Democracy Now! reported today on Halliburton and a wrongful death suit filed by the family of truck driver, Tony Johnson, who was killed while working in Iraq. On April 19, 2004, Johnson was one of six drivers killed in a gun battle on tyheir way to the Baghdad airport.
The increased use of contractors in the theater of war is creating many questions about how they are defined. Contractors fall under different laws than the military, so their actions are not nearly as regulated/ watched as members of the Armed Forces. Also, their status is not clearly defined, nor are the responsibilities of their employers.
Families of the four contractors killed in Falluja last spring are suing
Blackwater USA. That suit is for wrongful death and fraud. This suit is similar,as
Pratap Chatterjee states on the program:
the company intentionally placed these workers in harm's way. In fact, it goes further than that. It says that they were a decoy to ensure that if there was an attack, one of two convoys carrying fuel would be able to make it through, and what's most bizarre about this is that that the second convoy made it through.
<snip>
The lawsuit is alleging that this is deliberate and, in fact, because the Halliburton managers knew that there was a very good chance that the soldiers would be -- that the truck drivers might get killed, that this -- they needed to send two convoys in two different directions to double their chances of making it through, and so what's happened now is that many of the families are bringing this lawsuit against Halliburton and, in fact, most of the people in the convoy are expected to join this lawsuit in the next two weeks.
Last week, Pratap gave a reading and Q&A in Berkeley, in which he discussed his new book,
Iraq, Inc. A Profitable Occupation. It is important to understand under what circumstances Americans take jobs to drive trucks for Halliburton. Pratap has a chapter in his book called Operation Sweatshop Iraq (of which an article can
be read here).
At the reading, he explained the three levels, all of which take advantage of unemployment and low wages in a given region. Iraqis make up the first level, foreigners from mostly third-world nations make up the second level, and Americans make up the third:
The third group in that is workers from the United States. So you bring workers from the United States, of course, they are not going to work for three hundred dollars, let alone one hundred dollars a month, you have to pay them something a little higher than they would earn at home. So here you have to promise people more than twelve dollars an hour. And the lure for people, especially poor people in the south of the United States, from places like Mississippi and Alabama, is that they want jobs that will pay more than they get locally.
<snip>
What happens in Iraq is actually a little different, in fact. In fact, when they get there they realize to make $80,000 a year they needed to work seven days a week, twelve hours a day, and they were being paid wages that, in order to get full benefit from it, they had be to living outside the United States were it would be tax-free.
So at the end of the day, those people who thought they were making $100,000 a year, end up making $16 an hour. Truck drivers in Iraq are not making that much, but they went there lured by the system that they thought would allow them to save money for pension.
Poor or unemployed Americans are being sucked in by lucrative sounding deals to work in Iraq. Halliburton advertises in truck stops, hoping to catch the poor chicken hauler's eye. They are being used as decoys. Halliburton is running empty convoys and bilking
YOU the US taxpayer for millions. And families in America have to watch as their children, siblings and parents are sent over to a fradulent war as soldiers, or exploited as labor, while out treasury is sucked dry.
It is hard to imagine what these lawsuits will bring for the future. They may be settled quitely, they may create a precedent for contractors' rights, or companies may be found to have no responsibility for what happens in a region considered unstable enough for it to be impossible to be accountable.
What is surely new about this situation is actions and decisions made in the theater of war, even if only for logistical purposes, will be a part of civil suits involving corporations participating in a war effort. [Different from Alien Tort Claims Act cases] This is unchartered legal territory of which some of the defining of contractors on the battlefield will be sought.