Torture. Lying to the public. War mongering. War profitteering. Now slave labor. What law will the Bushies NOT break?
American managers and specialists involved with the project began protesting about the living and working conditions of lower-paid workers sequestered and largely unseen behind security walls bordering the embassy project inside the US-controlled Green Zone.
The Americans protested that construction crews lived in crowded quarters; ate sub-standard food; and had little medical care. When drinking water was scarce in the blistering heat, coolers were filled on the banks of the Tigris, a river rife with waterborne disease, sewage and sometimes floating bodies, they said. Others questioned why First Kuwaiti held the passports of workers. Was it to keep them from escaping? Some laborers had turned up “missing” with little investigation. Another American said laborers told him they were been misled in their job location. When recruited, they were unaware they were heading for war-torn Iraq.
Of course, Howard J. Krongard, the State Department’s inspector general, “Looked into it” and found no wrong doing. One labor foreman at the embassy site who recently read Krongard’s review called it “bull shit.”
Right now Civil Rights lawyers are looking into the matter. It looks like workers from the Philippines and from Nepal are being ticketed to go to one Gulf Arab state and then flown to Iraq. It also turns out that before Krongard visited the facilities, they were cleaned ahead of time to hide the abuse. So people were promised employment only to find their passport locked up by guards and working conditions horrid.
Juvencio Lopez, a high-level project manager under the US State Department over the course of 2 years said they had foreign workers sleeping 20 to a trailer.
“There were strikes and sit-downs every month,” Lopez says. He left Iraq in November 2006 and is now home in San Antonio, Texas. “Sometimes there were almost riots.”…Lopez vividly recalls a First Kuwaiti security guard unholstering his 9mm handgun and walking among the squatting protestors telling them to get back to work. Had the guard fallen or workers tackled him to the ground, the gun might have gone off. Lopez said he immediately reported the incident to First Kuwaiti. “Someone could gotten killed or injured.”
First Kuwaiti’s ( a development company) had acquired a workers medical clinic, complete with pharmacy, emergency room, x-ray machine, and dental suite, all of which appeared just weeks before the inspector’s general visit.
Several workers deaths were hidden from the Inspector general and many workers just showed up missing with no explanation. Workers were found to be on top of buildings and girders with no safety harnesses, helmets and many with no boots.
“Every US labor law was broken,” says an American labor foreman, John Owens, who adds that he never witnessed a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. “The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness,” charges Owen, who left the embassy project last June…Owen offers a different take on the workers he supervised. After having worked construction on US embassy sites in Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia, nothing compares to the mess he saw in Baghdad. “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up.”
Is this any different from what the Pirates did? They banged someone over the head and the poor fucker ended up on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic. Is this what the US occupation in Iraq is coming to?
The Rape Rooms are gone, but the torture and forced labor are back. Thanks W. Good job for liberating the Iraqis and providing opportunities for slave labor.
Link here:
http://www.iraqslogger.com/...