U.S. taxpayers financed human trafficking, report says
WASHINGTON – For the first time since Congress mandated its annual publication, a State Department report cataloging human trafficking across the globe includes allegations that American taxpayers financed such abuses.
This year’s Trafficking in Persons Report, released Monday, also ranks Iran among the 12 nations in the world with the worst records for limiting human trafficking within and across its borders, just as the Bush administration is attempting to bring pressure on Tehran because of its developing nuclear program.
Other familiar Bush administration targets, such as Syria, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela, also made this year’s list of the worst dozen, while White House allies and other strategically important nations – including India, Mexico, Russia and China – escaped the roll call despite evidence in the report of growing problems.
People can be trafficked across or within borders for prostitution or forced labor, a practice officials describe as a modern form of slavery.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice unveiled this year’s report by telling reporters that the United States and its allies “will stop at nothing to end the debasement of our fellow men and women.”
Yet this year’s report includes a special section on reforms the Defense Department instituted after an investigation prompted by “Pipeline to Peril,” a series published by the Chicago Tribune in October that detailed human trafficking into Iraq for privatized U.S. military support operations.
Human brokers and subcontractors from Asia to the Middle East have worked in concert to import thousands of laborers into Iraq from impoverished countries, often employing fraud or coercion along the way, seizing workers’ passports and charging recruitment “fees” that make it difficult for workers to escape employment in the war zone.
U.S. military leaders in Iraq have acknowledged confirming widespread abuses against such workers, who are brought to Iraq to do menial labor on U.S. bases for contractors and subcontractors. Those businesses ultimately receive their checks from the U.S. government. The abuses corroborated by military investigators included violations of U.S. human-trafficking laws.
mercurynews.com