Because we've outsourced so many functions that used to be handled by federal and/or military employees, we've also lost control of outcomes like this:

Contractors working for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan are fouling the nests of U.S. soldiers with pollution, poisoning the troops in the very bases meant to be their sanctuaries.

That's the central allegation in a new set of lawsuits filed in Nashville and elsewhere across the country. The legal actions name as defendants the controversial contracting firm KBR Inc. (formerly Kellogg Brown and Root), as well as Halliburton Co., of which KBR used to be a subsidiary, and a Turkish general contracting firm, ERKA Ltd.

"These for-profit corporations callously exposed and continue to expose soldiers and others to toxic smoke, ash and fumes," says the complaint filed in Nashville on Friday, which asks for damages on behalf of two Tennessee soldiers. "These exposures are causing a host of serious diseases, increased risk of serious diseases in the future, death and increased risk of death."

The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, describes "burn pits" at U.S. bases in both military theaters that contain "every type of waste imaginable." Reading like a postmodern version of Jonathan Swift's Description of a City Shower, the catalog of rubbish in the pits includes:

"Tires, lithium batteries, Styrofoam, paper, wood, rubber, petroleum-oil-lubricating products, metals, hydraulic fluids, munitions boxes, medical waste, biohazard materials (including human corpses), medical supplies (including those used during smallpox inoculations), paints, solvents, asbestos insulation, items containing pesticides, polyvinyl chloride pipes, animal carcasses, dangerous chemicals, and hundreds of thousands of plastic water bottles."

"Flames shoot hundreds of feet into the sky" as the huge pits are set ablaze, the Nashville lawsuit claims.

Noting that "burning plastics emit dioxins, which are known to cause cancer," the complaint accuses the defendants of negligence, battery and inflicting emotional distress. Saying an estimated 100,000 soldiers and contract personnel may have been harmed by the smoke from the pits, the plaintiffs want the court to force KBR and the other companies to cover future medical expenses and pay other compensatory damages.

I wonder who the human corpses were? And why were they burned?

DOWNLOADS: (1573)

PLAYS: (5945)

Embed

(h/t CSPANJunkie)

Rookie Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) passed an amendment to a defense bill this week that would withhold government contracts from organizations like KBR if they restrict employees from taking rape and sexual assault cases to court.

Thirty Republican senators voted against Al Franken's amendment, thus showing their support for gang rape by government contractors. And may I say, I'm not surprised:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.” Speaking on the Senate floor yesterday, Franken said:

The constitution gives everybody the right to due process of law … And today, defense contractors are using fine print in their contracts do deny women like Jamie Leigh Jones their day in court. … The victims of rape and discrimination deserve their day in court [and] Congress plainly has the constitutional power to make that happen.

On the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) spoke against the amendment, calling it “a political attack directed at Halliburton.” Franken responded, “This amendment does not single out a single contractor. This amendment would defund any contractor that refuses to give a victim of rape their day in court.”

In the end, Franken won the debate. His amendment passed by a 68-30 vote, earning the support of 10 Republican senators including that of newly-minted Florida Sen. George LeMieux. “He did what a senator should do, which was he was working it,” LeMieux said in praise of Franken. “He was working for his amendment.”

Appearing with Franken after the vote, an elated Jones expressed her deep appreciation. “It means the world to me,” she said of the amendment’s passage. “It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it.”

Download | play Download | play (h/t Bill W)

I've alternated between calling life under the Bush administration as some Carrollian absurdity and an Orwellian nightmare. Turns out that we in the liberal blogosphere aren't the only ones making some literary allusions.

First up in our ever-growing list of scandals is Halliburton subsidiary KBR, who will finally be subject to an investigation and hearing over 13 electrocutions deaths in their facilities in Iraq. Despite being notified that the electrical system was not grounded in the shower area way back in 2004, Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth died in January of this year from the improper grounding of the water pump in his barracks. Maseth's family is suing KBR civilly for their negligence in maintaining the facilities for the Department of Defense.

Next scandal du jour comes from an ex-22 year CIA veteran, suing the Bush adminstration to declassify documents that show that they were deliberately suppressing information that he provided that Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Told on five occasions to falsify his report or not to file it at all, the agent, who is fluent in Farsi and Arabic (because those aren't valuable skills in Bush's War on Terror™), was fired, after several attempts to discredit him turned up nothing. Out of curiosity, how many times do we have to have experts tell us the Bush administration is wrong about Iran's nuclear designs before the media stops furthering that narrative?

And finally, we have Huzaifa Parhat, a Chinese-born Muslim who has been detained at Guantanamo for more than six years. The heavily censored judicial review has become public and the Fed's case against Parhat was so flimsy--citing the same source multiple times, the accusations based on "bare and unverifiable" claims that even the judicial panel was compelled to cite Lewis Carroll's nonsensical poem, The Hunting of the Snark:

''We are not persuaded,'' the panel wrote.

"Lewis Carroll notwithstanding, the fact that the government has 'said it thrice' does not make an allegation true.''

Then for the sake of clarity, it disclosed its source:

Through the Looking-Glass author Lewis Carroll's 1876 poem called The Hunting of the Snark, an account of an absurd international voyage by a 10-member crew whose names all begin with `B.'

They include a baker, a beaver, a bellman and a barrister. The ruling went so far as to quote the relevant line, I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.

Despite this slapdown, the Justice Department has not decided how to move forward with Parhat.

You might remember those cases of service members in Iraq being electrocuted while showering, chalked up to faulty construction work by the contracting firm KBR? Well, the U.S. Army was so pissed off at KBR, it decided to grant them a $2.8 billion under its current Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) IV contract for one year of work.

The vast majority of the waste we’ve seen in government contracts comes not from fraud or corruption, but from a lack of basic oversight, and poor management. < Case in point is a Department of Defense’s Inspector General report released yesterday which found that DOD “did not efficiently and effectively contract for tactical vehicle field maintenance at Joint Base Balad, Iraq” over the past several years, leading to millions in waste due to man hours of work that fell well below what is required by Army rules.

Army regulations establish a standard of 85 percent utilization of contractor work with a goal of 90 percent. But at Balad, the utilization of contractor-provided maintenance services reached a low of 3.97 percent to a high of 9.65 percent, which the DoD’s IG says wasted $4.6 million of the $5 million for “maintenance services that were not required.” In other words, KBR had too many people to do work that didn’t exist.

The problem, according to the IG? The work order failed to contain requirements “for the contractor to report utilization data” to the Army. “In addition, the Army was not conducting adequate reviews of contractor utilization data provided by KBR and taking proper corrective action.”

You have to wonder, what the hell goes on inside of the tiny brains that run military acquisition projects sometimes. Eight years and they can't figure out how to effectively identify necessary work and track funds spent by major defense contractors. But I'm sure SecDef Bob Gates will work that all out when he hires those 20,000 new government employees... from the ranks of consultants from contracting firms who are currently doing the acquisition support tasks...