“I’m done for.”

These were the last words that Bishnu Hari Thapa’s family had heard from him since he had left to work for a Haliburton subsidiary—he was supposed to be working in a luxury hotel in Jordan—before he was murdered by insurgents in Iraq.

Thapa was brutally shot in the back of the head while he lay face down in a ditch just after his kidnappers sliced open the throat of another hostage, spilling his thick, red blood on the ground before them.

Thapa’s story is not of a man who had set out to rebuild a war torn country, it is the story of a man who had signed up for a better life and wound up a dead slave.

It has been recently reported in the Chicago Tribune that Haliburton has been employing inexpensive Asian labor recruited under the guise of decent jobs in countries surrounding Iraq. But once the workers leave their homes, they are transferred against their will to war torn Iraq, where they must stay because they are indebted to the company to such an extent that they cannot afford to leave. This amounts to nothing less than indentured servitude and it must be stopped.

Every action that Haliburton takes in Iraq is reflected upon the standards and morals of the people who put them there, namely we Americans.

This corporate neo-slavery is unacceptable.