More and more often in those months, the talk among his co-workers had turned to boasts about owning prostitutes — how young they were, how good they were in bed, how much they cost. And it wasn’t just boasting: Johnston often saw co-workers out on the streets of Dubrave, the closest town to the base, with the young female consorts that inspired their braggadocio. They’d bring them to company functions, and on one occasion, Johnston says, over to his house for dinner. Occasionally he’d see the young girls riding bikes and playing with other children, with their “owners” standing by, watching.

But the bragging about a 12-year-old sex slave pushed Johnston over the edge. “I had to do something,” he says. “There were kids involved.”

So Johnston says he complained to managers at DynCorp, the Reston, Va.-based company that had hired him to be a mechanic at the U.S. Army’s Camp Comanche in Bosnia, and to the Army Criminal Investigation Command (known by the acronym CID). In the end, two DynCorp employees would be fired for the activities Johnston complained about — including site supervisor John Hirtz — but not before Johnston himself lost his job. And nobody would face criminal charges of any kind for their involvement with the young prostitutes.

Now Johnston is suing DynCorp in a Tarrant County, Texas, courtroom, in a case that is set to go to trial in mid-July. He is claiming he was fired for blowing the whistle on his co-workers’ role in the sex trade, and is seeking unspecified monetary damages. And he is not alone. A second wrongful termination suit filed in the U.K. by a former DynCorp employee contracted to the United Nations to be part of the U.N.’s International Police Task Force in Bosnia charges that she was sacked for implicating DynCorp employees who participated in forced prostitution in the Balkans. In that case, which will likely reach a conclusion in the next several weeks, former officer Kathryn Bolkovac contends that other task-force officers frequented brothels staffed by women forced into prostitution.

The scope of the problem is stunning, says Martina Vandenberg, a women’s rights researcher with Human Rights Watch, and in a 1999 tour of Bosnia, she saw little effort to stop it. “I found that Bosnia was absolutely littered with brothels and those brothels were full of trafficked women,” she said. “We’re talking about women sold as chattel for $600 to $700, with all the rights of ownership attaching.”

DynCorp declined to comment on the suits, citing the pending legal action. But after a February 2000 story by Insight Magazine, a sister publication of the Washington Times, the company mounted a vigorous defense on its Web site, insisting that it cooperated with the government’s investigation and fired employees who were involved.

“The behavior described in the (Insight) article is intolerable and illegal and is something the company does not tolerate,” the posting says. “The Company has always been diligent in deterring, detecting, and disciplining any and all employee behavior that falls outside the Company’s stated policies, or could be perceived as violating the law.”

Further, DynCorp asserted that Johnston was not terminated for participating in an Army investigation, as the company did not even know that Johnston had gone to CID at the time of his firing. The posting did not directly address the Bolkovac case.

But the lawsuits are raising larger questions about the role and the accountability of the growing number of private military contractors working overseas. These firms — often referred to as private military companies or private military firms — provide an assortment of services to the armed forces and the U.S. government as well as foreign governments and international organizations, and it’s a rapidly growing business. In addition to mechanic units such as the one Johnston joined, DynCorp provides communications and weapons specialists to U.S. forces, crop eradication pilots to the State Department for use in South America, and police officers to the U.N.

DynCorp has a lot of company in this booming field. Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton — of which Vice President Dick Cheney is a former CEO — is another major player. The company has run or currently runs U.S. military bases in such far-flung locations as Georgia, Uzbekistan, Haiti, Rwanda, Somalia and the Balkans. Some companies actually train foreign forces. The firm MPRI, which boasted to the Los Angeles Times that it has “more generals per square foot than the Pentagon,” is in line for the contract to train the new Afghan army. As America continues its broad war against terror, these and other similar companies will be deployed to the Philippines, Afghanistan and anywhere else American, U.N. or NATO troops are sent.

In just 10 years, the private military industry has grown from a handful of companies to hundreds, with its income rising from millions of dollars a year to an estimated $100 billion a year, says Peter W. Singer, an Olin fellow with the Brookings Institution who has spent the last seven years studying the field.

But with their growing influence come new questions about their role. Are they monitored well enough, and by whom? In countries without a solid civic, military or police infrastructure, whether Bosnia or Afghanistan, who can police them? Are they above the law, or acting as the law themselves? Critics contend that these companies often operate without oversight in distant and developing countries and aren’t subject to the scrutiny conventional military operations receive. Problems, they say, are inevitable.

Attempts by Salon to have such concerns addressed by the U.S. government highlight the lack of accountability. The Department of Defense refused to answer questions about contractor accountability, referring them instead to the specific branch of service that holds a given contract. The Army was unable to find someone knowledgeable on the topic to be interviewed. The State Department failed to return phone calls on the matter.

The Air Force did respond to questions, but only to say that the contractors themselves are responsible for their employees. Lt. Col. David Talley of Air Force public affairs said that when it comes to contractors, the Air Force is concerned with whether the contract is carried out, not with the behavior of individual employees.

Ben Johnston’s story of the way DynCorp officials and staff took advantage of the lawlessness of postwar Bosnia is a cautionary tale about the lack of accountability enjoyed by these private companies working on behalf of the U.S. military.

A former West Texas high school athlete, Johnston had joined the Army with a sense of duty instilled by his upbringing — his father served in the Navy — and with an overload of television coverage of the Gulf War. Today, at 31, he’s almost five years out of the military, but he still proudly jingles the dog tags he wears all the time and talks about how everyone should serve while they’re young.

Johnston says he performed well in the Army, due in part to his extensive previous experience working on aircraft. His father owned a small airstrip in Shallowater, Texas, and Johnston talks about sneaking out in his father’s plane the way most people recollect sneaking out in their parents’ car. After college he attended a small Christian university for a year before enrolling in Rice Aviation, an aircraft maintenance trade school where Johnston earned his Airframe and Powerplant certificate.

He enlisted in the Army, and for the next six years, Johnston worked on helicopters — first on Black Hawks and Hueys, later on Apaches. He finished his term with the 2/6 Cavalry in Illesheim, Germany. That’s where he first heard of DynCorp, a company largely owned by employees that today boasts an income of almost $2 billion a year, according to its Web site. Over 95 percent of this income is derived from government contracts, according to DynCorp spokeswoman Anne Crecraft, and of that, approximately 40 percent comes from government-contracted IT and computer systems work. The other 60 percent, she says, comes from logistics support, aviation maintenance and similar services.

Johnston worked near such a maintenance team when he was stationed at Stork Barracks in Illesheim. As an enlisted mechanic, Johnston heard stories about the large amounts of money being made by DynCorp’s people for doing essentially the same job he was doing. When DynCorp employees working at the base virtually guaranteed him a job, Johnston says he was intrigued. In late 1998, as he was finishing his hitch in the Army, he landed a job working on aircraft at Camp Comanche in Dubrave, Bosnia, the same base he’d been stationed at while briefly deployed with the Army’s 2/6 Cav. Within days of being discharged from the Army, Johnston was on a flight to Bosnia, now making what he claims amounted to a six-figure income as a DynCorp employee.

When he took the job, he expected it to be similar to his time in the Army, and at first, much of it was. In the Army, Johnston spent his days working on Black Hawk or Apache helicopters. In Bosnia it was the same. He was even issued a Kevlar vest and helmet when he arrived, just as if he were part of a regular Army unit. He earned hazard pay and ate at the base mess hall.

But by Johnston’s description, the early days were lonely and the work environment far different from the one he’d known in military life.

His wife didn’t come with him and his marriage dissolved. His contracting crew was older then his crews in the Army had been — and far less motivated, Johnston says. A task such as changing tires on a Black Hawk should’ve taken 45 minutes, but at Camp Comanche, it took all day. The camaraderie Johnston had enjoyed while he was in the Army was all but absent. And he was revolted by the stories he was hearing about local prostitution, especially the use of young girls as sex slaves.

One day, while waiting for the DynCorp van to pick him up for work, he met a young Bosnian woman. Denisa, who is now 23, had spent her early teens in what she calls “life in the basement,” hiding from the shelling in the surrounding hills, often going without electricity, and sometimes without food and water. After that initial meeting, Denisa’s brother Sam invited Johnston to the family’s house for coffee. He struck up a friendship with Sam, and through it got to know Denisa’s family. Eventually Denisa and Johnston started a courtship that adhered to the conservative customs of local Muslims, and in September 1999, they married.

Life got better for a while. His home life was better, and he had made some friends at work. But soon Johnston began to realize that the unsubtle brand of Balkan prostitution he saw all around him was going to force him to do something — and the consequences couldn’t help but unsettle the peaceful life he was trying to build for himself in Bosnia.

Many prostitutes in the Balkans are not natives of the region, but are imported from poor Eastern European countries such Russia, Moldova and Romania, according to Ann Jordan, a lawyer with International Human Rights Law Group who works on human trafficking. Some come willingly, Jordan says, knowing that the region is home to a population of highly paid, unaccompanied men from military forces, international aid organizations, the United Nations and private military firms. These women hope to carve out a better life for themselves, maybe send some cash home to their families. Others are tricked by human traffickers who tell them they are going to Italy or another Western European country where they will work at conventional jobs. Many of these women are in their teens, or younger.

However the girls get there, they usually end up trapped. They become indebted to pimps and brothel owners, ostensibly for the cost of importing them. These men take the women’s passports and force them to repay the debts through prostitution.

“In the beginning they hold out hope that the situation will improve and they’ll be able to go free,” Jordan says. “But it’s not true.”

And sometimes, according to Jordan, these girls are sold outright to a customer — usually a member of the international contingent participating in some way in rebuilding the region.

According to deposition testimony from DynCorp employees and DynCorp e-mails made public by Johnston’s lawsuit, Bosnian police started an investigation in the summer of 1999 after local news media reported that five DynCorp employees had purchased the women’s passports from local Serbian mafia elements. Johnston was still relatively new at the job, and says at the time he knew nothing of that investigation. A Bosnian government representative brought the allegations to the attention of the Task Force Eagle commander (Camp Comanche is one of the bases that make up the larger Task Force Eagle). The men were accused in the Bosnian press of “harboring illegal immigrants and participating in organized crime activities to buy ownership (passports) of these aliens,” according to an e-mail from Martin Ayers, then DynCorp’s manager of European operations, to DynCorp vice president Chris DiGesualdo.

According to e-mails, on Aug. 10, the Army informed DynCorp of the men’s names and the accusations against them, and requested they be removed from Bosnia within 48 hours. By Aug. 12, DynCorp had flown the men to a DynCorp office in Germany to be interviewed. Within a few days of arriving in Germany, the men were fired. This apparently satisfied the Army. Thanks to DynCorp’s swift action, Ayers’ e-mail says, “We were able to turn this into a marketing success.”

But an Aug. 11 e-mail from DynCorp manager Joe Becker to Ayers indicates that even as these events unfolded, DynCorp already had an inkling that the problems were more widespread than had been addressed.

“[I]t appears that as many as three other employees are participating in similar activities that have not drawn the police attention and reporting we have seen with these first five,” Becker’s e-mail says. His solution: “Recommend that any action include counselling of our people to correct further embarrassment of this nature.”

Joseph Becker conducted interviews with the four employees when they arrived in Germany, according to his deposition testimony in the Johnston case (the fifth accused employee had already been fired and sent home for failing to show up to work). The impression Becker got from these interviews, he says, was not one of slave and master, but rather one of honorable men who had fallen in love with local prostitutes and tried to buy their freedom. According to Becker, the men had “saved the women.”

“I had an opportunity to interview those people and without exception all of them indicated that they would [buy the women] again,” Becker says. “They were in tears.”

He went on to say in his testimony that he did some research into the idea of men buying sex slaves in order to free them and then marry them, and found it to be common. He asserts there were grounds for dismissal because the men broke the local law, but he says that he found the men’s intentions admirable and indicates that he would consider hiring them again if they possessed the right skills for a position he had open.

Ann Jordan of the International Human Rights Law Group says she has heard of men buying women to free them but is uncertain how often they actually do free them. In any event, she says, the transactions are troubling.

“Why not go to the police and help the women get out who want to get out?” Jordan asks. Otherwise, “the person who sold her is still free.” And now the good-hearted customer has given money to the slave owner to go buy another girl.

In some cases, Jordan says, the claim of “buying their freedom” is merely an excuse.

“They don’t free them to free them,” she says. “They free them to keep for themselves.”

As the Bosnian investigation was underway in 1999, Johnston says that while he knew that several employees were fired (according to deposition testimony, one of them was his supervisor at the time), he only heard rumors about the circumstances. He had seen prostitution in Germany, but says he didn’t yet realize the slavery implications of the profession as practiced in the Balkans.

One of the first things that drove the point home, according to Johnston, was when co-workers began openly talking about it, bragging, even telling him point-blank that they owned women. And that was weeks, even months after DynCorp had fired the first five employees.

In his deposition, Johnston names at least seven co-workers who, he says, openly admitted buying women. An eighth man, according to Johnston, bragged about owning half interest in a brothel and called himself “pimp daddy.”

Recalling such stories in an interview, Johnston shifts from anger to disgust to paranoia. He is constantly worried both about DynCorp retaliating against him in some way, and about Serbian mafia members coming to kill him. He is angry about being fired, but gets even more upset when he recalls how blatant the problem became by early 2000.

By that point, Johnston says, such ownership was rampant among employees of DynCorp in Dubrave. He says the men walked around town with the women and openly displayed their affection. He describes the women as universally young — teenagers, even preteens — and foreign.

One particularly disturbing pattern Johnston describes in his deposition underscores the youth of the women involved:

Johnston: “You could see them [the prostitutes] right out the window [of my house].”

DynCorp attorney J. Gregory Marks: “What were they doing?”

Johnston: “Playing with other children. A lot of them are so young, they would play with other kids, and you could see them riding bikes and stuff like that.”

Marks: “You would see the women?”

Johnston: “Right, but the man would be out there, too.”

Marks: “And what would he be doing?”

Johnston: “Just watching, smoking a cigarette.”

At work, Johnston says, the prostitution talk had spiraled out of control. Co-workers, he says, would talk about “how good it was to have a sex slave at home,” and discuss the possibility of selling “them back for half price” when they grew tired of them.

Johnston says that one employee he invited over for dinner brought his sex slave with him. He says the man complained about the woman’s wanting to return to her home country and how the man was afraid to let her, because he feared she wouldn’t come back.

Johnston’s wife Denisa, a native of Dubrave, says that even though she was naive about such activities, in late 1999 and early 2000 she started to become aware of what DynCorp men where doing in their off time.

“I had never seen a prostitute in my life,” she says, “only in the movies.”

That limited exposure was enough to let her know that the foreign women hanging on the arms of DynCorp employees, identifiable by the patches on their uniforms, were prostitutes.

“I’ll never forget this one time,” Denisa said in a recent telephone interview. “There was one guy who weighs 300 pounds who wore this greasy leather jacket. He was so gross. And he was with a girl about 14 or 15. He was hugging her and she would push him away. And this was a good-looking girl. You could just tell that there was no way she would be with him [by choice].”

Such public displays didn’t sit well with the conservative Muslim community in Dubrave.

“A lot of people didn’t like it,” Denisa Johnston says. “My uncle and aunt had little kids that were just like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ You have to picture my town; when I started dating Ben, my brother would always go with us.”

She met a few of these girls at DynCorp-related functions and co-worker get-togethers and tried to talk with them. “They didn’t like to talk a lot,” she says. “They seemed really sad.”

Ben Johnston wasn’t the only DynCorp employee disturbed by what he was seeing. His best friend, Tom Oliver, eventually would go with him to the CID when Johnston decided he had to take action outside of the DynCorp chain of command to stop men from buying women. Oliver is personally familiar with the workings of forced prostitution in Bosnia — he admits he paid a local brothel owner for his current wife, who was in her late teens at the time. In his testimony, Oliver describes the transaction as “buying her freedom.” The woman, Mihaela, gave birth to Oliver’s son shortly before he left Bosnia, and they are now married and living in Alabama.

Oliver’s testimony supports Johnston’s claim that the purchasing of prostitutes was common among DynCorp personnel in Bosnia — and not necessarily to free them.

In one of the stories he tells in his deposition, Oliver says he was invited into the house of some co-workers to see what he describes as two “rental” live-in women in their late teens. The women, Oliver says, were clearly prostitutes.

“They invited me into the house [and] the women were just, you know, sitting around the house in their underwear, thongs, T-shirts, maybe a bra, that was it,” he testified. “I don’t think that’s the way most people entertain company.”

Perhaps the most shocking tale in Oliver’s deposition is the story of a DynCorp employee named Steve who bought a 16-year-old Romanian girl. He says that at some point Steve found himself both in financial trouble and angry with the girl so he sold her back to the bar he had bought her from. Then another DynCorp employee expressed interest in buying her.

Oliver says he gave his 30-day notice to DynCorp in late April 2000. That, he says, is when he and Johnston hatched a plan to report the forced prostitution to the Army Criminal Investigative Command.

Johnston had already complained to DynCorp leadership by that time, but to no avail. Johnston believes the reason for the inaction was the fact that his supervisors, including John Hirtz, were among the DynCorp employees involved in Dubrave’s sex industry.

Hirtz could not be located for comment on this story.

Johnston and Oliver are not clear on the exact date they first went to CID. Johnston says it was either February or March of 2000. Oliver sets the time in March or April, and a CID report on the incident lists an unnamed source coming to it on the first of May. Whichever date is correct, the resulting CID investigation into these new allegations of forced prostitution would continue until June 21, and include a raid of DynCorp’s hangar at Camp Comanche.

In mid-May, after the start of the investigation, Johnston was informed that he was being laid off. DynCorp managers contend Camp Comanche was overstaffed. In his deposition, Joseph Becker says that Johnston was picked over the other workers for several reasons. Johnston was inexperienced with Black Hawks, Becker said, and he was living with a Bosnian woman (his wife). Plus, the supervisor said, Johnston was showing interest in starting a business in Dubrave, which would violate a DynCorp agreement with the Army that prohibits employees from making money in the local economy. Johnston asserts that he had plenty of Black Hawk experience and denies that he was trying to make money in the local economy.

Becker and another manager at the time, Jonathan Lyons, both contend in their depositions that Johnston learned of his impending layoff and made his complaint to CID to get back at the company. It’s clear from the deposition testimony and the CID report that Johnston went to CID before he was formally notified of his layoff, but Becker and Lyons assert that he was able to deduce that it was coming. They also contend that Johnston himself was engaged in illegal activity in Bosnia.

A handful of DynCorp employees still working at Camp Comanche also charge Johnston with illegal and immoral behavior. In their depositions, several claim Johnston went to prostitutes. At least two claim that Johnston offered to sell them a gun (though neither is reported as making such a claim in the CID’s 2000 report on the incident), and several indicated that Johnston had threatened to “get even” with DynCorp.

Johnston vehemently denies that he was involved in any illegal activity, that he visited prostitutes, that he sold guns or that he went to CID as revenge for getting laid off. He calls the allegations ludicrous, and said he would take a lie detector test to prove his innocence. The charges were made in retaliation, he says, by men and a company angry that he “busted up DynCorp’s party.” He contends, rather, that he was laid off because site manager John Hirtz worried about his vocal complaints and had gotten wind that he had gone to CID.

Tom Oliver supported Johnston’s theory in his deposition, stating that he had told other DynCorp employees that he and Johnston had gone to CID, only to learn later that the employees were involved in similar activities and were Hirtz’s friends.

Meanwhile, the Army CID’s investigation into Johnston’s complaints was proceeding, but it was beginning to look like whatever it found, the CID would be unable to prosecute any of the men involved.

CID would not make agents available to be interviewed for this article, but a report on the incident provided to Johnston’s lawyers and human rights workers shows the problems CID encountered.

According to the report, Special Agent William Russ coordinated his investigation with the U.S. Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Russ spoke with a Lt. Col. Cole and a Maj. Nettles at the judge advocate’s office, and was informed that neither Bosnian law nor U.S. law applied to the men. The staff judge advocate told CID that all it could do was bar individuals from military bases and ask DynCorp to fire them.

In early May 2000, Tom Oliver left Dubrave with his family, and throughout the month Johnston continued to meet with CID, telling agents what he had seen and heard and taking them around town to point out the houses of people who he suspected had bought women.

On June 2, dozens of military police surrounded the DynCorp hangar at Camp Comanche, rounded up the scores of DynCorp employees working there and began interrogating them about their knowledge of illegal activities at the base. A few were selected, presumably on Johnston’s recommendations, to give sworn statements and have their homes and vehicles searched. Johnston was placed in protective custody.

The majority of CID’s searches and interviews didn’t turn up much, but DynCorp employee Kevin Werner delivered a bombshell: He admitted he bought a prostitute and an illegal gun and implicated other DynCorp employees, including Hirtz, in the town’s sex trade.

Werner could not be located for comment and has not given a deposition in Johnston’s lawsuit. But in his sworn statement, Werner told investigators about prostitution run by a Serbian mafia character known as the Belly.

“He is the operator of a nightclub by the name of Harley’s. Harley’s is a nightclub that offers prostitution. Women are sold hourly, nightly or permanently,” Werner told investigators. Werner admitted that he had purchased a Moldavian prostitute and the Uzi, apparently in a package deal. He claimed he had paid for the woman in order to free her, and told investigators that she could leave any time she wanted.

The investigative summary of the raid, dated June 21, 2000, says that CID agents established probable cause to believe Werner committed the offenses of illicit possession of a weapon and procuring and pandering. The summary also said Hirtz committed the offense of procuring and pandering when he solicited sexual intercourse from two female prostitutes who worked at Harley’s.

The case was then closed. Despite the fact that three employees of DynCorp were found to be living with young Eastern European women — Werner admitted that he had purchased his from a local bar — there is no evidence in the CID report that investigators interviewed the women or tried to determine if they were being held against their will. The final summary in the CID report reads: “This investigation was terminated in that it was determined that the offense was committed by a civilian who is no longer subject to the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice], there are no violations of federal criminal statutes with which the person can be charged, and no other Army interest exists.”

But CID investigators discovered on June 2, the day of the raid, that the staff judge advocate had been wrong. In fact, the Bosnian police could prosecute crimes committed by American DynCorp employees as long as the crimes were committed outside of their official duties in Bosnia. They turned the case over to the Zivinice, Bosnia, police.

But the Bosnian police would not get a chance to prosecute anyone. According to DynCorp e-mails, John Hirtz was transferred to Germany within days of the raid. DynCorp supervisor Lyons says in his deposition that Hirtz was later fired, and asserts that the firing was justified because the CID had “produced some evidence that [there] was clear violations of moral behavior, as well as some illegal activities.” Kevin Werner was escorted to the airport by the CID and sent out of the country. He was also subsequently fired by DynCorp. Neither was prosecuted. The Bosnian police did not pursue the matter — whether due to a lack of resources, continuing confusion over jurisdictional issues or simply a lack of will is unclear.

Ben and Denisa Johnston were held in protective custody for several days. At some point Johnston’s status with DynCorp was changed from laid off to fired. On his letter of discharge, DynCorp lists the reason for termination as “employee brought discredit to [DynCorp] and to the US Army.” Johnston was forced to pay for his own relocation costs and is not eligible to be rehired. But there’s an apparent contradiction that could prove important to Johnston’s case: Despite the official claim on DynCorp’s Web site that the company had no knowledge that Johnston had gone to CID when he was fired, Lyons says in his deposition that the way Johnston brought discredit to DynCorp and the U.S. Army was by bringing unsubstantiated charges against his fellow employees.

Two of the employees Johnston disclosed to investigators were fired. But many of the men who allegedly owned young women, including the man Johnston says bragged about owning a 12-year-old girl, were never implicated by the CID and never fired from DynCorp.

Johnston’s lawsuit will likely go to a jury next month. His lawyers will contend that DynCorp engaged in a pattern of illegal activity and fired him for blowing the whistle. DynCorp’s lawyers will likely paint a picture of Johnston as an embittered employee who charged his co-workers with crimes to retaliate for the layoff. No one will deny that at least some DynCorp employees purchased women in Bosnia. And whichever way the case goes, none of those employees who purchased women will likely ever face criminal charges.

Coming Thursday, Part 2: How they got away with it.

Smith and the other commissioners in his camp say they are simply writing the rules required to make the law’s definitions precise, resistant to court challenges and discouraging to frivolous or politically motivated attacks. But after a series of controversial votes last June — and with a new rule-making session just beginning at commission headquarters in Washington — critics say the commissioners have adopted a set of regulations with such narrow definitions and significant exemptions that the soft money floodgate will remain open, or at the very least, easy to circumvent.

Sen. John McCain and the other sponsors have blasted the FEC’s interpretation of the law, charging that the commissioners have ignored the will of Congress and exceeded their authority. “Their conduct has been the most disgraceful I’ve seen in 20 years in Congress,” McCain, an Arizona Republican, told Salon. “They’re clearly violating both the intent and the letter of the law. They say they are writing their regulations on the basis of constitutionality. That’s not their job. That’s the job of the courts.”

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., expressed similar frustration in a statement to Salon. “With its eyes wide open and in the face of strong criticism from both the sponsors of the law and groups that support it, the FEC has opened loopholes in the new law before it even takes effect,” he complained. “This is not a legitimate exercise of regulatory authority and something must be done about it.”

For years, critics across the political spectrum have warned with increasing urgency that hundreds of millions of dollars in unregulated “soft money” was corrupting the political process, allowing free-spending special interests to buy access and influence with lawmakers that other people or groups could never match. McCain-Feingold was intended to help purify the process by clamping down on the riches that get funneled to political parties and political action committees every election cycle.

While McCain and his allies may be dismayed by the commission’s actions, they shouldn’t be surprised. According to a Salon investigation, the commission has been criticized almost since its inception in 1974 as a poorly camouflaged tool of the two major political parties. Critics derisively call it the Failure to Enforce Commission, or, more simply, FECkless. In a two-year study released this May, a task force of public policy specialists, former commission officials and legal experts found the agency so flawed that they recommended it be scrapped and replaced with something less political and, presumably, more functional.

Now, to the chagrin of critics, this little-known but high-powered agency is slamming headlong into the most sweeping campaign finance law in almost 30 years. This week, the commission turned its attention to revising rules for political advertising — a process which, critics say, will likely mean finding a way to continue the abuses that plague campaign advertising in federal elections.

“If there’s one thing the FEC has done over its lifetime, it’s protect the political parties,” says Paul Sanford, a former commission attorney and current head of FECWatch, an oversight group run by the nonpartisan Center For Responsive Politics, a nonprofit based in Washington.

To be sure, groups ranging from the Republican National Committee, the National Rifle Association and antiabortion groups to the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed suit over various provisions of the bill. And the commission itself defies easy partisan breakdown — two veteran commissioners appointed by President Reagan, the conservative Republican icon, are the strongest reform advocates on the panel.

But the majority of FEC commissioners today are political ideologues or party insiders who often appear more intent on catering to the parties’ interests — and the interests of big money — than in protecting the public’s interest in having fair and honest elections. At least four of the commissioners — Chairman David Mason, Vice Chairman Karl Sandstrom, Smith, and Michael Toner — have expressed opposition to current campaign finance law. And three of them — Mason, Smith and Toner — openly opposed the bill as it moved through Congress. Only the Reagan holdovers, Danny McDonald and Scott Thomas, seem to support the laws they are responsible for enforcing.

But if the will of the membership seems to contradict the spirit of federal campaign laws, critics say, that may be by design. Fred Wertheimer, executive director of the watchdog group Democracy 21, says the problem is simple: The commission was supposed to be a paper tiger, and it is. The members, who are paid a set income of $130,000 a year, are chosen by the same politicians they are supposed to regulate. Commissioners like Smith are selected for their ability to soften the campaign laws and preserve the parties’ power, Wertheimer says, not for their ability to aggressively enforce the law.

“You don’t have people with enforcement backgrounds being appointed,” Wertheimer says. “You don’t have people who come from state ethics agencies or other ethics backgrounds appointed to this commission. You have people who are sent there with an implicit if not explicit mandate to protect the members of Congress and the political parties who sent them there.”

Reformers had been pushing federal lawmakers since the early years of the 20th century to regulate campaign spending and practices, but with little effect. That changed with the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act, the law that sets campaign contribution limits and requires timely contribution disclosures from federal candidates.

The law was amended after the Watergate scandals in 1974, giving birth to the Federal Election Commission, which is charged with investigating campaign abuses and, when it finds violations, either seeking fines or recommending that the Justice Department pursue criminal investigations. Under the law, the commission is the only body allowed to file suit against federal campaigns.

The concept of “soft money” was born in 1978, when the commission issued an opinion that allowed state political party activities affecting both state and federal races to be paid for with a mix of regulated and unregulated funds. A year later, the commission cleared the way for the national parties to raise unregulated funds for similar mixed state-and-federal campaign activities. Enron, for example, would be allowed to give millions to various state or national party committees and not have the donations be covered by the strict federal donation limits that presidential campaigns are subject to. These party committees can then spend the money on advertising, facilities, get-out-the-vote drives or other activities that end up benefiting the party’s presidential candidate.

“Gradually,” says Commissioner Thomas, “the party committees figured out that, hey, you’ve got a lot of states where you can give an unlimited amount to a party committee. Corporations can give, unions can give … Very influential federal legislators got involved in raising the soft money and it became suddenly a real players’ game, with huge amounts of money coming in. And the FEC, stemming from that 1978 decision, is largely responsible for getting it going.” Later, Thomas says, Congress reinforced this game with legislation that officially sanctioned such activities.

According to the campaign watchdog group Common Cause, during the first 18 months of the current election cycle, national parties raised over $300 million in soft money. That is an 18 percent increase over the amount raised in the first 18 months of the 2000 election cycle (a presidential cycle) and nearly three times the amount raised in the last comparable election four years ago, according to the group.

Critics identified problems in the system years ago, but early efforts to reform the commission were undermined in Congress. The commission originally had been structured to avoid partisan enforcement actions. No more than three of the six commissioners could be from any one party, and a four-vote minimum was required for any commission action. At first, the president was given two appointments, with two going to the majority leadership in Congress and two others to the minority leadership.

In 1976, the Supreme Court ruled that the process violated presidential appointment powers. Because the Federal Election Commission has the power to administer and enforce the law, the court ruled, commissioners are officers of the United States, similar to top executives at the FBI or the Securities and Exchange Commission. Therefore, the court said, the election commissioners have to be nominated by the president. Congress then restructured the appointment process to a more traditional formula in which the president made the appointments and Congress approved them. Practically, though, little changed. The president usually defers to congressional leadership for four of the seats, and Congress has been known to retaliate if the process doesn’t run smoothly.

Commissioner Bradley Smith is a contemporary case in point.

Smith, a law professor, had written numerous articles against campaign finance regulation and reform in journals and newspaper editorials, and found himself a favorite witness of reform opponents on Capitol Hill, most of them conservative Republicans. Eventually, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., approached Smith about an appointment to the commission. McConnell is among the most outspoken critics of campaign finance reform in Congress, and has already filed a lawsuit attacking McCain-Feingold as unconstitutional.

Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott, then the majority leader, sent Smith’s name to President Clinton for appointment. Clinton initially balked at putting such a strong critic of campaign finance regulation on the commission, but when Lott delayed the confirmation of Clinton’s choice for U.N. ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, and threatened several judicial appointees, the president relented.

Clinton thereby found himself in the odd position of simultaneously nominating and disparaging Smith. “I don’t like it,” Clinton told reporters in a 2000 news conference covered by the Associated Press. “But I decided that I should not shut down the whole appointments process and depart from the plain intent of the law, which requires that [the commission] be bipartisan and, by all tradition, that the majority make the nomination.”

Wertheimer and his group, Democracy 21, put together a task force of experts in 2000 to study the commission’s history and problems. Members of the team came from a range of backgrounds and included experts from such places as the Brookings Institution, Harvard Law School, Common Cause, and one former federal election commissioner. In its findings, the task force detailed a series of spectacular enforcement breakdowns. It also named the politicized nature of the appointment process as a key problem.

While the commission this week announced record fines against players in the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign for illegally soliciting foreign money, that action may have been a cover for mounting attacks against its leniency. Critics say such enforcement is the exception and not the rule.

One of the more serious debacles took place when the commission investigated both the Clinton-Gore and Dole-Kemp presidential campaigns’ use of television advertising in the 1996 campaign cycle. The commission’s general counsel found that both campaigns had run ads illegally coordinated between the candidates and the political parties, which had been paid for with soft money. The Clinton-Gore camp alone used over $47 million in illegally coordinated campaign ads, according to the report. Despite strong evidence of wrongdoing, and the recommendations of its own staff, the commission failed to pursue charges against either campaign. Even a fine, critics point out, would have discouraged such illegal coordination in the future.

“Those kinds of things involve enough spending that it really could have impacted the election result,” says Thomas, who voted in favor of enforcement. “And yet the commission … did nothing.”

Even as the Democracy 21 investigators were at work, ambitious bipartisan measures to overhaul the system were being advanced in Congress by Sens. McCain and Feingold and by Reps. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., and Martin Meehan, D-Mass. McCain and Feingold waged an epic seven-year battle to get their landmark campaign finance reform bill past fervent opposition. In late March, the supporters outmaneuvered the opponents for a final time, winning legislative approval for a bill formally known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. Public support for the measure was so strong that President Bush was compelled to sign it into law despite his earlier opposition.

The main thrust of the measure was to choke off soft money. The bill prohibits federal candidates and national parties from raising or spending soft money, even for state party activities. The president, for example, is prohibited from asking rich donors to give contributions over $25,000 to state party committees. Additionally, the law puts a check on state party usage of soft money to influence federal elections — money used for advertising mentioning a candidate, or get-out-the-vote drives, for example. The bill also places new restrictions on the kind of advertising that can be done by special interest groups close to an election. The bill has other provisions, such as raising the maximum individual restriction limits and further tightening restrictions on foreign donors, but the heart of the law is its attack on large, unregulated contributions.

But while a legal challenge was inevitable, a challenge from the Federal Election Commission was predictable, too. The bloc of four reform opponents was in place and they were facing their biggest challenge — and a cursory review of their résumés makes clear that even Bush’s signature was no guarantee that the law would be put into effect.

• Bradley Smith has never been a Republican activist, but as a professor at Capital University Law School in Columbus, Ohio, he gained notice in Washington for his frequent articles blasting campaign finance reform. McConnell views his recruit as an ideal choice for the commission.

  “Professor Smith is a First Amendment scholar and the most qualified commissioner in the history of the Federal Election Commission,” McConnell said in a prepared statement. “His constitutional expertise is particularly needed at an FEC that has a dismal string of losses in federal court. I believe the FEC needs at least one commissioner who understands the First Amendment and respects Supreme Court precedent.”

  Smith sees himself as a civil libertarian pulling for the underdog. In his view, campaign finance regulation restricts speech, is vulnerable to loopholes and helps incumbents at the expense of challengers. In a commentary written for the Wall Street Journal in March 2001, after his appointment, Smith accused McCain and Feingold of a cynical ploy to silence critics with their bill’s advertising restrictions.

  Contrary to the findings of Democracy 21, Smith, like McConnell, says the commission has been too aggressive in the past, venturing into areas where it has repeatedly been struck down by the courts.

  “I certainly wasn’t chosen for my partisanship,” he says. “I was selected because there was a great number of people in Congress who I think represent a great many people in this country who felt this commission had gone the wrong direction and needed a voice that would pull it back to the center.”

• FEC Chairman David Mason was deeply involved in the Republican Party prior to his 1998 appointment. He served in both Ronald Reagan’s and former President George H.W. Bush’s defense departments, and has served on the staffs of several House and Senate members, all Republicans. He ran for the Virginia House of Delegates on the Republican ticket in 1982, but lost.

  In a report for the conservative Heritage Foundation titled “Why Congress Can’t Ban Soft Money,” Mason made his objection clear: “Congress should recall that existing practices are direct responses to previous attempts to regulate political activity. As ‘hard money’ (direct expenditures on campaigns) was limited and regulated, activists simply changed tactics … The real solution to the problem of soft money lies in minimizing, not expanding, government controls.”

  Mason did not return calls for comment.

• Michael Toner is the most recent commission appointee, taking the post during a congressional recess in March — two days after Bush signed McCain-Feingold. Toner’s choice represented a slight departure from the traditional appointment process, in that Bush chose him rather than support the Republican congressional choice, former commissioner Daryl Wold. But critics were hardly relieved by Bush’s break from tradition. Like Smith and Mason, Toner has denounced campaign finance reform, though not as often or with as much furor. And he is much closer to the Republican Party apparatus.

  Immediately before his appointment, Toner was general counsel at the Republican National Committee, which soon would file suit to overturn the reform law. Before that, he was general counsel on the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign. He also worked as a counsel to the Dole-Kemp ticket in 1996.

  It was during his time with the Republican National Committee that Toner publicly opposed the McCain-Feingold bill. “Democrats are driving legislation that will put a stake through the heart of grass-roots and voter-education initiatives,” he told the Associated Press in July 2001.

  Like Smith and Mason, Toner has issued assurances that his views of campaign finance, and his relationship with the Republican Party, will not unduly influence his actions on the commission. In fact, Toner said in an interview that his involvement with the GOP is an asset to the commission.

  “I think my having worked in the trenches, advising candidates, political staff, the RNC — people who’ve had to deal with all these regulations — about what they need to do [is] a healthy and positive perspective,” he says. “You’ve got to tell people what they can and cannot do. The rules have got to be made as clear as possible.”

• Democrat Karl Sandstrom was appointed in 1998. Before that he was chairman of the Administrative Review Board at the Department of Labor and served on the Subcommittee on Elections in the Democrat-controlled House during the late ’80s and early ’90s. He doesn’t have the ideological baggage that his Republican counterparts do, but he has largely voted like them, shying away from strong enforcement action, refusing to pursue action in the Clinton and Dole television ad fiascos and asserting himself to water down McCain-Feingold.

  Sandstrom’s actions seem to stem from a belief that attempts at campaign finance regulation are so complicated that enforcing them is often impossible. His common refrain is that laws need to be made clear and “concrete” before they can be enforced.

  “Before we can enforce the law the public must be made aware of what the law is,” he said in a recent interview. “People active in politics are [sometimes] uncertain as to what the rules are. That is not a healthy situation. Either people proceed at some risk or they do not engage in political activity because they are fearful they might violate an uncertain standard.”

The cautious approach and the narrow interpretations are frustrating — sometimes maddening — to their two colleagues, Scott Thomas and Danny McDonald. Both, surprisingly, were appointed by President Reagan, and both have been bluntly critical of the majority.

“I view my role as primarily trying to give my colleagues the courage to enforce the law as Congress intended,” Thomas said in an interview. “At least from my perspective, commissioners are spending too much time trying to figure out ways not enforce the law, or to enforce it in a way that is focused only on rather insignificant little cases, and finding ways to drop the big cases.”

Between now and year’s end, the commissioners will preside over a complex process in which the rules of campaign finance reform will be drafted, studied, subjected to public hearings, reviewed, amended and then approved in a public vote. Thus far, only the rules on soft money have been reviewed and approved by the commissioners, but in that process, critics see a grim harbinger of things to come.

Initial drafts by the commission staff provoked only modest debate, and most controversies seemed to be quelled by the last proposed draft. But in the final session, spread over four days in June, the commissioners introduced and approved a set of amendments to the draft regulations that bloodied the law. “Watching the final soft money rule-making was like watching a stock market crash from the trading floor,” says Paul Sanford of FECWatch.

The meeting was held in the Federal Election Commission’s public hearing room in Washington, a room packed with commissioners, lawyers, staffers and an audience of more than 100. Those who attended watched a lesson in how fine-print changes in the law — seemingly insignificant — had the effect of a counterrevolution.

As drafted, the rules blocked federal candidates from raising or directing soft money, prevented national political parties or organizations related to them from doing the same, and generally curbed soft money’s influence on federal elections. But scores of amendments were introduced, one at a time, each weakening the law, and many passing by the same 4-2 vote.

When the commissioners tried to settle on what it meant to “solicit” donations, the commissioners’ general counsel, Larry Norton, offered a common-sense approach: Solicit means to “request, suggest or recommend” that a donation be made. Sandstrom flatly rejected that language, asserting instead that “solicit” means a candidate must explicitly “ask” for a donation. Norton shot back: “It doesn’t seem to me to take a great deal of cleverness to … persuade a person to make a contribution, without coming out and asking. I think this definition has the potential for great mischief.”

The reform opponents mustered four votes to pass the amendment.

In its effort to stop national political parties from using shell organizations to get around the new law, McCain-Feingold states that such organizations, when created or run by the parties, would also be covered under the law. But Toner moved to open a potentially huge loophole: Any organization created before the law took effect Nov. 6 would be exempt, as long as it was no longer controlled by the party after that date.

Again, the reformers were incredulous. “[The FEC] will allow the parties to set up these organizations, and perhaps provide them with some funding, and then after November these groups can operate however they like, and they’re not subject to the same soft money restrictions that apply to the parties themselves,” Sanford says. “The rules are a recipe for them to do this. It’s a big, giant sign in 6-foot letters that says: ‘Do this.’ And they’ve painted it on the Capitol dome. If party committees aren’t doing this, they need to have their eyes checked.”

And Sanford appears to be correct. The Washington Post reported just weeks after the meeting that the national parties were already moving to set up soft money shell organizations for use after November.

Toner counters that it’s ridiculous to hold someone accountable under a law for things they do before the law takes effect. “What basically developed was a concern that people would be prosecuted next year for conduct that they’re doing now that is legal under current law,” Toner says. “If you’re going to have a transition period, than what you’re doing now, if it’s legal under current law, should have no bearing on if it’s legal next year.”

When the June rule-making session was finished, campaign finance advocates were outraged. “You have so tortured this law, it’s beyond silly,” Commissioner Thomas, one of the Reagan-era veterans, told his colleagues. McCain and the bill’s other sponsors agreed, and they blasted the commission’s actions.

“The Federal Election Commission has taken upon itself the task of rewriting the newly passed McCain-Feingold/Shays-Meehan bill,” the four said in a joint press release the day after the rules were issued. “This is not a role given to the FEC by Congress, or by the Constitution … Many of the amendments adopted in the past two days simply ignore the law. They show that a majority of the FEC is willing to flout congressional intent and substitute its own policy preferences. The country deserves better, especially from an unelected body.”

Despite such a dressing-down by the congressmen who created the bill, the four commissioners who rewrote it were unapologetic. “They don’t understand the regulations that they’re criticizing,” Smith says of the sponsors. “At times they either don’t understand their own bill, or they’re trying to get the commission to do things that they didn’t think they could put in their bill and get it through Congress.”

Thomas disagrees. “I’d be happy to sit down with anybody at any time, and take the provisions of the statute and the legislative history and the comments we got, and show how the approach that my colleagues took doesn’t coincide with the language or intent or the legislative history,” Thomas says. “In virtually every occasion when that kind of an issue came up, four commissioners took the position that was: ‘Let’s interpret the law in a way that will allow more of the soft money to come in and continue.’”

McCain and the other sponsors will likely file a resolution in Congress seeking to have the rules overturned. They have also said that they are considering filing a legal action against the commission. But both avenues will be difficult at best. The resolution would need approval in both houses of Congress and would have to be signed by the president. A lawsuit will have to prove that the rules were “arbitrary and capricious,” a standard that campaign finance advocates say can be achieved, but only after a long detour through the courts.

And even as McCain and the other sponsors pursue these efforts, the commission is likely to chip away at the law in different areas as it continues in the five other rule-making sessions that are likely to last until the end of the year. So far, the draft rules in areas like advertising appear to be far less controversial than the final soft money rules, but critics are mindful that most of the objectionable changes on soft money rules came at the last minute.

There is one bright light on the horizon for Sanford and other reform proponents: Sandstrom is set to be replaced in October by Ellen Weintraub, a former counsel to the House Ethics Committee and the wife of Feingold’s legislative staff director; that change will almost certainly alter the balance of power. Bush approved the nomination only after McCain threatened to vote against Bush’s judicial nominees.

Far from solving the commission’s problems, however, the change may only result in gridlock. Many critics insist that the only way to really solve the problems of the Federal Election Commission is to disband it. The Democracy 21 task force recommended replacing the commissioners with a single, long-term administrator. That, the authors said, would force the president and Congress to appoint an executive who is more powerful and less partisan.

McCain says he may pursue some type of restructuring of the agency, in hopes that one day the campaign reform law will become what it was intended to be. “It took Russ [Feingold] and I seven years to get this law passed,” he says, “and we’re not going to quit. It may take another seven years to get it enforced properly, but we’ll win over time.”

“DynCorp is an enormous operation, with strong ties to the U.S. government,” Bolkovac’s legal representative, Karen Bailey, said in a prepared statement. “She took on the big guns and won. The plight of trafficking victims is appalling and I’m glad that Kathryn’s case has gone some way to bringing it to wider attention.”

The tribunal found that DynCorp Aerospace UK Ltd., a subsidiary of DynCorp Inc., violated the U.K.’s whistle-blowing statute — the Public Interest Disclosure Act of 1998 — when the company fired Bolkovac. A separate hearing is scheduled for October to determine what damages DynCorp should face.

DynCorp did not respond to calls seeking comment on Monday. But in remarks to the Associated Press, DynCorp spokesman Chuck Taylor said the company was considering an appeal. “We’re very disappointed in the tribunal’s ruling and can only reinforce that DynCorp’s decision to dismiss Ms. Bolkovac was based solely on the grounds of gross misconduct because of time-sheet fraud,” Taylor said.

In the second case, DynCorp agreed to settle a suit brought by former helicopter mechanic Ben Johnston late Friday night, two days before the case was set to go to trial in Texas. The amount of Johnston’s settlement is confidential, but both Johnston and his attorney said they viewed the settlement as a victory — and as a vindication after two years of fighting the company.

“This settlement wouldn’t have happened if DynCorp hadn’t, at least internally, accepted some responsibility for what happened in the Balkans,” said Johnston’s attorney, Kevin Glasheen, when reached at his Lubbock, Texas, office.

In late June, Salon published a two-part investigation into the participation of DynCorp employees in the Bosnian sex-slave trade, based in part on evidence uncovered in the Johnston case. At least 13 DynCorp employees have been sent home from Bosnia — and at least seven of them fired — for purchasing women or participating in other prostitution-related activities. But despite large amounts of evidence in some cases, none of the DynCorp employees sent home have faced criminal prosecution.

Because of a combination of international treaties, jurisdictional loopholes and bureaucratic confusion, employees of private military companies such as DynCorp can escape prosecution for crimes they commit overseas. Most common crimes committed outside the United States are beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, and the burgeoning local law enforcement systems in war-torn regions such as Bosnia are often insufficient or unwilling to police U.S. contractors.

Forced prostitution is common in nations undergoing rebuilding, due in large part to the massive contingent of unaccompanied, highly paid, mostly male international aid workers sent to such countries, according to human rights workers. Martina Vandenberg, a women’s rights researcher with Human Rights Watch, told Salon that during a 1999 tour, she found that “Bosnia was absolutely littered with brothels” staffed by women who had been sold as chattel for $600 to $700, “with all the rights of ownership attaching.”

DynCorp is a privately held company that relies on government contracts for over 95 percent of its business. Among other services, it provides pilots to the State Department; maintenance crews, communications specialists and weapons experts to the armed forces; and police officers to the U.N.

Ben Johnston claims that buying prostitutes — many of whom were clearly underage — had become so common among DynCorp employees at Camp Comanche, outside Tuzla, Bosnia, that he was forced to report the problem to the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigative Command.

The Army conducted an investigation into Johnston’s claims and eventually compiled a significant amount of evidence implicating at least two DynCorp employees in wrongdoing involving local prostitutes. The freedom of the prostitutes was never positively determined, as investigators ultimately found that the Army did not have jurisdiction over civilian contractors and turned the case over to the Bosnian police. The Bosnian police, who were unsure whether DynCorp employees were immune from Bosnian jurisdiction under the Dayton Peace Accords, never brought charges against the men. They were sent home and fired by DynCorp after the Army reported its findings to the company.

Johnston was also fired by DynCorp at that time. Glasheen, his attorney, said he is confident that they would have won a jury trial, in part because DynCorp’s excuses for firing Johnston were so numerous and varied that they undermined the company’s case. The company’s official reason for firing Johnston was that he had “brought discredit to the company and the U.S. Army.” On its Web site, DynCorp stated that Johnston’s firing had nothing to do with the Army investigation and that the company didn’t even know he had complained to the Criminal Investigative Command. The manager who signed his termination papers, however, stated in a deposition that Johnston had brought discredit to the company and the Army with unsubstantiated claims against co-workers — even though Army investigators had found support for some of Johnston’s allegations. Various other claims by DynCorp supervisors alternately implied that Johnston was fired for poor workmanship, misuse of company assets, or failing to report to work. Johnston denies all of these charges.

DynCorp had contended that Bolkovac was fired for falsifying time sheets. But in her case, she says, DynCorp fired her after she sent an e-mail to DynCorp and U.N. higher-ups describing complicity in forced prostitution by international aid workers, including members of the International Police Task Force. The British employment tribunal supported Bolkovac’s version of events, finding little to support DynCorp’s claim and describing the evidence DynCorp provided as being “sketchy to the point of nonexistent,” according to Bolkovac’s attorneys.

The investigation at Camp Comanche in Bosnia is at the heart of a lawsuit filed by former DynCorp mechanic Ben Johnston, who says DynCorp wrongfully fired him for assisting the Army Criminal Investigation Command in its probe of the camp. The investigation and its results, along with allegations made in a similar whistleblower lawsuit against DynCorp in the U.K., have brought to light a critical loophole in efforts to police the shadowy world of private military firms, a booming industry that’s now worth almost $100 billion a year.

Thanks to a combination of factors — the jurisdictional conflicts of American law, the immunity provided to these contractors by international treaties, and the underdeveloped police agencies in host countries — many crimes committed by private military personnel while based overseas will likely go unpunished, just as they did in Bosnia.

“You have a situation where employees of these companies can commit serious crimes and the only enforcement we have against them is the law of the marketplace,” says Peter W. Singer, an Olin fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has studied the companies for seven years. “That’s proven to be insufficient.”

These private military firms were thrust into the international spotlight in April 2001, when Aviation Development Corp. was involved in the accidental downing of a missionary plane in Peru. Aviation Development, on contract with the CIA to look for drug traffickers, may have misidentified the missionary’s plane as a drug transport, which was then shot down by the Peruvian military. According to media reports, the United States has paid an undisclosed sum to the family of Veronica and Charity Bowers, who were killed in the incident, and to the Baptist missionary group they belonged to, but stopped short of admitting culpability. Aviation Development has never publicly accepted responsibility, and the U.S. government has never publicly accused the company of wrongdoing.

Another incident, covered in great detail last March in the Los Angeles Times, implicates the private military company AirScan in planning and executing a 1998 attack by Colombian military forces against local rebels, which may have resulted in the accidental bombing of a small Colombian town. At the time, AirScan was under contract to Oxy Petroleum to track rebels who might threaten Oxy’s pipeline. Eleven adults and seven children were killed when a bomb exploded in the town of Santo Domingo, and according to the Times no one has been held accountable for their deaths. The Colombian military denies it bombed the town during the attack. AirScan denied involvement, according to the Times.

Critics say those cases and others show how private companies are in effect being used to distance the U.S. government from messy international conflicts. Although no Americans were directly accused of criminal wrongdoing in Peru or Colombia, the incidents underscore the troubling lack of accountability applied to the companies, they say.

The Peru incident helped provoke one of those critics, U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., to introduce a bill in April 2001 that would have stopped government funding for private military companies in the Andean region. But no action has been taken on the bill. Ed Soyster, a spokesman for military contractor MPRI, says such critics are wrong. As the U.S. military shrinks its forces, he says, private companies will be needed to fill the gap with an array of support services — from providing mechanical services and building military bases to training foreign armies. “The idea that somehow there’s no accountability because the government paid a company” to do a job, instead of doing that job itself, doesn’t hold up, Soyster says. “It won’t hold up with the media. It won’t hold up with the courts.” Employees of MPRI are held accountable by the local laws of whatever country they’re in, he says. If there is a breakdown in prosecuting criminal behavior, that breakdown is the problem of that government. After all, Soyster says, a company doesn’t have the power to arrest people, try them or send them to jail.

But Singer points out that the laws and enforcement capabilities of the host country can sometimes be inadequate — and that contractors have no incentive to expose their employees to prosecution.

“Typically when someone commits a crime, the legal system of a state is responsible for prosecuting that crime,” Singer says. “But these companies are operating in areas where the local legal system is either unable or unwilling to hold these guys accountable. So, what you have happening is that these guys are American, but they’re not being held under American law because they’re inside Bosnia or Kosovo or wherever. And then there’s no capacity to carry out enforcement by the locals. And if the locals do attempt to do something, the company pulls them out [of the country] because they’d rather not see their own employees get prosecuted. “It’s bad for business.”

The scenario Singer describes is almost exactly what happened when Bosnians and Americans began to complain that DynCorp employees were involved in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia.

In the U.K. suit, former DynCorp employee Kathryn Bolkovac contends that she was laid off after reporting that her co-workers were complicit in the rampant forced-prostitution industry in the Balkans. Bolkovac was part of the American contingent of the U.N.’s International Police Task Force, which is contracted to the U.N. from DynCorp, and she claims other members of the task force were patronizing brothels where women were forced to work as prostitutes. Like the men accused of wrongdoing in Johnston’s case, none of the accused police officers has faced prosecution.

“[IPTF] officers and … [overseas] contractors share one major characteristic: impunity,” Martina Vandenberg, a women’s rights researcher for Human Rights Watch told a House International Relations Subcommittee in April.

One problem, as laid out by Singer, and reiterated by Vandenberg in a recent telephone interview, is that for various reasons the host country — in this case Bosnia-Hercegovina — can’t or won’t prosecute U.S. contractors.

Often, according to Singer, the local police forces don’t have the resources to prosecute such crimes, or they’re corrupt, or they’re just not interested in pursuing crimes committed by U.S. contractors. But at Camp Comanche in Bosnia, two DynCorp employees escaped prosecution through a loophole created by a combination of bureaucratic confusion and corporate attempts to resolve the situation by immediately pulling accused workers out of Bosnia.

The investigation was opened when the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command (known as CID) received allegations that DynCorp employees were buying women to use as sex slaves. When CID started the investigation, the Army’s Office of the Staff Judge Advocate for Bosnia-Hercegovina said that the office did not have jurisdiction to prosecute civilian contractors. So the CID conducted its investigation and turned it over to the Zivinice, Bosnia, police.

But it wasn’t clear whether the Bosnian police had jurisdiction, either. When the investigation began, according to CID’s report, the judge advocate’s office was under the impression that contractors were protected from Bosnian prosecution by the Dayton Peace Accords, which govern the relationship between Bosnia-Hercegovina and the international stabilization forces in the region. The issue was clarified somewhat when the Army CID found an “Interpretation of the Agreement Between NATO and the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina,” which allowed for Bosnian prosecution of contractors. CID agents then handed the case over to the Bosnian police. But according to Vandenberg, who interviewed Zivinice’s police chief during a Human Rights Watch investigation in March 2001 — more than a year after the incident — the Bosnian police never developed such a nuanced understanding of the Bosnian agreement with NATO. When she interviewed the chief, she says, he still believed that he did not have the ability to arrest DynCorp employees.

The police chief told her, “‘We would have wanted to prosecute — but we couldn’t prosecute because we can’t arrest them,’” she recalls. “As far as they’re concerned, these are members of the international community with immunity.”

The issue became moot, however, when the Army and DynCorp pulled the accused men out of the country. The act effectively ended all investigations and ensured that the men would never face criminal charges unless they returned to Bosnia-Hercegovina, and perhaps not even then.

When it comes to the DynCorp employees provided to the U.N., however — subjects of the allegations raised in the Bolkovac case — the issue of immunity is far less gray. Stefo Lehmann, the U.N. spokesman for Bosnia-Hercegovina, says officers of the U.N.-supplied International Police Task Force are not subject to Bosnian law, as part of the agreement between the U.N. and Bosnia-Hercegovina. If IPTF members are accused of a crime, Lehmann says, they are investigated by a U.N. internal investigations unit, and if evidence is found, those persons are repatriated to their home countries for punishment.

Lehmann confirmed that out of about 10,000 police officers who have served in the police force at one point or another, roughly 15 have been sent home for wrongdoing. The majority of them — nine, according to Lehmann — have been from the American contingent. Six of these, he confirmed, were sent home for problems related to the solicitation and prostitution, although none, he stresses, was charged with trafficking women. And Lehmann says he knows of none who have been charged with a crime upon returning to the United States.

Lehmann says the American police are unique in that they have been recruited by a private contractor — DynCorp. Other contingents tend to be made up of the sponsor countries’ own national police, he says, and as a matter of national pride, they often send their best officers.

Whether the employees are sent by the U.N. or fired by DynCorp, a second problem emerges once they’re home, Singer says. These contractors are not prosecuted in the U.S. because, as Army Materiel Command staff judge advocate David Howlett says, U.S. law does not cover most common crimes when those crimes are committed in a foreign country.

Congress took steps to close this loophole with the passage of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act of 2000. Theoretically, the law allows for prosecution in U.S. courts of contractors working alongside the military overseas, but the law is far from comprehensive.

For one thing, the regulations to govern just how the statute works have yet to be written. So while the law is technically in effect, how it is to be carried out — how prisoners would be handled, who would defend suspects, which federal magistrates would handle cases — is unclear. Even when the needed regulations are written, it will take another 90 days before they become active.

“As far as I know, this act doesn’t have the regulations that are designed to implement it yet,” Howlett says, “and it hasn’t ever been used [to prosecute] a person who committed a crime overseas.”

Howlett says in a rare instance the law could be used without those regulations, but calls such a possibility unlikely.

“Let’s say one of our contractors from the Army Materiel Command that we have over in Southwest Asia right now kills another contractor, and it’s a murder case. The host nation probably doesn’t want to deal with it because it’s two Americans and it doesn’t bother their sovereignty a lot. That might be a case where we might say: ‘All right, let’s try and bring this person to justice using this method,’” Howlett says. “It’s my hope personally that before the situation arises, we’ll have these regulations.”

Singer, at the Brookings Institution, also points out that the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act covers only American citizens working for American forces. If MPRI employees go to Afghanistan to train the new Afghan army, for example, they will probably technically be employees of Afghanistan, not of the United States. And the act does not cover workers contracted to the U.N.

“The U.S. government has absolutely no criminal jurisdiction to prosecute civilian police officers who serve with U.N. missions abroad,” Vandenberg explains. So, as the U.N.’s Stefo Lehmann says, officers accused of committing a crime in Bosnia are immune from Bosnian prosecution and are sent home by the U.N. to be punished. But there is no U.S. law that would allow them to be prosecuted at home.

Vandenberg says that she has heard of efforts currently underway to expand the Military Jurisdiction Act of 2000 to include all U.S. contractors working overseas, but to the best of her knowledge no bills have been introduced. MPRI’s Soyster says he would not be opposed to such a law, because he’d “rather be tried in a U.S. court than a Bosnian court.” But even if such laws are introduced, Vandenberg expects a significant amount of legal wrangling before they take effect. She doesn’t see a solution in the immediate future.

Vandenberg points out that the International Criminal Court, which is scheduled to be born on July 1, may technically have the jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed by military contractors. But the administration of President George W. Bush publicly opposes the court and has already announced that it will not participate in U.N. peacekeeping missions unless Americans in those missions are granted immunity from the court. Even if that were not the case, Vandenberg says, the court would probably not pursue cases such as those raised by the DynCorp lawsuits, as it will be focused more on large-scale crimes such as genocide.

“What you have,” Vandenberg says, “is a climate of complete impunity.”