Trafficking Troubles Tip of Contracting Iceberg
by Austin on January 16, 2007
The outsourcing of war duties has created a lucrative new market for human traffickers. A host of activities that used to be considered the sole domain of the federal government has been hired out to private contractors. Private US citizens are conducting interrogations, intelligence gathering and analysis here in the United States and abroad. Critical security functions around the world are carried out by US-based corporations responsible for war duties previously performed by the military. And many Americans would be surprised to know that economic migrants from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh and Nepal are cooking and serving food to US troops in Iraq. Some of them were tricked into the situation through false promises of high-paying jobs in Jordan, but instead their papers were confiscated, they were shipped to Iraq and forced to work on US military bases. US taxpayers footed the bill, and human traffickers profited.
Instead of US troops performing support functions on the ground, today many of those jobs are contracted to US-based companies like Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, who then sub-contract to numerous other companies to carry out the actual work. According to reports documented on this blog, some of the businesses who have received such sub-contracts may actually be fronts for human trafficking rings. In one scenario, the traffickers posed as legitimate labor brokers who ‘recruited’ men from poor South Asian villages with few economic opportunities and charged them thousands of dollars for the service of finding them a ‘job’. The ‘brokers’ then trafficked them into Iraq as part of a sub-contract to support US troops.
Who is responsible for this crime? If the members of the US military were themselves were abusing workers, the laws and the punishment have been clear for quite some time. A chain of command, and of responsibily, is firmly in place all the way from the platoon leader to the Secretary of Defense and ultimately the Commander-in-Chief. When the US government outsources work to private companies, and those companies outsource to others and so on, who is responsible for abuses? The US government is finally clarifying that the original contractors are responsible for the conduct of their sub-contractors, and that severe penalties may be brought to bear on any company or individual that is complicit in human trafficking. Enforcement is another issue, and one that Free the Slaves will closely monitor.
In the military this shift from federal to corporate control is a product of troop drawdowns in the 1990s. The post-Cold War political environment led to a widespread restructuring of US forces. A revolution in military affairs (RMA), championed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, marked a shift toward smaller, ‘smarter’ armies.
One of the issues pointed out about smaller armies is that they’re challenged to provide both support operations (cooking, transporting, delivering mail, building bases, providing health care, etc) and technical expertise (intelligence gathering and analysis, training and information-technology services). In fact, today’s US military does little of the former and only some of the latter.
Instead these support and technical services are provided by private companies whose allegiance is presumably to shareholders and owners rather than the American people and the war effort at hand. Companies insist that it is in their best interest to keep their client (the Federal government and US taxpayers) happy, and that competition for contracts and government and public scrutiny keep them ‘lean and mean’ and more efficient than if the government was performing these duties itself.
At times, though, no-bid contracts mean that the government has few choices available, and few opportunities to adequately compare the performance of one company over another. Some companies are actually conducting oversight, management and priority-setting with (and sometimes for) the Federal Government. This places companies in the position of stipulating the size, scope and deliverables for projects that they will later bid for. This is not typically a businessperson’s definition of ‘healthy competition’.
Public scrutiny can also avoided by routing sensitive contracts through non-traditional channels in order not to attract the attention of the public and of government oversight bodies. For example, private contractors conducting interrogations at Abu Graib were working under contracts granted through a Department of the Interior office in Arizona.
A common thread seems to be that outsourcing is outstripping the pace of oversight and enforcement. Concerns like these have provoked an intense debate, including within the military itself, about what is appropriate to outsource and how to hold private companies accountable.
There are additional concerns within the human rights community about governments’ ability to ensure compliance with US or international law when contractors are doing what militaries used to do. For example, bases are built and troops are fed not by fellow service-people but by workers contracted (or sub-contracted) through massive Department of Defense contracts. Free the Slaves was recently told by a DOD employee that it is difficult to hold companies accountable for human trafficking because: ”Without these companies our soldiers wouldn’t get fed.” How does one punish or fire a company for violating US and international law if they are providing a service troops depend on? The US Defense Department will soon be forced to answer that question.
Free the Slaves’ interest is not in how the Defense Department is organized, but rather in the accountability mechanisms needed to root out cases of human trafficking and slavery, identify and assist the survivors, punish the perpetrators and prevent any further abuses. We will continue to press for effective laws and regulations regarding every agency of the US government, and then monitor to ensure enforcement. US taxpayers do not want to pay for human trafficking, and they certainly do not want to subsidize the companies that profit from it.
Organizations:
Resources Articles:
- Army unable to estimate number of contractors
- NYU Professor Paul Light on the True Size of Government
More resources are available from the resources posts on the WarSlavery Blog.
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