“Empty flatbed trucks crisscrossed Iraq more than 100 times as their drivers and the soldiers who guarded them dodged bullets, bricks and homemade bombs. Twelve current and former truckers who regularly made the 300-mile resupply run from Camp Cedar in southern Iraq to Camp Anaconda near Baghdad told Knight Ridder they risked their lives driving empty trucks while their employer, a subsidiary of Halliburton, billed the government for hauling what they derisively called ‘sailboat fuel.’ Defense Department records show Kellogg Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, has been paid $327 million for ‘theater transportation’ of war materiel and supplies for U.S. forces in Iraq and is earmarked to be paid $230 million more. KBR’s contract with the Defense Department allows the company to pass on the cost of the transportation and add 1 percent to 3 percent for profit, but neither KBR nor the U.S. Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Ill., which oversees the contract, was able to provide cost estimates for the empty trucks. Trucking experts estimate each round trip costs taxpayers thousands of dollars.”
– Seth Borenstein, “Trucks Made to Drive Without Cargo In Dangerous Areas of Iraq,” Knight-Ridder, May 23, 2004