depressingly incompetent at every level

Since about early 2002 I've been repeatedly disappointed, shocked, and raised to indignant rants about our Administration's performance. An article this morning left me feeling just deflated where previously there would have been outrage.

It's no secret that Halliburton and it's subsidiary KBR have woefully underperformed in Iraq after being given who knows how many no-bid contracts; I just hadn't realized that negligence, overwork, or simple beauracratic inefficiency, layered on top of poor work done in the first place, was killing our soldiers.

The Pentagon has ordered electrical inspections of all buildings in Iraq maintained by KBR, a major military contractor, after the electrocutions of several United States service members.

...Officials now acknowledge that Army experts warned as early as 2004 that poor electrical work by contractors was creating dangerous conditions for American soldiers. But those warnings were largely ignored.

...Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, a Green Beret from Pennsylvania, died Jan. 2 when he stepped into a shower and was electrocuted at his base in Baghdad. His death prompted investigations this spring by Congress and the Pentagon’s inspector general into evidence that poor electrical work at facilities used by American personnel had led to other electrocutions.

...Last week [Sergeant Maseth’s family] filed a motion in Federal District Court in Pittsburgh that included a new statement from another Green Beret, Sgt. Justin Hummer of the 10th Special Forces Group, saying that he suffered electrical shocks four or five times in 2007 in the same shower where Sergeant Maseth died.

It would be easy to write this off with a glib comment about 'government contracting' if I didn't work right next to a bunch of government contracting specialists. I think they're generally insular, harboring an 'us vs. them' mentality, and the group as a whole seems to suffer from a woefully inadequate process that makes glaciers look like Indy cars, but not one of them would let something like this pass for even a moment, both out of adherence to any number of safety directives and because of their personal standards. This is just beyond the pale. Depressing.