[User imabluemerkin] recommended that I repost this after the convention, and I agreed with his assessment, so here it is.... I'm surprised that this has not gotten more press time somewhere....]
Appalling. Disgusting. Horrific. And the US Government is allegedly paying for it through contracts with KBR.
Wow. Isn't this a proud moment for the United States. Because of our privatization efforts, we can now have people coerced into working for our benefit.
More details:
According to a report in the Washington Post, the actual trafficking is being run by KBR's Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners.
Unfortunately, we appear to have missed this when a case related to this was first decided back in April. According to this story in the Washington Business Journal:
On behalf of nine of the slain men's families, they filed suit in 2006 against the Jordanian subcontractor, Daoud & Partners, and its insurance company.
This past April, they won. A judge in the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Administrative Law ruled that the men's families were entitled to benefits. The judge ruled on summary judgment — essentially saying there were enough undisputed facts that there was no need to go to trial.
Unfortunately, the April decision was not about human trafficking:
This lawsuit ultimately wasn't about human trafficking. The attorneys sued under the Defense Base Act, which is similar to a workers' compensation statute for military facilities overseas. They argued the men's families were entitled to death benefits, which will amount to about $100,000 over the life of each man's beneficiaries.
"It doesn't sound like much, but it's an absolute fortune [in Nepal]," Handley said. The per capita income in Nepal is about $1,200 per year, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
The case sets a precedent. The Defense Base Act had apparently never been used before to cover workers who wound up on military bases not knowing they were going there, Fryszman said. "It should expand government contractors' notions of which workers they're liable to. You can't treat foreign workers as disposable labor."
... In court documents, the company argued that Fryszman and Handley didn't prove that some of the Nepali families qualified as dependents.
This is not the first time that allegations of human trafficking have cropped up in this regard. An article from 2006 in the Chicago Tribune discusses a special report, "Pipeline to Peril" that ran in October of 2005, that prodded the Justice Department to start an investigation into the allegations about KBR and Daoud & Partners participation in human trafficking activities.
The successful prosecution of this case was aided by a lucky break, as reported in an article at NepalNews.com:
Since there was no proper paper work to prove that Daoud and Partners was the employer of the men, and since the men’s passports and other documents were held by the employer, Daoud and Partners and their lawyers flat out denied any responsibility for the death of these workers. Matt’s firm was hitting a brick wall in pursuing Daoud and Partners since Daoud did not appear to have any formal office and local folks in Amman, Jordan were not cooperating. After going through many months of investigation and feeling like they were peeling an onion with no end in sight, Matt’s firm got a lucky break of finding a Nepali worker who was in the same caravan as the twelve men who were killed, but who was left behind at the check point. This person actually made it to the US base at which he was supposed to work and, after completing his job successfully, made it back to Nepal with a copy of the work contract that clearly stated that Daoud and Partners was his employer.
I am disgusted in the oversight provided by the U.S. and its contractors in Iraq. It's yet another example of this administration and it's cronies total disregard for anyone without a voice that could affect their public image. Well, we can help provide that voice.
Spread the word.