The scandals for KBR just keep coming. The former Halliburton subsidiary responsible for the sexual assault of Jamie Leigh Jones and the accidental electrocution of a U.S. soldier is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit for exposing employees to "unsafe water, food, and hazardous fumes" at the largest U.S. installation in Iraq.
According to the Army Times, Joshua Eller, a former technician with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, said that while he was stationed at Balad Air Force Base in 2006, he experienced skin lesions that spread and became worse, along with debilitating blisters on his feet, vomiting, cramping, diarrhea, and severe abdominal pain.
As former KBR Water Purification Specialist Ben Carter described in this clip from Iraq for Sale and in his Congressional testimony, KBR failed to provide adequate water safety in Iraq, resulting in toxic drinking and bathing water. This war profiteer also failed to manage a medical incinerator properly, instead disposing medical waste and human remains in an open air burn pit. Eller claims that at one point, he saw a wild dog running around the base with a human arm in its mouth that KBR had dumped into the pit. And the grizzly kicker: the suit accuses KBR of using mortuary trucks that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice" later served to U.S. troops.
It's high time we hold KBR and Halliburton accountable. Hopefully, President-elect Obama and Congress will support Rep. Jan Schakowsky's bill to phase out private military contractors altogether over the next five years. Until then, I fear these scandals stemming from KBR's blatant disregard for the welfare of our soldiers in Iraq will continue.
This story has been around for awhile and it should be investigated, our soldiers deserve better than to be treated this way by our vice president and his cronies.
There is a quaint forgotten document you may have heard of (The Constitution) which defines that act in Article 3 Section 3.
Let us be strict constructionists and apply the original intent of the Founders here.
You're absolutely right in everything you said except one thing, their heads were stuck up their collective @sses.
The sad part is that the military HAD the infrastructure until the current drive for "privatization came about and the operations were turned over to private enterprise. Remember the old Republican mantra, "Get government out of our business."? Maybe it's time we got business out of our government.
We did pretty well for a couple of hundred years without KBR, and we can do without the thieving, murdering bastards again once we transition back to the military doing the military stuff again.
Haliburton/KBR is the biggest, most egregious flim-flam operation that has ever bilked the Department of Defense and the American Tax-payers
all the republican hypocrites who claim to support our troops are amazing silent about Haliburton/KBR's abuses
Viable? Feasible?