The Lifeboat News
[ Message Archive | The Lifeboat News ]

    Not forgotten..burn pits were worse than that .. Archived Message

    Posted by Shyaku on May 6, 2019, 6:32 pm, in reply to "Beau Biden and the burn pits: Are these toxic military waste sites making soldiers sick?"

    I followed Fallujah in some depth at the time on ICH, and also read about the burn pits. Neither forgotten.

    The burn pits were worse even than stated - because of cost-plus contracts in which the US govt guarantees contractors profits as immutible, and costs are simply added to the guaranteed profit *by the contractor*. Whole supply trucks would go into makeshift burn pit for just a punctured tire:

    "Because contractors were paid on cost-plus arrangements, they had a powerful incentive to spend to the hilt. The undisputed master of milking the system is KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary so ubiquitous in Iraq that soldiers even encounter its customer-survey sheets in outhouses. The company has been exposed by whistle-blowers in numerous Senate hearings for everything from double-charging taxpayers for $617,000 worth of sodas to overcharging the government 600 percent for fuel shipments. When things went wrong, KBR simply scrapped expensive gear: The company dumped 50,000 pounds of nails in the desert because they were too short, and left the Army no choice but to set fire to a supply truck that had a flat tire. "They did not have the proper wrench to change the tire," an Iraq vet named Richard Murphy told investigators, "so the decision was made to torch the truck."

    https://corpwatch.org/article/great-iraq-swindle

    - Shyaku

    Message Thread: