Here’s an interesting story in the news from today’s Houston Chronicle about a lawsuit against US contractor KBR’s activities in Iraq. The story revolves around an incident in 2004, during which a military contractor truck convoy iwas ambushed by insurgents, leading to six civilian truck drivers being killed and others injured – and whether or not someone should have stepped in and proactively stopped the convoy.
According to the Chronicle, US District Judge Gray Miller previously ruled that the US Army had “control” over KBR’s activities, meaning that once the military made the decision to send the convoy out, the private contractor no longer had effective decision-making authority to stop the order. However, an appellate court subsuquentlu sent the case back for him to Miller, and that now, the “legal landscape may look different after months of pretrial information gathering.”
For example (quoting from the article):
Internal KBR e-mails from April 8 and 9 suggest many KBR supervisors did not believe they were constrained by military orders — a constraint that is central to KBR’s defense in the federal case. KBR declined to discuss individual e-mails for this story.
Some examples of e-mails on the question of who had the authority to decide whether convoys proceeded:
• “You, your team or any individual (as you have previously indicated to everyone in theater), have the right to say no to anything that is unsafe or where security is not available.”— T.J. Lopez, KBR senior vice president for government and infrastructure.
• “We need to work with the Army without a doubt relative to stopping convoys, but if we in management believe the Army is asking us to put our KBR employees in danger that we are not willing to accept then we will refuse to go . . . We cannot allow the Army to push us or to put our people in harm’s way …” — Tom Crum, KBR Middle East regional chief operating officer.
• “All — no KBR convoys will move tomorrow, 10th April 04. I will inform the military chain of command.” — KBR supervisor Craig Peterson to employees.
• “KBR will not execute convoys tomorrow, 10 April 04 . . . I appreciate the challenges that this decision causes your operation. We cannot continue to put these drivers at such great risk …” — Peterson to military commanders.
Read sure to read the rest of the article to hear KBR’s side of the story (i.e.: these internal emails don’t tell the entire story) and leave us a comment on what you think about the merits of the case.
Interesting – but I think a good question is whether the Army thought it was in control…Clearly KBR thought it was in control but that seems ridiculous unless the Army led KBR to think it had ultimate decision making power.