I wrote about this security incident briefly last month. A new video on YouTube now sheds some absolutely shocking and downright gut-wrenching first-person evidence related to Halliburton’s apparent failure to treat water for soldiers or notify them that the water put into tanks was no different than that in the Eurphrates river itself.

It is one thing to read a story like Confessions of an Economic Hitman about the way Halliburton exploited and destroyed foreign markets:

As Chief Economist and Director of Economics and Regional Planning at MAIN, his primary job was to convince Less Developed Countries (LDCs) around the world to accept multibillion dollar loans for infrastructure projects and to see to it that most of this money ended up at MAIN, Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown and Root, and other U.S. engineering/construction companies. The loans left the recipient countries wallowing in debt and highly vulnerable to outside political and commercial interests.

But these latest reports are starting to show that Halliburton was even cheating with regard to the health of US soldiers who had no choice but to trust their systems. What kind of company would do such a thing? From the MSNBC quote of the original Granger [Theatre Water Quality Manager in the war zone for Halliburton’s KBR subsidiary] report:

“Theatre wide there is no formalized training for anyone at any level in concerns to water operations.â€? […] Confusion between KBR and military officials over their respective roles. For instance, each assumed the other would chlorinate the water at Ar Ramadi for any uses that would require the treatment. […] Inadequate or nonexistent records that could have caught problems in advance. Little or no documentation was kept on water inventories, safety stand-downs, audits of water quality, deliveries, inspections and logs showing alterations or modifications to water systems.

It seems to me the company was put in charge of purifying the water. So the fact that no one was actually running the purification system, coupled with the fact that no one was actually testing to see if the purification system was running…

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) “Shine, Republic”:

The quality of these trees, green height; of the sky, shining, of water, a clear flow; of the rock, hardness.

And reticence: each is noble in its quality. The love of freedom has been the quality of Western man.