politics

The People vs. the Profiteers via Digby:

The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. “Inside, there were 15 human bodies,” he recalls. “A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again.”

…It is not unheard of for trucks in a war zone to perform hearse duty. But both civilian and U.S.-military regulations state that once a trailer has been used to store corpses it can never again be loaded with food or drink intended for human consumption…

But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice—ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red. Another former KBR employee, James Logsdon, who now works as a police officer near Enid, says he first saw R-89 about a week after Conyers’s grisly discovery. “You could still see a little bit of matter from the bodies, stuff that looked kind of pearly, and blood from the stomachs. It hadn’t even been hosed down. Afterwards, I saw that truck in the P.W.C.—the public warehouse center—several times. There’s nothing there except food and ice. It was backed up to a dock, being loaded.”