Pipeline to Peril an investigative report by the Chicago Tribune

You have to register to read the article, but the salient points are.....

To fill a need for cheap labor in Iraq, the U.S. military and its contractors have tapped an illicit human pipeline that exploits and endangers workers.
The U.S. and its main contractor in Iraq, KBR, leave every aspect of the hiring and deployment of foreign laborers to Middle Eastern subcontractors.
Some subcontractors and brokers employ the same tools of fraud and coercion condemned by the U.S. when practiced in other countries.
Several nations, including Nepal, have banned or restricted citizens from work in Iraq, but KBR allows people from these nations to work under its contract anyway.

The article is very short on provable facts, and very long on hyperbole.

 

WASHINGTON -- The top U.S. commander in Iraq has ordered sweeping changes for privatized military support operationsafter confirming violations of human-trafficking laws and other abuses by contractors involving possibly thousands of foreign workers on American bases, according to records obtained by the Tribune.

Gen. George Casey ordered that contractors be required by May 1 to return passports that have been illegally confiscated from laborers on U.S. bases after determining that such practices violated U.S. laws against trafficking for forced or coerced labor. Human brokers and subcontractors from South Asia to the Middle East have worked together to import thousands of laborers into Iraq from impoverished countries.....

LINK

Edited for schtoopid spelling & HTML code.

[ April 24, 2006, 10:32 PM: Message edited by: Bro. Curtis ]

 

Just for the record, I'm anti-human trafficking. I'm glad it's being addressed.

Now, is there somehow going to be the claim that Bush, Cheney, & Halliburton were pocketing money from this ?

 

According to Interpol, trafficking in persons and human smuggling are two distinct phenomena. Trafficking in persons involves the exploitation of the migrant, “often for purposes of forced labour and prostitution,” whereas human smuggling “while odious in its own right,” is focused only on “the procurement, for financial or material gain, of the illegal entry into a state of which that person is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident.” ... It isn’t clear that the United States necessarily delineates the two categories.

LINK

The State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons—along with other State Department officials in South Asia and the Middle East, and the Department of Defense—will investigate “alleged abuses of workers who are part of an undocumented pipeline used to deliver thousands of Asians to labor on U.S. military bases in Iraq".

from www.state.gov

 

But they are doing work that Americans wont do.

 

http://www.aina.org/news/20060424182950.htm

 

KBR is a subsidiary of Haliburton. I would not be at all surprised if Cheney pockets some loose change from all this down the line - but that's idle speculation.

I did hear, however, that the Cheney's 2005 refund was about 1.8 million dollars. I don't know how much tax was paid, but that's a hefty refund! I understood a big chunk of his income tax was from exercising some (all?) his Haliburton stock options. Let me see if I can dig up the actual story...

 

Yes, here is the Whitehouse press release:

So their refund equals their income, roughly, but wouldn't that have to be added back into their taxable income? I don't know.

However, I did come across this interesting take on the tax refund:

Sorry for the derail ~ if you hadn't mentioned Cheney profitting.....

 

Looks like he also paid more in taxes than everyone I know.

Anyhoo, it looks like the temporary government was in charge of the hiring. I don't know why this has anything to do with the world hating us. I remember people hating us as far back as when Clinton was pres.

 

It looks as if he paid well over a quarter of his income in taxes! That's just wrong, on so many levels.

I wonder why the major media outlets didn't run with the story about how much the Cheneys gave to charity?