For those of you who have been stalked by Tacticor, Tangiers, or whoever else AIG or  CNA hired to catch you eating a taco chip or something even more devious…… Enjoy

From our favorites at Workers’ Comp Insider

Turkey Shoot

William Wehnke, 51, claims to have spotted a wild turkey in his field in rural Annsville, New York (population 3,000). He took aim and fired at the turkey and managed to hit Matthew Brady, a workers comp investigator, who happened to be crouching in the field, dressed in camouflage. Brady was apparently performing surveillance on Wehnke, who is collecting workers comp benefits for an unspecified injury. Whatever his disability, Wehnke is obviously capable of operating a shotgun.

Local authorities are not buying Wehnke’s story about the turkey. He’s been arraigned on a three-count grand jury indictment that includes felony second-degree assault and unlawful manner of taking. He is even charged with using inappropriate ammunition for hunting turkeys. Wehnke is in a lot of trouble for his little turkey shoot.

Investigator Brady was hit in the side, back and legs. He underwent surgery and presumably filed his own workers comp claim for what is surely a work-related – if highly unusual – disability.

Images – Lasting and Otherwise
I could not help but think of the other Mathew (sic) Brady, the 19th century photographer whose iconic images of the Civil War still resonate with us. As pathetic as investigator Brady’s situation is, his earlier namesake fared even worse. After the Civil War, Mathew Brady found that war-weary Americans had little interest in purchasing photographs of the bloody conflict. Having risked his fortune on his Civil War enterprise, Brady lost the gamble and fell into bankruptcy. His negatives were neglected until 1875, when Congress purchased the entire archive for $25,000, which might sound like a lot, but was not even enough to cover Brady’s debts. He died in 1896, penniless and unappreciated. In his final years, Brady said, “No one will ever know what I went through to secure those negatives. The world can never appreciate it. It changed the whole course of my life.”

The world may ultimately take little note of the suffering of the other Matthew Brady, wounded as he crouched in that desolate Annsville field. His life, too, has been significantly changed. But he at least will benefit from the wonders of modern medicine and the cushion of weekly indemnity, until he once again pursues his craft as a comp investigator. But the next time he is asked to don camouflage, he just might want to take a pass.

Original with comments here

Forgotten and Ignored:  The Shadow Army Awaits Deployment

By: Rayne Monday November 30, 2009 6:55 pm

I was taken to task for allegedly ignoring the role of military-industrial complex corporations in my recent post about the decision-making process leading up to tomorrow’s anticipated announcement regarding U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Concern about corporate interests is well-placed, but it’s only a portion of the picture. Contractors have been a nagging problem since the U.S. began military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. With a current ratio of nearly two contractors to every soldier, the immediate problem is the number of the non-military personnel — a virtual shadow army — we are about to deploy in an escalation in Afghanistan, and the one still on the ground in Iraq.

Coincidentally, today represents the deadline which House Oversight and Government Reform Chair Eldolphus Towns set for Defense Secretary Robert Gates to report the number, size, and details of contracts awarded for work being performed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Towns’ letter is dated November 3, giving Gates nearly a month to get his hands around these numbers and report them.

Towns has even allowed Gates to report the numbers from the Department of Defense’s records without commenting in his letter about the rather disconcerting numbers Towns has already seen based on reports from the General Accounting Office and the Commission on Wartime Contracting.

The CWC, a bipartisan entity authorized by and reporting to Congress, reported a wide range of numbers depending on the tracking source. The DOD’s Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker (SPOT) reported 160,000 contractors working for the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and several other smaller and less active arenas this summer. However the U.S. Army Central Command’s quarterly census reported a much different number — 242,000 contractors, with much of the data gathered by hand rather than through reports. As the CWC noted, that’s a difference of roughly 80,000 between the two tallies.

Although CENTCOM’s census doesn’t include contractors working for Department of State or the Agency for International Development (USAID) and SPOT does not account for foreign nationals, it’s generally believed that 80,000 is still too broad a spread in numbers and cannot account accurately for the difference in contractors between the two systems.

Read the full post here

Why not watch and see tomorrow night, Wednesday and beyond who really does ignore the shadow army we’ll be deploying?

Monday 30 November 2009

Truthout

Recently, the Congressional Research Service released an amazing statistic – it will cost one million dollars a year to support one soldier for one year in Afghanistan.

This mind-blowing number partly includes the cost of private contractors who have moved into areas of support that have been strictly military in the past. Estimates for the numbers of contractors have been as high as one contractor for every soldier. As President Obama prepares to announce his decision on Afghanistan, the price of this war is also on his mind since he included Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, in his last war council.

One of the reasons for the high costs of maintaining each soldier is the lack of oversight of private contractor billings over the course of these two wars. The Department of Defense (DOD), and especially the Army, has fought the auditors and the investigators in the military who have attempted to expose fraud, waste, overbillings and other abuses of costs in contractor contracts. The contractors, using contingency contracting, which is similar to the old cost plus contracts, knew that their profits and, more important, their future task orders and contracts would be priced based on what they spend in the beginning of the wars. So the contractor billing meter, especially in labor costs, spun vigorously in the first years of the war with little oversight. When the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) tried to withhold a small percentage of payment from KBR, the largest contractor, because it believed that the billings were excessive and they wanted to scrub the numbers, the Army pushed past the DCAA and paid KBR the excessive costs. This set the tone to let the contractor billings run wild.

Click here to see Truthout’s Matt Renner interview Dina Rasor.

Click here to read full article by Dina Rasor at Truthout

Stay tuned . . . if you don’t hear about American war contracting fraud cases in the news, you will know that there is a group of very frustrated whistleblowers who cannot legally tell you what is going on with fraud in our wars.

This Thanksgiving if you happen to be giving thanks for your home and the food on your table,  we hope you take a minute to think about the injured contractors’ lives you’ve stomped all over to get them.

Do your families know the things you do to other families for financial gain?

THE COMMISSION ON WARTIME CONTRACTING IN IRAQ & AFGHANISTAN HOLDS A HEARING ON ACCOUNTABILITY ISSUES IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, PANEL 1
NOVEMBER 2, 2009

“Counting Contractors: Where Are They and What Are They Doing?” carries the theme of accountability into three important areas of the commission’s work.

I offer this opening on behalf of Co-chair Christopher Shays and myself.

The other commissioners at the dais are Clark Kent Ervin, Grant Green, Robert Henke, Charles Tiefer, and Dov Zakheim.

There is currently one vacancy on the eight-member commission awaiting a congressional appointment.

Read the transcript here

The wives of four South African men abducted on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, nearly three years ago have made an emotional plea for help to President Jacob Zuma.

Speaking to the media in Pretoria today, the women cried as they spoke of their sadness and hope that they might one day find out what had happened to their husbands – whether they were dead or alive.

“As the wives, we are here to plead for help. Would someone out there please show compassion and human kindness,” said Marie Enslin, whose husband Johann was kidnapped on December 10 2006 along with Hardus Greef, Callie Scheepers and Andre Durant.

“We are sincerely appealing to our new leader Mr Jacob Zuma to assist us and our children.”

Referring to the Koran, Enslin said it read that husbands and wives were each other’s garments and in the Bible they were each other’s convents.

“Our garments and our convents have been missing for 1074 days,” she said.

The men were working for the private security operations company Safenet when they disappeared.

This Christmas would be the fourth she and their four children were without her husband, said Enslin.

“Whether dead or alive, the stress of living and missing loved ones is like a black hole in the heart. Please release them,” she appealed to the men’s captors.

“We need closure. If they are dead, God forbid, please be compassionate and hand over their remains so that we can have closure.”

Retha Scheepers echoed her fellow wives’ prayers that they needed to know what had happened to the men.

“We [my family and I] don’t know where he [Callie] is and every morning I wake up and think today is the day I’m going to get good news or bad news, and at night, nothing.

“We were married for one year and two months, I haven’t really got a marriage beyond the honeymoon stage. My family is broken because their father isn’t here,” she said.

Elmarie Greef said Safenet had promised to “unconditionally” support the women financially, however this had stopped when they went to the media.

“As we started speaking to the media… in December we did not get paid. They said we must declare our men dead and claim from the US government,” said Enslin.

In a statement shortly after the payments stopped, Safenet said this was no longer the responsibility of the company, which had done more than enough to help.

It was also unclear whether Safenet – which no longer operates in Iraq – had ever paid a ransom, even though it had assured the women it would.

“The rumour is just that it wasn’t paid. It was asked for, but never paid,” said Enslin.

“There are people out there who must know what’s going on,” she said.

Lourika Durant is the only one of the four women who heard from her husband Andre after his abduction.

He called her briefly on December 23, 2006, but the call was quickly disconnected.

“I was excited. It was such a high. I just can’t imagine what it would be like to hear his voice again.

“When my phone rings and it’s a no number or a private number, my heart beats. My youngest is one-year-old, so she doesn’t even know her daddy,” Durant said.

The women are receiving money from the US treasury department. Their husbands are not officially declared dead, but are still listed with the United Nations as being among the 45,000 people missing.

Shortly before the briefing, the department of international relations and cooperation issued a statement recognising that the abductions had left “numbness of unexplained cause and effect”.

The department said it had worked on the case since the start and had shared the families’ countless disappointments, dashed hopes and the absence of communication from the captors.

Original Story here

Under American law, the Defense Base Act, they’ll still be allowed to kill, maim, or allow their employees to be raped, just not anyone else.

Courthouse News Service

by Nick Wilson

WASHINGTON (CN) – Senators introduced legislation Wednesday that would bring foreign military contractors under the jurisdiction of American laws following an appeal from the parents of a soldier allegedly killed by a contractor in Iraq.
In introducing the legislation, Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight Chair Claire McCaskill from Missouri told the story of Lt. Col. Dominic Baragona who was allegedly killed when a contractor’s truck slammed into him in 2003. The man’s parents spent years appealing to the Defense Department, the Bush administration and the Army to seek accountability and information regarding their son’s death.
The family sued Kuwait & Gulf Link Transport Company (KGL), the contracting company, in 2006. McCaskill said the contracting firm did not show up before the court until after the family won a $4.9 million judgment. The contractor then argued that the government does not have jurisdiction over it and the court vacated the judgment.
“The need for Congress to act with this legislation has raised serious questions for me about the systematic failures that have allowed companies like KGL to escape accountability for their actions,” McCaskill said.
The subcommittee also released a report showing that federal agencies rarely dismiss abusive contractors.
The investigation revealed that over the last five years, the Defense Department Office of Inspector General reported 2,700 convictions, but the Defense Department only debarred 708 contractors.
The Department of Homeland Security did not debar any contractors in 2006, despite widespread reports of waste, fraud and abuse following Hurricane Katrina.
The “Lieutenant General Dominic ‘Rocky’ Baragona Justice for American Heroes Harmed by Contractors Act” would require foreign companies that enter into contracts with the United States to consent to personal jurisdiction in cases involving serious injury, death or rape.

Retired SEAL from Virginia Beach slain by bomb in Afghanistan

The Virginian-Pilot

At a time when many men would have been enjoying retirement, former Navy SEAL David W. LaConte headed back to a combat zone to train American soldiers in the latest military technology.

On Friday, he was killed by a homemade bomb in eastern Afghanistan. Army Spc. Christopher J. Coffland of Baltimore also died in the attack, according to the Defense Department.

LaConte, 58, came to Afghanistan in August as an independent contractor with the Rapid Equipping Force, an Army organization based at Fort Belvoir, Va.

“He was very dedicated,” Lt. Col. Dean Hoffman, the unit’s team chief, said from Afghanistan on Wednesday. “He was one guy who couldn’t sit still.”

Last week, LaConte was in charge of teaching six soldiers how to use a new technology called an unmanned ground sensor. LaConte could have easily created a Power Point demonstration to show the soldiers on base, said Hoffman, but he decided to go outside the wire and teach them the right way.

“That right there tells you what kind of a person he was,” said Hoffman. “His greatest asset was his greatest demise. He was willing to do what it took to get a job done.”

LaConte enlisted in the Navy in December 1969 and became a hull technician, according to Navy personnel records. During a career of more than 20 years, he achieved the rank of senior chief petty officer and served on SEAL teams on both coasts, as well as at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Colorado, Calif.

Neighbor Barry Ezell said LaConte was the kind of guy who always had your back.

Once when Ezell left town for a few days, LaConte saw a strange man standing in Ezell’s backyard. He quickly phoned Ezell and said calmly, “There’s a man in your backyard, and I’m gonna take ‘em out.”

“I said, ‘No, don’t! It’s just a relative,’” Ezell recalled. “That’s just what he was trained to do – catch the bad guys. He always looked out for you.”

After hearing about LaConte’s death, Ezell created a picture slide show of LaConte and his family and posted it on the video sharing Web site, YouTube. By Wednesday afternoon, the post had hundreds of hits. Friends from all over – Afghanistan to Alaska – commented on what a great person he was, said Ezell.

“David was very, very well known,” Ezell said. “A lot of people are feeling the sting of him dying.”

Skip Krepcik, who met LaConte more than 10 years ago, said he had a warm, tender side.

“He would tell me how much he loved his family,” said Krepcik. “ He was so proud to live in a country where his daughter could grow up and have ambition, instead of living in a country where women are treated like property.”

LaConte leaves behind his wife of 23 years, Robin; a 21-year-old daughter, Courtney, and a 14-year-old son, Cody.

Capt. Colin Kilrain, commander of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, called LaConte “a great American and a fantastic SEAL who served his country with honor and distinction in a variety of capacities.”

“We will never forget his service and the ultimate sacrifice he made,” Kilrain said in a statement.

A week before he died, LaConte sent his neighbor Ezell an e-mail expressing how much he was enjoying the deployment.

“God’s been really good to me,” he wrote.

By Jaedda Armstrong

A retired Navy SEAL from Virginia Beach was killed Friday in eastern Afghanistan when a roadside bomb exploded.

David W. LaConte, 58, was working as an independent contractor in Afghanistan. An American service member, whose name was not released, also was killed, according to the International Security Assistance Force.

LaConte enlisted in the Navy in December 1969 and became a hull technician, according to naval personnel records. During a career of more than 20 years, he achieved the rank of senior chief petty officer and served on SEAL teams on both coasts as well as at the Naval Special Warfare Center in Coronado, Calif.

LaConte is survived by his wife, Robin; daughter Courtney; and son Cody, among others. A funeral service will be Saturday at First Baptist Church Norfolk.

Memorial contributions may be made to Naval Special Warfare Foundation, P.O. Box 5965, Virginia Beach, VA 23471.

Workers Comp Insider is a favorite of ours here at this blog.

Their perspective on issues facing all aspects of Workers Comp are much appreciated.

Fraudulent claims and bad faith insurance practices are equally destructive to a system meant to protect both workers and employers.   They’ll out you on both sides of the fence.

Thank you Tom Lynch, Jon Coppelman and Julie Ferguson for your honest and informative blog.

A few of our favorites are

Risk Transfer Without Risk

Bullshit as Science, The Fake Bad Scale

AIG in Iraq: A cruel way to make a buck

Workers Comp Insider Wins Top National Blog Award

Well, bust our balloons and call us surprised!

We learned yesterday that the Lexis Nexis Workers’ Compensation Law Center has honored the Workers Comp Insider with the award of Top National Workers’ Compensation blog of 2009. With so many excellent blogs being written now, we’re proud and humbled at the same time.

When we created the Insider in September 2003, we hoped that we’d attract others to join the insurance blogosphere, but we never imagined that so many superb professionals would join the blogging rolls. Now, to be singled out for this honor is more than a little gratifying.

I need to take a moment to commend and thank Julie Ferguson for hatching the idea in 2003 and for managing the enterprise ever since. Julie is one of, if not the, nation’s foremost blog experts, and we are lucky indeed to have her at Lynch Ryan. Moreover, she’s an excellent writer who’s written about a third of all our blog posts.

And where would we be without the tireless search for blogging excellence exemplified every day by Jon Coppelman, a bona fide workers’ compensation guru. Jon’s posts are always interesting, thought-provoking, honest and well-sourced. Judging by your comments, they can also be provocative and controversial, but that’s what the medium is all about. I’m thankful for Jon’s expertise and his friendship.

In making the award, here’s what the Lexis Nexis Workers’ Compensation Law Center said about the Insider:

Workers’ Comp Insider’s excellent coverage this past year of the side effects of the economic recession on workers’ compensation, from government bailouts to bankruptcy to fraud and more, made it our choice for the Top Blog of the Year 2009 on national workers’ compensation and workplace issues. Workers’ Comp Insider also proved again the power of a company blog to showcase the expertise of its employees as evidenced this year by articles in both The Washington Post and the Las Vegas Sun, which cited the Workers’ Comp Insider on the issues of death from a workplace injury and controlling workers’ comp costs, respectively. Workers’ Comp Insider’s in-depth research to uncover the best government and industry websites and blogs in the blogosphere was second to none in 2009, and enabled policymakers, journalists, and anyone with an interest in and passion for workers’ compensation and workplace safety to do a deep dive into a collection of online resources that they may never have heard of otherwise.

All of us at Lynch Ryan are committed to doing everything in our power during the coming year to justify this award. Thanks again to Lexis Nexis and thanks to our readers for joining us on the ever-fascinating journey that is workers compensation.

The body of Christopher Coffland is back on US

soil after he was killed Friday in a roadside

bombing.   Darren Valcourt reports those

closest to the lifelong Maryland resident are

remembering him.

Coffland graduated from Gillman High School in Baltimore 25 years ago, where he met many of the friends who are hailing him as a hero.

Coffland decided to join the Army Reserves at 41-years-old, just a month shy of the military’s enlisting age limit. He was deployed to Afghanistan last month.

He met with lifelong friend John Nozemack before he left.

“Reality had sunk in to Chris when he spoke to the man he was replacing over there in Afghanistan, Chris was a brave man, but he was also scared because he knew what he was getting himself into,” said Nozemack.

Coffland was trained in intelligence for a year before being sent to Afghanistan to gather intelligence on roadside bombs or IED’s.

Ironically, it may have been one of those bombs that killed him and two marines in the Sayed Abud region on Friday.

Saturday night, Coffland’s body was flown back to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

On Sunday his family and friends mourned for the man who spent much of his life coaching, traveling and even studying anthropology.

“Chris was one of those people who felt that he had a destiny calling him or something greater in life another challenge,” said Nozemack. “Anybody who puts his life on the line fore their country, I look at it as I didn’t have to go. Chris went to save other people, Chris went so my children would have a safer world to live in and absolutely is a hero.”

Read original story here