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The Cost of Training Iraqi Police
By Andrea Mitchell
November 4, 2003 The cost of training a new police force for the new Iraq is higher than you might expect and much higher than the same kind of work here at home.
IRAQI POLICE
recruits are now being trained by the U.S. military on the streets
of Baghdad. But soon, 1,500 private trainers hired by the State Department will
take over training 32,000 Iraqi recruits, over the next 18 to 24 months, at a
military base to be rebuilt in neighboring Jordan.
The
contractor: DynCorp International, a company in charge of screening and training
foreign police in Haiti, Bosnia and now Iraq. But, at what cost? According to the help-wanted notice on DynCorp’s Web site, the company will pay as much as $153,600 for senior people in Iraq for one year. On top of that, they get all their living expenses, and most of their salary is tax-free — a package that will cost taxpayers as much as $400,000 to put each trainer in Iraq.
Private contractors make the kind of salaries military police only dream of earning. “I can tell you this — none of our ordinary troops are making that kind of money. Many of them are having families at home that are suffering because they don’t have enough money even to make it through the month,” says U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D.-Ill.
So are the DynCorp employees worth their big salaries? The work is high-risk. Three weeks ago, three DynCorp security men guarding embassy employees in Israel were killed by a bomb in the Gaza Strip.
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