U.S. Embassy Baghdad

From The People’s Voice:

John Owens didn’t realize how different his job would be 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.”

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

From the referenced 10-7-06 CorpWatch:

On April 4, 2006, the Pentagon issued a new contracting directive following a secret investigation that officially confirms what many South Asian laborers have been complaining about ever since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some contractors, many working as subcontractors to Halliburton /KBR in Iraq, were found to be using deceptive, bait-and-switch hiring practices and charging recruiting fees that indebted low-paid migrant workers for many months or even years to their employers. Contractors were also accused of providing substandard, crowded sleeping quarters, serving poor food, and circumventing Iraqi immigration procedures.

While the Pentagon declines to specifically name those contractors found to be doing business in this way, it also acknowledged in an April 19 memorandum that it was a widespread practice among contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan to take away workers passports. Holding onto employee passports — a direct violation of US labor trafficking laws — helped stop workers from leaving war-torn Iraq or taking better jobs with other contractors.

Contractors engaging in the practice, states the memo, must immediately “cease and deist.”

“All passports will be returned to employees by 1 May 06. This requirement will be flowed down to each of your subcontractors performing work in this theater.”

The Pentagon has yet to announce of any penalty for those found to be in violation of US labor trafficking laws or contract requirements.

On the switcheroo:

“Everyone was told to tell customs and security that they were flying to Dubai,” Mayberry explains. Once the group passed the guards, they went upstairs and waited by the McDonald’s for First Kuwaiti staff to unlock a door — Gate 26 — that led to an unmarked, white 52-seat jet. It was “an antique piece of shit” Mayberry offers in a casual, blunt manner.

“All the workers had their passports taken away by First Kuwaiti,” Mayberry claims, and while he knew the plane was bound for Baghdad, he’s not so sure the others were aware of their destination. The Asian laborers began asking questions about why they were flying north and the jet wasn’t flying east over the ocean, he says. “I think they thought they were going to work in Dubai.”

Ain’t nobody seen it, yet:

But scratching the surface is the only view yet available of what may be the most lasting monument to the US liberation and occupation of Iraq. As of now only a handful of authorized State Department managers and contractors, along with First Kuwaiti workers and contractors, are officially allowed inside the project’s walls. No journalist has ever been allowed access to the sprawling 104-acre site with towering construction cranes raising their necks along the skyline.

From the AP:

A congressional committee has launched an investigation of the State Department’s inspector general, alleging he blocked fraud investigations in Afghanistan and Iraq, including potential security lapses at the newly built U.S. embassy in Baghdad.

Also under scrutiny is whether Blackwater USA, the private security firm banned this week from working in Iraq for the alleged killing of eight civilians, was “illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq,” according to a letter to IG Howard J. Krongard obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

From the whistleblower:

“A rocket — an unexploded munition — went through a portion of a cement ceiling there, and it was supposed to be an area able to withstand a direct hit from a missile that did explode,” said McNamara. He said investigators wanted to look into charges that the walls were not built to the required thickness or concrete consistency, but they were blocked from pursuing it.

U.S. workers, he said, “were putting their lives on the line and assuming that the facility they were going into was going to provide them all the protection they needed, and that’s not true … With all these allegations coming in, we need to make sure these folks were being protected.”

Martin Kemp doesn’t like it:

The new American Embassy in Baghdad scowls at the world with a neo-Stalinist frown. It occupies some 104 acres next to the Tigris, assigned to the USA by the nominal Iraqi government in 2004. A hideous modernist bunker, devoid even of the residual classical motifs favoured for totalitarian architecture, it speaks bleakly of the USA’s position in the world.

Eyeball it.

From ABC News:

Of the 1,000 U.S. employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, only 10 have a working knowledge of Arabic, according to the State Department.

From Global Nation:

Ramil was informed that there were no more jobs at the hotel in Kuwait and because his recruiter had processed only a one-month travel visa for him, he could not work in Kuwait. He had three options: pay a $1,000 penalty and work in Kuwait for free for six months, be arrested and jailed, or work in Iraq. As he pondered these choices, Ramil lived in an apartment building in Kuwait, without mattresses or blankets, with 800 other Filipinos. They would eat only chicken and rice under the building’s crumbling ceilings. One Filipino worker lost his mind and died in the building, Ramil recalled.