Over the strong objections of the Irish community and a protest lodged by Dyncorp, Tim Spicer's company Aegis has managed to hold onto their huge contract to provide security in Iraq:

Spicer contract gets U.S. nod

A controversial contract between the Pentagon and a British-owned private defense company has been given the go-ahead by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Aegis Defense Services secured the $292.5 million contract for security work in Iraq.

The contract, awarded in May, is one of the largest for such work in Iraq and was given to Aegis in the face of six initial rival bids, including one by a U.S. company, Dyncorp.

It was a protest brought by Dyncorp that put the Aegis contract on hold and resulted in an investigation and legal determination by the GAO, the congressional and federal government financial and legal watchdog, which, until recently, was known as the General Accounting Office.

Aegis is headed by former British army Lt. Col. Tim Spicer, who commanded the Scots Guards regiment in Belfast when teenager Peter McBride was shot dead in September 1992.

McBride was shot in the back and his death remains one of the most controversial of the troubles.

President Bush has been urged to cancel the Aegis contract because of the questions swirling around Spicer, not just in relation to his service in Northern Ireland, but as a result of later business ventures around the world involving so-called "private military companies," a term widely viewed as merely a sanitized way of describing mercenaries.

I expected this. Despite some suggestion that the awarding of the Aegis contract was the result of incompetence, it has seemed to me a result of deliberate policy. The Pentagon knows what it's getting: a certain style of military action behind a contractual cloak of deniability.

UPDATE: Govexec.com has more details:

GAO found that DynCorp's proposal was "marginal, and ineligible for award without significant revision" and therefore, the company had no standing in the protest. The contract was awarded on a "best value" basis, based on technical and management capability, past performance and cost. The request for proposals had advised contestants that technical and management capability would be rated slightly higher than past performance, and that the two factors together would rate higher than cost.