By Kathryn Wallace
November 28, 2003
Subcontractor
Destruction and renewal, gunfights and rebuilding: the United States has two separate and contrary objectives in Iraq.
On one hand, 145,000 soldiers are still engaged in a war; November was the bloodiest month yet of the conflict, with 104 Allied soldiers and diplomats killed. On the other hand, another force of thousands – construction crews – has occupied Iraq to pick up the pieces that are still falling.
With a projected $100 billion worth of Iraqi reconstruction projects, the boldest reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan, hundreds of companies scrapping for contracts have descended on Iraq. The challenge, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development, (USAID) is to make sure the companies hired to rebuild Iraq are friendly to American objectives.
That may not be the case. A look at the list of subcontractors rebuilding Iraq reveals an organization that is alleged to have possible ties to the Al Qaeda terrorism network.
The group in question is the Al-Bunnia Trading Company, a 93-year-old Iraqi company awarded the first subcontract in the Iraqi reconstruction last May from Bechtel Inc.
The San Francisco-based construction giant, Bechtel, has the prime contract worth about $1 billion for restoring Iraq’s infrastructure, and has hired out 80 percent of the work, mostly to Iraqi companies. For a list of Bechtel’s subcontractors, click here (PDF format).
Al-Bunnia was hired to perform two subcontracts through Bechtel to repair bridges and roads for an undisclosed amount, The two included a contract for the strategically important Al Mat Bridge that links Jordan and Baghdad.
But as documents obtained by The Nation from the Swiss Federal Commercial Registry show, one of Al-Bunnia’s three founding partners also began another group tagged by the State Department and the United Nations Security Council as part of the Al Qaeda network.
These documents link Sadoon Al-Bunnia to the Malaysian Swiss Gulf and African Chamber (MIGA), one of 14 businesses that then-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill declared in 2002 "appeared to be providing a clandestine line of credit to a close associate of Osama bin Laden” up to September 2001. Emails to Al-Bunnia’s Iraq office were unanswered.
According to the USAID, business with Al-Bunnia is perfectly legal. MIGA is red-flagged but Al-Bunnia is not.
Bechtel spokesperson Howard Menaker responded to the Nation’s findings, "Al Bunnia was vetted through the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). During the background investigation, there was nothing found that indicated we could not work with Al Bunnia. Further, there were additional informal discussions with other individuals and advisors to us but again nothing indicated wrong doing nor that we would be precluded from doing business with Bunnia."
According to press releases on Bechtel’s Web site, subcontractors “in the theater” with connections on the ground in Baghdad are likely to score contracts. The company awarded 104 of 140 contracts to Iraqi companies.
Many of the companies are new, and since the CPA has relaxed restrictions, allowing foreign companies to purchase Iraqi companies, tracking exactly who is rebuilding Iraq with U.S. taxpayer dollars origin becomes difficult.