Vineland reporter: Halliburton Feeds Filth to Troops

[pynchonoid]

[...] ON       JULY 17, 2003, HEATHER YARBROUGH [photo
      at right] flew       to Kuwait to start a new
job: monitoring the quality and safety       of food
served to soldiers on U.S. military bases in Iraq. Her
      employer was the Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR)
Government Services       division of Halliburton, the
Texas-based oil company formerly       run by Vice
President Dick Cheney that has contracts with the     
 U.S. government to support military personnel in the
field and       to help with Iraq reconstruction.

Yarbrough, 33, felt upbeat and       excited. She had
trained hard for a position like this, one that      
required expertise in food and science. She was
banking on the       high salary -- $1,500 a week --
to pay off her student loans.       And unlike many of
her fellow students at Humboldt State University,     
 she supported the Bush Administration and its war on
terrorism.     

Yarbrough never dreamed she'd       be fired a month
later for what in her view was simply an effort      
to implement the Army's own safety and sanitation
standards.       Nor did she imagine that she'd be
telling congressional staffers       about potentially
dangerous food being served to U.S. soldiers       by
ESS Support Services, a food-service subcontractor to
Halliburton.      

While Yarbrough did not see       any soldiers fall
sick from food served by ESS, she did witness      
something else that disturbed her: the labor system
that feeds       and supports U.S. troops in Iraq and
Kuwait. It's a system in       which highly paid
Americans oversee a huge corps of Indians,      
Pakistanis and other so-called "third-country
nationals"       working in sweatshop conditions for
as little as $3 a day.      

Yarbrough is not alone in pointing       to problems
in Halliburton's military contracts. Congressional    
  watchdogs criticized excessive costs charged by
Kellogg, Brown       & Root (now a subsidiary of
Halliburton) in the late 1990s       at Camp Bondsteel
in Kosovo.      

Early in the Iraq war, the head       of Army
logistics complained that Halliburton and its
subcontractors       were deploying too slowly to
forward areas, forcing soldiers       to go longer
than necessary without fresh food, showers and other  
    amenities, according to the Houston Chronicle.

And last month a flurry of media       coverage ensued
after it was revealed that the Pentagon is
investigating       whether Halliburton and its
subcontractors overcharged the United       States as
much as $61 million for fuel and inflated cost
estimates       by $67 million in a proposal for
dining facility services. [...]

...continues:
<http://northcoastjournal.com/010804/cover0108.html>

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