WASHINGTON - The Army's primary support contractor in Iraq is being warned by Pentagon auditors to cut its work force there or face nearly $200 million in penalties for keeping thousands too many on the payroll.
The Houston-based KBR Inc., responsible for everything from mail and laundry to housing and meals, has increased employee levels while U.S. troops steadily leave the country after more than six years of war, the audit says. As a result, the U.S. government is paying far more in labor costs in Iraq than it should as military resources are shifted to Afghanistan.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has taken a bit of abuse for being one of only seven senators to vote against defunding the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, better known as ACORN.
Last month, both houses of Congress quickly voted to deny federal funding to the community group after the now-infamous videos by young right-wing activists James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles. The pair posed as a pimp and a prostitute and, with a hidden camera, went to a number of ACORN's tax preparation offices seeking tax and business advice.
Federal prosecutors have charged a former KBR employee with sexually assaulting a female co-worker in Iraq last year.
Charles Breda, 34, of Pearland, Texas, was arrested last week and charged with abusive sexual contact of another employee of Texas-based government contracting giant KBR in October 2008 at Camp Al Asad. Breda, who left KBR earlier this year, was arrested last week at a Houston-area barber college. He has pled not guilty. He appeared in court Wednesday for a detention hearing.
SAN FRANCISCO - KBR Inc (KBR.N) said a U.S. appeals court ruling would help protect the company from civil lawsuits stemming from its work done under U.S. military logistics contracts.
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that KBR could not be found negligent in the case of a U.S. Army sergeant severely brain-damaged when a KBR fuel tanker he was escorting in a military convoy crashed in Iraq in 2004.
At a hearing in Washington today, the federal
Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan is releasing a 111-page report that represents its “initial investigations of the nation’s heavy reliance on contractors.” According to a
release on the hearing:
More than 240,000 contractor employees, about 80 percent of them foreign nationals, are working in Iraq and Afghanistan to support operations and projects of
Six people from Texas, including some soldiers, who claim they were poisoned by toxins and emissions from burn pits at U.S. camps in Iraq and Afghanistan are suing contractors KBR and Halliburton.
The suit, moved to federal court in San Antonio from state court last week, alleges the companies operated the large war-zone pits and burned waste since 2004 that included trucks, tires, plastic water bottles, medical waste, hazardous materials, animal carcasses and even human corpses.
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army paid "tens of millions of dollars in bonuses" to KBR Inc, its biggest contractor in Iraq, even after it concluded the firm's electrical work had put U.S. soldiers at risk, according to a source close to a U.S. congressional investigation.
The Senate Democratic Policy Committee plans to hold a hearing on Wednesday to examine KBR's operations in Iraq, and question why the Army rewarded the Houston-based company.
The Pentagon has done little to collect at least $100 million in overcharges paid in deals arranged by corrupt former officials of Kellogg Brown & Root, the defense contractor, even though the officials admitted much of the wrongdoing years ago, two senators have complained in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
The letter also said that the Army had almost completely failed to move away from the monopolistic nature of the logistics contract that has paid the contractor, now called KBR, $31.3 billion for logistics operations in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON - The military is racing to inspect more than 90,000 U.S.-run facilities across Iraq to reduce a deadly threat troops face far off the battlefield: electrocution or shock while showering or using appliances.
