Looks like Al Qaeda is designing our soldiers showers...

The worst part from that article:

Army documents obtained by CNN show that U.S.-paid contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) inspected the building and found serious electrical problems a full 11 months before Maseth was electrocuted.
KBR noted "several safety issues concerning the improper grounding of electrical devices." But KBR's contract did not cover "fixing potential hazards." It covered repairing items only after they broke down.
​

KBR is, of course, trying to get the lawsuit the family filed dismissed.

Pittsburgh Soldier's Iraq Death Prompts Lawsuit; KBR Responds

While the parents of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth remembered their son on Memorial Day, military contractor KBR was calling for a judge to throw out their lawsuit over his death, and U.S. Rep. Jason Altmire said an investigation is needed.
"I think to argue that you should, as a contractor, have the right to ignore a known problem and suffer no consequences as a result when your inaction causes death is a pretty faulty argument," Altmire said on Monday.
​

 

In the novel Catch 22, soldier-turned-entrepreneur Milo Minderbinder contracted with the U.S. to bomb a city in Italy, and with the Italians to defend it. Sounds like KBR may be taking money from both sides as well.

 

This is not the first time KBR has been in hot water, so to speak

AP: Troops sickened at Iraq bases using KBR water - CNN.com

The Pentagon threw out the charges against KBR over the water issue, so they will dismiss any concern about getting fried in a shower

 

It is disgusting. KBR should be hauled into court by... John Edwards. Maybe he can get KBR to cough up some cash.

 

This is another demonstration of the pitfalls on relying to heavilly on contractors to prosecute a war. They didn't fix a potential problem (electrical hazard) because their contract was to repair things that were broken.

If a government employee (read civil service, or military) had inspected an area and found a hazard of this nature, it would have been fixed. But that's just my opinion...

 

If your friendly fun-loving Toyota Service Manager discovered a nail in your tire, he would not have an obligation to fix/replace that tire without you authorizing the additional costs.
I'm not trying to defend KBR, but there may be more to this story.

 

Unless perhaps he installed the tire originally with the nail in it, like KBR installed the showers with electrical hazards.

 

This is just one more example of how our government is NOT supporting the troops. It's pure rhetoric folks ... pure rhetoric.

The truth of the matter is that the taxpayer continues to overpay (that's the understatement of the year!) these contractors (no bid = pure theft) for substandard work that directly affects the lives of the troops.

This war is one GIANT taxpayer money grab. Our kids and grandchildren get to pick up the rest of the tab. At least Dick Cheney can afford that 4th vacation home in Aspen now. I was getting worried about him.

... Brad

 

Hey, how else would we taxpayers get to pay extra just so our troops can have towels with the KBR logo embroided on it (wish I was joking).

KBR forces its towel on troops

In a hearing today on waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) said the defense contractor KBR, formerly of Halliburton, has been stamping its logo on towels given to U.S. troops. Dorgan said a contractor told him that he ordered plain white towels for troops, but the “superviser” said the towels must have the KBR logo on them — despite the cost to taxpayers:

He said the problem is, that will triple or quadruple the price. His superviser said, ‘doesn’t matter. This is a cost-plus contract. Taxpayers pay for that.’ So this is the towel the troops got, with KBR embroidered on it.
​

So at least Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth's parents can take comfort in the fact that he probably had an embroidered towel with him when he died with the murderer's name on it.
*angry*

YouTube - Sen. Byron Dorgan: Iraq Waste Floor Speech

 

Our government has never supported its own troops. Not in my lifetime, anyway. I'm not familiar with troop support in WW II. For 5 years I did volunteer work (10 to 15 hours a week during about three of those five) in a homeless shelter, and somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 of the homeless men that came to our shelter were Vietnam vets. They certainly got no support from the government. And gawd help you if you ever have to go to the VA for medical care. A friend of mine almost died during a flexible sigmoidoscopy performed by a physician's assistant at the VA. No MD was present! He wound up in the emergency room. Some support!!!

"Support the troops" is nothing but a mindless slogan meaning "Support the criminals running the war and making big bucks off it."

 

It's a shame anyone could die that way.










Oh yeah...



****************************************

 

Naptown,

That's a positively berman-esque change of subject.

But hey, I'm sure if we pretend there's nothing wrong with the way KBR does things, everything will be just hunky-dory.

WASTE, FRAUD, AND ABUSE (more after link)

Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, I had a chance to meet Herman Wouk, who is one of America's greatest authors. He wrote ``Caine Mutiny'' and he wrote ``War and Remembrance.'' He is 91 years old and a remarkable man, just a remarkable man. He was telling me something kind of in jest.

He said: ``You know, I don't know much about what happened after 1945, but I know everything that happened before 1945."

He was talking about his body of work, his research on the Second World War and prior to that period of time. And he wrote wonderful books, as all of us know. He is one of America's greatest authors.

Herman Wouk and I were talking about the Iraq war and talking about the stories about the Iraq war, and he said to me: ``Do you know anything about the Truman Committee? Do you know anything about what happened in the Second World War with President Harry Truman, then-Senator Harry Truman, who created a committee, a special committee in the United States Senate, bipartisan, to go after this issue of contract fraud that was going on with respect to defense contracting?"

I told him I certainly did know about the Truman committee, and we have had, I believe, four votes in the Senate that I offered as amendments to establish a Truman committee.

At this point I want to show my colleagues a photograph of a man. I don't know this man personally. This comes from a Thursday, March 27, edition of the New York Times. I read an article about this man on an airplane, and I was struck by it because it is such an unbelievable story, and it is another chapter of, in my judgment, a shameful series of chapters of abuse of the American people by contractors with respect to the Iraq war.

The New York Times published this article, and this is a picture of a 22-year-old man from Miami Beach. He had gotten contracts worth over $300 million in U.S. taxpayers' dollars, and he had signed a contract with the U.S. Army to provide arms to Afghan soldiers. Apparently, we, as taxpayers, and the U.S. Army, were trying to provide additional arms for the Afghan Army with which to fight and defend itself. So this 22-year-old man got a $300 million contract from the Army Sustainment Command, through a company that had been a shell for a number of years established by this man's father. Mr. Diveroli is his name. This is a mug shot from the Miami Dade Police Department.