Soldier electrocuted in Iraq by KBR-installed water pump

Contractors employed by Kellogg, Brown & Root -- under the umbrella of supercontractor Halliburton--are paid upwards of $100,000 annually to install and maintain equipment on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. But such a generous sum doesn't compel all of those contractors to pay attention to their work, to pay "attention to detail," in military parlance. An article in the NY Times today reminds us of one deadly failure on the part of KBR contractors to work meticulously and ensure quality control -- the article describes the death of Special Forces Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth, who was electrocuted in 2008 while taking a shower. The water pump feeding into his shower container was not properly grounded, a careless oversight that KBR refuses -- as the article shows -- to assume responsibility for.

I am not surprised. When I was in Iraq in 2004 and 2005, I was jolted daily by my own door handle every time I returned from the shower. The generator next to my living container -- big enough to power an entire apartment building -- was not properly grounded, and my wet feet provided the perfect conduit between the electrically charged dirt beneath my feet and the metal doorhandle. Lucky for me, the jolt was just enough to seize up my muscles, make me clench my jaw. After awhile it became a joke between my roommate and me. We'd call our friends over as they ambled back to their containers from the shower, then we'd trick them into grabbing the doorhandle. It was hilarious. It could have been deadly. When we finally got a KBR contractor to bring his Turkish crew over to investigate the problem, he told us as much. "You guys are lucky," he said, "this much current could fry you."

It took us more than weeks to get the KBR contractor to fix our generator, despite constant harassment and the obvious danger posed by the situation.

In the aftermath of an investigatory commission's findings on the Maseth accident, a KBR spokeswoman has issued a statement denying any responsibility on KBR's part. "The military never directed KBR to repair, upgrade or improve the grounding system in the building in which Maseth resided," wrote KBR's Heather Browne, "nor was KBR directed to perform any preventative maintenance at this facility." The amount of money raked in by KBR and other Halliburton contractors during the Iraq war is legend, not to mention obscene. One would expect any contractor paid such a gross fee to offer all necessary follow-up services -- even if those also implied a fee. But, as Ms. Browne's comments reveal, KBR is more than happy to blame the US military for its own shortcomings. It's as if she were to say, "It's the military's fault that they didn't have enough generator expertise to know to tell us that we needed to come and do preventative maintenance." How about a little follow-up on your services, KBR? And why didn't you ground it right the first time?

No accountability is a popular escape mechanism for contractors and politicians alike these days. Who will call these people to account?

Istanbul 1

Bread vendor, Sultanahmet, Istanbul



View from Galata Bridge, Istanbul

Karakoi punks, Istanbul

Kid & Soldier in the Old City

The Old City is a tense, bustling place. Ultra-orthodox Jews and Muslims rush past one another in the narrow, tunnel-like streets and arcades on their way to Jerusalem's holiest sites: the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall. But the Old City is also a thriving bazaar, loaded with street vendors and curiosity shops, hawkers and panhandlers. In this photo, an Israeli soldier taking a break from patrolling the Old City haggles with a young Palestinian boy over the price of knock-off sunglasses.

Kid vendor and Israeli soldier, Damscus Gate, Old City, Jerusalem

Iraqi Kurds make their big and totally predicted move

From a NY Times article today :

"With little notice and almost no public debate, Iraq’s Kurdish leaders are pushing ahead with a new constitution for their semiautonomous region, a step that has alarmed Iraqi and American officials who fear that the move poses a new threat to the country’s unity."

Well, it looks like the Kurds are making their big move to secure their hold on Iraq's oil futures — the big bone of contention between the separatist and ethnically isolated Kurds and their Arab neighbors to the south. We always knew it would come at some point. It'll be interesting to see how this new source of formal division in the Iraqi political context plays out alongside the withdrawal of American troops from major population centers and the near-complete turnover of control to the Green Zone government. Ay yay yay.

Traffic Jam — Al Atatra, Gaza Strip

Hope's Coffin: a Gaza Story

Elliott D. Woods

The Virginia Quarterly Review

July 1, 2009

For a generation of young people, the Gaza Strip has become a place where dreams go to die.

Israel did its best to keep me out of the Gaza Strip. Not just me—all international media. For two weeks, we watched from the Egyptian side of Gaza’s southern border as plumes of smoke erupted from around Rafah, and the wounded trickled out, one by one, in battered Palestinian ambulances on their way to intensive care units in Cairo. Finally, in the last week of Operation Cast Lead, something gave, and the Egyptian government unexpectedly opened the gates.

I entered Gaza with a few dozen journalists and aid workers on January 16—the day after my twenty-eighth birthday. An armed drone tracked my taxi, plastered with press insignia, through the wasted streets of Rafah, and the ear-splitting sonic booms of strike fighters rattled the windows. The war was no longer a spectacle on the horizon; I was in the kill zone.

As I moved north from the heavily bombed neighborhoods near the Egyptian border, targeted for their proximity to Gaza’s illegal tunnel network, toward the epicenter of the Israeli offensive in Gaza City, I was haunted by images of Stalingrad, Dresden, Hué City. Weeks of shelling had left the tiny, teeming enclave a moonscape of flattened homes and ravaged fields.

On January 18, Israel called an end to Operation Cast Lead and withdrew. What, if any, tactical or ideological gains Israel had made, however, remains unclear. Ostensibly the offensive was designed to reduce militant rocket fire against southern Israel and to cripple Hamas—the Islamic Resistance Movement—which has governed in the Gaza Strip since 2007. But Hamas retains the capability to launch rockets; its senior cadre remains intact; its smuggling tunnels are still operating; and Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped in 2006, isn’t any closer to freedom—in fact, some Palestinian militants have circulated the rumor that Shalit was injured by the Israeli bombings.

Hamas, for its part, can hardly declare a tactical victory over the Israeli military (Israel lost only thirteen soldiers in the fighting, four to friendly fire), but twenty-two days of air strikes by screaming F-16s and two weeks of ground maneuvers by the Israel Defense Force’s (IDF) highly trained riflemen and tankers produced nearly 1,400 martyrs for Hamas to claim. Such casualties have left Hamas stronger than ever as it has sought, in the months since the offensive, to portray Operation Cast Lead as conclusive evidence of the savagery and irrationality of the occupier.

Among young Gazans, raised on a diet of death and disappointment, this message is especially powerful. According to the Ministry of Social Affairs, 437 children under the age of sixteen were among the dead of Operation Cast Lead and nearly 1,900 more were wounded. And those are only the immediate, visible casualties. A joint Japanese and Jordanian team of doctors is treating more than a thousand children for the long-term effects of white phosphorus weapons, and the Gaza Community Mental Health Project estimates that as much as 90 percent of Gaza’s youth suffer from some sort of psychological trauma. For hundreds of thousands of children, Operation Cast Lead proved what their forebears have told them all along—Israel thirsts for Palestinian blood and will stop at nothing to punish the Palestinians for the very fact of their existence.

Continue reading at The Virginia Quarterly Review

Elliott D. Woods traveled to Gaza with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Learn more about this reporting project.

Qalqilya: The Wall

On a settler highway running north-south past the Ariel settlement block, you might never know that you were cutting Palestinian territory in half with your speedy commute. The wall to your right if you're going north, to your left if you're going south, looks like one of the sound barriers you find on I-495 around Washington DC, the kind that keep bedroom communities quiet and serene. But it's not a sound barrier — it's a physical barrier, a separation wall constructed in 2002 to enclose the approximately 40,000 residents of Qalqilya. The wall cuts Qalqilya residents off from their land, from the labor market in Israel many once depended on, and from their families.

In early June, a week after these photos were taken, Qalqilya witnessed a spate of violence that captured the insanity of Israeli-Palestinian blood politics. Israeli authorities made it known to the PA security forces that they wanted several high-priority targets from the Hamas paramilitary wing dead. Who knows what the Israelis promised to the PA in exchange for doing their dirty work. PA forces botched an assault on a Hamas safehouse, getting three officers killed in an attempt to kill their own targets. Two Hamas fighters and the owner of the house also died in the attacks. A string of retributive arrests took place in the West Bank and Gaza over the ensuing days. The violence and the political turmoil that resulted threatened to derail the fragile reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas in Cairo.

In the end, Israel decided to remove its major checkpoint going into Qalqilya from within the West Bank, and also decided to allow yellow-plated cars belonging to Arab Israelis to enter Qalqilya freely (Israeli citizens, Jew and Muslim, are prohibited from entering Palestinian territory almost everywhere else, although it's an odd prohibition, given that 400,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem).

It seems the IDF got what it wanted. And lived up to whatever promises it had made to the PA.

LIFE ALONG THE WALL: QALQILYA, WEST BANK

Sarkozy's funny convo. re: Avigdor Lieberman

Saw this bit about a conversation between French Pres. Nicolas Sarkozy and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu in a NY Times article today and laughed out loud. I wish more reporting was this humorous. I also wish more reporters had access to fly-on-the-wall stories like this one.

When Mr. Lieberman visited France recently, Mr. Sarkozy declined to meet with him, although he routinely received Ms. Livni, who was foreign minister in the last government.

According to the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Mr. Sarkozy told Mr. Netanyahu that he should remake his government so that he, Ms. Livni and the defense minister, Ehud Barak, could produce historic breakthroughs for Middle East peace. He was reported to have said, “I’ve always received Israeli foreign ministers. I met with Tzipi Livni in the Élysée Palace, but with that one I simply can’t meet. I’m telling you, you need to get rid of that man. Get him out of the government and bring in Livni. With her and with Barak you can make history.”

The paper said Mr. Netanyahu replied: “No need to exaggerate. Lieberman is a very nice person, and in private conversations he speaks differently.”

Mr. Sarkozy was reported to have replied, “In private conversations, Jean-Marie Le Pen is also a nice person.”

Mr. Sarkozy is said to have added of Mr. Lieberman, “Sometimes when I hear what he says I have the urge to pull out my hair.” He placed his hands on his head and grabbed hold of his hair.

Hugo Chavez supports CIA conspiracy theory re: Iranian elections

The French daily Le Monde ended an article today about the reestablishment of diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Venezuela with a statement about Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's support for the idea that the protests throughout Iran are the result of CIA meddling. The quote from the article is here:

"Mercredi, M. Chavez a réitéré son soutien à la réélection contestée du président Mahmoud Ahmadinejad et accusé la CIA de soutenir les manifestations en Iran."

In English: "Wednesday, Mr. Chavez reiterated his support for the contested reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and accused the CIA of supporting the demonstrations in Iran."

While it doesn't seem outlandish to me to think that the CIA might be thrilled about what's going on in the streets of Iran right now, it does strike me as absurd to assume that any foreign intelligence agency could so successfully mobilize a large and thoroughly modern population to confront authority. How utterly ironic that the man who loves to dress up like Ché Guevara and who buddies up to Fidel Castro would speak out against what is clearly a people's movement in Iran against an autocratic, militaristic and theocratic regime. The irony is compounded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's warnings that any movement against the revolutionary government — which is to say, the governmental system that has ruled Iran since the successful 1979 Islamic revolution — will be met with crushing force.

Herein lies the problem with revolutionary movements and the people who rise to power on their wings — the principle of revolution that enables major social, political, and economic transformation inevitably becomes a threat to the original revolutionaries. Once safely installed in power, former revolutionaries — history shows — are loathe to support the same revolutionary spirit in their subjects, much as they may claim otherwise. Former revolutionaries all too often become strong-fisted autocrats, often bearded, though not always.

But the problem for Iran's current rulers and men like Hugo Chavez is that the concept of "revolution" — while convenient for mobilizing the masses in the short term — will perpetually destabilize subsequent governments if those governments tend toward autocracy, especially when it becomes part of the ideology of a people. A revolutionary people will never tolerate the stagnancy of autocracy for long. The revolution — as the word itself implies — will come full circle.

And perhaps this is why Hugo Chavez, the so-called revolutionary, fears the apparent revolution against the Islamic revolution in Iran. This is perhaps why Hugo Chavez blames the CIA and supports President Ahmadinejad — he knows that the very revolutionary ethos he subscribes to and claims to represent will become a danger to him in the future.

And for all of Mr. Chavez's scathing talk about the Great Gringo, he never mentions the fact that his country is the third largest exporter of crude oil to the United States. Mr. Chavez nationalized the oil industry in Venezuela, and now his central government reaps profits from the U.S. addiction to gasoline. How many of his "revolutionary" socialist redistribution of wealth programs would be possible without oil revenue?

Sadr City bomb does not bode well.

The New York Times reported today that a bomb in a crowded Sadr City market killed at least 60 Iraqis last night. It was, according to the Times, the third bomb in two weeks to cause double-digit casualties in the Shiite areas. The portent of these bombings, as well as recent activity in Falluja — the former hotbed that has been quiet for over a year — is that the American "troop surge" was only successful in as much as it put "cops on every corner." Now that those surge troops are drawing down, and coalition forces are scaling down tactical operations altogether, it is becoming clear that the surge did not rid Iraq of its destabilizing elements — it merely forced them into hiding. They're much less afraid of Iraqi security forces, who share similar equipment and do not benefit from the immense tactical and logistical superiority possessed by the Americans. In the coming weeks, as the Americans begin to pull out of population centers, we will see that the relative calm of the surge years — when there was a cop on every corner — gave us and the Iraqis a false sense of security.

As Alissa Rubin writes, "The bombing on Wednesday occurred just six days before the American forces officially withdraw from Iraqi cities, towns and villages, as required under the Iraqi-American security agreement. In Baghdad, many of the troops have already withdrawn, and whatever preventive effect they had may well be fast evaporating. In their absence, insurgent groups appear to be beginning to test the security system now run almost wholly by Iraqis."

It may be the case that the period of relative calm that resulted from the surge afforded Iraqi security forces the time to hone their skills under their foreign instructors and gain critical real-world training. It may be the case that Iraqi security forces will be able to maintain stability in Iraq even amidst isolated bombings and attacks by destabilizing elements.

Just because "insurgent groups appear to be beginning to test the security system now run almost wholly by Iraqis" doesn't mean that they are capable of causing that security system to fail. But it's going to be a bloody examination. Whether the Iraqi security system passes or fails may not matter politically to those Iraqis who have to suffer through the test.