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Monday, January 31, 2011
The whistleblower : sex trafficking, military contractors, and one woman's fight for justice
by Kathryn Bolkovac. Bolkovac, who worked as part of the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia in the late 1990s, provides yet another perspective on why private military contracting has encroached on U.S. foreign policy, threatening our image, national security, and the lives of those we are supposed to be protecting. A police officer turned human rights investigator, she worked at uncovering international sex trafficking and cover-ups by her bosses at DynCorp International, which led to her firing, a mad rush across the border, and a subsequent wrongful termination lawsuit in which she was victorious and became the self-described poster girl for everything wrong about security-for-hire. Most galling is the sad truth that DynCorp answered to no law, nor to the military, the U.S., or the Bosnians. The criminality, including rape and murder, committed by corporate military contractors has proliferated in the past decade, and Bolkovac's cautionary tale ends on the sourest of notes. DynCorp won another federal contract on the heels of her lawsuit, and no one was prosecuted for crimes against the women whose lives she struggled to save. Infuriating and heartbreaking. --Booklist (Check Catalog)