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On Jan. 2, yet another American soldier died in Iraq.
But Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a highly decorated Green Beret, didn’t
die in a roadside bomb blast or after being shot by an Al Qaeda sniper. He
was killed by his shower.
More accurately, Maseth’s killer was
privatization. That’s the out-of-control policy of turning over
essential military support systems to a sprawling, unregulated network of
for-profit corporations and letting them get away again and again with
shoddy — even deadly — work. Maseth was safely inside his Army base in Baghdad
when he reached for the shower faucet. Electricity instantly shot through
the pipes, through the water itself, and through his entire body,
electrocuting him. His mother, stunned, pressed the Army for details but
got only hemming and hawing at first. Then she got a lie: She was told that
her son had a “small appliance” with him in the shower. She
knew better and kept pushing, finally learning that the facility’s
water pump had not been properly grounded. Worse, Army documents reveal that Halliburton, under
contract to inspect such systems, had found serious electrical problems in
this facility nearly a year before Maseth’s last shower. Why
wasn’t it fixed? Because Halliburton’s contract did not cover
“fixing potential hazards”; instead, it required only that it
fix equipment already malfunctioning.
Meanwhile, the Army itself should have known about
this deathtrap, but under the Pentagon’s convoluted privatized system
the danger that Halliburton found was not red-flagged and was never
reviewed by a “qualified government employee.”
At least a dozen of our soldiers have been killed by
improper grounding of electrical equipment, but Halliburton coldly claims
that it is not part of the Army and has no contractual obligation to
prevent the electrocution of American troops.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2008.
