‘Best of Phinney’ Archives
Marking Up The Reconstruction
The Civilian Police Training: A top-priority Bush administration project for training Iraqi police by DynCorp is now mired in controversy for unexplained cost overruns, questionable work orders and much more. Congress, the Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and [...]
Baghdad Embassy Investigated for Labor Trafficking and Abuse
Baghdad Embassy Investigated for Labor Trafficking and Abuse By David Phinney, IraqSlogger Posted on June 1, 2007 Editor's note: Rumors of labor trafficking and abuse have plagued the building contractor now completing the $592 million Baghdad embassy building project, but a State Department inspector general investigation reported finding [...]
Flying Baghdad Embassy Express
Asian Workers Smuggled to Build World's Largest Embassy: Oct. 17, 2006. CorpWatch, Alternet, Inter Press Service, Asia Times, Counterpunch and others (October 2006). Recipient of Project Censored award and Online News Association fiinalist for [...]
Escape from Iraq: Filipino Migrant Worker Recounts Nightmare Flight
He Didn't Want to Go: Ramil Autencio thought he was traveling to Kuwait for a job in a luxury hotel. The employer, a major Kuwait contractor working for the US government, instead pressured him to work on US military camps in Iraq. The father of two recounts his escape with more than 40 others during interview in Manila. He says he never wanted [...]
Just Business: Buying a US Embassy Contractor
An Update: Apparently, the sale of the Baghdad embassy contractor's US partner is a done deal -- or nearly a done deal. (Sorry about the earlier typos... I was typing in the dark in an SUV in the back country.) According to documents: Robert Farah, Paul Jureidini and Robert K. Kelley are the key players to taking control of Grunley Walsh [...]
Baghdad Embassy Contractor Wins More US Contracts
Despite allegations of poor construction, lousy and abusive labor practices and missed deadlines for completion, the Kuwaiti contractor building the new $592-million-and-counting US Embassy in Baghdad has been quietly bagging new lucrative contracts to build US diplomatic compounds around the world. In September, First Kuwaiti General Trading and [...]
Iraq Revokes Security Contractor Immunity
The Iraqi government has decided to revoke immunity from prosecution that the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority extended to private security companies operating in the war-ravaged country, according to journalist Ammar Karim. "The cabinet held a meeting yesterday and decided to scrap the article pertaining to security companies operating in [...]
What Happened to Saba and Nashat?
Iraqi officials jailed two young men in the summer of 2005 for allegedly pocketing the wages of hundreds -- if not thousands -- of Iraqis working for the Sandi Group, a Washington, DC, firm doing a multi-million-dollar business in Iraq as the leading subcontractor to DynCorp's $1.2-billion Iraqi police training contract, according to sources [...]
Iraq’s Police Training Program Records in Disarray
The State Department so terribly managed a $1.2 billion contract for Iraqi police training that it can't figure out what it got for the money spent, a new report says (pdf). Total Disarray: in invoices and records on the project -- and because the government is trying to recoup money paid inappropriately to contractor DynCorp International, LLC [...]
Baghdad Embassy Coverup
A project manager and the State Department Inspector General covered up "enormous problems" in the management of the $592-million embassy project in Baghdad, McClatchy newspaper reporters Warren P. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay report today. Problems became apparent after a mortar shell smashed into the sprawling new U.S. Embassy last May, [...]
