Kill, Burn & Loot (5/7)

anthony @ 11:09 BST

From Martial Law, Inc. KBR: A Halliburton Subsidiary, by Andrew G. Marshall:

KBR in Afghanistan and Iraq:

As Dan Briody wrote in The Halliburton Agenda, “When troops were deployed to Afghanistan, so was Kellogg Brown & Root. They built US bases in Bagram and Kandahar for $157 million. As it had done in the past, KBR has men on the ground before the first troops even arrived in most locations.” (Briody, p.219) It was reported that KBR “was awarded a $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the State Department.” (Peterson)

As the Center for Public Integrity reported, “KBR, Inc., the global engineering and construction giant, won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts for work in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2004 to 2006—far more than any other company.” (Perry)

Indeed, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq presented Halliburton and its subsidiary, KBR, with an amazing opportunity of war profiteering on a scale never before seen. Not only was the company enriching itself, but its former CEO, Dick Cheney, currently Vice President of the United States, “sold most of his Halliburton shares when he left the company, but retained stock options worth about $8m,” and the Guardian reported in 2003 that KBR “is still making annual payments to its former chief executive, the vice-president Dick Cheney.” (Bryce and Borger)

In December of 2005, the Chicago Tribune reported that, “A proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor was drafted by the Pentagon last summer, but five defense lobbying groups oppose key provisions.” The lobbying groups, “say they’re in favor of the idea in principle, but said they believe that implementing key portions of it overseas is unrealistic. They represent thousands of firms, including some of the industry’s biggest names, such as DynCorp International and Halliburton subsidiary KBR, both of which have been linked to trafficking-related concerns.” (Simpson) However, human trafficking experts have criticized the move by the lobbying groups, and told “the Pentagon that the policy would merely formalize practices that have allowed contractors working overseas to escape punishment for involvement in trafficking.”

The allegations of human trafficking include, “the alleged involvement of DynCorp employees in buying women and girls as sex slaves in Bosnia during the U.S. military’s deployment there in the late 1990s,” and that, “Middle Eastern firms working under American subcontracts in Iraq, and a chain of human brokers beneath them, engaged in the kind of abuses condemned elsewhere by the U.S. government as human trafficking,” which pertained to KBR. The Chicago Tribune then reported in 2006 that, “some of KBR’s subcontractors, and a chain of human brokers stretching to South and Southeast Asia, allegedly engaged in the same kinds of abuses routinely condemned” as human trafficking. (Simpson)

Jamie Leigh Jones

In December of 2007, it was reported that, “A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.” The article continued, “Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Ross, Sauer and Rood) Jones filed a lawsuit against Halliburton and KBR, and “says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave. Jones described the container as sparely furnished with a bed, table and lamp.”