link 4 ex-KBR workers sue over Iraq rape and sex harassment charges By ROBERT CROWE Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle TOOLS Email Get section feed Print Subscribe NOW Comments Recommend Four women who worked for Houston-based Halliburton Co.'s former subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root have filed federal lawsuits against the companies, claiming they endured sexual harassment and, in two cases rape, while working in Iraq. Attorneys say their clients encountered a sexually-charged atmosphere where women were repeatedly demeaned and solicited for sex despite reporting harassment to supervisors. The lawyers for women in the alleged rape cases say they are turning to the civil courts in part because they haven't been able to determine whether federal authorities are pursuing criminal prosecutions. KBR would not comment specifically on the cases, but a spokeswoman said sexual harassment is barred. Before being deployed to Iraq, all KBR employees are briefed on the company's code of business conduct, which "strictly prohibits sexual harassment by KBR employees," said KBR spokeswoman Heather Browne. Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann said her company "is improperly named" in the lawsuits. Halliburton and KBR split earlier this year. Experts say they fear that untold numbers of crimes by civilian contractors have not been prosecuted because of ambiguities over which judicial system to apply to U.S. civilians working in a foreign war zone. "You are using more and more contractors and yet you've created a legal netherworld where there's, at the least, a lack of accountability," said Peter W. Singer, a fellow with the Brookings Institution and author of the book Corporate Warriors. "At the same time you're paying contractors more and than you pay soldiers yet you're holding soldiers to higher standards." United States Department of Justice spokesman Bryan Sierra said U.S. attorneys recently told Congress that only three criminal cases have been prosecuted. He did not say why U.S. attorneys have not prosecuted more cases. Singer said it is largely due to jurisdictional problems. The plaintiffs in the lawsuits say the culture among the largely male dominated contractor population was hostile to women when they worked there in 2004 and 2005. In court papers filed in May, a married Conroe woman said that she needed surgery to repair torn muscles and ruptured breast implants after she was drugged and brutally raped by a drunken co-worker and other men, firefighters, in a coed dorm at Camp Hope in Baghdad in July 2005. A rape kit taken shortly after she awoke included DNA from a man who was sleeping in her bed as well as other unknown "John Doe" suspects, according to the lawsuit filed by Houston attorney Todd Kelly. "This attack never would have occurred but for the 'boys will be boys' attitude that permeated the environment that defendants first created, then failed to warn (the woman) about – an environment that was excused, if not encouraged, and of which the defendants had ample prior notice," states the suit, filed on May 30 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in Beaumont. Kelly is representing the Conroe woman , then 20, as well as a married North Carolina woman who filed a suit in May alleging that she was nearly raped in a separate 2005 incident. In another lawsuit filed in January in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, a woman alleges that she was raped by a drunken male KBR employee at an apartment in Ramadi, Iraq, in December 2005. On Tuesday, an Oklahoma woman filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma, claiming she was fired in October 2005 for reporting sexual harassment. The Chronicle is not naming the women because they say they are victims of sex crimes. Each woman is seeking unspecified damages. Their lawyers say the problems were exacerbated because KBR permitted the consumption of alcohol in barracks. And even when it banned alcohol later in 2005, the company did little to stop its employees from drinking in living quarters, said said John Spiegel, a Miami attorney representing a Florida woman. That suit states that the woman was raped by a drunk coworker who entered her room with a stolen key. But KBR's Browne said the company does not permit alcohol in its living quarters and it "does fully investigate improper conduct including any allegations of sexual harassment." The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, however, found that KBR's investigation into the Conroe woman's allegation was "inadequate and did not effect an adequate remedy," according to a May 8 letter from the EEOC's Houston District Director R.J. Ruff Jr. KBR told EEOC officials that the male accused in the rape claimed that the woman "consented to have sex with him," according to the EEOC letter. Lawyers for the alleged rape victims say KBR, Halliburton and federal authorities have refused to say whether their alleged attackers will face criminal charges or whether they are still in Iraq. All of the women have stopped working for the company.''Our client is left with the continuing fear her attacker is walking the streets free and may attack her again,'' said Spiegel, the attorney representing the Florida woman.
the big problem is that with the way the laws are set up they can get away with this stuff. the military has no jurisdiction over private contractors and as the crime was not committed in america, the laws here dont apply. why should we be suprised though? dyncorp and kbr were both caught running kidnapping and slavery rings and they still get government contracts. why should the vice-presidents former company not get special treatment too (technically dubai-based halliburton no longer is the parent company of kbr, but it was a recent split). http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...y?page=1&coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true U.S. stalls on human trafficking Pentagon has yet to ban contractors from using forced labor WASHINGTON -- Three years ago, President Bush declared that he had "zero tolerance" for trafficking in humans by the government's overseas contractors, and two years ago Congress mandated a similar policy. But notwithstanding the president's statement and the congressional edict, the Defense Department has yet to adopt a policy to bar human trafficking. Pipeline to peril A proposal prohibiting defense contractor involvement in human trafficking for forced prostitution and labor was drafted by the Pentagon last summer, but five defense lobbying groups oppose key provisions and a final policy still appears to be months away, according to those involved and Defense Department records. The lobbying groups opposing the plan say they're in favor of the idea in principle, but said they believe that implementing key portions of it overseas is unrealistic. They represent thousands of firms, including some of the industry's biggest names, such as DynCorp International and Halliburton subsidiary KBR, both of which have been linked to trafficking-related concerns. Lining up on the opposite side of the defense industry are some human-trafficking experts who say significant aspects of the Pentagon's proposed policy might actually do more harm than good unless they're changed. These experts have told the Pentagon that the policy would merely formalize practices that have allowed contractors working overseas to escape punishment for involvement in trafficking, the records show. The long-awaited debate inside the Pentagon on how to implement presidential and congressional directives on human trafficking is unfolding just as counter trafficking advocates in Congress are running into resistance. A bill reauthorizing the nation's efforts against trafficking for the next two years was overwhelmingly passed by the House this month, but only after a provision creating a trafficking watchdog at the Pentagon was stripped from the measure at the insistence of defense-friendly lawmakers, according to congressional records and officials. The Senate passed the bill last week. Delay seen as weakness The Pentagon's delay in tackling the issue, the perceived weakness of its proposed policy and the recent setbacks in Congress have some criticizing the Pentagon for not taking the issue seriously enough. "Ultimately, what we really hope to see is resources and leadership on this issue from the Pentagon," said Sarah Mendelson, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank in Washington. She also had called for creation of an internal Pentagon watchdog after investigating the military's links to sex trafficking in the Balkans. Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.), author of the original legislation targeting human trafficking, said there seems to be an institutional lethargy on the issue at the Pentagon below the most senior levels. He said he was concerned that the Pentagon's overseas-contractor proposal might not be tough enough and that the delays in developing it could mean more people "were being exploited while they were sharpening their pencils." But he pledged to maintain aggressive oversight of the plan. `We're addressing the issue' Glenn Flood, a Pentagon spokesman, said he did not know why it has taken so long to develop a proposal but said, "From our point of view, we're addressing the issue." An official more directly involved with the effort to draft a formal policy barring contractors from involvement in trafficking said it might not be ready until April, at least in part because of concerns raised by the defense contractors. Bush declared zero tolerance for involvement in human trafficking by federal employees and contractors in a National Security Presidential Directive he signed in December 2002 after media reports detailing the alleged involvement of DynCorp employees in buying women and girls as sex slaves in Bosnia during the U.S. military's deployment there in the late 1990s. Ultimately, the company fired eight employees for their alleged involvement in sex trafficking and illegal arms deals. In 2003, Smith followed Bush's decree with legislation ordering federal agencies to include anti-trafficking provisions in all contracts. The bill covered trafficking for forced prostitution and forced labor and applied to overseas contractors and their subcontractors. But it wasn't until last summer that the Pentagon issued a proposed policy to enforce the 2003 law and Bush's December 2002 directive. The proposal drew a strong response from five defense-contractor-lobbying groups within the umbrella Council of Defense and Space Industries Associations: the Contract Services Association, the Professional Services Council, the National Defense Industrial Association, the American Shipbuilding Association and the Electronic Industries Alliance. The response's first target was a provision requiring contractors to police their overseas subcontractors for human trafficking. In a two-part series published in October, the Tribune detailed how Middle Eastern firms working under American subcontracts in Iraq, and a chain of human brokers beneath them, engaged in the kind of abuses condemned elsewhere by the U.S. government as human trafficking. KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, relies on more than 200 subcontractors to carry out a multibillion-dollar U.S. Army contract for privatization of military support operations in the war zone. Case of 12 Nepali men The Tribune retraced the journey of 12 Nepali men recruited from poor villages in one of the most remote and impoverished corners of the world and documented a trail of deceit, fraud and negligence stretching into Iraq. The men were kidnapped from an unprotected caravan and executed en route to jobs at an American military base in 2004. At the time, Halliburton said it was not responsible for the recruitment or hiring practices of its subcontractors, and the U.S. Army, which oversees the privatization contract, said questions about alleged misconduct "by subcontractor firms should be addressed to those firms, as these are not Army issues." Once implemented, the new policy could dramatically change responsibilities for KBR and the Army. Alan Chvotkin, senior vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council who drafted the contractors' eight-page critique of the Pentagon proposal, said it was not realistic to expect foreign companies operating overseas to accept or act on U.S. foreign policy objectives. "This is a clash between mission execution [of the contract] and policy execution," Chvotkin said. "So we're looking for a little flexibility." He said that rather than a "requirement that says you have to flow this through to everybody," the group wants the policy to simply require firms to notify the Pentagon when their subcontractors refuse to accept contract clauses barring support for human trafficking. Still, Chvotkin said, "We don't want to do anything that conveys the idea that we are sanctioning or tolerating trafficking." In a joint memo of their own, Mendelson and another Washington-based expert, Martina Vandenberg, a lawyer who investigated sex trafficking for Human Rights Watch, told the Pentagon its draft policy "institutionalizes ineffective procedures currently used by the Department of Defense contractor community in handling allegations of human trafficking." Without tough provisions requiring referrals to prosecutors, they said, contractors could still get their employees on planes back to the U.S. before investigations commenced, as they allege happened in several documented cases in the Balkans. They said some local contract managers even had "special arrangements" with police in the Balkans that allowed them to quickly get employees returned to the U.S. if they were found to be engaged in illegal activities. http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/031505_mckinney_transcript.shtml Transcript of Representative Cynthia McKinney's Exchange with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, and Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) Tina Jonas, March 11th, 2005 CMK: Thank you Mr. Chairman. Mr. Secretary, I watched President Bush deliver a moving speech at the United Nations in September 2003, in which he mentioned the crisis of the sex trade. The President called for the punishment of those involved in this horrible business. But at the very moment of that speech, DynCorp was exposed for having been involved in the buying and selling of young women and children. While all of this was going on, DynCorp kept the Pentagon contract to administer the smallpox and anthrax vaccines, and is now working on a plague vaccine through the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program. Mr. Secretary, is it [the] policy of the U.S. Government to reward companies that traffic in women and little girls? DR: Thank you, Representative. First, the answer to your first question is, is, no, absolutely not, the policy of the United States Government is clear, unambiguous, and opposed to the activities that you described. The second question - CMK: Well how do you explain the fact that DynCorp and its successor companies have received and continue to receive government contracts? DR: I would have to go and find the facts, but there are laws and rules and regulations with respect to government contracts, and there are times that corporations do things they should not do, in which case they tend to be suspended for some period; there are times then that the - under the laws and the rules and regulations for the - passed by the Congress and implemented by the Executive branch - that corporations can get off of - out of the penalty box if you will, and be permitted to engage in contracts with the government. They're generally not barred in perpetuity - CMK: This contract - this company - was never in the penalty box.
Mercenaries do not operate according to anyone's laws. They're just into profiteering and making the most buck out of a bad situation.
To be clear we are not really talking about 'mercenaries'. In this particular case we are taking about firefighters. In Bosnia I believe it was helecopter mechanics. I would actually trust the people who come the closest to being mercenaries - ex combat soldiers who do security - more than the civilian contractor guys. The few ex-military contractor types that I've met seem to be much more sober and diciplined individuals, though I guess there are all types. But I think if you aren't going to be holding a gun, firms like KBR won't do any type of 'character' background check. But the dictionary definition that would apply to a war zone describes mercenaries as troops hired to fight in a foreign army. None of these guys really meet that defintion.