Halliburton really sucks ballz. Kellogg, Brown, and Root (subsidiary of Halliburton) apparently has been putting waste water back into the water tanks they use for everything except drinking (bathing, brushing teeth, etc) at this army base. Instead of checking the water three times a day for contaminants like their contract says they should, they've checked it twice. Total. They haven't added chlorine to kill off organisms, and they don't even replace their filters they're supposed to replace. Halliburton's chief of water use for all of Iraq and Kuwait said that the water they bathe in, etc, is twice as contaminated as that of the Euphrates. It's pretty awful, and worse is that Halliburton has threatened litigation against anybody who says anything about it, and gotten rid of the people who have actually tested the water. They've also somehow failed to keep records of any testing, etc, so that conveniently nobody can really investigate. That's a breach of contract as well, as their contract says they're supposed to keep records for their thrice daily checks, and epidemiologists also say they should keep track of diseases to see if there's any particular problem, which of course they haven't done.

Almost worse is the whole truck thing. I don't know how many of you know about this, but a while ago, Halliburton had a problem with a bunch of the brand new Ford pickup trucks in their fleet in Iraq. They had to scrap a whole bunch of them. Now, they've stopped paying mechanics to fix any trucks, and instead, when one breaks down or even when one just RUNS OUT OF OIL, they simply leave it and buy a new one. The OSD gave them a no-bid, cost plus contract, which means that they don't pay any of their expenses, so it's efficient for them to simply scrap a car and buy a new one when it runs out of oil. That's almost mind-bogglingly ridiculous, considering that they could pay ten bucks for oil rather than 30,000 for a new pickup truck. They probably get at most a thousand miles or so out of those trucks before they run out of engine oil . . . about 1/1000th of how long the truck should actually last.