REVIEW: IRAQ FOR SALE

[mistertrickster]

Here's a review of Robert Greenwald's latest film I sent to my hometown paper. This is not copyrighted--use as you wish:

“IRAQ FOR SALE” SHINES HARSH LIGHT ON WAR CONTRACTORS

By Brad Radcliffe

As WWII began, President Franklin Roosevelt famously said, “I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.” Robert Greenwald’s latest documentary “Iraq for Sale” suggests our current administration seems to have exactly the opposite view.

The second largest army in Iraq is not the British or any other country in our shrinking “coalition of the willing.” It is the 25,000 employees of Blackwater, KBR, Halliburton, and CACI. Forty cents of every dollar controlled by the Pentagon now goes not to the US military, but to private contractors.

These corporations answer to no one in the chain of command. If a soldier uses excessive force, he must stand for a court-martial. A contractor simply gets sent home.

Everyone remembers the disgraceful pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. What Greenwald reveals is that fully half of the interrogators at the prison were not soldiers but employees of contracting companies, employees who took no tests, met only minimal standards and received virtually no training.

Critics used to complain about the “revolving door” as government officials morphed from public official to private consultant and back again. Now, there is no door because there’s _no wall_. Public money goes directly to private concerns run by former government cronies, under the authority of government bureaucrats who worked as top administrators of those same firms. Dick Cheney’s employment history as Secretary of Defense to CEO of Halliburton to Vice-President is but one example of this “new world order.”

Greenwald’s film leaves the viewer with a poignant sense of disillusionment—the needless deaths of beloved family members sacrificed for profits, the unconscionably shoddy work that puts our patriotic troops at risk, and the system of “cost plus” accounting that rewards companies for spending as much taxpayer money as possible.

In Iraq, Greenwald shows, some Americans are getting killed. Some others are making a killing.

[redphish]

1. Of course Bush&Co use contractors for their dirty work.

Soldiers sign an oath to conduct themselves honorably and report those that do not. This is totally against the neocon philosophy of world domination and they raking in of profits by whatever means that they feel are appropriate.

[mistertrickster]

2. That blew my mind when I found out that the interrogators at Abu Ghraib

were 50 percent contract labor.

We hire people to torture . . . unbelievable, just unbelievable.

[carzen]

3. who needs an army when you can buy one?