Samuel Loewenberg / Politico | July 8, 2008

For KBR, Danny Langford was a PR nightmare.

At a recent Senate hearing, Langford, in his Texas drawl, told of the broken bags of chemicals and the shiny particles strewn throughout the water treatment plant where he worked in Iraq for KBR, an American contractor. Along with another former employee, Langford alleged that the highly carcinogenic substances sickened them and perhaps hundreds of other workers and U.S. soldiers.

KBR has denied any wrongdoing. But with Democrats in charge on Capitol Hill, congressionally sponsored hearings about misconduct have become commonplace. So the company is fighting back by joining with other contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan to launch a new public relations and lobbying initiative to make its case.

“This is, in essence, a response to the steady drip of negative front-page media reports about contractors and growing public concerns about the effectiveness of the federal contracting process,” said David Marin, who runs the new lobbying and public relations campaign aimed at improving the images of government contractors.

Formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, the global engineering giant was until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton, the controversial oil services company once headed by Vice President Cheney. And KBR, which won more than $16 billion in U.S. government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, continues to draw fire.

That is when folks such as Marin come in handy. He’s the contracting industry’s point man charged with heading off criticism — via phone, Web and old-fashioned shoe leather.

As the former Republican staff director of the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee, Marin is no stranger to congressional investigations. He has now set up shop at the Podesta Group, where he lobbies for government contractors.

His client is a trade group blandly called the Professional Services Council. Its membership list is anything but innocuous, however; it includes many of the companies — Blackwater USA, Boeing, DynCorp International and KBR — that have been at the center of the front-page controversies.

Marin acknowledges “the anti-contractor climate on Capitol Hill and the incidents of contract mismanagement that have spawned it.”

And on the Hill, the pounding continues. With its tales of waste, malfeasance and negligence, the Democratic Policy Committee’s periodic hearings on contracting abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan have become something of a morbid Friday morning ritual. Congressional Republicans have mostly kept quiet on the contracting abuse issue, while the Bush administration maintains that contractors provide vital functions.

“Rather than accepting its responsibility and doing right by those that it injured, KBR is trying to escape accountability for its actions,” charged the committee’s chairman, Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.).

In a hearing last month, Langford told the senators how the dust was scattered around the Qarmat Ali water treatment plant near Basra in Southern Iraq, where he was a technician in 2003. He and the other workers were given no protective equipment. And within weeks, he began having nosebleeds and spitting up blood.

The dust is believed to have been sodium dichromate, a highly carcinogenic chemical now rarely used in the United States. It was being used in Iraq to keep oil pipelines from rusting.

The Emergency Election Sale is now live! Get 30% to 60% off our most popular products today!