Supporting the troops, again

Accidents happen. Frontline people aren’t perfect. It’s Halliburton’s cover-up response that really bothers me. Reading between the lines of the entire AP story I’ve only briefly excerpted, you’d think Halliburton’s corporate culture was shaped by someone like, shucks, I dunno, Dick Cheney...

Halliburton’s water treatment manager in the war zone warned that troops and civilians in Iraq were left vulnerable to “mass sickness or death” by a contamination incident at the Ar Ramadi base and that problems existed at other locations across Iraq...

[Manager Wil Granger blamed the contamination in part on “the company's failure to assemble and use its water purification equipment at the site. ‘This event should be considered a ‘near miss’ as the consequences of these actions could have been very severe...’ ”

[The contamination] was discovered in March 2005 in a commode by Ben Carter, KBR’s water expert at the base. In an interview, Carter said he resigned after KBR supervisors at the base “told me to stop e-mailing” company officials outside the base and warned that informing the military “was none of my concern”...