Wednesday, July 23, 2008
KBR Revisited-Again
For every time she shouted “fire!”
They only answered “Little liar!”
And therefore when her aunt returned,
Matilda and the house were burned.
—Hilaire Beloc, Matilda
At first it seemed outrageous. Then the reader put it in perspective. It wasn’t that big a deal. This is a war that has cost millions of Iraqi lives and more than 4000 American lives. This most recent disclosure involves only 13 American deaths and they were not killed because of enemy fire, landmines, defective or inadequate body armor or humvees that were inadequately protected. These were deaths that were caused by a surge. Not the surge of which George Bush was so proud but an electrical surge that was not planned and in a well managed war would never have happened. The reports of the deaths were almost unnoticed and might still languish in the graveyard of Bush mistakes alongside the corpses he helped create, were it not for the death of Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth.
In January of this year Sgt. Maseth was taking a shower on his base in Baghdad and was electrocuted because of defective electrical wiring. At first the army explained to Sgt. Maseth’s mother that her son had an electrical appliance with him in the shower that caused his electrocution. That, as so much else associated with this war is, was a lie. He was electrocuted because a water pump in the building was not properly grounded and when the shower was turned on Sgt. Maseth was electrocuted. Sgt. Lambeth was not the first person to be electrocuted. According to Pentagon documents more than 12 other people have been electrocuted and many more injured by electrical shocks. In one barracks there were almost daily reports of its inhabitants receiving electrical shocks.
According to the New York Times an Army survey of February 2007 noted “a safety threat theater-wide created by the poor-quality electrical fixtures procured and installed, sometimes incorrectly, thus resulting in a significant number of fires.” In early July of this year an electrical fire resulted in the destruction of 10 buildings.
The first thing one is tempted to do when learning of something like this is to assume it is KBR’s fault. That is because KBR is the poster child for what went wrong with private contractors in Iraq. Among other things, it charged for food it did not serve the troops, it failed to build a pipeline for which it was paid $75.7 million and failed to deliver safe water for hygiene uses. (Some people may wonder how one company can get so much wrong. The answer is since the war began it has been paid more than $24 billion and has 40,000 employees in Iraq. That affords it lots of opportunity to perform incompetently and it has taken advantage of many of them. More are coming its way. KBR was recently awarded a part of a $150 billion contract for restoring the oil fields in Iraq. It will develop the southern oil fields while two other companies, one of which, Parsons, that has had its own share of shoddy performance, will develop those in the North.)
It would not be fair to blame KBR for Sgt. Maseth’s death just because it was responsible for the Radwaniya Palace Complex (RPC) where Sgt. Maseth died. That is because it is not required to act prophilactically. Reporting on the RPC electrocution, CNN reported that KBR said its contract did not cover “fixing potential hazards. ” It was only required to fix things after they broke down. KBR and the Pentagon would probably agree that a shower that electrocutes the bather is a shower that has broken down but the only way that can be discovered is after someone has been electrocuted. Heather Browne, a KBR spokeswoman, said the company found no link between its work and the electrocutions. As is sometimes the case when KBR explains what happens, not everyone agrees with its self-analysis.
Ingrid Harrison, an official with the Pentagon’s contracting management agency was quoted in the Times as saying: “KBR has been at R.P.C. for over four years and was fully aware of the safety hazards, violations and concerns regarding the soldiers’ housing.” KBR, said she, “chose to ignore the known unsafe conditions.” Electricians who were formerly employed by KBR said their repeated warnings to their superiors as well as to military personnel about unsafe electrical conditions were ignored. That probably explains why 283 electrical fires took place between August 2006 and January 2007. There should be fewer in the future. According to the New York Times, “senior army officials have ordered electrical inspection of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR. Chris Isleib, a spokesman for the Pentagon said: “We consider this to be a very serious issue.” He got that right. KBR, as usual, got it wrong. It won’t affect its owners-only the soldiers who have died or been injured and the taxpayer who rewards the company for its incompetence.
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Fleeting Fame
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Washington Post Editor’s Dad Has Anti-Bush Blog
You remember Marcus Brauchli? First, short-lived editor of the Wall Street Journal under the reign of Rupert Murdoch and now the newly-installed executive editor of the Washington Post? Well, it’s a good thing Brauchli finally escaped the Journal, because Paul Gigot and his gang of conservative editorialists must have given him unending grief over his father’s awesome left-wing blog! We were just alerted to the existence of the site, but the dad, a lawyer and contributor to sites like Spot-On and Counterpunch, has been at it for some time, posting items steadily since 2005. Officially, Christopher Brauchli’s site is about more than Bush — “political commentary and satire,” the tagline reads — but, more often than not, the president makes an appearance. And you know what? The site is pretty damn funny! In fact, I’ll take Christopher Brauchli’s posts over most of the op-ed content in American newspapers, the Post and Journal
included. After the jump, a sampling.
As was observed in last week’s column, photographs of French president François Mitterand’s funeral, showed his widow, mistress and their daughter, all gazing sadly at the casket. Had Eliot Spitzer died while consorting with prostitutes there would have been no photographs of the prostitutes standing sadly by the coffin with Mr. Spitzer’s wife and daughters. That’s because prostitutes don’t do funerals. Here is the answer to the riddle. Neither does George Bush
George Bush doesn’t even like to be in the presence of coffins even though it is thanks to him that the sad remains of more than 4000 service personnel have found resting places in coffins. . . .
It would be unfair to compare the response of Myanmar Junta leader, Than Shwe, to Cyclone Nargis to George Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina. For one thing, the two disasters were separated by thousands of miles. Furthermore, Burma initially rejected all foreign aid whereas Mr. Bush only rejected aid from Cuba. . . . As the recent hearings show, by not tracking the purposes of the disbursements, there is no risk of embarrassing anyone because of the failure of the recipient to satisfactorily complete the work for which it was paid. As teenagers would say, if asked, “That is SO Iraq.” . . . . Health insurance companies are constantly looking for new ways to make money. Two of the major impediments to their quest are sick people and the drugs they need. . . .Just-kind-of-hardcore-strident excerpts:
If there were only one agency (and there’s probably not) that has consistently enjoyed the benefits lavished on it by an ignorant president who continuously diminishes its standing in the world of science, it would be the Environmental Protection Agency. No other agency has so thoroughly given in to the importunings of a president who lives in constant fear of what science might offer if left to its own devices, science being a branch of knowledge that cannot be controlled by him or Dick Cheney. . . . We live in a country run by a consummate liar whose most egregious lies have resulted in (a) the deaths of more than 4000 American servicemen and women, (b) the infliction of life altering wounds on more than 20,000 servicemen and women, and© millions of people in a far-off land becoming homeless and refugees in foreign countries.Great stuff! If only this blogger could somehow get someone in the mainstream media to pay attention to his concerns! For example, by writing, or calling, or at least coming home for the holidays this year.
[The Human Race & Other Sports]
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Plagiarist and The Judgeship
When you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism; if you steal from many it’s research.
— Wilson Mizner, Sayingyu
Talk about a bunch of whiners. We live in a country run by a consummate liar whose most egregious lies have resulted in (a) the deaths of more than 4000 American servicemen and women, (b) the infliction of life altering wounds on more than 20,000 servicemen and women, and© millions of people in a far-off land becoming homeless and refugees in foreign countries. We live in a country where a general of the Army whose first concern should be the welfare of his troops, lies to Congress about the quality of water supplied to troops working in the far off land that the consummate liar has done much to destroy. This is a general to whose command the welfare of those he commanded was entrusted. And we whine about a plagiarist.
Early in July it was disclosed by Senator Byron Dorgan that General Jerome Johnson misled (a Washington euphemism for lying) Congress in April 2007 when he testified that there were no problems with water supplied to American troops by KBR, described as the largest defense contractor in Iraq.
According to a report in the New York Times, beginning in 2006 whistleblowers let Congress know that there were problems with the nonpotable water KBR supplied the troops. The Pentagon’s inspector general confirmed that KBR had not provided safe nonpotable water for hygiene uses at several Iraq bases. The Pentagon learned of this in a communication from the inspector general on March 31, 2007. Three weeks later General Johnson testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that problems with the water supplied by KBR were not widespread. It was a minor breach of trust by the general. When your commander-in-chief is a man whose lies have ruined millions of lives, a drop or two of bad water is hardly anything to get excited about. Nor is a bit of plagiarism even when the plagiarist has been nominated to a Federal District Court judgeship.
Michael E. O’Neill, a former to aide to Senator Specter is law professor at George Mason University. He is considered a fine legal scholar who has had a brilliant career and is clearly of the sort of cloth from which federal judges are cut. There is only one flaw in the fabric and it would not even be noticeable if some journalist from the New York Times had not only discovered it but then seen fit to hold the fabric up for all to see. Alan Liptak is the journalist. He discovered that Mr. O’Neill has plagiarized on more than one occasion. One of several occasions of plagiarism involved an article he wrote in 2004 for the Supreme Court Economic Review, a journal published by the George Mason School of Law.
The purloined passage dealt with something called “bounded rationality” which, according to Mr. O’Nell “is not a refutation of the rational actor model,” quoting word for word from a book review published in 2000 in the Virginia Law Review. Explaining the copying Mr. O’Neill said it was a result of a “poor work method.” “I didn’t keep track of things. I frankly did a poor and negligent job.” He got that right. In 2007 the Review issued a retraction of the article.
The White House is unperturbed by a bit of plagiarism sanctioning as it has, lying to create foreign policy. Emily Lawrimore, a White House spokeswoman said Mr. O’Neill had been completely forthcoming” and had “expressed remorse for his actions. ” She also said that the background searches the White House conducts are “very thorough” and “would capture issues such as this one .” It is hardly surprising that an administration that routinely lies would be unperturbed by a bit of plagiarism and would consider confession of misconduct adequate to remove the stain from a reputation. Not everyone agrees with the White House.
Deborah Rhode who teaches legal ethics at Stanford described the retraction of the article in the Review as “extremely unusual” and said the plagiarism was a “textbook case of conduct that casts doubt on someone’s fitness for judicial office .” Mr. O’Neill, in contrast, said the 2004 plagiarism was “fairly insignificant” and asked whether it was “something to kill someone’s career for?” One answer was given by Daniel Polsby, the dean of the law school. He said as a consequence of the plagiarism Mr. O’Neill “stepped away from tenure and will reapply for it.” That may not be necessary. Mr. O’Neill, answering his own question has refused to withdraw his nomination for a federal judgeship and if an unethical administration has its way, Mr. O’Neill will have life tenure as a federal judge. That’s much better than humbly applying for restoration of a privilege lost through misconduct that was held up for all the world to see.