Contractors Testify on Conditions at Baghdad Contruction Project

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 26, 2007; 5:48 PM

Two American civilian contractors who worked on a massive U.S. Embassy construction project in Baghdad told Congress today that foreign laborers were deceptively recruited and trafficked to Iraq to toil at the site, where they experienced physical abuse and substandard working conditions.

State Department officials disputed the charges, telling a House committee that inspections had not substantiated the worst reported abuses.

The conflicting accounts were delivered at a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on allegations of waste, fraud and abuse in the construction of a huge new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad at a cost of nearly $600 million. The embassy, slated to be the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, is being built by a Kuwait-based firm, First Kuwaiti General Trading & Contracting Co., which was awarded the contract after no American company would meet the terms, the committee was told.

The State Department says the project is on schedule for delivery in September and will come in at or under its budget of $592 million.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, called the hearing to explore what he called "red flags involving the embassy complex that should not be ignored." One issue involves the same company's construction of a temporary facility nearby for embassy security guards.

The project, described in a July 5 Washington Post story, has become the subject of an intramural dispute among U.S. officials over alleged shoddy construction practices and safety issues.

The embassy project "has also been beset by allegations that the prime contractor, First Kuwaiti, has used forced labor to build the embassy, violating the laws against human trafficking and sending exactly the wrong message to Iraqis and the rest of the world about U.S. respect for human rights," Waxman said at today's hearing. In response to the panel's inquiries, he charged, the State Department "has gone into full bunker mentality, stonewalling the committee's document requests and obstructing our efforts to conduct legitimate oversight of the embassy project."

First Kuwaiti declined the committee's invitation to testify or provide officials for interviews, Waxman said.

The firm's labor practices are under investigation by the Justice Department, which is looking into allegations that foreign employees were brought into Iraq under false pretenses and then were unable to leave because the company had confiscated their passports. First Kuwaiti has called those allegations "ludicrous."

Testifying before the committee today, John Owens, an American who worked for First Kuwaiti at the embassy site as a construction foreman from November 2005 to June 2006, said he found living and working conditions for the foreign laborers there "deplorable." Because of difficulty hiring Iraqis for work inside the heavily fortified Green Zone, most of the laborers were from countries such as India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Sierra Leone, the committee was told.

Foreign workers lived in tightly packed trailers and had "insufficient equipment and basic needs -- stuff like shoes and gloves," Owens said. They worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and made as little as $240 a month, he said. They were "verbally and physically abused" and had their salaries docked for petty infractions, he added.

On one flight to Baghdad from Kuwait, Owens said, he saw workers with tickets to Dubai and was told by a First Kuwaiti manager, "Don't say anything," he testified. Upon landing, the workers were taken away in buses without going through immigration or customs controls at the airport, he said.

Rory J. Mayberry, an emergency medical technician who worked briefly at the embassy site under a subcontract, testified that he was asked by First Kuwaiti managers to escort 51 Filipinos through the Kuwait airport and onto a flight to Baghdad. However, "all of our tickets said we were going to Dubai," he said, adding that a First Kuwaiti manager instructed him not to tell any of the Filipinos they were going to Baghdad.

Mayberry testified that he later found out the men thought they had signed up to work in hotels in Dubai. "They had no idea they were being sent to do construction work on the U.S. Embassy," he said.

"When the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were headed for Baghdad, all you-know-what broke loose on that airplane," Mayberry testified. "People started shouting. It wasn't until a security guy working for First Kuwaiti waved an MP-5 [submachine gun] in the air that people settled down. They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad."

He said the men were basically "kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the U.S. Embassy." Their passports had been confiscated, and they were driven away on buses after landing in Baghdad, then were "smuggled into the Green Zone," he said.

At the embassy site, "there were a lot of injuries" because of poor working conditions, Mayberry said. "I saw guys without shoes, without gloves, no safety harnesses, on scaffolding 30 feet off the ground, their toes wrapped around the rebar like a bunch of birds," he told the committee.

Mayberry testified that a State Department inspector general's report that found no evidence of human trafficking was "a cover-up" and "not worth the paper it's printed on."

Howard J. Krongard, the State Department inspector general, strongly disputed the allegations in a subsequent session of the hearing. He testified that a "limited review" he conducted, as well as inquiries by the inspector general of the Multi-National Force-Iraq, did not substantiate the abuse claims.

"The MNFI inspector general found no evidence indicating the presence of severe forms of trafficking," Krongard said. "Nothing came to our attention that caused us to believe that trafficking-in-persons violations" or other serious abuses "occurred at the construction workers' camp at the new embassy compound," he said.

Asked about allegations of deceptive recruiting for such jobs, Krongard said, "I don't believe I have any authority to enforce the laws of Nepal or Sri Lanka."

Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) urged the State Department to adopt a more proactive attitude on the issue. "We are complicitous," he said. "We have to make sure . . . that we aren't in essence becoming part of the problem of human trafficking."

But two other Republican committee members, Thomas M. Davis III (Va.) and Darrell E. Issa (Calif.), sought to discredit the former contractors' testimony. Davis pressed Owens about a reported lawsuit he has filed against First Kuwaiti, suggesting that he was "publicly smearing" the company for his own "monetary advantage." Owens said he was "legally prevented" from answering questions about the matter, which Waxman said was the subject of a "sealed court case."

Issa recalled that Mayberry had appeared before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee in June 2005 to air criticism of his former employer in Iraq, KBR Inc., a subsidiary of Halliburton.

"You are a professional whistleblower," Issa told Mayberry. He asked why Mayberry keeps "taking jobs in Iraq" and then denouncing his employers.

Mayberry said he was "supporting the United States and the armed forces -- that's why I take jobs in Iraq."