(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
From RawStory: “Even with President Obama’s looming deadline to close the Guantanamo Bay military prison, and the U.S. Senate’s refusal to supply funding to do so until its prisoners can be transferred anywhere but the United States, somehow money has been approved to upgrade the prison’s access control system and to install new video surveillance cameras.”
According to Government Security News magazine:
When it initially posted its “special notice” of the upcoming security work on May 1, the Gitmo contracting branch indicated it planned to award a sole source, fixed price contract to Norment Security Group, Inc., of Tracy, CA, for its “proprietary electronic access control system,” but a subsequent notice published May 22 appears to open the procurement contract to all qualified security vendors.
Norment performed the original systems integration work on the access control system in Camp Six, under a contract worth about $600,000, when it was built during the Bush administration, Steve Stonehouse, a sales and marketing executive at the company, told GSN on May 26.
“They want to add some cameras, so they can see some areas better,” said Steve Adams, an electronics estimator with Norment.
The Joint Task Force – Guantanamo described the current access control system as including a programmable controller by Omron, of Kyoto, Japan; an Access database from Microsoft; touch screen software from the Wonderware unit of Invensys Group, of London, UK; and other products by Honeywell.
Neither Stonehouse nor Adams could explain why the Guantanamo contracting office would be spending additional money on the access control and video surveillance systems, if the president intends to close the detention facilities during the coming year. They guessed that the upgrades were simply temporary measures that would enhance security on a short-term basis.
19 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
So… “Close Gitmo” doesn’t really mean “CLOSE Gitmo”?
Maybe it’s something like “upgrading” Bush’s Military Commissions?
even if it makes me angry and queasy.
Once a project has been identified and funded, the recipient has no alternative but to spend the allocation on whatever it identified. Since budgets work on a fiscal basis, that money is designated on Oct. 1 and must be spent by Sept. 30 of the following year. Despite some ineffective attempts to reform the system, offices find themselves in the tough position of not spending the full budget and getting penalized the following year or wasting money on changed priorities. Congress won’t allow them to not spend the money. That explains why construction at bases destined to close, for example, is ongoing to the day it does so.
picturing 4 of the most wildly incompatible of systems, I do wonder if it ever worked.