Halliburton worker killed in Iraq - Tim Smith

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Halliburton worker killed in Iraq
4/10/2004 1:14 PM
By: Associated Press

AZTEC, N.M. (AP) -- A Halliburton employee from New Mexico has been killed in Iraq.

The family of Tim Smith says the Aztec man was killed yesterday while working as a truck driver for the company.

Houston-based Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Gist confirmed the death of a truck driver. She would not release his name or any details on the cause of his death.

She says Halliburton is grieving the loss of a co-worker. She says the truck driver was working for a project team supporting the U.S. Army Material Command LOGCAP III Project.

http://www.news24houston.com/content/headlines/?ArID=27004&SecID=2

impoverished area.

'nuf said.That poor family.

DAMN YOU, PRESIDENT BUSH*!!

n/t

Cheney will sleep peacefully.

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What for? They are all mercs. Making money on the deaths of other
people. The ILLEGAL occupation of a sovereign country.

Screw that...

it's not like he was some greasy greedy fatcat. Sometimes people take jobs like that because they actually need them to make a living. If it was some high-up money grubber executive I wouldn't have much sympathy but I still feel for a guy doing a job like driving a truck.

Unlike the poor G.I. from Iowa making $1,000.00 per month.. according to Neocons then the kid from Iowa died for Freedom or his country?

Sometimes the self-righteousness and utter lack of compassion that one finds here take my breath away, though I should be used to it by now.

I visited Aztec a few days ago, while interviewing for a job in the area. It's far from a wealthy town, and that region as a whole is pretty poor. Many people on the nearby reservations don't even have electricity or running water. Decent jobs are not easy to find. So it's not hard to imagine how a working stiff from there would take a hazardous job that pays well. He--or she--might not have any other option. Even the Great Unwashed need food and a place to live.

This reminds me of all the rants we got a year ago from those claiming that anyone who would do something so dastardly as join the military deserves whatever they get. It had apparently escaped these people's attention that not everyone has the same options in life. Some young people are not burdened with the choice of which college to attend of the eight that accepted them, or whether they should plan on being a doctor, lawyer, or stockbroker. For many young people in this country, the military is just about their only way out of poverty.

some of those huge profits for the family.
Somehow I doubt that the Board of Directors is On-Site over there.

Posted on Sat, Apr. 10, 2004

Associated Press

AZTEC, N.M. - A Halliburton employee from New Mexico has been killed while working in Iraq.

The family of 40-year-old Tim Smith told KOB-TV in New Mexico that he was killed Thursday while driving a truck for the company.



KBR designs and builds liquefied natural gas plants, refining and processing plants and production facilities and pipelines. KBR's non-energy business does engineering and construction for governments and civil infrastructure customers.

http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/state/8403118.htm?1c

Are pretty creepy. Definite fascist overtones, in my opinion.

First logo -- Who is that one?

Scott Custer, a principal at Custer Battles, an international risk-management firm with some 1,300 employees in Iraq, explained that his firm subscribes to the "faster camper" theory of security. The reference is to the musty joke about the ravenous bear that invades a campsite: To survive, it is not necessary to outrun the bear, only the slowest camper.

The security firms cannot stop attacks from happening, Mr. Custer said. So his company tries, for instance, to avoid large and conspicuous convoys, which are particularly vulnerable to attacks. He also refuses to rely entirely on stealth - say, by asking clients to drive at normal speeds to blend in with the ordinary flow of traffic.

"I focus on speed," Mr. Custer said, which means getting through dangerous areas as quickly as possible. He also said that routes are often scouted out the day before and he tries to avoid the hours between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m., because roadside bombs are generally put out at night. "You don't want to be the first big target," he said.

Still, officials at several security companies said that the action in Iraq - and the potential for a quick profit - has drawn rank opportunists to Iraq.

"You've got a whole host of fly-by-night and disreputable companies," said Mr. Custer. "They're terrible. They get people killed." With that in mind, industry professionals said that the most important factor in the risk-management trade was choosing and training the right people. All candidates are subjected to a rigorous vetting in order to weed out people with a history of everything from domestic violence and drug use to committing a felony. And yearly salaries - which insiders say can range anywhere from $70,000 to $250,000 - are set high enough to compensate the best in the business. Hotheads and swashbucklers need not apply.

Christopher Beese, a director of ArmorGroup, which reports 800 employees in Iraq, described typically promising candidates this way: "They don't expect to win medals; they don't expect to win glory. They expect an opportunity."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/04/weekinreview/04glan.html

Briton Told of Fears in E-Mail - Killed in Iraq UK Foreign Office


6:27pm (UK)


By Gemma Collins, PA News


A Briton shot dead while working in Iraq as a security guard had sent an e-mail to friends in the United States just hours earlier telling them of the worsening situation, it emerged tonight.

Former soldier Michael Bloss, 38, sent the message to friends at the Colorado ski resort where he had spent several years teaching the disabled to ski.

“We are expecting to be overrun tonight, and we may have to fight our way to a safe haven. Unfortunately all the safe havens are already under attack,” he wrote on Wednesday.

“I don’t wish to alarm you. We’ll probably be OK! I’ll e-mail when I’m safe.”

more
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=2760318


This guy worked there

Briton 'shot dead in Iraq'


Apr 9 2004


A former soldier who was working in Iraq as a security guard has been shot dead.

Michael Bloss, 38, who had served in the Parachute Regiment, was working for an American company.

His father, Peter, of Bridgend, south Wales, told BBC Radio Wales's Good Evening Wales programme his son had got the contractors he was guarding to safety but was then shot himself.

Mr Bloss, whose wife died last year, said his son had been working in Colorado in the United States as a ski instructor since leaving the Parachute Regiment several years ago.

"At the end of the season he was taken on by this company as a security guard," he said. "They obviously had a contract of sorts working in Iraq and he finished up there."
more

http://icealing.icnetwork.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=14134253&method=full& ...

Goff is a former US Army Special Forces sergeant. He recently posted an article at Mike Ruppert's www.fromthewilderness.com web site giving his POV on the contractor/mercenary issue. Unfortunately it's for subscribers only so you either have to pay the subscription fee or wait a while until they make it available for non-subscribers.

Anyway here's a snip from Goff's article

Convoys are indispensable in sustaining an occupying military force, and they have been identified by the Iraqi guerrillas as the key vulnerability for US forces. The US is transferring the most high-risk activities to these privatized troops to keep most of the actual military, to the greatest degree possible, behind the wire and more or less out of harm's way.10.This force protection imperative is driven by both the utter loss of battlefield initiative and by the political liability of the ever-amplified GI body count.

All this further reinforces my own assessment that the US is… to coin a phrase, in very deep shit in Iraq. And they are compounding that immersion with even more blunders, including the outsourcing of combat. I am opposed to the occupation, period, but even from the perspective of someone who thinks bloody imperial conquest is okay, this is going from bad to worse.

<snip>

On the combat end, Blackwater USA is mostly ex-SEALs with a few former SWAT cops thrown in, run by a blustering hyper-macho ex-SEAL named Gary Jackson. One of the victims of the Fallujah ambush – a WWF-looking body-builder-type – had boasted to a reporter staying in his hotel in Baghdad that he preferred hand-to-hand combat so he could see his quarry eye to eye. When I was running a Special Forces A-Detachment, this kind of talk would have sent me seeking a way to reassign you out of my team.

But it's part of that whole right-wing culture of militarism, one that is pimped aggressively by the entertainment media to our young, who have no notion of its fascistic origins.

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/040604_mercs.html

Good to hear Stan Goff's opinion on this.

One of the victims of the Fallujah ambush – a WWF-looking body-builder-type – had boasted to a reporter staying in his hotel in Baghdad that he preferred hand-to-hand combat so he could see his quarry eye to eye.

Guess he found "hand to hand combat" ?

it is revolutionary, by that i mean honest.

the German GSG-9 was that country's official counter-terrorism police, not some private security firm for hire??

http://www.mpri.com/ (Note the MPRI logo at the top of the page, the one with the sword.) This is the parent company of L3 Communications, for which Linda Daschle, wife of our Senate Minority Leader, is a Washington lobbyist. See: http://www.indyweek.com/durham/2003-07-23/cover.html

Had no idea she was doing mercs.

Not that it really matters, the Senator continues to morph into Joe Lieberman before my eyes. It's like there's something in the water up there....

Is there a site with numbers of American non-military fatalities in Iraq? I have found sites that present this question, but haven't found a site that knows how many non-military Americans are in Iraq, or how many have been killed.

I'm starting to keep track. Mercenaries are not counted by our government as casulties of war.

Old Mafia saying

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