Editor’s Note: Below is an excerpt from Ron Soodalter and Kevin Bales’ book The Slave Next Door, which focuses on modern-day slavery. This particular excerpt addresses the use of slavery in Operation Iraqi Freedom. A few minor edits were made to condense the length of text. This is the second of three excerpts we’ll be posting on this topic by Soodalter and Bales, so stay tuned for the next segment. You can read last week’s excerpt here.

Despite the fact that foreign workers had been complaining of abuses since early 2003, the problem was first flagged in a news report in late 2005. The report provoked a flurry of base inspections by the government. In April 2006, the Pentagon, without naming any of the subcontractors to Halliburton/KBR, concluded that “doing business in this way” was common in Iraq and Afghanistan. The confiscation of workers’ passports kept the laborers from leaving Iraq, the report stated, or from seeking jobs with other contractors. No penalties were assigned to the contractors. Nonetheless, the Pentagon ordered that all passports be returned, and that such practices “cease and desist” immediately.

They didn’t. In July 2007, two American civilian contractors who had worked on the embassy testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by California congressman Henry A. Waxman. One of the two, native Floridian John Owens, had worked for 27 years building U.S. embassies around the world, sometimes in areas troubled by violence and corruption. But after working for seven months as a foreman in Iraq, he quit. “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up. Every U.S. labor law was broken,” he said. Owens testified that the workers’ living and working conditions were “deplorable,” and described how they were “verbally and physically abused,” forced to live in cramped trailers, denied basic needs like shoes and gloves, made to work 12-hour days, seven days a week, with time off only for prayer, and “had their salaries docked for petty infractions.”

The second contractor to testify was Rory J. Mayberry. He told the committee that First Kuwaiti managers had asked him to escort 51 Filipino workers onto a flight to Baghdad. The plane, Mayberry recalled, was an unmarked 52-seater - “an antique piece of shit.” Mayberry noted with surprise that “all of our tickets said we were going to Dubai,” whereupon a First Kuwaiti manager told him not to let any of the laborers know they were going to Iraq. John Owens recalled the same experience when he saw the workers’ boarding passes: “I thought there was some sort of mix up and I was getting on the wrong plane.” In Mayberry’s words, the workers were “kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the U.S. Embassy.” After their passports were taken in Baghdad, they were “smuggled into the Green Zone.”

Mayberry, an emergency medical technician, was horrified at the number of injuries and ailments among the 2,500 or so foreign laborers. Infected, unattended, sores and unbandaged wounds were common. There was a lack of disinfectant, hot water, and any form of hygiene. Prescription pain killers, he testified, “were being handed out like a candy store…and then people were sent back to work… I told First Kuwaiti that you don’t give painkillers to people who are running machinery and working on heavy construction and they said, ‘that’s how we do it.’” After he requested an investigation into the deaths of two laborers as a result of what he believes could have been “medical homicide,” Mayberry was fired.

Owens confirmed the inhumane treatment. He testified that health and safety measures were non-existent, and that serious injuries took place as a result. When he advised workers to seek medical help for their injuries and illnesses, he was accused by the firm’s managers of “spoiling the workers and allowing them to simply skip work.” At one point, 17 laborers tried to escape by climbing over the wall; they were recaptured - with the help of a State Department official - and put in “virtual lockdown.”