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KBR and Halliburton – two major U.S. military contractors – can be sued for the health impacts of trash incineration on U.S. soldiers who served in the war in Iraq, according to a new court decision that allows a series of 57 lawsuits against the companies to go forward.
The two companies have been paid some $40 billion for services provided to troops serving in the U.S. War on Terror throughout Central Asia and the Middle East in countries ranging from Afghanistan and Iraq to Kuwait and Uzbekistan. (Most of the contracts were implemented by KBR which was a subsidiary of Halliburton until 2007 when it was spun off into a separate company)
“We’re confident that further discovery will show that KBR acted outside the control of the military, ” Susan Burke, the lead lawyer for the soldiers, told Bloomberg in a telephone interview.
U.S. District Judge Roger Titus threw out 57 consolidated lawsuits against the companies brought mainly by military personnel who claim they suffered damaging health effects from exposure to the contractors’ pits, where items including medical waste, paints and pesticides are burned in war zones.
“The critical interests of the United States could be compromised if military contractors were left ‘holding the bag’ for claims made by military and other personnel that could not be made against the military itself,” Titus said in a decision released yesterday in Greenbelt, Maryland.
But in March, a panel of three judges in Richmond, Virginia, over-ruled Titus. KBR was entitled to immunity “only if it adhered to the terms of the contract with the government,” Judge Henry F. Floyd wrote. “Accordingly, we hold that the district court erred in finding that KBR was entitled to derivative sovereign immunity at this time and vacate the court’s decision.”
Finally, the Court denied KBR's contention that it was entitled to dismissal based on the combatant activities exception. KBR argued that it was entitled to sovereign immunity for any claim arising out of the combatant activities of the military during time of war. The Court noted that few decisions have been issued on the combatant activities exception to the FTCA and that KBR's work treating water and handling waste on military bases may not arise out of “combatant” activity. The Court indicated that Plaintiffs are at least entitled to conduct discovery so additional facts are available to the Court in considering the issue further.
The rise in health-related concerns – asthma, chronic bronchitis and Lou Gehrig’s disease - among returning soldiers led Tom Bishop and Carol Shea-Porter, two Democratic members of Congress, to successfully lobby their fellow legislators to agree to a ban on the waste-burning practice in 2010.
Iraq is poisoned. Thirty-five million Iraqis wake up every morning to a living nightmare of childhood cancers, adult cancers and birth defects. Familial cancers, cluster cancers and multiple cancers in the same individual have become frequent in Iraq,” wrote Savabieasfahani in a paper co-authored by Al-Sabbak, Sadik Ali, O.Savabi, G. Savabi and Dastgiri in Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. “We suspect that the population is chronically exposed to an environmental agent. ”
I hope compensation is high and this does not happen again.
originally posted by: buster2010
I hope compensation is high and this does not happen again.
I hope it is high enough it drives them into bankruptcy. Every time you see something bad happening to this nation Halliburton is involved.
originally posted by: speculativeoptimist
Iraq is poisoned. Thirty-five million Iraqis wake up every morning to a living nightmare of childhood cancers, adult cancers and birth defects. Familial cancers, cluster cancers and multiple cancers in the same individual have become frequent in Iraq,” wrote Savabieasfahani in a paper co-authored by Al-Sabbak, Sadik Ali, O.Savabi, G. Savabi and Dastgiri in Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. “We suspect that the population is chronically exposed to an environmental agent. ”
www.corpwatch.org...
Sad indeed and insulting on a few levels as well. I hope compensation is high and this does not happen again. How do you vets feel about this?