KBR, Partner in Iraq Contract Sued in Human Trafficking Case

By Dana Hedgpeth

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 28, 2008; A13

A Washington law firm filed a lawsuit yesterday against KBR, one of the largest U.S. contractors in Iraq, alleging that the company and its Jordanian subcontractor engaged in the human trafficking of Nepali workers.

Agnieszka Fryszman, a partner at Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, said 13 Nepali men, between the ages of 18 and 27, were recruited in Nepal to work as kitchen staff in hotels and restaurants in Amman, Jordan. But once the men arrived in Jordan, their passports were seized and they were told they were being sent to a military facility in Iraq, Fryszman said.

As the men were driven in cars to Iraq, they were stopped by insurgents. Twelve were kidnapped and later executed, Fryszman said. The thirteenth man survived and worked in a warehouse in Iraq for 15 months before returning to Nepal.

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KBR, the defense contractor doing a lot of heavy lifting in the upholding of our occupation of Iraq, has banned the use of personal cell phones by its employees. KBR and its previous parent company Halliburton are notorious for many things. One of those things is the rape and cover up of rape committed by its male employees against its female employees.

How are the two related? Well, the first and most widely-known woman to come forward with an allegation of rape and cover up is Jamie Leigh Jones. Jones was gang raped by her coworkers, then locked inside of a shipping container for days in order to prevent her from reporting the attack. The Justice Department never brought charges against her assailants, and extremely important evidence in the case was “lost” by KBR. But the relevant part is how Jones escaped: through the use of a cell phone. A “sympathetic guard” loaned the phone to her, which she used to call her father in the United States. Her father subsequently called his congressperson, who ended up securing Jones’ release. If that “sympathetic guard” (you know, the one who didn’t set her free) hadn’t handed her that cell phone, god only knows where Jamie Leigh Jones would be today. But it just might not be alive, let alone acting as a major anti-rape and anti-KBR activist.

So. KBR employee is raped by her coworkers and then kidnapped and held prisoner. Employee secures her release through use of a personal cell phone. KBR doesn’t really give a shit about any of it. Employee makes a lot of noise about the incident, making KBR look really bad, even if not actually impacting the company financially. KBR bans personal cell phone use.

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Hearing on Electrocution of Troops: Waxman Questions

Added: July 30, 2008

The Oversight Committee holds a hearing, "Deficient Electrical Systems at U.S. Facilities in Iraq." The hearing will examine electrical problems leading to the injuries and deaths of military personnel and the Department of Defense's management and oversight of contractors. Chairman Henry Waxman questions witnesses from DOD and KBR.

By Adel Safty, Special to Gulf News

Published: July 14, 2008, 00:08

Recently unsealed US court records shed light on the inner world of war profiteers. According to the Chicago Tribune, the records show how bribery and kickbacks played a role in securing Iraq war contracts for serving the US military even before the war started.

Four former supervisors from Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), the defence firm that secured some of the largest contracts, a US Army officer, and five KBR executives, were among 36 people "indicted to date on Iraq war-contract crimes".

An investigation by the Boston Globe revealed that the leading American war contractor for Iraq - KBR, until recently a subsidy of Halliburton Corporation -had avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes, by hiring workers through shell companies in the Cayman Islands. These revelations come on the wake of other revelations about those who are profiting from the Iraq war.

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Related
Pentagon Inspector General Won't Probe KBR Rape

Pentagon's top investigator to resign

By RICHARD LARDNER

The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 2, 2008; 8:10 PM

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon's inspector general is resigning after just over a year in the job and at a time when defense spending has skyrocketed but personnel shortfalls in the oversight office have strained its ability to probe allegations of waste, fraud and abuse.

Claude Kicklighter, 74, took over as the military's top investigator in April 2007. He'll be replaced by Gordon Heddell, the Labor Department's inspector general since January 2001.

The Defense Department announced the changes Wednesday. It's not clear if Heddell, who will hold the post in an acting capacity, will be officially nominated for the position.

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Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir

WASHINGTON — The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

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Will the Pentagon correct Major Gen. Jerome Johnson's tainted testimony on the potentially contaminated water KBR provided to the troops? "

Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium

June 05 , 2008 When Major Gen. Jerome Johnson appeared under oath before a congressional committee last year, he told enough untruths about KBR's work for the military that the US Army took the unusual step of retracting a portion of his testimony. Now it appears that Johnson also misled members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on another KBR-related matter: its provisioning of potentially contaminated water to US troops in Iraq.

Nearly three months ago Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), chair of the Democratic Policy Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the subject of Johnson's testimony, but he has yet to received a reply. "This was either an attempt by General Johnson to deliberately deceive the Congress, or a display of negligent disregard for facts," Dorgan wrote in the March 12 letter. "I hope you will review this matter and take appropriate action."

In April 2007, Johnson, then the commanding general of the US Army Sustainment Command, which is responsible for providing food, lodging, and a range of logistical support to the troops, appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to answer questions about the Pentagon's primary logistics contract in Iraq. During the hearing, the committee's chairman, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), alleged that the Army had reimbursed KBR, then a Halliburton subsidiary, for the cost of overpriced trailers the company had purchased through a subcontractor.

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US confirms KBR Nigeria bribes

By Upstream staff

US authorities say they have evidence that an agent used by Halliburton’s former subsidiary KBR did issue bribes to Nigerian officials in connection with a Shell project in that country, according to a filing made by Halliburton to the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) at the end of last month.

The SEC launched a formal investigation into the matter, which dates back to the 1980s, last year after a March 2007 Halliburton government filing disclosed it.

The more recent filing stated that Halliburton and KBR suspended their agent in Nigeria and another agent who had worked for KBR on “several current projects and on numerous older projects going back to the early 1980s”.

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AP

Fri May 9, 10:34 PM ET

A woman who said she was raped by co-workers while employed by a contractor in Iraq can take her claims to trial, a federal judge ruled Friday.

Jamie Leigh Jones filed a federal lawsuit last year, saying she was attacked while working for a Halliburton Co. subsidiary at Camp Hope, Baghdad, in 2005. Her lawsuit claims that after she endured harassment from some of the men where she lived in coed barracks, she was drugged and raped by Halliburton and KBR firefighters.

Jones, a former Conroe resident, said a KBR representative imprisoned her in a shipping container for a day so she wouldn't report the assault.

Attorneys for Halliburton, KBR and other subsidiaries that have been sued have disputed Jones' allegations. KBR split from Halliburton last year.

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Exclusive: Hedge Fund in Talks to Buy Blackwater

Private Equity Firm Could Invest At Least $200 Million Into Controversial Security Firm

By MADDY SAUER

April 30, 2008—

The hedge fund giant that owns a controlling stake in Chrysler is in negotiations to buy the controversial security firm Blackwater USA, which has millions of dollars in U.S. government contracts in Iraq, according to sources familiar with the talks.

Cerberus Capital Management could invest $200 million for a stake in Blackwater, said a source close to the negotiations. Other sources said auditors from Cerberus had been examining Blackwater's books since the beginning of the year.

A source close to the negotiations says there is no deal yet, but there might be one in the future and that negotiations about a possible investment into Blackwater are ongoing.

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The reclusive founder of Cerberus, Stephen Feinberg, reportedly told his investors in a letter earlier this year that he hated all the attention the company was getting.

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... SEC Chairman Christopher Cox,(who lied about WMDS in Iraq sending thousands to their deaths),and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson, Jr.,(who threatened Academy Award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore for taking a trip to Cuba while allowing ex Treasury Secretary John Snow, Dan Quayle, Stephen Feinberg as well as Kellogg,Brown and Root boys and their sleezy Cerberus hedge fund to operate their money laundering Austrian Bawag Bank there),keep only Syria ,Cuba and Iran on their list of terrorist money laundering nations while Chris Cox's SEC allows criminally connected far right Israelis as well as far right Arabs in Dubai(where the $70,000 check to Mohamed Atta in Venice,Florida was sent just before 9/11),to continue to 'invest' in and defraud American and retail investors with U.S. penny stocks ! Why !?

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Steve Feinberg - Wikipedia
Steve and Gisela Feinberg are prolific donors to the Republican Party and related organizations. Former Republican Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle works for Cerberus as Chairman of Global Investments and former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a client.

Cerberus - Wikipedia

In Greek mythology, Cerberus or Kerberos (Greek Κέρβερος, Kérberos or Sürbürǔs, the daemon or ker of Erebos) was the houndHades, a monstrous three-headed dog[1] with a snake for a tail and snakes down his back like a mane, whose analogs in other cultures are hellhounds. Other hell hounds included Orthus, his two-headed brother. Cerberus guarded the gate to Hades.

Houston-based KBR has again been selected to participate in a 10-year military logistical support contract valued at up to $150 billion, the U.S. Army announced today.