KBR: Dirty Water, Dirty Deals

[babylonsister]

KBR: Dirty Water, Dirty Deals
Editorial


A hundred years from now (maybe longer if John McCain is elected president), when the history of the Iraq war finally is written, students will want to know how KBR Inc. got away with with war profiteering.

How did this firm, whose employees have time and again been hauled into court and accused of fraud by government inspectors, continue to prosper? And prosper it has: After being spun off in April 2007 by Halliburton, its former parent company, KBR took in $8.75 billion in revenue for the year, of which $520 million was profit.

Not bad for government work.

With $16 billion in outstanding contracts related to the Iraq war, KBR continues catering diverse parts of the sprawling war, providing everything from pizza parlors and hamburger joints in a desert to millions of rounds of ammunition and millions of gallons of fuel. KBR employees or subcontractors have washed a million sets of dirty BDUs and GI uniforms and have built thousands of showers and hundreds of barracks rooms. In so doing, some people in the company have made out, as the apt cliche goes, like bandits.

“I happen to think we have seen and are seeing the most significant waste, fraud and abuse in the history of this country,” Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., said Monday. “And, regrettably, most of the federal government seems to be asleep. That is especially true of this {Bush} administration.”

As a unit of Halliburton, KBR came under fire pretty much from the moment the Iraq war began five years ago. The company and some of its people have been under investigation almost that long. Most recently, KBR has been accused of supplying contaminated water for troops to bathe in (and expensive monogrammed towels for them to dry with). Employees have been indicted for fraud and bribery in federal court in Rock Island, Ill.

And according to an investigation by The Boston Globe, the company has long been using a shell company in the Cayman Islands to duck Social Security and Medicare taxes for its employees. Not paying these taxes gives KBR a competitive advantage when it bids for government work, but it leaves employees with fewer Social Security benefits and adds to the long-term Medicare costs of the government. While legal, the practice is not the kind of slick maneuver that the government should tolerate among its contractors.

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/07/7674/

[Hekate]

1. The military, iirc, used to be self-contained--enlisted personnel performed all duties related to...

....maintaining and sustaining their units. Cooking and food prep, laundry, setting up camp and breaking it down -- it meant that there was a wide range of work for a wide range of skills, and (I want to shout here but am refraining) it meant that the performance of these jobs and the quality of the result were accountable all up and down the chain of command. The costs were contained -- especially salaries, since enlisted personnel performed the jobs, but also any fraud and waste could be minimized.

From the moment I read that Congress had decided to break apart this relatively workable, relatively cost-effective, relatively efficient, and time-honored system and sell it out to private industry I knew that it was going to result in no savings at all -- and now it is FUBAR.

I don't know how we can put this particular evil genie back in its bottle, but it will literally take an Act of Congress.

Hekate

[Sam Ervin jret]

5. Too true, who ever heard of a sovereign country that relied on this sort of thing for

self defense, troop protection and troop needs?

How reliable is your military if it is not self reliant?

This is madness. It is privatization gone mad. The Bushian way.

[happydreams]

2. delete

[givemebackmycountry]

3. CNN did a story about this atrocity this afternoon

And they did their typical dance around the edges of the story type of coverage.
HOW EVER, I did see this disgusting image.



Give me a fucking break.
A yellow ribbon?
How evil can one company be?

[Doctor_J]

4. Next year when the criminals have been run out of the government,

can we seize all of their assets? I would like to see the military, if neccessary, just raid their HQ and take everything that isn't nailed down, then freeze all of their bank accounts, eventually seize all of their cash and other assets.

Edit: This would of course include seizing all of the personal assets of the board of directors.