Kellogg, Brown and Root

Busted Business Bureau

Amy Do and Blender Bluid continue on our season-long journey into private military contracting! Avarice incarnate with a healthy heap of political parasitism, we're talking about the origins of KBR. Do you know how to build a nuclear power plant? No? Who gives a hoot! Let's try it anyway! Along the way we'll get 100,000 meals to throw out, Blender Bluid's RuPaul impression, and of course more war profiteering than you previously thought imaginable. It is still nuts to me that we're having the exact same conversation in different fonts all these years later re: KBR's failures, waste, fraud and abuse.

Amy's recording remotely on a USB microphone which is why she sounds different. Additionally, Casey went nuts on some of the audio editing and I'm SO excited for y'all to hear this one.

Follow @BlenderBluid on socials, keep Amy Do in your thoughts, please clap for Casey Synesael, and plzzzzz vote for me on the Chicago Reader Awards starting 12/13! https://chicagoreader.com/best-of-chicago/2023-ballot/#//

SOURCES:

1) I made it up

2) THE TRANSFORMATION OF DON LUCE, Ted Lieverman, HistoryNet.com (lol), 2017

3) Saigon Is Investigating ‘Tiger Cage’ Cells at a Prison, New York Times, 1970

4) 4 South Vietnamese Describe Torture in Prison ‘Tiger Cage’, New York Times, 1973

5) Here's the link to the 1970 Life Magazine with the story/Tom Harkin's pics: https://books.google.com/books?id=jVUEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

6) Donald Sanders Luce (1934-2022): Exposed the Truth About the Tiger Cages, Mark Ashwill, Vietnam Full Disclosure/Veterans for Peace, 2022

7) Recalling Don Luce, the high-profile Vietnam War critic who did PR for a Falls soup kitchen, Mark Sheer, Niagara Gazette, Nov 2022

8) American Innocence, Robert N. Strassfeld, Case Western Reserve University School of Law Scholarly Commons, 1997

9) American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity by Christian G. Appy, 2015 (where the Don Luce interview about KBR's cages being 'in every way worse than the original ones'

10) Brown & Root helped pave way for Houston's growth, David Hunn, Houston Chronicle 2016

11) The Candidate from Brown and Root, Robert Bryce, The Texas Observer, October 2000

12) Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq by T. Christian Miller, May 2007

13) Brown & Root, one of the world's largest construction..., Gary Taylor, United Press International, 1981

14) here's that GAO Balkans report titled "Army Should Do More to Control Contract Cost in the Balkans https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA382598.pdf

15) Outsourcing War, An inside look at Brown & Root, the kingpin of America's new military-industrial complex, Anthony Bianco and Stephanie Anderson Forest, 2003

16) Mesothelioma.com Halliburton Page: https://www.mesothelioma.com/asbestos-exposure/companies/halliburton-company/

17) Inspector General of the DOD report "Hurricane Relief Costs on the Navy Construction Capabilities Contract": https://media.defense.gov/2019/Aug/22/2002174066/-1/-1/1/D-2008-097.PDF