One day, not so long ago, the US State Department handpicked Texas-based DynCorp for an $800-million contract to train over 100,000 Iraqi police officers, a top-priority project of the Bush administration’s effort to stabilize the war-torn country and strengthen the fragile civilian government there (as part of a larger $1.2 billion contract). But State Department wanted a contractor with strong ties in Iraq, so DynCorp obligingly teamed up in 2004 with a company known as Corporate Bank Financial Service, a Washington-based business better known as The Sandi Group.

It seemed to have the makings of a winning partnership. DynCorp offered a track record for building police forces in Haiti, Bosnia and other trouble spots around the Globe for the State Department since the early 1990s, so it easily won the contract with little competition and supplied 700 or so trainers largely recruited from police departments in the United States and other coalition allies.

The Sandi Group, run by Rubar Sandi, an Iraqi who immigrated to the United States in the late 1970s, would perform the logistics, provide security, hire interpreters, and perform other services as required. The 54-year-old Sandi, a member of a prominent Kurdish family, had the well-established political and social connections in Iraq. Those connections and his entrepreneurial know-how served Sandi very well, not only in Iraq, but at the State Department where he had been an influential advisor to the “Future of Iraq Project,” a pre-war planning effort,

After the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Sandi immediately opened shop in Iraq where he took control of major Baghdad hotels, a newspaper, and several banks. The one-time Kurdish resistance fighter also recruited an armed private security force with a payroll of 7,500, laid plans for establishing an Iraqi airline, and positioned himself for US-administered contracts in the reconstruction effort. Those contracts included dozens upon dozens with DynCorp for construction projects, leases on posh hotels, security, logistics and other support services as needed.

“Could You Determine Any Value Added?”

All the while, The Sandi Group kept a low profile in Washington. Then on February 7,  its sister company, Corporate Bank, was singled out during a congressional hearing for its controversial handling of a multimillion-dollar DynCorp contract to build an Iraqi police training camp in Baghdad near parade grounds of Adnan Palace, a once luxurious domed castle used by Saddam Hussein’s family.

Two weeks after receiving the $55.1-million contract from DynCorp on Aug.15, 2004, Sandi’s Corporate Bank hired an Italian company, Cogim SpA, for $47.1 million to do all the work. The task included providing 1,048 living trailers and building an Olympic-sized swimming pool. On paper, the deal had the look of an effortless $8-million profit for Sandi at the US taxpayers expense — just for being the middleman and flipping the contract to Cogim.

A skeptical Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., laid out the arrangement before the crowded House congressional hearing teeming with scribbling reporters and TV cameras.

“The problem is the tiering of all these contracts. You have a general contractor, a subcontractor and a sub-subcontractor and a sub-sub-sub contractor,” Lynch noted to witness Stuart Bowen, the leading investigator of the US-funded reconstruction efforts in Iraq.

Chances are there could be plenty of sub-sub-sub-subs in the final mix, but Lynch was especially keen on Corporate Bank’s $8 million handling fee.

His eyes widened with the puzzled look of a straight man setting up the punch line: “I just want to understand, is that right?”

Bowen didn’t crack a smile. Sitting with hands calmly folded on the witness desk during his testimony before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction cascaded into what is now a familiar, but still opaque, explanation for deciphering the contracting chaos in Iraq — a mess that so far has left government auditors scratching their heads over $10 billion in taxpayer money seemingly misplaced through sloppy bookkeeping, job delays, bloated expenses and work that was paid for, but never performed.

“Quality assurance,” Bowen said, “expects that the contractor execute a quality control program over his subcontractors and the lack of visibility by the operational overseer of the government doing the program results in the loss of visibility and cost control.” (Translation: State Department contracting officers handed off the cost control and job performance issues to DynCorp. The government didn’t have a clue to what was going on except for what it learned from DynCorp.)

Lynch reframed his question about Sandi’s $8 million carrying charge for Adnan: “Could you determine any value added?”

“No we didn’t,” Bowen said, but stopped short of singling out a possible bad guy.

Someone using the screen name instantly uploaded the C-SPAN video of Bowen’s testimony on to youtube.com, (and credited to “Nancy Pelosi”), but Lynch could have gone straight to the source for his answers by catching a short cab ride to The Sandi Group’s elegant office just 1 ½ miles away on Connecticut Avenue in the fashionable DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington, DC.

After passing a wall-sized collage of folded dollar bills portraying an American flag near the front door, Lynch may have found a digital trail littered with dozens of contracts and agreements of Sandi’s work with Dyncorp for apparently even larger paper profits.

‘Corporate Stuff’….Cash Margins and Profit

According to Adnan Palace agreements leaked out on the Internet more than a year ago, Sandi indeed planned to make $8 million on the Adnan Palace while giving the work to Cogim. That was the charge to DynCorp — an 11 percent for general administration costs, known as G&A, and 6 percent profit for an exact total of just over $8 million.

The contracts between DynCorp and Corporate Bank and Corporate Bank and Cogim read almost exactly the same. An administrative assistant sitting at a computer could have easily employed a copy-and-paste approach and just replaced a few words with “Cogim.”

Tim Crawley, who left DynCorp as vice president of contracting last June to join Sandi as executive vice president and general manager, defends the standard G&A and profit included in the contract as an industry standard. The G&A, he explained, reimburses the back office administration; it keeps the office lights on, pays for health insurance, payroll systems, legal advice, business development, “thought processes” and operational “guidance.”

“There’s a lot of confusion about this,” he said. “It pays for the corporate stuff.”

Meanwhile, the profit is, well, profit. And DynCorp then presumably tacked on its own administrative handling charges.

“Six percent is pretty low, especially in Iraq,” he said, before curtly concluding his interview at The Sandi Group’s office. “There was a large cash outlay and it took 90 days from the first notice to proceed to the time of reimbursement.”

Crawley excused himself when it came to commenting on a dozen other draft contracts, represented by sources the actual ones. These agreements reflect a business practice that Sandi may have repeated again and again when tasked with building almost 30 police camps and providing an array of other services to DynCorp.

By all appearances, those agreements could have left Sandi with a hefty cash margin sometimes reaching 50 percent or more in profit above the sum that DynCorp agreed to pay.

Here’s how those agreements apparently worked: Sandi’s Corporate Bank would first sign task orders with DynCorp, include charges for profit and administration costs, and then pass them off to a handful of construction companies from Baghdad, Jordan, Turkey and Italy for much less money. The contracts read very much the same as those between DynCorp and Corporate Bank except for an opening paragraph. Sandi supplied the “guidance” while the subcontractor would “direct the project.”

So, according to the draft agreements, when DynCorp hired Sandi’s Corporate Bank in October 2004 to build a regional camp with 24 living trailers at Ad Diwaniyah, Corporate Bank billed $1,194,197. One month later, Corporate Bank then hired the Hozan General Construction Company of Baghdad for $605,000 to do the work. Similarly, DynCorp agreed to pay $833,680 for a 16-trailer camp at Al Kut. Corporate Bank then hired Hozan for $388,000. In Karbala, DynCorp agreed to pay $809,520. Corporate Bank turned to Hozan for $388,000.

In effect, one dollar of reconstruction money became $50 cents…with the final subs hiring subs to do the work. It appears that the first contractor in line gets the lion’s share of profit and benefit. If this tiny shaft of light into the world of reconstruction is typical then it would be American corporations, not Iraqis who are the major beneficiaries of America’s largesse.

Sandi and DynCorp both chose not to comment on repeated inquiries about the amounts being charged for the camp building — nor did representatives comment on whether or not the companies viewed the charges as “fair and reasonable,” an industry standard in government contracting laid out in sometimes ambiguous federal procurement regulations.

Once DynCorp paid Corporate Bank for its services, it would then charge the State Department – with another 4 percent to 6 percent markup for handling and management.

Sandbagging in Iraq

Louis Brown ran Sandi’s Iraq operation until autumn 2005 and is now vice president of special projects. He picked up on the interview about Sandi’s work in Iraq where Crawley left off. Brown said Sandi’s extra financial padding was necessary because Sandi’s Corporate Bank hired subcontractors that regularly failed to perform as Sandi had hoped.

“The government wanted DynCorp to build product as if it were in the United States,” Brown said. “We couldn’t just go out to Home Depot.”

But there is no lack of sand in Iraq. And DynCorp requested Sandi to provide filled burlap sandbags or a “reasonable substitute” to fortify most of its police camps, including a 17-trailer installation in the town of Najaf, a hotbed of Shiite insurgency and bombings and the site of one of Islam’s holiest shrines. Sandi determined that 24,990 sandbags were needed at $1.89 a piece, according to a December 23, 2004 agreement.

DynCorp agreed to pay $67,397 for the work. The tab included, among other things, a $10,050 charge for an onsite project manager to guide the sandbagging with the proviso: “The contractor shall have a superintendent on site at all times during the course of work.”

Sandi then hired an Iraqi company, Al-Kahirat, to do the work. The $23,000 contract with Al-Kahirat reads very much the same as the one DynCorp agreed to, including the requirement that Al-Kahirat “shall have a superintendent on site at all times during the course of work.”

Why did Sandi plan on paying itself more than $44,000 while hiring Al-Kahirat for $23,000 to perform the actual work? To cover unforeseen contingencies, Brown explains. The sandbags turned out to be useless at Najaf, he said. The job had to be redone– but that was after contracts had been written.

Sandi itemized the exact same sandbagging fee at other camps it built for DynCorp.

“Throwing Darts and Drinking Beer”

The threat of roadside bombs and insurgency threats also frequently delayed projects, said Brown, a towering man who says he once worked as a security adviser to high-level government officials and celebrities such as James Brown, Janet Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson before joining Sandi in Iraq. He also says he once was a guard for a US vice president, but won’t say which one.

Jobs scheduled to be completed in 45 days could drag out to 155 days, Brown recalls, and Sandi provided security details at its own expense to travel with subcontractors and convoys carrying materials to work sites located at US military camps. One American security supervisor for low-paid Iraqi guards could cost $450 to $700 a run, Brown said.

For all of its Iraq contracts, which include a variety of work ranging from perimeter security of hotels housing DynCorp operated by Sandi to the guarding of U.S. government agencies and contractors to intelligence gathering, Sandi’s security force, which has numbered as many as 7,500, has paid a heavy price. The company has suffered 186 casualties, including one American. The US Department of Labor recently fined Sandi $40,000 for not reporting the deaths as part of a US-required insurance program known as the Defense Base Act, Brown acknowledged.

The most savage deaths occurred in December 2004 when eight Iraqi security guards were executed after being kidnapped west of Baghdad. The event cast a chill of fear among Sandi’s subcontractors.

Any news of a bomb or mortar attack around Baghdad put the subcontractors on edge. Workers with the Italian firm, Cogim, refused to leave their villa, recalls Donald Vance, a Navy veteran from Chicago who worked as a Sandi security supervisor in 2004 and 2005. “They would tell us we couldn’t make them go out even for a 30-minute ride,” Vance said. “I would be at meetings and just sit back and laugh. They were afraid of being kidnapped.”

Sandi provided subcontractors with the best body armor and factory armored GMC sports utility vehicles available. Vance assured them they would be safe, but the Cogim team frequently wouldn’t budge. “They had everything they needed in their villa,” Vance claimed. “They liked staying there while throwing darts and drinking beer.”

Even worse, at some of the project sites, supervisors were nowhere to be found and workers for the subcontractors preferred spending time enjoying the stores, food courts, recreational facilities and other amenities at the military camps.

“I remember going to Camp Victory and there was no equipment or staff on the project site,” Vance said. “We would take a Sandi supervisor out and he would blow a gasket. People weren’t working. It was 130 degree heat. Everyone preferred jumping into the pool.”

Cogim declined to comment on its work for Corporate Bank in Iraq.

In 2005 several top executives with Cogim were investigated and charged for bribes paid to UN officials on deals to provide prefabricated building to peacekeeping missions unrelated to Iraq. Cogim’s name no longer appears on the U.N. vendors’ list as an approved supplier. The relationship beween DynCorp, Corporate Bank and Cogim is also featured in SIGIR report06_029.pdf

‘All Bad’

Brian Evancho, a 14-year Marine veteran from western New York who worked in aviation quality assurance, had a job as a Sandi project supervisor in Iraq for seven months after working other Iraq projects with the US Army Corps of Engineers. A few of Sandi’s camps worked out well. Others had serious problems, Evancho recalled during an interview last year before returning to Iraq for another contractor.

Iraqi police camps in Bakubah, Victory, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Najaf “were all bad,” he said. “Sandi was overcharging and didn’t perform. I’d say half of the reason for the nonperformance by the sub-contractors was because they didn’t get paid so they didn’t show up for work.”

One project at Camp Diamond Back in the northern Iraq town of Mosul apparently ran through three subcontractors before it was finished. DynCorp apparently agreed to pay $2,157,823 for a camp that included 52 living containers and support structures along with 85,000 sandbags itemized at $160,650.

“Mosul should have cost $600,000 to build,” Evancho said, suggesting that such a sum would include a “reasonable profit” of 28 percent.

The camp took a year to finish and when a State Department representative looked the place over, “he was laughing.” Evancho said that the air conditioning didn’t work, the furniture was “corrugated garbage” from China, and the mattresses were made of foam so thin that they “wouldn’t last two weeks” if an adult slept on them.

As far as the Adnan Palace police camp is concerned, the State Department dropped the project after spending $43.8 million for the uncompleted camp. But while that project was planned right under the nose of government contract officers, the dozens of camps DynCorp built with Sandi in Iraq didn’t come close to that degree of government “visibility” or scrutiny.

Of the seven major regional training camps costing a total of $17.9 million, none were visited by the State Department. The government contracting officer who authorized the spending on the projects told Bowen’s investigators that he “never visited the sites” because of security concerns and that he relied on reports from others regarding the status of the camps.

The inspector’s general investigators intend to visit the other police camps sometime in the future, the report says. Perhaps the visibility will be better.

Meanwhile, DynCorp and Sandi parted ways last August. The two will no longer be pursuing further construction projects together, said DynCorp’s spokesman, Greg Lagana. “The company reviewed its strategic partnerships and it was determined the company could perform the work on its own.”

Marking Up The Reconstruction is a post from: The Rough Cut

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 nothing untoward. Now David Phinney reveals previously unreported instances of appalling living conditions, abuse and coerced labor, making clear that the allegations against the contractor managing the embassy project remain unresolved.

In the months following September 2005, complaints began coming in to the U.S. State Department that all was not well with its most ambitious project ever: a sprawling new embassy project on the banks of the ancient Tigris River. The largest, most heavily fortified embassy in the world with over 20 buildings, it spans 104 acres– comparable in size to the Vatican.

Soon after the State Department awarded a $592 million building contract to First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting in July 2005, thousands of low-paid migrant workers recruited from South Asia, the Philippines and other nations poured into Baghdad, beginning work to build the gargantuan complex within two years time. But sources involved in the embassy project tell Slogger that during First Kuwaiti’s rush to the finish the project by this summer on schedule, American managers and specialists involved with the project began protesting about the living and working conditions of lower-paid workers sequestered and largely unseen behind security walls bordering the embassy project inside the U.S.-controlled Green Zone.

Interactive renderings of the U.S. Embassy by architect Berger Devine Yaeger

The Americans protested that construction crews lived in crowded quarters, ate substandard food and had little medical care. When drinking water was scarce in the blistering heat, coolers were filled on the banks of the Tigris, a river rife with waterborne disease, sewage and sometimes floating bodies, they said. Others questioned why First Kuwaiti held the passports of workers. Was it to keep them from escaping? Some laborers had turned up “missing” with little investigation. Another American said laborers told him they were been misled in their job location. When recruited, they were unaware they were heading for war-torn Iraq.

After hearing similar allegations during much of 2006, Howard J. Krongard, the State Department’s inspector general, flew to Baghdad for what he describes as a “brief” review on Sept. 15. He now reports that the complaints had no substance.

“Nothing came to our attention,” he wrote in a nine-page memorandum posted recently on the State Department’s website. More importantly, after interviewing an unstated number of workers from the Philippines, India, Nepal and Pakistan, Krongard said no evidence was found of labor smuggling, trafficking or other abuses. Krongard makes no mention of an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Justice Department of First Kuwaiti and others for such alleged practices and other matters.

One former labor foreman at the embassy site who recently read Krongard’s review called it “bull shit.” Another former First Kuwaiti employee viewed it as “a whitewash.”

Meanwhile, Justice Department trial attorneys Andrew Kline and Michael J. Frank with the civil rights division have been contacting former First Kuwaiti employees and others for interviews and documents, but declined to comment on the investigation other than to say they are looking into allegations of labor trafficking.

Ticketed to Dubai, diverted to Iraq

Dozens of migrant workers from Nepal and the Philippines have previously accused First Kuwaiti of pressuring them to work in Iraq under U.S. military contracts against their wishes. Late last year several Americans also claimed they boarded separate chartered jets in Kuwait loaded with work crews holding boarding passes to Dubai, but the planes then flew directly to Baghdad. Just this week, another American reported to Slogger that he was told by workers from Ghana on the embassy site that they were led to believe they would have jobs in Dubai but were then taken to work in Iraq.

First Kuwaiti general manager Wadih al Absi flatly dismisses the accusations as unfounded and false.

“I am telling you that First Kuwaiti has never violated any visa violations or forced people to work,” he said during a telephone interview last January. “In the coming months, you will see that First Kuwaiti is the best company working in the Middle East.”

Since landing the Baghdad project, the State Department has given First Kuwaiti some $200 million more in embassy work in Africa, India and Indonesia. The company is now said to be competing for a large U.S. embassy in Lebanon.

Had Krongard visited earlier than last September and unannounced, he may have witnessed something very different then what his memorandum relates. A half-dozen Americans who worked on the embassy project now say the inspector general saw nothing inappropriate, because the problems had been cleaned up in anticipation of his Sept. 15 inspection and because of complaints and inquiries from the news media.

Living 20 to a trailer

“Most of the allegations (from the Americans) were true before he arrived,” claims Juvencio Lopez, who says he was a high-level project manager under the U.S. State Department over the course of two years. During a telephone interview last weekend, he said the laborers “had their backs to the wall,” and had been living 20 to a trailer. Protests over First Kuwaiti’s bad food, abusive treatment from managers and unsafe working conditions were routine among many of the 2,700 workers during much of 2005 and 2006.

“There were strikes and sit-downs every month,” Lopez says. He left Iraq in November 2006 and is now home in San Antonio, Texas. “Sometimes there were almost riots.”

Lopez vividly recalls a First Kuwaiti security guard unholstering his 9mm handgun and walking among the squatting protestors telling them to get back to work. Had the guard fallen or workers tackled him to the ground, the gun might have gone off. Lopez said he immediately reported the incident to First Kuwaiti. “Someone could gotten killed or injured.”

On another occasion, a company manager roughed up a Filipino worker, sources say. All of the other Filipinos nearby began loudly protesting as bewildered workers from other countries watched. “The workers were from 36 different countries, and everyone spoke a different language,” Lopez says.

One of First Kuwaiti’s new improvements includes the workers’ medical clinic, complete with pharmacy, emergency room, x-ray machine and dental suite, all of which appeared just weeks before the inspector’s general visit, according to several witnesses. “Every month the clinic wasn’t there, they were saving money … but it got to be an embarrassment,” Lopez says. “I was away, but when I returned in November, it was there.”

That wasn’t what former Army emergency medical technician Rory Mayberry found in March 2006. First Kuwaiti had hired Mayberry as a medic under a subcontract with MSDS, a two-person, minority-owned computer consulting company outside Washington, D.C. Recommended to First Kuwaiti by contractor Jim Golden, who oversees the embassy project for the State Department, MSDS had never before provided medical services or worked in Iraq.

Once arriving at the construction site, Mayberry says he found the most basic of medical needs missing and that clinics lacked hot water, disinfectant and hand-washing stations. Mayberry also claims that workers’ medical records in total disarray or nonexistent, beds were dirty and the support staff was poorly trained. Prescription pain killers were being handed out “like a candy store … and then people were sent back to work,” to operate heavy equipment or climb scaffolding, he adds.

Better now?

Several workers had died prior to Mayberry’s arrival, perhaps because of improper diagnosis, and he recommended an investigation. Days after reporting the problems to First Kuwaiti and the State Department, Mayberry was taken off the site and discharged.

More than six months later, the inspector general discovered the clinic clean and well-organized and with several medical staff members. “The medications were neatly arranged and appeared to be labeled in both English and Arabic. Medical staff members we interviewed said they were not aware of any medical unit visits by workers for injuries related to beatings or abuse.”

Krongard also noted that the food is “quite good” with “six different dining facilities serving Egyptian, Filipino, African, Lebanese, Pakistani and Indian cuisines to meet the different tastes of most of the workers.”

The Lebanese food was always good, sources say, because all of First Kuwaiti’s top managers are Lebanese, and they ate there along with the American managers. There was a pecking order based on nationality, race and class, Paul Chapman said. He worked nine months for a subcontractor to First Kuwaiti and is now home in South Carolina. Chapman recalls seeing workers walk a mile to stand in line where rice, stew and flatbread were served from the back of truck. Food was ladled from marmite food containers. “I’d see them eating alongside the road or near their trailers.”

But what bothered Chapman more was the disappearance of seven workers from India, Pakistan and the Philippines who were listed as “missing” on First Kuwaiti rosters. Fearing they may have been killed and dumped into the Tigris, he began pressing embassy officials overseeing the project to investigate. “They told me to forget about it because the workers had probably found other jobs.”

Since workers were rarely allowed outside the project area, it was a mystery how they would have found other jobs. Even more puzzling was that they may have left without passports. First Kuwaiti keeps most passports locked up in a storage room.

In October, workers from Ghana on the embassy site told Chapman that they expected to get jobs in Dubai but were then sent to Iraq. Chapman wanted to report these incidents to the inspector general but says he was discouraged from doing so.

“Every U.S. labor law was broken”

Supplementing Krongard’s review, the coalition Multi-National Force inspector general in Baghdad also interviewed 36 workers from seven different countries at the new embassy site in December. The MNF-I IG claimed it found no evidence to indicate the presence of severe forms of labor trafficking, but did find workers from Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who reported deceptive hiring practices by recruitment agencies in their home countries. They said they had been promised higher pay, shorter hours and days off. “A large majority of workers” from the Indian subcontinent incurred recruiting fees of up to one year’s salary.

Chapman and others also claim that standard safety procedures on the project frequently went unobserved. Many worked without safety harnesses when off the ground and had no hardhats or boots. Work clothes were dirty and tattered. Those that had them had only one set of work clothes so they were rarely washed. They became dirty and tattered, causing rashes and sores.

Some worked in sandals, others in bare feet. “They had their toes curled around the rebar like birds,” Lopez remembers.

“Every U.S. labor law was broken,” says an American labor foreman, John Owens, who adds that he never witnessed a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. “The accident might not have happened if there had been a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness,” charges Owens, who left the embassy project last June.

Still, Lopez believes that First Kuwaiti is one of the best companies he has ever worked with, adding “I wish I could bring the company here” to the United States. He talks in global terms and explains that many Americans are not accustomed to working on an international stage where workers come from impoverished countries and are eager to work under any conditions. “Just look at where the workers came from,” he says. “They were much better off in Baghdad.”

Owens offers a different take on the workers he supervised. After having worked construction on U.S. embassy sites in Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia, nothing compares to the mess he saw in Baghdad. “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up.”

Baghdad Embassy Investigated for Labor Trafficking and Abuse is a post from: The Rough Cut

By DAVID PHINNEY

Things began looking pretty sketchy to John Owens as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2006 following some R&R in Kuwait city.

Employed by First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owens remembers being surrounded at the airport by some 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines, Pakistan, India and Africa. 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.

He buttonholed a First Kuwaiti manager standing near by and asked what was going on. The manager waved his hand, looked around the terminal and whispered to keep quiet.

“‘If anyone hears we are going to Baghdad, they won’t let us on the plane,’” Owens recalls the manager saying.

‘Not Valid for Iraq’
The secrecy struck Owens a little odd, but he grabbed his luggage and moved on. Everyone filed out to the private jet and flew directly to Baghdad. “I figured that they had visas for Kuwait and not Iraq,” Owens offers.

The deception had all the appearances of smuggling workers into Iraq, but Owens didn’t know at the time that the Philippines, India, and other countries had banned or restricted their citizens from working in Iraq because of safety concerns and growing opposition to the war. After 2004, many passports were stamped “Not valid for Iraq.”

Nor did Owens know that both the US State Department and the Pentagon were quietly investigating contractors such as First Kuwaiti for labor trafficking and worker abuse. In fact, the international news media had accused First Kuwaiti repeatedly of coercing workers to take jobs in battle-torn Iraq once they had been lured to Kuwait with safer offers.

The Kuwait-headquartered, Lebanese-run company has billed several billion dollars on US contracts since the war began in March 2003. The firm performs much of its with cheap labor largely hired from South Asia and has an estimated 7,500 foreign laborers in the theater of war.

Now, with a highly secretive contract awarded by the US State Department, First Kuwaiti is in the midst of building the 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.

But Owens says that working on the project proved to be one of the worst jobs he has ever had in his 27 years of construction work.

Not one of the five different US embassy sites he previously worked at 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. First Kuwaiti is the exception. Brutal and inhumane, he says “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every US labor law was broken.”

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

In the resignation letter last June, Owens 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, have responded. After a year of requests, State Department officials involved with the project also have ignored or rejected opportunities for comment.

Your Passports Please
That same March Owens returned to work in Baghdad, Rory Mayberry would witness similar events after he flew to Kuwait from his home in Myrtle Creek, Oregon.

The gravely voiced, easy-going Army veteran had previously worked in Iraq for Halliburton and the private security company, Danubia. Missing the action and the big paychecks US contractors draw Iraq, he snagged a $10,000 a month job with MSDS consulting Company.

MSDS is a two-person minority-owned consulting company that assists US State Department managers in Washington with procurement programming. Never before had the firm offered medical services or worked in Iraq, but First Kuwaiti hired MSDS on the recommendation of Jim Golden, the State Department contract official overseeing the embassy project. Within days, an agreement worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for medical care was signed.

The 45-year-old Mayberry, a former emergency medical technician in the Army who worked as a funeral director in Oregon, responded to a help wanted ad placed by MSDS. The plan was that he would work as a medic attending to the construction crews on the work site in Baghdad.

Mayberry sensed things weren’t right when he boarded a First Kuwaiti flight on March 15 to Baghdad — a different one from the one Owens flew.

At the airport in Kuwait City, Mayberry said, he saw a person behind a counter hand First Kuwaiti managers a passenger manifest, an envelope of money and a stack of boarding passes to Dubai. The managers then handed out the boarding passes to Mayberry and 50 or so new First Kuwaiti laborers, mostly Filipinos.

“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.”

One former First Kuwaiti supervisor acknowledges that the company holds passports of many workers in Iraq — a possible violation of US contracting, although the company claims it is for safekeeping on behalf of its workers.

“All of the passports are kept in the offices,” said one company insider who requested anonymity in fear of financial and personal retribution. As for distributing Dubai boarding passes for Baghdad flights, “It’s because of the travel bans,” he explained.

Mayberry believes that migrant workers from the Philippines, India and Nepal are especially vulnerable to employers like First Kuwaiti because their countries have little or no diplomatic presence in Iraq.

“If you don’t have your passport or an embassy to go to, what you do to get out of a bad situation?” he asks. “How can they go to the US State Department for help if First Kuwaiti is building their embassy?”

Deadly ‘Candy Store’ Medicine
Owens had already been working at the embassy site since late November when Mayberry arrived. The two never crossed paths, but both share similar complaints about management of the project and brutal treatment of the laborers that, at times, numbered as many as 2,500. Most are from the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. Others are from Egypt and Turkey.

The number of workers with injuries and ailments stunned Mayberry. He went to work immediately after and stayed busy around the clock for days.

Four days later, First Kuwaiti pulled him off the job after he requested an investigation of two patients who had died before he arrived from what he suspected was medical malpractice. Mayberry also recommended that the health clinics be shut down because of unsanitary conditions and mismanagement.

“There hadn’t been any follow up on medical care. People were walking around intoxicated on pain relievers with unwrapped wounds and there were a lot of infections,” he recalls. “The idea that there was any hygiene seemed ridiculous. I’m not sure they were even bathing.”

In reports made available to the US State Department, the US Army and First Kuwaiti, Mayberry listed dozens of concerns about the clinics, which he found lacking in hot water, disinfectant, hand washing stations, properly supplied ambulances, and communication equipment. Mayberry also complained that workers’ medical records were in total disarray or nonexistent, the beds were dirty, and the support staff hired by First Kuwaiti was poorly trained.

The handling of prescription drugs especially bothered him. Many of the drugs that originated from Iraq and Kuwait were unsecured, disorganized and unintelligibly labeled, he said in one memo. He found that the medical staff frequently misdiagnosed patients. Prescription pain killers were being handed out “like a candy store … and then people were sent back to work.”

Mayberry warned that the practice could cause addiction and safety hazards. “Some were on the construction site climbing scaffolding 30 feet off the ground. I told First Kuwaiti that you don’t give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said ‘that’s how we do it.’”

The sloppy handling of drugs may have led to the two deaths, Mayberry speculates. One worker, age 25, died in his room. The second, in his mid-30s, died at the clinic because of heart failure. Both deaths may be “medical homicide,” Mayberry says — because the patients may have been negligently prescribed improper drug treatment.

If the State Department investigated, Mayberry knows nothing of the outcome. Two State Department officials with project oversight responsibilities did not return phone calls or emails inquiring about Mayberry’s allegations. The reports may have been ignored, not because of his complaints, but because Mayberry is a terrible speller, a problem compounded by an Arabic translation program loaded on his computer, he says.

Accidents Happen
Owens’ account of his seven months on the job paints a similar picture to Mayberry’s. Health and safety measures were essentially non-existent, he says. Not once did he witness a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. “The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness.”

Owens also says that managers regularly beat workers and that laborers were issued only one work uniform, making it difficult to go to the laundry. “You could never have it washed. Clothing got really bad — full of sweat and dirt.”

And while he often smuggled water to the work crews, medical care was a different issue. When he urged laborers to get medical treatment for rashes and sores, First Kuwaiti managers accused him of spoiling the laborers and allowing them simply to avoid work, he says.

State Department officials supervising the project are aware of many such events, but apparently do nothing, he said. Once when 17 workers climbed the wall of the construction site to escape, a State Department official helped round them up and put them in “virtual lockdown,” Owens said.

Just before he resigned, hundreds of Pakistani workers went on strike in June and beat up a Lebanese manager who they accused of harassing them. Owens estimates that 375 laborers were then sent home.

‘Treated Like Animals’
Recent First Kuwaiti employees agree that the accounts shared by Owens and Mayberry are accurate. One longtime supervisor claims that 50 to 60 percent of the laborers regularly protest that First Kuwaiti “treats them like animals,” and routinely reduces their promised pay with confusing and unexplained deductions.

Another former First Kuwaiti manager, who declines to be named because of possible adverse consequences, says that the complaints of Owens and Mayberry only begin “to scratch the surface.”

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.

Even this tight security is a charade, says on former high-level First Kuwaiti manager. First Kuwaiti managers living at the construction site regularly smuggle prostitutes in from the streets of Baghdad outside the Green Zone, he says.

Prostitutes, he explains are viewed as possible spies. “They are a big security risk.”

But the exposure that the US occupation forces and First Kuwaiti may fear most could begin with the contractor itself and the conditions workers are forced to endure at this most obvious symbol of the American democracy project in Iraq.

Flying Baghdad Embassy Express is a post from: The Rough Cut

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 to go. Iraqslogger, Alternet and Inter Press Service, Part 1 and Part 2. (June 2007). Story reiterated in Philippines.

by David Phinney
December 25, 2006

Ramil Autencio dreamed of making a better life in the Philippines for himself and his young family with the promise of a good-paying job in Kuwait. He never suspected that weeks after leaving home in December 2003 he would be living a wartime nightmare in northern Iraq, pushing boulders 11 hours a day, seven days a week for a contractor fortifying a U.S. military camp in Tikrit.

Showers to wash off the day’s sweat were an uncertainty, and in the chilly January and February nights of 2004, he and seven other Filipinos would live in an empty truck container with no windows, sleep on cardboard boxes for a bed, and eat leftovers and ready-to-eat meals from soldiers. It was the only way to get enough food. Crackling gunfire and crashing incoming mortar would wake them at all hours of the night and the unfortified trailer would tremble and shake from nearby rocket blasts.

It was not what he had planned at all.

Hoping to earn $450 a month

Trained as an air conditioning repairman and technician, Autencio says his recruiter in the Philippines agreed to place him in a two-year job at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Kuwait for $450 a month — maybe more with overtime. But after arriving at the Kuwait airport, he was quickly shuttled to a rundown apartment building managed by First Kuwaiti General Trading and Contracting, a Kuwaiti firm doing a booming multimillion-dollar business with the U.S. military and the Pentagon’s primary support contractor KBR.

To date, the company has billed the U.S. government perhaps $2 billion for work in Iraq, including the $592 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad now nearing completion.

There were no more jobs at the hotel, Autencio was informed, and because the job recruiter had processed him for only a one-month travel visa, he could not work in Kuwait. Autencio said First Kuwaiti offered him one of three options: pay a $1,000 penalty and work unpaid in Kuwait for six months, be arrested and jailed, or work in Iraq. As he weighed these choices, he would live in the dilapidated apartment building with 800 other Filipinos, where, at first, there were no mattresses or blankets. They ate only small pieces of chicken and rice under the building’s crumbling ceilings.

“A jail would be better,” Autencio recalled. “We were ordered to go. … They forcibly brought us to Iraq.”

Former supervisors with First Kuwaiti who have since left the company call the three-story building Jaleeb.

“They would lock them in without documents — no passports or IDs,” recalled one longtime supervisor. “The building was so crowded, you could barely breathe.” Many say one Filipino lost his mind and died while Autencio was there.

Another supervisor agreed the building was “a mess” and said, after much urging, it was cleaned up sometime in 2006.

First Kuwaiti’s general manager, Wadih Al-Absi consistently denies that his company would ever endorse such recruitment practices. During numerous conversations, he has said that First Kuwaiti never pressured workers into Iraq or violated international visa requirements. During one meeting in Washington, D.C., in September 2005, he said that people were envious of his company’s success. “People will never criticize someone who fails,” he said.

Al-Absi also flatly accused Autencio of lying. His proof is a working agreement, purportedly signed by Autencio before leaving the Philippines. Although Al-Absi admitted that unscrupulous recruitment agencies do sometimes misrepresent jobs and take money from people eager to work, he provided Autencio’s undated contract with First Kuwaiti, which identified the job site as Kuwait and “mainly” Iraq.

The agreement also lays out salary: $346 a month for eight-hour days, seven days a week, plus $104 a month for a mandatory two hours overtime every day.

Company placed on ‘watch list’

Despite Al-Absi’s protests of innocence, the Philippine government placed First Kuwaiti on a “watch list” in June 2005 that lasts to this day, according to a Philippine official. It is a warning to the company to comply with worker contracts. Al-Absi said he was unaware of that action.

First Kuwaiti placed a job order with Philippine Overseas Employment Agency in November 2003 for more than 700 workers, according to the official. Only 41 of those jobs were listed for Iraq, while the remainder was advertised for being in Kuwait.

One former First Kuwaiti logistics manager who processed workers told me he witnessed the company send more than 500 Philippine laborers into Iraq in 2003 and early 2004 to work on the construction of U.S. military camps.

A frequent complaint among Filipino workers is that they are issued tourist visas when traveling to the Middle East for work. Such visas prevent them from getting the jobs they planned to have, and they then have few options but to take work in Iraq. “So many were issued tourist visas,” the official said. “We have no concrete evidence, but there are so many workers with these complaints.”

Because of allegations of labor trafficking and other abuses, First Kuwaiti is now under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department, precipitated by American employees reporting last October that workers transiting Kuwait were handed boarding passes for Dubai before landing in Baghdad. A Philippine official also recently announced that his government has renewed an investigation into the recruitment practices of firms that supplied workers to First Kuwaiti.

Because of ongoing allegations about labor trafficking and worker abuse, U.S. State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard conducted a site review of the U.S. embassy project in September. “Nothing came to our attention,” Krongard wrote in his nine-page memorandum released in late April, although his office admitted this week that First Kuwaiti had a three-month advance warning about his visit. An addendum to Krongard’s report by the multinational force inspector general in Baghdad did find complaints about deceptive hiring practices by recruitment agencies after interviewing 36 workers in a March 2007 site inspection.

A nightmare unfolded

Autencio recounted his tale last November while sitting in front of his home — a two-room shack assembled with old wood and sheet metal on a dirt alley off a busy commercial street in metropolitan Manila. A tattered curtain hangs across the front entrance. Jets fly overhead connecting some 8 million Filipino laborers, 10 percent of the nation’s population, to the global economy — most seeking more than the $10 a day that many make at home.

A stray dog and a few cats pattered by as Autencio’s wife Angela and his two small children watched him carefully unfold a plastic grocery bag holding his documents. Speaking in Tagalong, he holds each paper like a sacred text that strengthens his resolve to share the hell he says he endured.

While at Jaleeb in Kuwait, Autencio claims he signed papers as a supervisor placed his hand over the paragraphs. “I don’t read Arabic or English, but it was that, or jail,” he recalled. Before leaving the Philippines, the papers he signed at the airport were for work in Kuwait, he stressed again and again. He did not want to go to Iraq.

Autencio said after a few weeks in Jaleeb, a handwritten memo listing his name among others was posted warning people to prepare for travel to Iraq: “People received $100 salary deductions for failure to get on the buses. Furthermore, their daily deductions will be made from their salary until they reach Iraq, and their salaries will not be paid until the end of the month. If your name is on the list below and you wish to go back to the Philippines, you will still have to work until you can pay for your ticket expenses equivalent to USD $1,000.

“These people failed to meet their departure dates for Iraq, which means that they also delayed many of your departures. Delayed departures mean that you might receive your salary late because no more salaries will be paid in Kuwait. All salaries will be paid in Iraq! If everyone wishes to receive their salary on time, you must make sure that you do not miss your departure date, and make sure no one else fails to go!”

Once in Tikrit, Autencio said he was not getting paid. He was told the money was waiting in Kuwait, but the conditions became increasingly unbearable for him and the Filipinos working with him.

Escaping the war

As if sharing a secret, Autencio carefully unfolds a dog-eared yellow piece of paper and passes it over like a quiet secret. He circulated the paper among his fellow workers, who agreed to flee Iraq and their unwanted servitude. Over 40 Filipinos signed their names. They believed their chances would be better if they stuck together.

Autencio befriended a sympathetic Filipino soldier in the U.S. Army who persuaded a driver of a flatbed truck headed south towards the Kuwaiti border to take the group with him. For three nights they rode in darkness, packed tight on a truck with very little food or water. “We were nearly starved,” Autencio said.

When they arrived at the border, the sheer number of desperate Filipinos arriving without papers stunned the Kuwaiti police, who tried to prevent them from leaving Iraq.

“We were even angrier then because one of us had died, so there was nothing they could do to stop us,” Autencio continued. “We pushed them away when they asked for our papers. … We outnumbered them.”

The group made their way to the Philippines embassy, where the ambassador reluctantly allowed them shelter until their return home could be arranged. For a while, Kuwaiti police waited outside planning to arrest them, Autencio said.

Ramil claims he was only paid $300 for the entire three-month ordeal. He sued First Kuwaiti for back pay but lost in court. He blames that on his lawyer, who was unqualified. A second lawyer he hired disappeared.

That was enough for First Kuwaiti to conclude that Autencio’s allegations are nothing but fiction.

“He sued me in court over this, and he lost,” Al Absi said. “He doesn’t have a case against us.”

In April 2006, the Pentagon confirmed in a new contracting order that an investigation of U.S.-funded contractors in Iraq found significant evidence of deceptive hiring practices, excessive recruiting fees in debting workers for months if not years, substandard living conditions that include crammed sleeping quarters and poor food, and the circumventing of Iraqi immigration procedures. It also noted the illegal confiscation of passports by employers and the lack of mandatory “awareness training” in labor trafficking.

“Leaders must understand the dynamics and indicators of trafficking and be vigilant in correcting and reporting suspected violations or activities,” the Pentagon stressed in the contracting order. No company or contractor is named in the Pentagon’s findings, and the U.S. government has not publicly penalized or prosecuted any U.S.-funded contractor in Iraq for labor trafficking and abuse.

The U.S. State Department recently awarded some $200 million in new contracts to First Kuwaiti for embassy work in Africa, India and Indonesia. The company also is said to be competing for a new U.S. embassy project in Lebanon.

Autencio’s story is now featured in the new documentary Someone Else’s War, currently circulating in the Philippines and at U.S. film festivals.

Journalist Lucille Quiambao contributed research and translation to this report. David Phinney can be contacted at phinneydavid@yahoo.com.

Escape from Iraq: Filipino Migrant Worker Recounts Nightmare Flight is a post from: The Rough Cut

… Several diplomats, backed by the vocal support of their colleagues there, vehemently complained about the prospect of so-called “directed assignments” to Iraq to make up for a lack of volunteers.
“Incoming is coming in every day, rockets are hitting the Green Zone,” said Jack Croddy, a senior foreign service officer, referring to the highly fortified area of Baghdad where the embassy is located.
“It’s one thing if someone believes in what’s going on over there and volunteers, but it’s another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment,” Croddy said. “I’m sorry, but basically that’s a potential death sentence and you know it…. Who will raise our children if we are dead or seriously wounded?”

Forced Labor in Iraq and State Department Mutiny is a post from: The Rough Cut

The Mega-Bunker of Baghdad is a post from: The Rough Cut

The Army approved Fluor’s proposal even though the proposal relied on different assumptions than those listed in the contract solicitation — a shortcoming that hurt other bidders’ proposals, the GAO said.

New Military Support Contract ‘Improperly Awarded’ is a post from: The Rough Cut

The administration is more interested in turning the watchdogs into lap dogs. Just as he politicized every other facet of government from FEMA to the Farm Bureau, President Bush has ignored the law and stocked the inspector general posts with inexperienced cronies.

Here’s the story.

Investigators Become Lapdogs? is a post from: The Rough Cut

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=4075

Q That’s okay. Help us understand why senior U.S. military officers, such as General Dorko yesterday, are protected by private security contractors and not U.S. troops.
MR. MORRELL: My understanding of that is limited, but let me suggest this. I think this is a very limited case. I don’t think this is indicative of how general officers operate in Iraq. He, as I understand it, was from the Army Corps of Engineers and works with a group that is basically comprised of civilians. And this, I think, has to do with Iraqi reconstruction and so forth. And for that reason, I believe that there were contractors procured for his protection.
I think this gets back though, Jamie, to the overall issue of dedication of resources. We simply do not have the resources to do everything that perhaps we would like to do. And so you have to make choices about where they can best be used. And it’s our belief that our highly trained and competent U.S. military personnel are best used going after the enemy, going after al Qaeda, and that’s why certain fixed structures are protected by contractors and that certain personnel, as you mentioned with General Dorko, are protected by contractors. I also think it may be in the case of that group an effort to prevent less of a militaristic face to the endeavor, to reconstruction.
Q If you had more resources, if you had more troops, would it better if U.S. generals were protected by U.S. troops? Or is it just as good or fine for them to be protected by contractors?
MR. MORRELL: I think, by and large, U.S. generals are protected by U.S. troops.
Q Well, those who command combat forces, I take it, but –
MR. MORRELL: Well, for example, when we go to — when anybody goes to Iraq, when they go to the international zone, you’re protected — all of us there are protected by private contractors. I mean, you’ve got Triple Canopy who protects the compound there. So I think at some point or another we all benefit from the protection provided by private security contractors — you know, generals, civilians alike. Now when they leave the wire, that’s another question.
Q I guess the only thing I was getting at was whether this arrangement with private contractors in some cases is a bit of a compromise, or is it seen as essentially equally good as protection by the U.S. military?
MR. MORRELL: I don’t know if I would characterize it as equally as good; it could well be. I’m just not an authority on such matters.
What I would suggest you do, though, Jamie, is talk to specifically the Army Corps of Engineers about why it is they felt it best that General Dorko be protected by a private security contractor. I can only guess that it had to do, perhaps, with resources and it had to do, perhaps, with the image that they wanted to project to the Iraqi people in the areas they operated.

Private Security Protecting Army General is a post from: The Rough Cut

The UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations, the multinational force with an annual budget of $5.5 billion and about 100,000 personnel serving in 18 security actions globally, has 243 Fijian troops deployed in the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. It sees Fijian soldiers as a cut-rate blessing.

Here’s the story.

In the abstract, it is understandable to appreciate the need for private military companies in supporting the military around the world — ideally, the bring professionalism, experience and a quick, just-in-time response. But the practice also raises some very poignant and substantive questions:
– What does it say about a nation that relies heavily on paying citizens of other countries to wage war?
– To what extent should private soldiers engage in war rather than having a nation invest its collective will with a military draft?
– And if a draft is not politically possible, if, indeed, a draft is political suicide, should there be a long-term war at all?

Private Soldiers Fuel Fijian Economy is a post from: The Rough Cut