A report released late last month by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lowenstein Clinic at Yale Law School documents ongoing abuse and trafficking of workers hired by U.S. Government contractors to support the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The civilian workforce comes mostly from developing countries and performs low-wage services like construction, transportation, security, and food services.

Tens of thousands of Third Country Nationals (TCNs) are hired yearly through contractors to support the military and are subject to a variety of abuses, including illegal recruitment, trafficking, and forced labor. Vulnerable workers, many of whom make less than $1 per day, are targeted by recruiting agents who promise exorbitant salaries and often lie about the location and type of work the recruits will preform. Then, when the workers arrive in Iraq or Afghanistan, they are subjected to appalling work and living conditions, including twelve- and fourteen-hour work days, seven-day work weeks, no vacation, low salaries, squalid living conditions, confinement, and inedible food.

Because TCNs often have to borrow money to pay recruiting fees, they comprise a uniquely vulnerable group. They remain in Iraq or Afghanistan even when abused with impunity in the hope that they will eventually be able to pay off recruiting fee debts, which are subject to interest rates as high as 50 percent per year, and protect their families from retribution. The report describes individual instances of abuse such as the following:

• Thirteen men from Nepal, promised jobs in hotels in Jordan, were instead sent to work for a government contractor in Iraq. Twelve of the men were kidnapped by insurgents and executed. The thirteenth man was prevented from going home for fifteen months.
• In 2008, 1,000 South Asian workers protested outside of Baghdad. They had been confined to a windowless warehouse without pay or work for three months.
• Another group of workers incurred debts up to $5000 for jobs that never materialized, and were forced to live in huts made out of tarp and pieces of carpet. The workers had no access to food or water.

While the United States has a zero-tolerance policy toward human trafficking, existing measures are failing to curb the entrapment and abuse of foreign workers. “Accountability exists in theory but not in practice: to date, the U.S. government has yet to fine or prosecute a single contractor for trafficking- or labor-related offenses,” the report states. The ACLU recommends making changes to prevention, investigation, and prosecution policies in order to protect workers.

–Alex Brown

Twisted gun statue outside the U.N. By walker_dawson/flickr.

Call it the conspiracy theory that won’t die. The U.N. has been working for years to produce a final text of the Arms Trade Treaty, an agreement to regulate the global arms trade (right now, international banana and bottled water sales are more restricted than weapons sales). The negotiations have just restarted and, with them, a massive round of panic on the right about the U.N.’s nefarious plan to undermine the Second Amendment. The NRA frets that “global gun banners have markedly stepped up their attack on our Second Amendment freedoms.” Roughly 130 Congresspeople speculated that “the ATT is likely to pose significant threats to…our constitutional rights.” The Washington Times led an editorial with the screaming headline “The U.N. is coming for your guns.” There’s just one problem with this narrative: it’s totally made up:

• The Obama Administration required language in the initial 2009 General Assembly resolution acknowledging “national constitutional protections on private ownership, exclusively within their territory.”
• The State Department rules out provisions restricting constitutional rights and sovereign control of domestic weapons regulation in its ATT “Red Lines.”
• Since the Supreme Court has held that individual gun ownership is constitutionally protected, and international law cannot override the Constitution, the U.N. could not take American guns even if the Administration and Senate wanted it to.
• As Naval Postgraduate School arms expert Diana Wueger points out, the ATT isn’t even intended to regulate domestic arms: “The Arms Trade Treaty will not regulate domestic sales of firearms. Its focus is instead on the control of the legal, international trade in conventional weapons.”
• Conspirators seize on a recently leaked U.N. paper’s suggestion that “arms trade must therefore be regulated in ways that would…minimize the risk of misuse of legally owned weapons.”  Even setting aside the ambiguity of the line in question, the paper (inaccurately portrayed as part of a press kit) is playing no role in the negotiations over the text of the ATT. ThinkProgress confirmed this with U.N. Office for Disarmament Affairs Information Officer Ewan Buchanan, who said “The negotiation is being done by the member states of the U.N., not by the Secretariat. It was an information paper that does not form any part of the negotiation process and the member states of the U.N. don’t have it.”

While the NRA and its allies scream about UN plots, the global arms trade continues to kill people in conflict zones around the world.

Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law may disenfranchise as many as 758,939 voters, but that is not stopping Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) from spending $249,660 to promote it. Gov. Corbett’s administration signed a contract with Chris Bravacos, a Romney fundraiser, to direct the media campaign.

The ad campaign attempts to portray the voter ID law as protecting voters and continuing the legacy of the Voting Rights Act. One ad, which contains a series of black and white photos of people voting, opens with: “Your right to vote: it’s one thing you never want to miss out on.”

Watch it:

But the ID law may be directly responsible for more than 750,000 eligible voters missing out on their right to vote this November. Though Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele had assured lawmakers that 99 percent of voters possessed an acceptable ID, data released by Pennsylvania last week shows that 9 percent of voters statewide, and 18 percent of Philadelphia voters, lack an acceptable ID. Gov. Corbett reacted to the new data by rejecting a request to delay implementation of the ID requirement.

The ACLU and NAACP have filed a lawsuit against Pennsylvania, alleging that the voter ID law violates the state constitution and will disenfranchise thousands, “disproportionately affect[ing] older citizens, people with disabilities, racial minorities, and lower-income people.” The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, Viviette Applewhite, is 93 years old and has voted since 1960, but will be barred from voting in the upcoming election because she does not have an acceptable ID and is unable to obtain a birth certificate from the state, which is required in order to get an ID.

–Alex Brown

Florida may be missing vital pieces of information when it screens concealed carry permit applications because it does not check the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). NICS contains 1.6 million records of people nationwide with mental illness. The Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which screens permit applications, does run applicants names’ through four databases, but none contain nationwide data on mental illness.

According to the Sun Sentinel investigation, Florida’s system of ingorning the federal database when granting concealed carry permits may have a significant affect on who can carry guns nationwide.

Florida can’t use the NICS system for concealed carry permits because a criminal justice agency doesn’t administer the licensing program.

As a result, gun control advocates say, Florida could be missing potentially vital pieces of information for weeding out individuals with a history of mental illness.

“It seems incredibly silly and dangerous to public safety to let this information rest on the shelf,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Washington-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “People with dangerous mental health histories should not be allowed to carry firearms in Florida.” [...]

The background screening gap is particularly significant because Florida is a go-to place nationwide for gun carry permits that then are valid in other states through so-called reciprocity agreements.

Florida has 952,000 active concealed weapon licenses. Nearly 12 percent are held by out-of-state residents, according to the Agriculture Department.

The NRA, a potent lobbying force for pro-gun laws, has been a driving force behind reciprocity laws, which, combined with Florida’s inadequate background checks, may be pointing Americans at risk. While most states check NICS before granting a concealed carry permit, many have also maintain reciprocity agreements, which honor permits granted by other states. Thirty-five states honor concealed carry permits granted by Florida to Florida residents, while thirty-one honor permits granted by Florida to non-residents. Reciprocity agreements allow potential gun owners to shop around for the state with the least stringent permit laws, and then force other states to honor their permit.

The revelation that Florida’s practices lax background checks when screening concealed carry applications comes at a time when gun laws are becoming increasingly less strict. Since 1980, forty-four states have passed laws that allow gun owners to carry concealed weapons, and Illinois remains the only state not to allow concealed carry in any circumstance. In 2004, the federal assault weapon ban expired, and since 2005, twenty-one states have passed “stand your ground” laws. The United States has the highest rate of civilian gun ownership of any country in the world.

–Alex Brown