shame.

I encourage you all to read this heartbreaking, infuriating series from the Chicago Tribune. This article gives a good introduction, but you really should read all parts of the series to get a full understanding of how the "war on terror" and American profiteering is destroying lives all around the world.

U.S. cash fuels human trade
By Cam Simpson and Aamer Madhani
Tribune staff reporters
Published October 9, 2005
American tax dollars and the wartime needs of the U.S. military are fueling an illicit pipeline of cheap foreign labor, mainly impoverished Asians who often are deceived, exploited and put in harm's way in Iraq with little protection.
The U.S. has long condemned the practices that characterize this human trade as it operates elsewhere in the Middle East. Yet this very system is now part of the privatization of the American war effort and is central to the operations of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, the U.S. military's biggest private contractor in Iraq.
To document this system, the Tribune retraced the journey of 12 Nepalese men kidnapped last year from an unprotected convoy en route to an American military base in Iraq.