More War Profiteering: Defective M249 machine guns

[unhappycamper]

Lawsuit: Contractor approved bad gun parts
By Charles Wilson - The Associated Press
Posted : Wednesday May 26, 2010 18:55:42 EDT

INDIANAPOLIS — A former employee of an Indiana defense contractor has filed a whistleblower lawsuit claiming the company ordered him to approve parts for machine guns used by troops that didn’t meet quality standards, and that he was fired for complaining about it.

In his lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Evansville in February 2009 and unsealed in March, Andrew T. Pool accuses Dugger-based Northside Machine Company of fraud and wrongful termination. He is seeking reinstatement with back pay and unspecified damages.

In a court filing Wednesday, the company contends that it never told Pool to falsify test results and that Pool never complained to management before he was fired. It asked a judge to dismiss his lawsuit.

~snip~

According to a 2006 report by the Center for Naval Analyses, a federally funded research group that studies military matters, 30 percent of troops surveyed reported that the M249 had stopped firing during combat, a higher percentage than with any other weapon included in the report. Problems with the light machine gun and other weapons were reported during the July 2008 battle in Wanat, Afghanistan, in which nine U.S. troops died and 27 were wounded.

Army spokesman Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings Jr. declined to comment on any possible link between such weapons failures and alleged substandard parts, citing the ongoing litigation. The Virginia-based Center for Naval Analyses also declined to speculate about any such connection and said its report hadn’t diagnosed the underlying causes of complaints about the M249.

[ShortnFiery]

1. Billions upon billions of dollars a year are made by our American Corporations focusing

on the primary goals of DEATH and DESTRUCTION.

What could Americans manufacture if we shut down this MASSIVE multi-billion dollar industry? :shrug:

http://yorick.infinitejest.org:81/1/img/card-weapons_of_mass_destruction_usa.jpg

[pinboy3niner]

2. In this case, the company's casual attitude toward quality...

apparently served to assure that the weapons would be rendered harmless.

[izquierdista]

3. I'm with the company on this one

The worse Americans weapons work, the sooner the American Empire can be over. If I recall correctly, not one of the munitions from Oskar Schindler's factory worked right either.

[Scuba]

6. Interesting analogy....

... suggests our war machine was comparable to Hitler's. I suppose the gray line is somewhere along the lines of how the military is deployed. It also suggest's that most American's would qualify as "the good German", heads in the sand, believing the lies because it's easy to do so.

Not a very pretty picture, but not entirely inaccurate. Damn, I hope we're better than that.

(edited for grammar)

[proteus_lives]

8. Lame nazi comparison.

[Scuba]

4. Shameful, criminal.

Blame the Politicians who sent them into battle, prosecute them for war crimes, but don't disarm our innocent troops.

[OneTenthofOnePercent]

5. Isn't the M249 made by FN Herstal, a Belgian company?

[Blue_Tires]

7. there needs to be a wholesale audit of defense contracts...