Halliburton

What happens when the government gives no bid contracts with no oversight to a company closely associated with the Vice President? Yes, cronyism. Yes, corruption. But possibly worse than Republican cronyism and corruption are troops killed by the incompetance and callousness of a company that cares about nothing by profits.

As outlined in a Daily Kos diary, KBR, a branch of Halliburton, a company closely associated with Dick Cheney and favored heavily by the Republican Party for no-bid contracts with no oversight, has so bungled the maintenance of one of our Iraq bases that 12 of our troops have been electorcuted since 2004.

And this company has continued to get no bid contracts even though this problem was known. This is the worst kind of Republican corruption: sacrificing our troops for greed. That's goes even beyond the usual Republican war profiteering.

From a Houston Chronicle article:

At least a dozen soldiers and Marines have been electrocuted in Iraq over the five years of the war, and investigators now are trying to learn what role improper grounding of electrical wires played in those deaths.

And Houston-based KBR — which builds bases and maintains housing for U.S. troops in Iraq — is at the center of the probe, with questions being raised about its responsibility to repair known wiring problems.

This didn't even get it's own article in the NY Times but rather was buried at the bottom of an article on 4 marines dying in a helicopter crash. Really, you have to scroll down almost to the end to find it. It turns out that Halliburton has been awarding subcontracts based on bribes:

In Rock Island, Ill., the director of operations for a Saudi company that operates dining facilities for American troops in Iraq and Kuwait was sentenced Friday in the Federal District Court for the Central District of Illinois to 51 months in prison for his involvement in a kickback scheme, according to a news release issued by a federal prosecutor’s office there.

In the scheme, Mohammad Shabbir Khan, operations director of the Tamimi Global Company, paid kickbacks to an employee of Kellogg Brown & Root Services to secure two dining subcontracts valued at $21.8 million, the statement said.

A United States district judge also ordered Mr. Khan to pay a fine of $10,000 and restitution to the United States government of $133,860, the amount he paid the Kellogg Brown & Root employee, the statement said.

The judge also sentenced the former Kellogg Brown & Root employee, Stephen Lowell Seamans, to 12 months in prison for his role in the scheme, the statement said.

Mr. Seamans was also ordered to pay restitution of $380,130 for that and another kickback scheme, according to the statement.