Deadly KBR Showers Came With $80M Bonuses

From Jeremy Scahill at The Nation today, a synopsis of explosive testimony before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee regarding contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root (former Halliburton subsidiary and by far the largest beneficiary of federal wartime funding, ever). According to the story, KBR received more than $80 million in bonuses for installing electrical writing in military facilities in Iraq — $30 million of that was paid after a soldier was killed by faulty wiring in one of the showers on base. According to Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J, 18 soldiers have perished under similar circumstances.

The take-home passage:

James Childs, a master electrician hired by the Army to review electrical work in Iraq during 2008, testified that KBR’s work in Iraq was the “most hazardous, worst quality work” he’d ever seen. He said his investigation found improper wiring in “every” building KBR wired in Iraq (of which there are thousands) and that KBR’s rewiring work in buildings that were previously safely wired resulted in the electrical system becoming unsafe. Childs said that KBR did not do any work “according to code.” He also testified that the same risks exist in Afghanistan, which he recently visited. “While doing inspections in Afghanistan, I found the exact same code violations,” Childs said.

For its part, KBR denies any culpability for the electrocution deaths.

Scahill quotes a former military official once in charge of such contracts, saying the bonuses were paid out of fear KBR would cease work, that they became  “too big to fail.” That’s a big reason why hearings like these — as informative and cathartic they are — never result in any real action. Behemoths like KBR  have too many friends in Washington, and  have become utterly indispensable to Long War operations in the two-front theater.

The corporate war industry — first conceived by Republicans, long acquiesced to by Democrats — now full in its glory. These lawmakers, now twisted in frustration over electrocuted soldiers, have no one to blame but themselves.

Excellent Interview: Goodman-Barstow

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman did an excellent interview last week with David Barstow, a New York Times reporter who recently won the Pulitzer prize for his April, 2008 story about Rumfeld’s “Force Multiplying” generals sent on combat missions to America TV news studios to lie us into war (and all the giant piles of cash money they made selling military hardware). In the interview Barstow discusses his story, the recently repudiated Pentagon Inspector General report which denied his claims and the TV networks’ continued blackout on his story.

Media Elite Fall Down Again, and Again and …

For all of their gasbaggery about the virtue and necessity of the Fourth Estate, the glittering mainstream media elite (big names, big money, very little gumshoe) is simply allergic to breaking news, and intelligently reporting about anything that implicates the power structure beyond the isolated criminal doings of one man or woman, i.e, senators and congressmen who terrorize airport bathrooms and congressional pages, or cheesy Midwest governors with small mind/big hair complexes. Those stories are safe, and therefore deserve the exhaustion of every pitiful analysis and resource.

But when it comes to serious stuff — preemptive war, torture, spying on Americans without warrant, the upending of the U.S constitution — these mainstream mavens (who are ever-so-fond of waxing nostalgic about their weaning during the Woodward & Bernstein glory years of the 70’s)  quickly “close ranks” and reframe the context of these stories to ensure the teeniest impact possible on the status quo. This typically means protecting their establishment friends in government, not rattling the corporate sponsors, and skittering off  to perceivably more ratings-grabbing news, like what really happened to Anna Nicole Smith, and what are the ladies on The View dishing about today? This is all done of course, in that gratingly condescending way (think and picture Chris Matthews)  that has all the subtle effect of nails filing down on a chalkboard.

The worst is when they completely ignore stories that put their “profession” in the most garish of lights, those little slivers of truth that peek out from time to time thanks to real reporters in the business. David Barstow won a Pulitzer Prize this week for his expose on the media using generals planted by the Pentagon to sell the war , but I bet most Americans haven’t heard of “message force multipliers” and wouldn’t know why they should care, since the story never made it to the nightly news.

As for the current torture scandal, of which we have hardly heard the full extent, Glenn Greenwald has an excellent analysis on his site today regarding the corporate media’s complicity in playing down the story throughout the Bush years and its ongoing attempts to frame it in the most self-serving way possible. A taste:

For years, media stars ignored the fact that our Government was chronically breaking the law and systematically torturing detainees (look at this extremely detailed exposé by The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest and Barton Gellman from December, 2002 to get a sense for how much we’ve known about all of this and for how long we’ve known it).  Now that the sheer criminality of this conduct, really for the first time, has exploded into mainstream political debates as a result of the OLC memos, media stars are forced to address it.  Exactly as one would expect, they are closing ranks, demanding (as always) that their big powerful political-official-friends and their elite institutions not be subject to the dirty instruments that are meant only for the masses — things like the rule of law, investigations, prosecutions, and accountability when they abuse their power.

Read more here.

Antiwar.com: Enemy of the State

Earlier this week, our webmaster reported on the now infamous State of Missouri Information Analysis Center missive, “The Modern Militia Movement.” Less jaded political activists reacted with the expected righteous indignation while others subtly exploited the report with the intent to whip supporters of causes as benign as medical marijuana and homeschooling into a frenzy.

Alas, you can’t fool KMOV St. Louis, Channel 4. They know an enemy of the state when they see one; one of the bumper stickers they prominently featured marking an American citizen as some sort of potential terrorist was from….Antiwar.com. Yes, no one is as dangerous to the state as an advocate for peace.

The Spineless Huffington Post Gives ‘Equal Time’

Huffington Post was so very kind this week to give space to almost frustratingly moderate Palestinian intellectual Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi. In his well-reasoned article, “Palestine’s Guernica and the Myths of Israeli Victimhood,” he supplied all the basic facts behind the problems in Palestine. One would expect the hordes of so-called “liberal” Democrat ignoramuses who infect that publication’s comment areas to bleat tired, false old bromides about Israel’s porcelain-white innocence in the face of attacks by grizzled Arab barbarians, but what gives with the long disclaimer marring the top of Barghouthi’s article?

“HuffPo” runs all kinds of commentary from all over the political spectrum (or at least its leftish side), but only those who dare speak against the sainted Israelis seem to require an editorial explanation that resembles an apology.

Shame on Huffington Post for its disgusting lack of integrity.

Gary Webb Was A Great Reporter

For those interested in the tragic story of Gary Webb, the reporter who covered the Dark Alliance between the CIA and crack epidemic-supplying Contra gangsters, as told in this weekend’s viewpoint by Robert Parry, you can listen to my January 31, 2004 interview of Webb here.

You can read the entire Dark Alliance series for the San Jose Mercury News here.

And get the book here.