Posted on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 - 11:18 pm:

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WASHINGTON - Water supplied to a U.S. base in Iraq was contaminated, and the contractor in charge, Halliburton, failed to tell troops and civilians at the facility, according to internal documents from the company and interviews with former officials.

Although the allegations came from Halliburton's water-quality experts, the company once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney denied that there was a contamination problem at Camp Junction City in Ramadi.

"We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated," said a July 15 memo by William Granger, the official for Halliburton's KBR subsidiary who was in charge of water quality in Iraq and Kuwait.

"The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River," Granger wrote in one of several documents.

Granger also wrote that there may have been problems at other U.S. bases in Iraq.

He said that water testing "is required per our statement of work" but that "I have yet to find an installation that does the required testing, let alone has such documents to support their testing activities."

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