On January 14th 2002, CORP WATCH ran a story about whistleblower Ben Johnston who was fired for revealing a child sex ring at DynCorp, a U.S. contracting company doing business in Bosnia.
For those looking for more of the backstory on Dyncorp whistleblowers story, Nick Schwellenbach unearthed material from an interview he conducted with Bolkovac and some related research in 2010. The material was chopped from a story he was working on for The Washington Post because of 'space considerations'. Here’s the draft section that was cut:
Roughly a decade ago, two Dyncorp employees reported that some of their fellow employees were involved in the buying and selling of women and young girls in Bosnia. Dyncorp is a U.S. defense and security contractor that held U.S. logistics and security contracts for work in the former Yugoslavia.
Both were fired, retaliation for their whistle-blowing they said.
“The only reason they fired me was because I told on them, and I broke up their little boys’ club,” former Dyncorp employee Ben Johnston said at a congressional hearing in 2002.
A helicopter mechanic working for Dyncorp on an Air Force contract, Johnston had observed Dyncorp employees with young girls believed to have been purchased and employees bragging about buying and selling them in 1999 and 2000.
His allegations were investigated by the Army but after some initial work that did turn up significant evidence of trafficking, including a confession by one employee that women were sold “permanently,” they turned the investigation over to the local police. But the local police erroneously did not believe they could prosecute American contractors, according to a Human Rights Watch report. Nor did the Army investigators interview a Moldovan woman who was purchased, explore allegations that Johnston’s supervisors had raped a woman or that she or other women had been trafficked.
“There is my supervisor, the biggest guy there [in Bosnia] with DynCorp, videotaping having sex with these girls, girls saying no,” Johnston said at the hearing, referring to a video turned over to Army investigators, “but that guy now, to my knowledge, he is in America doing fine. There was no repercussion for raping the girl.” [source POGO]
"Keep protecting the corporate lie," that's the message.
