Baghdad Express - John Owen didn’t realize how different his job would be

[bridgit]

...from his last 27 years in construction until he signed on with First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting in November 2005. Working as general foreman, he would be overseeing an army of workers building the largest, most expensive and heavily fortified US embassy in the world. Scheduled to open in 2007, the sprawling complex near the Tigris River will equal Vatican City in size.

Then seven months into the job, he quit.

Not one of the five different US embassy sites he had worked on around the world compared to the mess he describes. Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia all had their share of dictators, violence and economic disruption, but the companies building the embassies were always fair and professional, he says. The Kuwait-based company building the $592-million Baghdad project is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14173

[aquart]

1. Labor laws? There are no laws if Bush doesn't like them.

[bridgit]

5. why doesn't bush just issue one signing statement that tells America...

to go fuck herself and be done with it...i say he's too chicken-shit to try it

[gratuitous]

2. The Bush administration's mortal enemy

Someone with even a scintilla of integrity. Can you imagine what of money Mr. Owen walked away from? Civilian truck drivers are being paid six figures, tax free, which is their incentive to leave their families for months at a time to haul cargo in Iraq. If you survive, you get a big pot of money. I'd suspect Mr. Owen was offered a buttload of cash to oversee this project, but like Olaf-glad-and-big, there was apparently some shit Mr. Owen would not eat.

[bridgit]

4. correct, while our armed forces are being paid low 5 figures to protect...

them; our armed forces are being used like the ultimate Burns Security Agency

[MADem]

3. Hmmm, land of the free, building an embassy with slave labor

In the resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers beat their construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breeched security.

And it was all happening smack in the middle of the US-controlled Green Zone -- right under the nose of the State Department that had quietly awarded the controversial embassy contract in July 2005.

He also complained of poor sanitation, squalid living conditions and medical malpractice in the labor camps where several thousand low-paid migrant workers lived. Those workers, recruited on the global labor market from the Philippines, India, Pakistan and other poor south Asian countries, earned as little as $10 to $30 a day. ... Owen didn’t know at the time that the Philippines, India, and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and fading support for the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped “Not valid for Iraq.”

Nor did Owen know that both the US State Department and the Pentagon were quietly investigating contractors such as First Kuwaiti for labor trafficking and worker abuse. In fact, the international news media had accused First Kuwaiti repeatedly of coercing workers to take jobs in battle-torn Iraq once they had been lured with safer offers to Kuwait. The company has billed several billion dollars on US contracts since the war began in March 2003 and now has an estimated 7,500 laborers in the theater of war.....

The whole article is DAMNING!!!! A hideously fascinating read!!!!!

[bridgit]

6. oh it is for them, republicans feel 'land of the free' means to take...

people's shit IS freedom :thumbsdown: