Asian Workers Trafficked to Build U.S. Embassy in Baghdad

By David Phinney, CorpWatch. Posted October 26, 2006.

The State Department quietly awarded a corrupt Kuwaiti company a $592-million contract to build the embassy in Iraq.

Things began looking more sketchier than ever to John Owen as he boarded a nondescript white jet on his way back to Iraq in March 2005 following some R’n’R in Kuwait city.

Employed by First Kuwaiti Trading & Contracting, the lead builder for the new $592-million US embassy in Baghdad, Owen remembers being surrounded at the airport by about 50 company laborers freshly hired from the Philippines and India. Everyone was holding boarding passes to Dubai -- not to Baghdad.