FILM ARCHIVES Supermax in Baghdad
by Ward Harkavy
If you build it, they will
come
Shanghaied to build to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Working on the construction site without safety equipment — or even shoes. The story of the alleged kidnapping of Filipino workers who thought they were going to Dubai but instead were flown to Baghdad to help build the $500 million embassy is stunning.
But it’s likely to be all for naught. Congressman Henry Waxman should haul Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney before the House Oversight Committee to explain.
Waxman exposed the embassy scandal on July 26, but a full-fledged investigation of this particular Cheney regime scandal probably won’t happen. And even if it does, the final result of our having built this super-expensive supermax embassy will be reminiscent of Saigon in 1975: civilians fleeing a U.S. embassy by helicopter.
In case you’ve forgotten about the little-publicized new embassy in Baghdad, it’s already officially insane. As I noted in September 2004:
Great. Americans already had to have counseling just to work in the old embassy in Baghdad. Because the Green Zone gets bombed so often, the new one will be much more of a prison. Think of the shrink work that will entail. Just building it can cause one to freak out. Here’s yesterday’s story in the Times (U.K.):
Passengers jumped out of their seats screaming in protest until a gun-toting air steward ordered them to sit down, claimed Rory Mayberry, an emergency medical technician travelling on the same flight.
Mayberry said the men were “kidnapped” to build America’s luxurious new embassy in Baghdad’s green zone. He gave his account to a congressional committee investigating allegations of fraud at what will be America’s largest diplomatic mission.
Mayberry’s full statement, courtesy of the hard work of Waxman’s House Oversight Committee, is riveting. Here’s an excerpt:
Well, Mr. Chairman, when the airplane took off and the captain announced that we were headed for Baghdad, all you-know-what broke loose on that airplane. People started shouting. It wasn’t until a security guy working for [contractor] First Kuwaiti waved an MP-5 in the air that people settled down. They realized they had no other choice but to go to Baghdad.
Let me spell it out clearly. I believe these men were kidnapped by First Kuwaiti to work on the U.S. Embassy. They had no passports
When the airplane touched down at Baghdad airport, they where loaded into buses and taken away. Later, I found that they were being smuggled into the Green Zone. They had no IDs, no passports, nothing. They were being smuggled in passed U.S. security forces. I had a trailer all to myself in the Green Zone. But they were packed 25 to 30 in a trailer, and every day they went
out to work on the construction of the embassy without the proper safety equipment.
How’s that construction going? You need a telephoto lens (see the AP pic below).
You won’t see photos of it on the websites of the White House or the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
But Martin Kemp of the Guardian (U.K.) wrote in May:
The new Baghdad embassy can hardly be dignified as “architecture”. It is an insult to a city of great historic visual culture. Its walls are punctuated by soulless eyes. Its ears are deaf to the world. It is a monster.
Whoever will rule Iraq, or that part of Iraq, or that strip of land in Baghdead, will be able to use the embassy as a supermax because it already is one.