a payment that depends on the company’s financial performance over the next several years, these people said.

One of the lead investors in the deal is Jason DeYonker of Forté Capital Advisors, who has a long relationship with Mr. Prince and Blackwater. He helped advise Mr. Prince in his development of Blackwater’s business plan when the company was founded and helped negotiate the company’s first training contracts with United States government agencies and the company’s expansion of its training center in Moyock, N.C. In addition, he managed the Prince family’s money from 1998 to 2002. The other lead investor is Manhattan Growth Partners, a private equity firm in New York.

Exact terms of the deal could not be learned, but people involved in the talks said the transaction was worth about $200 million. Bank of America led the financing of the transaction, these people said.

Mr. Prince, a former Navy Seal who created Blackwater in 1997, put his company up for sale in June and moved his family to Abu Dhabi, court records show. Mr. Prince, who built Blackwater using an inheritance from his family’s Michigan auto parts fortune, stepped aside as Xe’s chief executive in 2009 but has remained chairman until now. Mr. Prince sold the company’s aviation division, Presidential Airways, to the AAR Corporation in March.

The auction for Xe Services has dragged on for months as speculation has swirled about the company’s future and the auction process. Some bidders speculated that Mr. Prince had always favored selling the company to the investor group led by Mr. DeYonker.

The new buyers are hoping to recast the company as a military training organization instead of a private security service. The company’s training center in Moyock has trained more than 50,000 United States government personnel and allied forces. The buyers hope to receive new contracts to train forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, among other locations, especially as the United States withdraws troops and needs to train local forces.

After the sale, the company will continue to be subject to an agreement it reached with the State Department in August. Under the settlement, the company paid $42 million in fines over hundreds of violations of United States export control regulations, permitting it to continue to compete for government contracts.

Wendy Wysong, a partner at the law firm Clifford Chance, was appointed as a special compliance officer for Xe Services as a result of the settlement.

James Risen contributed reporting.

America's New Mercenaries

Tim Shorrock Wed Dec 15, 10:39 pm ET

NEW YORK – As American commanders meet this week for the Afghanistan review, Obama is hiring military contractors at a rate that would make Bush blush. Tim Shorrock on the Blackwater heirs.

Top U.S. commanders are meeting this week to plan for the next phase of the Afghanistan war. In Iraq, meanwhile, gains are tentative and in danger of unraveling.

Both wars have been fought with the help of private military and intelligence contractors. But despite the troubles of Blackwater in particular – charges of corruption and killing of civilians—and continuing controversy over military outsourcing in general, private sector armies are as involved as ever.

Without much notice or debate, the Obama administration has greatly expanded the outsourcing of key parts of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East and Africa, and as a result, for its secretive air war and special operations missions around the world, the U.S. has become increasingly reliant on a new breed of specialized companies that are virtually unknown to the American public, yet carry out vital U.S. missions abroad.

Companies such as Blackbird Technologies, Glevum Associates, K2 Solutions, and others have won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military and intelligence contracts in recent years to provide technology, information on insurgents, Special Forces training, and personnel rescue. They win their work through the large, established prime contractors, but are tasked with missions only companies with specific skills and background in covert and counterinsurgency can accomplish.

Some observers fear that the widespread use of contractors for U.S. counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Horn of Africa could deepen the secrecy surrounding the American presence in those regions, making it harder for Congress to provide proper oversight.

Even in Iraq, where the U.S. has ended combat operations, the government is "greatly expanding" its use of private security companies, creating "an entirely new role for contractors on the battlefield," Michael Thibault, the co-chairman of the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting, recently warned Congress.

Blackbird, which is staffed by former CIA operatives, is a key contractor in a highly classified program that sends secret teams into enemy territory to rescue downed or captured U.S. soldiers.

Among the companies getting contracts is Blackbird, which is staffed by former CIA operatives, and is a key contractor in a highly classified program that sends secret teams into enemy territory to rescue downed or captured U.S. soldiers.

Glevum, meanwhile, fields a small army of analysts in Iraq and Afghanistan who provide the U.S. military with what the company opaquely describes as "information operations and influence activities."

And K2 is a highly sought-after subcontractor and trainer for the most secretive units of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, including the SEAL team that rescued the crew of the Maersk Alabama from a gang of pirates last year. It is based near the Army's Special Forces headquarters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and was founded by Lane Kjellsen, a former Special Forces soldier.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander of conventional and special forces in the war zones, is using contractors because "he wants an organization that reports directly to him," said a former top aide to the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, the umbrella organization for all Special Forces. "Everyone knows Petraeus can't execute his strategy without the private sector." The former aide spoke on the condition that he not be identified, saying his career could be jeopardized if he went public. The International Security Assistance Force, the general's home command, did not respond to a request for comment.

The use of contractors could become a serious problem if controversies about them are not addressed, a senior British official warned during a recent visit to Washington. Pauline Neville-Jones, the U.K.'s minister of state for security and counterterrorism (and a former executive with QinetiQ PLC, a major intelligence contractor), told an audience at the Brookings Institution that "we have something of a crisis in Afghanistan" partly because of the "largely unregulated private sector security companies performing important roles" there.

The Pentagon's Central Command had nearly 225,000 contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan and other areas at last count, doing tasks ranging from providing security to base support. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Agency field thousands more under classified contracts that are not publicly disclosed, but extend into every U.S. military command around the world. (According to reports in The Nation and elsewhere, Blackwater, which is now known as Xe, has contracted to send personnel into Pakistan to fight with the Joint Special Operations Command, although a command spokesman said the reports were "totally wrong.")

In response to a question from The Daily Beast, Neville-Jones said that American and British forces must work out "the operational rules and roles that they have when they are in the frontline." Unless that happens, "We are in danger of getting up against Geneva Convention problems and failure to observe fundamental rules of war."

A spokesman for SOCOM would not say exactly how many people work on its contracts, but did say that between 2001 and 2009, SOCOM's budget has grown from about $3 billion to about $10 billion. Neither SOCOM nor Special Operations forces outsource combat operations, the spokesman said. "About the only contractors Special Operations forces might have with them on operations are interpreters," he said.

However, private contractors are now fulfilling vital functions previously done by the military itself.

Blackbird is a case in point. Based in Herndon, Virginia, a stone's throw from the CIA, Blackbird deploys dozens of former CIA operatives and provides "technology solutions" to military and intelligence agencies. Much of the company's revenue—including a $450 million contract awarded last year by the Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command—comes from the deployment of special teams and equipment into enemy territory to rescue American soldiers who have been captured by Taliban or al Qaeda units or have stranded after losing their helicopters in battle.

Until recently, the task of rescuing American soldiers was largely carried out by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. But Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recommended that the agency's parent command in Virginia be closed. If the recovery agency is shut down, Blackbird would likely pick up the rescue business as it is outsourced. In that case, recovery of captured or stranded American soldiers "won't be a military command anymore; it will be a business," said the former Special Operations command aide (an agency spokesman said, "It's too early to say what will happen.")

Blackbird is run by CEO Peggy Styer, an investor once labeled a "serial defense entrepreneur" by CNN. Last year, she hired Cofer Black, the former head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, to a senior position. (Black hired and managed some of the first private operatives to enter Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and later joined Blackwater.) Perhaps anticipating a pickup in future business, a venture-capital fund launched by Styer and two other Blackbird founders recently raised $21 million on Wall Street. Blackbird did not return phone calls or emails.

Glevum Associates, for its part, has won contracts for controversial intelligence-gathering work.

The Boston-based company was founded in 2006 by Andrew Garfield, a former British intelligence officer with counterinsurgency experience in Northern Ireland. Garfield first gained public notice in 2004, when he was a key player in the Lincoln Group, a defense contractor that became notorious for engaging in a covert psychological operation to plant stories in the Iraqi press that put a positive spin on America and the U.S. war effort in Iraq. (Covert psychological operations are known in the trade as psy-ops.)

Garfield won his first contracts for Glevum as an adviser to the U.S. military in Iraq. Drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland, his company began researching the views of Iraqi citizens toward the U.S. military. At the time, "no one was doing systematic target audience research," he told me in an interview.

Glevum's contribution to counterinsurgency efforts is a trademarked program called "Face-to-face Research Analysis" that combines intelligence collection with polls and interviews, primarily for the Army's Human Terrain System—a system that some American social scientists have described as unethical because information gleaned from anthropological researchers ultimately can be used to kill people.

Garfield denies the charge. The U.S. military, he told me, can't "connect opinions to location." Rather, the military uses his information "to focus their operations the right way and to provide solutions that Afghans would choose." Several experts on the program said it's impossible to divorce it from other—bloodier—counterinsurgency efforts. "HTS has been an intelligence-funded program from the beginning," said John Stanton, a Virginia military analyst who has written extensively about the system.

(Glevum's corporate partners include primary contractors BAE Systems and ManTech International. K2, which declined to comment, also wins much of its classified work as a subcontractor for larger companies such as Boeing and CACI.)

Garfield pushes back against the notion that Glevum Associates bears any resemblance to Blackwater, which became synonymous with corruption and incompetence for a series of incidents that included shooting innocent civilians and smuggling illegal weapons. "Whenever people think of contractors now, they think of Blackwater," said Garfield. "Well, if you hire a cheap plumber, don't be surprised when the plumbing breaks."

Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based investigative journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster. His articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Salon, Mother Jones, The Nation and many other publications at home and abroad. He can be reached through his website at timshorrock.com.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-15/counterinsurgency-outsourcing-americas-new-mercenaries-in-afghanistan-middle-east-africa/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsR2

Wendy Wysong

Wendy Wysong is now responsible for making sure that Blackwater doesn’t continue to illegally export weapons, under a $42 million settlement agreement between the infamous mercenary company and the US State Department.

Wysong is a partner at a top-flight Washington, DC law firm, and an export in arms trade regulations. She also happened to be the US Commerce Department’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement for several years when Blackwater happened to be—that’s right—illegally exporting weapons.

http://www.warisbusiness.com/2010/12/former-bush-admin-lawyer-will-keep-tabs-on-blackwater/

Residents of quiet desert town up in arms over proposed military training center

San Diego-based Wind Zero Inc. says the facility would bring much-needed jobs and revenue to cash-strapped Imperial County. Critics say it would upset Ocotillo's peaceful rural atmosphere.

By Stephen Ceasar, Los Angeles Times

For years this tiny desert town in western Imperial County has been a haven for retirees and others who desire a slow and quiet existence.

Howard Kelly, 62, a Vietnam War veteran, moved here to escape the urban noise that triggers his incapacitating post-traumatic stress disorder. Joseph Asciutto, 64, a retired firefighter from San Diego, built a home in this stark landscape he visited as a boy and grew to love, and which he now calmly observes from a lawn chair on his front porch.

Brandon Webb, 36, a former Navy SEAL sniper, was also attracted to this stretch of desert. But for different reasons.

Its remote setting, he said, would make it ideal for his dream of building a sprawling $100-million military and law enforcement training center that would include shooting ranges, live-fire training houses, a commercial racetrack, a heliport and an airstrip. He said the project will provide much-needed jobs and revenue to the cash-strapped county, where the unemployment rate in October hit 29.3%.

"This will put the county on the map" in the law enforcement community, Webb said.

But residents fear the center would upset the rural atmosphere of their desert community — home to about 300 residents — and destroy the peace and quiet they cherish.

"The idea of putting something so ugly and disruptive in a place so quiet and beautiful is offensive," said Susan Massey, a retired teacher and leader of a group of activists who have lobbied against the center since it was proposed in 2006.

The Imperial County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to hold a public hearing Monday on whether to give Webb's San Diego-based company, Wind Zero Inc., approval to begin construction of the 944-acre facility.

Much of the county's law enforcement community has endorsed the project, citing the high cost of sending officers to Riverside County to attend the academy and for other training there. It can cost as much as $38,000 for a single officer, El Centro Police Chief Ed McGinley said.

"All law enforcement agencies in this county can benefit from having a facility with these capabilities," he said.

Wind Zero also hopes to negotiate contracts with the military and federal law enforcement agencies for training at the center when it is completed in 2013, Webb said. Former Navy SEAL colleagues have expressed interest, he added.

If approved, the facility would be built across a dirt road from Kelly's home in the Nomirage area of Ocotillo.

He worries that the noise will make life unbearable. He is particularly concerned about helicopters and the shooting ranges.

"If gunfire goes off," he said, "I come unglued."

If the center is built, Kelly said, he and his wife plan to move from their home of 23 years.

Webb said that helicopter operations would be limited to daylight hours a few days a month and that the shooting ranges would either be indoors or semi-enclosed, "taking the noise issue off the table" in terms of gunfire. He pointed out that the project's environmental impact report concluded that noise in the area already exceeds acceptable levels for residential neighborhoods.

Asciutto, whose home is also across the road from the proposed site, disputes the findings. He said the little noise in the area comes from cars on Interstate 8, which is about a mile away from his home, and from adjacent Highway 98.

Opponents also worry the center could deplete the city's limited water supply.

Although most of the county's residents receive water from the Colorado River via an expansive canal system, Ocotillo relies solely on a natural underground aquifer. The aquifer is fed by scarce rainwater that seeps through the ground. It is unknown how much groundwater is there or what kind of effect the project would have on it, said Noel Ludwig, a hydrologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

According to plans, the center would use about 65 acre-feet of water annually, or 21,180,341 gallons, nearly twice the amount of water now permitted by the land's residential zoning. A typical family of four uses about 1.5 acre-feet annually, or about 488,776 gallons, said Dave Black, an Imperial County planner.

During construction, Wind Zero would have to follow stringent water-level monitoring and mitigation requirements so as not to deplete the groundwater, Black said.

Officials know the risks but are attracted by the potential jobs the project would bring to a county that routinely has the highest unemployment rate in both California and the nation, Massey said.

The center would generate an estimated 100 full-time jobs and bring in about $500,000 in annual tax revenue, providing an economic boost to the city and county, Webb said. "There's no economy in Ocotillo," he said. "There's nothing out there. There is a gas station and a bar, I think."

About 70% of the workers would be recruited from Imperial and San Diego counties. Some jobs would require specialized skills, and local businesses would be contracted for custodial, security and maintenance positions.

Critics see unsettling similarities between the Wind Zero project and a training and supply facility proposed but then scrapped in San Diego County by the controversial private security firm Blackwater USA, which trains and supplies civilian military personnel for assignments overseas. Some have suggested that Wind Zero is a front for Blackwater — which now operates under the name Xe — or could be sold to it once the project has been approved. Webb dismisses the claims.

Wind Zero has made a commitment to not train mercenaries, Webb said. "Our business philosophy is to train men and women in uniform, not replace them."

Kelly, the Vietnam vet, said there may be a need for such a facility, but Webb should have been more sensitive to those who would be most affected.

"I'm a military man, we need training," he said. "But they don't need to destroy a whole neighborhood to do it."