Word: sauer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...likely less shocked by the embassy scandal than James Sauer, a 22-year veteran of the U.S. Marines from Massachusetts who was hired in December of 2006 to prepare to take over responsibility for the safety of 1,000 employees at the Kabul embassy. Virtually from the moment he arrived in Afghanistan as an employee of a unit of the private security contractor ArmorGroup, which had a contract to manage embassy security starting in July of 2007, Sauer knew there were problems. According to a 46-page complaint Sauer filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., at almost every step...
That meant Sauer would have to buy substandard vehicles, replace American employees with cheaper South Africans and pay what Sauer thought were slave wages to the Nepalese Gurkhas, who make up nearly two-thirds of the embassy's 450 guards. The situation would eventually get so bad, the POGO documents said, that it would prompt two threats of mass walkouts by the Gurkhas. Guards would end up suffering chronic sleep deprivation because the staff was 20% shorthanded...
...exasperated Sauer declared in the complaint that he repeatedly tried to draw the line. "There needs to be a clear understanding, acknowledgment, and willingness to correct the financial deficiencies built into this thing by the business development people," he wrote in one e-mail to top executives, according to the court document. "You are going to have to go into the margin - either commit to spending the money, or pull the plug on this now before ArmorGroup looks more stupid than a box of rocks." (See pictures of British soldiers in Afghanistan...
...June 2007, one month before he was to officially start managing security for the embassy, Sauer found himself fired, along with his deputy, another retired Marine, Peter Martino of New Hampshire. Their case - which had the support of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit public-interest group that promotes government and corporate accountability - was settled out of court; its terms bar the parties from speaking about the case, and Sauer's attorney says neither she nor her client can speak to TIME. Sauer, however, isn't the only former ArmorGroup employee to make similar allegations about the embassy contract...
...very much in the mode of a commentator and a chronicler of the liberal foibles of Harvard. There was always a depth that other polemicists did not have,” Ambinder added. Douthat’s freshman year roommate Jason T. Sauer ’02 said he was unsurprised by Douthat’s appointment based on his recollections of his former roommate’s record as a journalist in College. One piece profiling Douthat as a senior in Fifteen Minutes magazine cited him for writing over 3000 words of copy each week...