It's like an omen: as I'm putting the final touches on my five part blog series, "Who's Supporting Our Troops?", featuring an in-depth interview with a formerly-deployed soldier sharing her firsthand account of the KBR contaminated water scandal (this blog will run on the Progressive Future website all next week), it turns out that contractor abuse and fraud has exploded all over the blogs.

And thank heavens. Because as I have been following story after story of private contractors acting in total disregard for the health and safety of our troops, I was starting to think the American public is too jaded by the lies and deception the administration has been feeding us for the past seven years, to come together and take action.

Yet finally, this week, I am beginning to see a beacon of outrage upon the horizon...

ZP Heller reported today on the Huffington Post on a new contractor that we haven't yet heard of who is doing its part to spread the corruption and greed-motivated practices private contractors have been known for. L-3, responsible for providing the much-maligned translators to the Abu Graib prison, has made it company policy to hire unqualified personnel to perform such services as: interrogation, background checks, and intelligence gathering. You know, such menial tasks that any layperson could perform:

CorpWatch Managing Editor Pratap Chatterjee claims that L-3 fills positions with unqualified personnel simply to meet their contractual quotas. Of course, these interrogators, analysts, and screeners don't want to lose their jobs, since they are getting paid upwards of $100,000 a year. And so, as ex-Titan translator Marwan Mawiri has said, these translators are willing to say and do whatever it takes to keep their jobs safe.

Kudos to Heller for trying to fill the gap of unreported, yet incredibly pertinent, stories regarding corrosive practices going on in our name in Iraq. But what I enjoyed even more was Heller's tone of outrage in his report, an emotion that many Americans are too tired, too jaded and too overwhelmed by the woes of the world to act on:

What's it going to take for us to hold the Iraq War profiteers accountable? The Bush administration's $3 trillion war in Iraq has been the direct cause of our current recession, and yet private defense contractors continue to reap billions in profits. I'm not even talking about KBR for the moment. That loathsome Cheney-backed Halliburton subsidiary has actually been the focus of a bit of media and Congressional attention recently (though not nearly enough) for contaminating our troops' water supplies, ignoring electrical safety standards that led to troop casualties, and dodging hundreds of millions in tax payments. No, I'm talking about L-3, the second largest employer in the Iraq occupation behind KBR.

I hope that those of us who can still tap into our collective rage will check out my five-part blog series, "Who's Supporting Our Troops?" next week. Each day, I will post a new entry on the Progressive Future website, following a different theme of the testimony given to me in my interview with Rachel. And I sincerely hope those who read it will be outraged enough to take action and Call for Consequences.