Things are going just perfectly in Iraq.

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 Halliburton officials.

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

This is getting ridiculous. Halliburton feeds troops spoiled foods. Halliburton overcharges 188,000 meals per month. Halliburton fails US Army audit, forced to give back $42 million.

One of the more bizarre villains in an Ian Fleming “James Bond” story once said, “Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. But three times, Mr Bond, is enemy action.”

William Granger, the Halliburton/KBR executive in charge of water purity wrote in a July 15 memo:

We exposed a base camp population (military and civilian) to a water source that was not treated,"

In a succeeding memo he wrote:

"The level of contamination was roughly 2x the normal contamination of untreated water from the Euphrates River,"

The company's former water treatment expert at Camp Junction City said he discovered the problem last March, a statement confirmed by his e-mail the day after he tested the water. While bottled water was available for drinking, the contaminated water was used for virtually everything else, including handwashing, laundry, bathing and making coffee, said water expert Ben Carter of Cedar City, Utah. Another former Halliburton employee who worked at the base, Ken May of Louisville, Ky., said there were numerous instances of diarrhea and stomach cramps — problems he also suffered.

They take untreated water from the Euphrates River. I guess they didn’t get the memo from Iraq. (“Please be advised that since you Americans destroyed our water treatment stations and sewage pumping plants, we will henceforth be using the Euphrates for disposing of our nightsoil.”)

Senator Byron Dorgan, from North Dakota, will be holding some hearings on the matter. I don’t think Sen Dorgan ever served in the military, but apparently he understands the coffee tastes better if the latrines are placed downstream of the mess facilities. Sen Dorgan said Democrats were acting on their own because they had not been able to persuade committee chairmen in the Republican-run Senate to investigate.

This is not surprising, I guess. It’s an established scientific fact that nitrogen breathers have a high tolerance for coliform bacteria.

Just what our troops in Iraq need. Republican water. Full of shit.