War On Error

LONDON / WASHINGTON — Even within the secretive world of private military companies, AirScan is noted for being unforthcoming about its operations. The Florida-based company has repeatedly refused to disclose what work it is doing in Europe, choosing instead to discuss the company's plans to track polar bears hibernating in the Arctic.

“We work closely with the U.S. government,” explained a company spokesman on Tuesday, when approached for comment on their operations in the Balkans. “We couldn’t answer any questions without their permission.” Earlier, Walter Holloway, AirScan’s founder and president, when asked what work the company did in Europe, responded: “Europe? Who told you we were in Europe?”

When questioned on the contracts the U.S. government holds with private military companies like AirScan, officials retreat behind a wall of silence, claiming that any information is proprietary and they can not disclose anything without the permission of the companies.

It is all the more ironic, then, that live feeds from AirScan’s spy flights have been turned into international television broadcasts, freely available to the general public.

What is known about AirScan is that it was formed in 1984 by former U.S. air commandos, the Air Force version of Special Forces. Its first and longest lasting contract has been to provide airborne surveillance security for U.S. Air Force launches at Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. AirScan also has contracts in the war zones of Colombia and Angola, where it guards oil pipelines for U.S. companies, and is part of the U.S. anti-drug operation, Plan Colombia.

Most recently, three AirScan pilots were sought for questioning by the Colombian attorney-general for their role in providing intelligence to the Colombians before the Colombian air force bombed the village of Santa Domingo on December 13, 1998, killing 18 people, including seven children.

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War On Error

LONDON, June 12, 2002 — The flaw in the U.S. communications system is a Pentagon network called the Global Broadcasting Service (GBS), a new military satellite system begun in 1996. The system was designed to "provide efficient, direct broadcast of digital multimedia information" and give "deployed warfighters...high-bandwidth data imagery and video of critical information." It uses commercial broadcast satellite technology. But it was not originally intended to use ordinary commercial TV satellites.

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War On Error

LONDON, June 12, 2002 — If you heard anything, you would think it was a mosquito hovering, hunting for fresh prey. But in the dark night skies over the Balkan mountains, that distant, faint buzzing may mark a hunter of a different sort. Shrouded from view, loitering up to 16,000 feet in the air is a small army of robot spy planes used by Allied forces to watch for trouble. Every day, the spy planes are aloft to monitor the high mountain passes and deep valleys for illicit traffic, across routes in use for centuries to smuggle arms, drugs, even women destined for the sex business. In Afghanistan, some of the spy-in-the-sky observers can even be armed to fire missiles by remote control.

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