The U.S. Embassy in Iraq: an Update

You haven’t forgotten the super-duper U.S. Embassy being built in Iraq’s
Green Zone, have you? Well heck, let me bring you up-to-date with an article from AlterNet.

Asian Workers Trafficked to Build U.S. Embassy in Baghdad
By David Phinney, CorpWatch
Posted October 26, 2006

The State Department quietly awarded a corrupt Kuwaiti company a $592-million contract to build the U.S. embassy in Iraq.

Things began looking even sketchier than ever to John Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 following some R&R in Kuwait City.

Employed by First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded at the airport by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai--not to Baghdad.

"I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane," says the 48-year-old Floridian who was working as a general construction foreman on the embassy project.

Seven months after signing on with First Kuwaiti in November 2005, he quit.

In his resignation letter last June, Owen told First Kuwaiti and US State Department officials that his managers physically assaulted and beat the construction workers, demonstrated little regard for worker safety, and routinely breached 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. As with many US-funded contractors, First Kuwaiti prefers importing labor because it views Iraqi workers as a security headache not worth the trouble.

Despite numerous emails and phone calls about such allegations, neither First Kuwaiti general manager, Wadih Al Absi, nor his lawyer, Angela Styles, the former top White House contract policy advisor, has responded. After a year of requests, State Department officials involved with the project also have ignored or rejected opportunities for comment.

Now there’s a tidy end to a pesky problem, eh? You can read the rest of this article on AlterNet; it is giving me a headache. But let me ask at this juncture: is this where the American worker’s future is headed?