The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog

Members of Congress Outraged at Human Trafficking Fueled by Our Tax Dollars

Ranking Member Connolly (left) and Chairman Lankford (right).

By NICK SCHWELLENBACH

The Chairman and Ranking Member of a House subcommittee on federal procurement expressed anger after holding an oversight hearing on labor trafficking by U.S. government contractors and subcontractors in war zones and other contingency operations.

I represented POGO as one of the witnesses on the first panel of the hearing. One of my co-panelists was David Isenberg, an expert on private military contractors and my co-author on a POGO report on alleged trafficking by a U.S. subcontractor in Iraq.

“These labor practices violate every human value that we have as a country,” said Chairman James Lankford (R-OK) of the House Oversight Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and Procurement Reform in a written statement.

Human Trafficking Testimony: A Post-Mortem Interview

By BRYAN RAHIJA

POGO Director of Investigations Nick Schwellenbach testified yesterday about U.S. government contractors' and subcontractors' role in fueling labor trafficking in places like Iraq. I caught up with him this morning for a quick post-mortem interview about the hearing and the broader issue of labor trafficking.

BR: Do you think human trafficking is something that the U.S. public knows enough about?

NS: I think the public cares a lot about human trafficking, but I don't think it knows as much about the role U.S. contractors and subcontractors play in fueling it.

BR: What was the best question you were asked at the hearing?

Interview: Kathryn Bolkovac of "The Whistleblower" on Human Trafficking Scandal, New Film

Kathryn Bolkovac

By DANA LIEBELSON

In "The Whistleblower," which airs this weekend at POGO's Whistleblower Film Series in Silver Spring, Maryland, Rachel Weisz plays a U.N. peacekeeper who exposes a sex trafficking ring among her colleagues in Bosnia.

The movie is based on Kathryn Bolkovac (find the trailer below the jump), the real-life whistleblower who served as a peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia in 1999. She was fired by her employer, DynCorp, after alleging that her fellow U.N. peacekeepers were complicit in the rape and trafficking of underage girls. In 2002, a British employment tribunal ruled that she was unfairly dismissed.

DynCorp continues to do billions of dollars of business abroad with the U.S. government. POGO interviewed Bolkovac over email about whistleblower protections, the untold side of the scandal and the Hollywood portrayal of the story.

POGO: We've heard a lot about your role in sparking investigations into DynCorp and U.N. officers for sex trafficking. What's the one aspect of this story that people are missing?

Report Shows Wasteful Contracting Puts Money in the Pockets of Human Traffickers

By DANA LIEBELSON

If you think it's bad enough that billions of taxpayer dollars are going down the drain in wartime contracting in Afghanistan and Iraq--it gets worse. Some contractors have been shown to support human trafficking and labor exploitation, as their subcontractors lure impoverished third-country nationals into working for them. A new report shows that many of these traffickers are getting away scot free. With your money.

The Commission on Wartime Contracting writes, “The globalization of the world economy has spurred the movement of people across borders, especially from poorer countries, to fill low-skill jobs in support of the U.S. contingencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

On one Iraq trip in 2009, the Commission found that some contractors withheld pay from third-country workers until their contract term was completed, effectively preventing them from going home. These workers also were paid lower salaries, worked unusually long hours and did not receive vacation days.

In one example, "the SABRE International prime contractor paid the Ugandan guards an average of $700 per month, but the government paid SABRE $1,700 per month for each guard."

Contractor Accountability and Human Trafficking at Center of Upcoming Film, The Whistleblower

By NICK SCHWELLENBACH

For those looking for more of the backstory on Dyncorp whistleblowers Ben Johnston and Kathyrn Bolkovac, whose tale is the subject of the movie The Whistleblower, (opening in theaters this Friday, see trailer above), I have unearthed material from an interview I conducted with Bolkovac and some related research last year.

The material was chopped from a story I was working on for The Washington Post because of space considerations. Here's the draft section that was cut:

"Spring Break in Kabul" Contractor Settles for $7.5 Million After DOJ Joins Whistleblower Lawsuit

By NICK SCHWELLENBACH

Private security contractor ArmorGroup North America Inc. (AGNA) agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle whistleblower allegations that it violated procurement rules that put the security of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan at risk. AGNA's parent company said the settlement was made solely "to avoid costly and disruptive litigation—and that there has been no finding or admission of liability."

This is the same company whose employees are depicted in lewd pictures POGO made available in fall 2009—which demonstrated a serious breakdown in discipline among the security personnel defending the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan. POGO Executive Director Danielle Brian called it a 'Lord of the Flies' environment.

Former AGNA director of operations James Gordon was the whistleblower who filed the lawsuit—he will receive $1.35 million from the $7.5 million AGNA has agreed to pay. According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) press release, these are the whistleblower allegations that were resolved by the settlement:

• "AGNA submitted false claims for payment on a State Department contract to provide armed guard services at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan";

Pentagon Contractor Employee Investigated for Human Trafficking, Fired... But No Prosecutions or Contract Terminations

By NICK SCHWELLENBACH

Yesterday, the State Department released its latest annual report on combating human trafficking. The report said that although one Department of Defense contractor employee was investigated and dismissed in the last year, there have been no prosecutions and no contract terminations:

Allegations against federal contractors engaged in commercial sex and labor exploitation continued to surface in the media. During the reporting period, allegations were investigated and one employee was dismissed by a DoD contractor. The Inspectors General at the Departments of State and Defense and USAID continued their audits of federal contracts to monitor vulnerability to human trafficking and issued public reports of their findings and reparations. USAID also created an entity dedicated to proactively tracking contractor compliance with the authority to suspend contracts and debar contracting firms, a positive step toward increasing enforcement in this area. No prosecutions occurred and no contracts were terminated.

Earlier this month, POGO published an investigation into a case of alleged labor trafficking by a DoD subcontractor in Iraq. In that instance, there were no prosecutions or contract terminations. Last year, I and Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig wrote that there have been zero prosecutions or contract terminations ever since a tough-sounding "zero tolerance" policy that emphasized prosecutions went into place nearly a decade ago. Experts inside and outside the government told us there is little appetite and investigative resources to go after these crimes. "Zero prosecutions," we quoted attorney Martina Vandenberg, a former Human Rights Watch investigator, "suggests zero effort to enforce the law."

Nick Schwellenbach is POGO's Director of Investigations.

Documents Reveal Details of Alleged Labor Trafficking by KBR Subcontractor

The Najlaa Episode Revisited

By DAVID ISENBERG and NICK SCHWELLENBACH

A laborer participating in the December 2008 protest speaks to a reporter.

In December 2008, South Asian workers, two thousand miles or more from their homes, staged a protest on the outskirts of Baghdad. The reason: Up to 1,000 of them had been confined in a windowless warehouse and other dismal living quarters without money or work for as long as three months.

In a typical comment made by the laborers to news organizations at the time, Davidson Peters, a 42-year-old Sri Lankan man, told a McClatchy Newspapers reporter that "They promised us the moon and stars...While we are here, wives have left their husbands and children have been shut out of their schools” because money for their families back home had dried up.

The men came to Iraq lured by the promise of employment by Najlaa International Catering Services, a subcontractor performing work for Houston-based KBR, Inc. under the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) III contract.

Now, a cache of internal corporate and government documents obtained by POGO offer insight into this episode of alleged war zone human trafficking by companies working for the U.S.—and suggest that hardly anyone has been held accountable for what may be violations of U.S. law.

The subcontractor, Najlaa, appears to have suffered no repercussions for its role in luring hundreds of South Asian workers to Iraq with promises of lucrative jobs only to turn around and warehouse at least 1,000 of them in dismal living conditions without work—and pay—for several months. In fact, Najlaa continues to win government contracts.

Despite strongly worded “zero tolerance” policies against human trafficking, the U.S. has directly awarded contracts to Najlaa after the December 2008 protests, including one contract that lasts through 2012.

Human Trafficking Not at a Standstill

For years there have been allegations of contractors engaging in sex and labor trafficking in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia. The Department of Defense (DoD) confirmed (p. 21 of 295) human trafficking problems in 2006. As a result, the government amended its contracting rules to implement policies prohibiting activities on the part of its contractors, subcontractors, and their employees that support or promote trafficking in persons (TIP).

According to a recent piece in The Daily Caller, those new rules are having little impact. The author writes that “not a single case has ever been filed by the government and no contractor has ever been suspended under the law’s provisions.”

Additionally, relying on a DoD IG report issued earlier this year, the article stated that “more than 50 percent of the 99 contracts reviewed did not even contain the clause mandated by the trafficking statute that informs contractors of conduct constituting trafficking-in-persons violations. Not surprisingly, the report went on to say, the contractors interviewed were not even aware that trafficking in persons was illegal.”