KBR, Sexual Harrasment And Child Porn

By Cernig

Yet more evidence that there's something seriously wrong with KBR's corporate culture, as if we really needed it after their attempts to sidestep responsibility for rapes and attempted rapes by their employees in Iraq.

From the London Times:

An Iraqi cleaner and two cooks claim that a culture of sexual harassment, abuse and bullying exists at the British Embassy in Baghdad.

The middle-aged cleaner told The Times that a British contractor with KBR, the company hired to maintain the embassy’s premises, offered to double her daily pay if she would stay the night with him. When she refused, she said, her pay was cut and she was later dismissed.

The Iraqis accuse the embassy of leaving the abuse unchallenged and failing adequately to respond to complaints against several British managers for KBR. The company was allowed to conduct its own inquiry, an arrangement criticised as a very serious conflict of interest.

The complainants – the cleaner and two male cooks who worked in the embassy canteen – say that some KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly, paid or otherwise rewarded them for sex and dismissed those who refused or spoke out.

The British Embassy heard the complaints initially but left KBR to investigate; a KBR report found that there was no case to answer.

And from the Houston Examiner:

A former bus driver for Iraq war contractor KBR Inc. who was fired in 2006 for possessing child pornography got rehired less than a year later, and has again been caught with a large collection of child porn, according to prosecutors.

Ira L. Waltrip of Lampasas, Texas, who had been working for KBR at Camp Liberty in Baghdad, was charged this week in U.S. District Court with possessing child pornography. According to a court affidavit, KBR fired Waltrip in January 2006 when he was assigned to the Al Asad Air Base in Iraq after he was discovered with a collection of child pornography. At the time, authorities with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service elected not to prosecute Waltrip because they said they lacked sufficient evidence that the pornography in question actually depicted minors. KBR rehired Waltrip in December 2006 as a bus driver. Again, Waltrip was caught with an extensive library of child pornography, some of which appeared to depict children as young as four to six years old.

It is not entirely clear how Waltrip managed to get rehired by KBR. A spokeswoman for the Houston-based company, Heather Browne, issued a statement saying that KBR keeps a list of employees ineligible for rehire.

It would appear, to me, that KBR thinks issuing repeated statements claiming they are doing the right thing are enough, when it's readily apparent they aren't and that they consider Iraq the kind of place where anyone will do for the job. It also seems to me, although I'm not a lawyer, that the pattern of such incidents might be sufficient to establish KBR's complicity and incompetence were someone to sue them for one of these incidents alleging that their corporate culture encouraged such events to occur.