The Black Hole of Government Contracting

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition August 1-3, 2014
The Crimes of KBR

The Black Hole of Government Contracting

by DANIELLE MARIE MACKEY


In January 2008, a 24-year-old Green Beret from Pennsylvania, Ryan Maseth, was electrocuted and killed while showering at Radwaniyah US base in Iraq. The cause, his family alleges in a negligence suit filed in district court in Tennessee, was improper electrical wiring by Kellog, Brown and Root (KBR), the contracting company in charge of the base. He is one of at least eighteen U.S. soldiers who have been electrocuted in similar situations at U.S. bases in Iraq.

Then, in 2012, KBR was found responsible in an Oregon court of knowingly exposing twelve Oregon National Guard soldiers to a toxic chemical, sodium dichromate, at the Qarmat Ali water treatment plant in Iraq. Information from depositions with KBR employees reveals that they were fully aware of the true nature of the yellow dust—which is, according to the chairman of the Department of Environmental Science at NYU Medical School, Dr. Max Costa, “one of the most potent carcinogens known to man” and that can “enter every cell … and potentially produce widespread injury to every major organ.” Two of the soldiers already died from cancer that their doctors attribute to sodium dichromate exposure.

In 2013, KBR was ordered to stand trial yet again, accused of human trafficking in the case of twelve Nepali men, eleven of whom were murdered. The men’s families say that in 2004 they were promised safe jobs in Jordan, but instead were smuggled to Iraq, destined for a KBR-run U.S. Air Force base. They were intercepted by insurgents en route, and their passports confiscated. Eleven were beheaded; the twelfth survived, and is among the plaintiffs in this case, filed in a district court in Texas.

This is a partial list of the allegations of negligence, corruption, and human trafficking that KBR has, or is still, facing from its operations in Iraq.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/01/the-black-hole-of-government-contracting/

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