Demagogue

Two truckers who worked in Iraq told a Senate Democratic policy committee on Monday that their employer, a Halliburton subsidiary, knowingly sent a lightly armed convoy of fuel tankers into a combat zone in April 2004, leading to the deaths of seven truckers and at least two soldiers.

The allegations now form the basis of a lawsuit that families of the dead, along with several truckers wounded in the same incident, have brought against the subsidiary, KBR, formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root.

While an array of lawsuits, criminal investigations and Congressional inquiries have accused KBR and its subcontractors with overcharging and other purely financial offenses, this is the first case to assert that the company put its employees’ lives at risk in the service of profit.

The company denied the accusations and said the United States military, not KBR, was responsible for the security of its convoys.

... The truckers were civilians recruited by KBR to drive in convoys supplying American troops as part of the company’s enormous logistics contract with the Army. Under the contract, the company has been paid more than $15 billion to perform jobs like delivering food and fuel to troops around the world since 2001.

... A lawyer for the truckers, T. Scott Allen, presented documents that he said showed that the company later offered to nominate the truckers for a civilian medal if they signed paperwork releasing KBR from any legal liability.