Costs of War: Revolving Doors

Confirmation hearings for retired US Army General Robert A Harding, President Barack Obama’s chosen candidate, will take place in the shadow of a series of missteps by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), including the external page accidental online posting last year of a confidential security manual.

The agency has been charged with the crucial job of quickly rolling out new technology - scanners to detect low-density explosives like those used by the would-be Christmas Day underpants bomber, and an online watch-list checking system called Secure Flight.

Harding himself is already external page facing insinuations that he is another ‘revolving door’ nominee - a retired military intelligence officer who established a multimillion-dollar security contracting business after leaving the Army.

The union dilemma

But his confirmation hearing is likely to be dominated by another issue altogether, the question of union representation for the TSA’s 48,000 transportation security officers, known as 'TSOs' or 'screeners,' who pass 2 million passengers and their luggage every day through security checkpoints at 457 US airports.

The union issue has simmered since the agency was created in the wake of 9/11. A brutal congressional row on the question culminated with an election campaign attack ad against a Democratic senator who had been a hold-out supporter of union rights - comparing him to Osama bin Laden. The senator, Max Cleland of Georgia, was unseated in the 2002 elections.

President George W Bush’s administration allowed TSOs to join a union, but ruled that they could not be represented by them in wage or other negotiations. Bush officials made an unprecedented public threat to veto an appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security - of which the TSA is part - if it included a measure that would allow the screeners collective bargaining and other representation rights.

Obama pledged during his campaign for the White House to “work to ensure that TSOs have collective bargaining rights,” and external page one of the unions involved is already external page petitioning for the right to represent screeners.

But Obama’s pledge only appeared to feed the fire of Republican anger on the union issue, which burned his initial pick for the TSA job last year. external page Erroll Southers’ nomination imploded after he external page gave inaccurate answers to senators about a serious disciplinary matter 20 years ago.

But before those facts ever emerged, some Republicans charged that Southers had been evasive about the question of collective bargaining rights for screeners, and one - conservative South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint - went so far as to external page block his nomination over the union issue.

It is not clear what Harding’s stance on the question will be; as is traditional for nominees awaiting a hearing, he has maintained a public silence.

Union officials say that collective bargaining rights, by helping to better working conditions, will improve morale and reduce employee turnover - two issues that have historically been major challenges for the agency.

DeMint and other opponents argue that it would make the agency too inflexible to respond quickly to new terrorist threats.

Some security experts agree. Collective bargaining would prevent management “disciplining and moving people around the way they need to do in a security agency,” former Federal Aviation Authority special agent Brian Sullivan told ISN Security Watch.

Sullivan, an aviation security specialist who has worked with the relatives of 9/11 victims in lawsuits on the security issue, is a long-time critic of the TSA.

“A whole series of embarrassments over the past year” had left the impression that the TSA “ship has been rudderless for a long time,” he said.

Rush to fill the gap

As result, he said, Republicans were likely to face a lot of pressure to move quickly on Harding’s nomination. “There will be a rush to favorable judgment” on the nominee, Sullivan predicted.

Indeed, it has already begun.

In a external page statement the day of the nomination, Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee and former chairman of the Intelligence Committee, called it “great news for America’s national security.”

“His work in the intelligence community for nearly 40 years should prove to be invaluable experience for this crucial post, added Rockefeller, promising to move the nomination “as expeditiously as possible.”

“Republicans are going to be hard pressed to do a proper, hard look at his background, his views, his qualifications,” said Sullivan. “What are his credentials? What does he really know about aviation security?”

Libertarian scorn

Harding’s background in military intelligence, and his private sector work as an intelligence and security contractor, has already external page attracted scorn from some libertarian critics of the TSA.

In 2003, as CEO of Harding Security Associates, the company he founded that year and sold last July, the general, who is black, external page gave evidence to a House Intelligence Committee hearing on diversity in the intelligence workforce.

His testimony includes an interesting sideswipe at the CIA, long-time bureaucratic rivals of the Defense Intelligence Agency (he accused them of improving their diversity numbers by hiring away military intelligence officers), alongside a closely argued plea for more visible minority and female leadership.

According to his external page White House biography, Harding retired in 2001, after a year or so as the deputy head of Army intelligence, and having previously served as head of operations for the Defense Intelligence Agency - the military’s senior-most human intelligence officer - and director of intelligence for US Southern Command, when it was headed by General Barry McCaffrey.

It notes several positions in counter-intelligence - spy catching - including heading “the Army’s premier Counterintelligence Group, the 902d,” based at the Fort Meade HQ of the National Security Agency.

Silence on Harding’s private dealings

But the White House says very little about his work in the private sector, external page noting only that Harding Security Associates and its 400 employees “provide subject matter expertise and strategic security solutions” to US intelligence and defense agencies.

The terms of the external page sale of his company last July to a venture capital firm were not disclosed.

external page His testimony at the November 2003 hearing and a external page biography handed out there - and preserved for posterity by the invaluable external page Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists - says that he started “consulting in private practice” but had recently abandoned that in favor of “government contracts - specifically in homeland security areas related to counter-intelligence, HUMINT [human intelligence or spy recruitment] and MASINT [measurement and signals intelligence].”

The testimony suggests that at least part of his business was finding individuals with particular linguistic or cultural backgrounds.

A search of external page federal procurement records reveals that Harding’s business made several million dollars a year from such “professional support” and other “intelligence services” contracts starting in 2004 (the first year for which records are available online), slowly growing its income nearly $8.5 million by 2007.

But the following year, 2008, the company’s contract income ballooned by a factor of nearly eight to $63 million, more than half of which was from a series of defense department contracts for “biometric support services.”

TSA, of course, oversees a number of biometric programs including the troubled external page Transportation Worker Identity Credential, or TWIC, program, and it will be interesting to see whether this issue surfaces at his hearing.