Gotham Notes...

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.

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.

...

"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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