Saturday, October 18, 2003
The Rape of Iraq Begins in Earnest
Josh Marshall passes along an extremely disturbing piece from the Financial Times in his latest Talking Points Memo.0 comments
I tried to track down the original, but I couldn't find it on the FT.com site, and I don't have a subscription to FT in any event. So I pass on a quote from it from Marshall's site.
According to an article in Tuesday’s Financial Times, US sub-contractors in Iraq are importing cheap labor from South Asia rather than hiring Iraqis.
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"In the dusty backyard of the US administrators' Baghdad palace, south Asians, housed 12 to a Saudi-made temporary cabin, organise 180,000 meals a day for US troops and administrators.
A Tamimi manager says the company pays an average salary of one Saudi riyal (Dollars 3) a day and grants leave once every two years. The contracts are awarded by Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, which in 2001 won its second Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, contract to sub-contract the supply of US military provisions. The Logcap is open-ended and its Iraqi share is worth 'in excess of Dollars 2bn', according to officials of the Defence Contract Management Agency in Baghdad."
Let's see...
They're pulling in over $2 billion dollars on an open-ended contract and paying $3.00 a day to non-Iraqis.
I hope we're teaching the Iraqi Councilmembers the fine points of being a crooked politician, or they just won't be prepared to take over from us.
Disgusting.
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posted by Gotham 2:46 AM
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