As posted on Kos
Raw Story is running a story Governor writes Rumsfeld on human trafficking. The story is referencing an article in the Chicago Tribune. From the Trib article:
"In a letter expected to go to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich said he is troubled by the Pentagon's inaction on human trafficking and called on Rumsfeld to take aggressive measures to protect human rights.
Blagojevich, a former congressman, was reacting to a story in Tuesday's Tribune about the Pentagon's delay in adopting rules that bar overseas contractors from supporting human trafficking for forced labor and prostitution."
On Tuesday December 27th the Chicago Tribune ran an article U.S. stalls on human trafficking: Pentagon has yet to ban contractors from using forced labor, written by Cam Simpson. This article described how lobbying groups for US military contractors have been pressuring the Department of Defense to not implement President Bush's "zero tolerance" directive, issued in February of 2003.
CorpWatch is running the Trib story without the need to register.
I posted an "addendum" to the December 27th Tribune article on tradio21 entitled US defense contractors push for ability to violate US human trafficking laws and cross posted the entry here on Kos.
The tradio21/ Kos post included some background on a US law that would allow prosecutions of DOD contractors who commit human trafficking violations overseas, the fact that there have been no DOD prosecutions to date, and described a law mandating the President to ensure termination clauses be included in federal contracts for programs and activities conducted abroad should a contractor engage in trafficking or use forced labor in the performance of the contract. As is shown in the Dec. 27th article in the Chicago Tribune, the President has not followed up on this mandate.
Today's Chicago Tribune article is part of a series of articles that have detailed fraudulent and coercive practices used by sub-contractors of Kellogg, Brown, and Root to obtain menial labor for the US led war effort in Iraq.
As some Kos readers know, an audio interview with Cam Simpson, concerning his October series, is available in mp3 format on tradio21.
According to the October Chicago Tribune series, Pipeline to Peril, US military contractor Kellogg, Brown, and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, has tapped into a "pipeline" of cheap labor that has existed for decades in the Middle East. Practices that are condemned regularly in the US State Department's annual Human Rights Report and the Trafficking in Persons Report, are now believed to be routinely used to obtain workers for the war effort in Iraq.
Along with fraud and coercion, Cam and his colleague, embedded journalist Aamer Madhani, found on US military bases widespread de facto debt bondage coupled with the confiscation of foreign workers' travel documents.
Confiscation of travel documents is a federal crime in the US, when used in furtherance of human trafficking activities.
To date there has been no response from any US government agency on this matter.
David Phinney from CorpWatch has written about this issue, as has T. Christian Miller of the LA Times
Cam Simpson was also interview by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air
The Helsinki Commission wrote a letter in 2003 asking the State Department to "ensure that U.S. contractors do not participate in prostitution or human trafficking-related activities in Iraq."
November 19th, Stars and Stripes ran an article about human trafficking legislation before Congress that was "...targeted at U.S. contractors who participate in human trafficking -- including forced labor and forced prostitution."
