{"id":358102,"date":"2010-02-24T11:45:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T16:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=77547"},"modified":"2010-02-24T11:45:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T16:45:00","slug":"army-contract-overseer-didn%e2%80%99t-check-that-paravant-was-a-blackwater-%e2%80%98shell%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/358102","title":{"rendered":"Army Contract Overseer Didn\u2019t Check That Paravant Was a Blackwater \u2018Shell\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an interview with Senate staff, former &#8220;Paravant&#8221; vice president Brian McCracken said that the only reason a company called Paravant ever existed was because Blackwater wanted a piece of Raytheon&#8217;s contract with the Army to train Afghan security officials &#8212; without the &#8220;baggage&#8221; of the Blackwater name. (You know, like killing Iraqi civilians.) So Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) asked Steven Ograyensek, the contracting officer at an Army office responsible for overseeing the contract, whether he had any idea Paravant was part of Blackwater. There was &#8220;no indication&#8221; of that relationship in Paravant&#8217;s bid for the Raytheon subcontract, Ograyensek replied. Yet it took Senate staff a fairly short time to determine Paravant was a shell company for Blackwater.<span id=\"more-77547\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Did Ograyensek even check Paravant&#8217;s references? &#8220;We didn&#8217;t call those references,&#8221; he said. &#8220;That was the responsibility of Raytheon.&#8221; Your contracting oversight at work.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Paravant had never done anything,&#8221; Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) interjected. &#8220;But they represent in their [request for the contract] that they had 2000 personnel deployed overseas. They had no one. &#8230; It&#8217;s just a shell.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an interview with Senate staff, former &#8220;Paravant&#8221; vice president Brian McCracken said that the only reason a company called Paravant ever existed was because Blackwater wanted a piece of Raytheon&#8217;s contract with the Army to train Afghan security officials &#8212; without the &#8220;baggage&#8221; of the Blackwater name. (You know, like killing Iraqi civilians.) So [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-358102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}