Cutting corners and electrocuting soldiers

If you had to guess whether or not facing down insurgents and al Qaeda or taking a shower and hanging around the base was more dangerous, you'd probably pick the terrorists. You might be wrong.

Shoddy wiring on US military bases has been responsible for hundreds of fires (averaging out to almost 1.5 fires a day during the most recently measured period) and dozens of deaths from fire and electrical shocks. The Army has classified this problem as the 'most urgent noncombat safety hazard for soldiers in Iraq.'

What government contractor is responsible for these mistakes of incompetence that is killing soldiers? Former Halliburton subsidiary and no-bid contractor KBR. KBR is the same company that brought you unsafe drinking water for troops, failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted and raped, and they overbilled the Government for their inadequate services.

The electrical problems are also electrician 101, things that any idiot who spent one day on a job site would know, things like: don't expose wiring and ground the distribution panels. But then they didn't hire skilled electricians to do the work, the hired unskilled Iraqis and pocketed the profit. KBR was warned by some of their employees about this, but their concerns were either ignored or not understood becuase the officials lacked the training.

The Pentagon also knew of these problems and did little to address them until Green Beret, Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth was electrocuted in January. But even now they aren't addressing how widespread the problem is, just the specific circumstances that specifically led to Maseth's death. Unsurprisingly we also learn that there weren't enough government inspectors to do the job either.

Quite simply this is war profiteering. When you so drastically cut the level of competence and skilled labor so you can squeeze as many nickels out of the project as you can, so much so that your awful work is killing soldiers, you are committing a crime.

And when degenerate flag humping cretins like Joe Lieberman, control oversight panels that could do something about this and refuse even to hold hearings, they can also rot. But maybe Joe is too busy stumping for McCain to worry about the troops. Why should John and Joe worry if soldiers are killed in showers, they're too busy trying to get them killed in Iran.

That the policies of Bush, Cheney and the Pentagon led to this and are standing in the way of getting something done are of little surprise. When you emphasize free money for the taking and speed over competence and oversight, this is all you can expect. But, at this point, this is just another thing that's etched into their already awful legacy.