The Pentagon keeps hiring DynCorp through military contracts, even after years of scandals and abuse, such as pimping out children and providing drugs to Afghan police. The newest criminal behavior from DynCorp involves trafficking workers and confiscating their passports and denying them legal work visas in order to keep them working under slave-like conditions.
DynCorp and it's subcontractor Global Linguist Solutions (GLS), have U.S . military contracts, ad both are being sued for treating American citizens working as military translators in the Middle East like slaves. They have been "housed" in Kuwaiti tent-cities, forced to live there under threat of being imprisoned if they try to escape their deplorable conditions.
Other Pentagon contractors also engage in this slave-driving of workers while they reap the profits. ManTech is an outsourcing firm that is being sued by six Americans for "rel[ying] upon forced labor to illegally sacrifice its employees' health and safety in pursuit of a higher profit margin." Passports were confiscated as they were forced to work around toxic chemicals with no protections. This has long been a problem "for low wage migrant workers who either don’t have the education to fight back or don’t have a secure place to store the passport or don’t have the leverage to say anything", said David Segall, a research scholar who studied migrant labor abuse in the Gulf at New York University.
The lawsuit against DynCorp began in 2016, which has been unsealed this month for the public to know about. The U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) signed a contract with DynCorp to provide English-Arabic translators to the military. This contract was subcontracted to GLS to hire translators and bring them to Kuwait.
Upon arrival, translators had their passports confiscated by GLS. This was claimed to be a necessity in order to secure work visas. But those work visas never arrived. Instead, the translators only got tourist visas, and still didn't have their passports returned to them. Without a work visa, the work they were doing was technically illegal, putting them at risk of being arrested.
They were also placed in dangerous living conditions, in what are called tent cities like Camp Ali al-Salem, Camp Arifjan and Camp Buehring. There were designed to temporarily shield U.S. soldiers from the desert sun for a few hours while traveling. They were never meant to be used as permanent long-term living. Yet, translators have been put there to be battered by dust storms and the scorching heat. Some tent cities are infested with rodents, lice and bedbugs due to a lack of sanitation and overcrowding. Other are filled with raw sewage. While the translators are forced to live in this conditions, GLS staff managers have been living in luxury by the seaside apartments.
Translators are indeed forced to live there, because they don't have their passports to legally leave the country. They can;t go to Kuwaiti authorities for help since they were never given work visas. They are thus held against their will, forced to live in slave-like conditions. One translator who complained of the treatment to a GLS manager was told that complainers "would all be fired and returned to the U.S. to 'deliver pizzas'".
Some who complained were made an example of, as they were placed in situations "where GLS knew that they were likely to be arrested". This was a warning to frightening others in not attempting to leave the base, as those who who strayed off the base would be arrested in short time.
Some risked leaving in order to try to get away from their conditions. But the warning were made true, as the Kuwaiti government issued arrest warrants for illegally working in the country. The corrupt authorities forced them to confess to crimes they never intentionally committed, but were forced into unwillingly. These translators were then banned from being able to reenter Kuwait and other Gulf nations.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit say their treatment as the hands of GLS and DynCorp were worse than anything experienced working with the U.S. military in the battlefield, saying they "experienced deprivation on the battlefield of Iraq; however, nothing compared to the decrepit, overcrowded, open-bay housing of Arifjan". A lawyer representing the plaintiff, Joseph Hennessey, has said:
These U.S.-citizen linguists are heroes—they go into combat unarmed to help minimize the chaos of the battlefield and gather intelligence. To have been treated so horrifically is unfathomable.
Like ManTech who tried to get their own lawsuit dismissed as "undeveloped legal theories and scattershot allegations", DynCorp is playing the typical denial game to try to get away with their crimes, calling them "wholly without merit" and "baseless", while GLS has not commented publicly.
DynCorp's track record of deplorable ethics continues. They have been facilitating human trafficking and child prostitution. In the 90s they were accused of raping children in Bosnia, selling 12-year-old girls as sex slaves, and transporting women in human trafficking. Later they were enslaving minors, and employees. In 2004, DynCorp employees sexually assaulted underage girls in Colombia. In 2009 employees furnished drugs and child prostitutes in Afghanistan, which was exposed by WikiLeaks, and covered by the U.K. Guarianin 2010:
A scandal involving foreign contractors employed to train Afghan policemen who took drugs and paid for young "dancing boys" to entertain them in northern Afghanistan caused such panic that the interior minister begged the US embassy to try and "quash" the story, according to one of the US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks.
There is a long tradition of young boys dressing up as girls and dancing for men in Afghanistan, an activity that sometimes crosses the line into child abuse with Afghans keeping boys as possessions.
The story had been held back after the warning that it would "endanger lives." The Afghan government asked the US to military to maintain oversight over its mercenary forces only to find that that would violate their contract.
Yet, after all this, DynCorp has been awarded military contracts. Their ethical profile should disqualify them from receiving any contracts whatsoever, as they clearly care more about maximizing profits than treating people properly. Humans are just commodities to DynCorp. They have yet to be held accountable for their crimes.
References:
- Lawsuit: US Military Contractor DynCorp Accused of “Enslaving” American Employees in Kuwaiti Tent Cities
- Lawsuit: Pentagon Contractor Treated Workers Like ‘Slaves’
- American Defense Contractor Accused of Enslaving U.S. Citizen Linguists
- It’s Déjà Vu for DynCorp All Over Again
- Even after years of scandal, US hires DynCorp again
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