Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, Nov 3 2006 (IPS) — With just four days to go before the U.S. mid-term congressional elections, the director of a scathing new documentary about the outsourcing of personnel and supplies for the Iraq war says he hopes audiences will view it “as a tool for discussion”.

Robert Greenwald’s “Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers” is a relatively succinct 75 minutes long. “I wanted it to be short so that it can be discussed by audiences after it’s shown,” Greenwald told IPS.

“I think that it’s going to take three things to start to address these issues about war profiteering: public pressure, public shame and finally, legislation,” he said.

“The short length of the film follows the lead of my other films, such as ‘Outfoxed’ (about the journalistic ethics of Fox News). I make all of my films as a tool for discussing the issues of the day. Church groups, military groups, civic organisation groups – all of these have shown my films and had discussion sessions afterwards,” he said.

“Iraq For Sale” can be described as an anti-war film in the spirit of Errol Morris’ “The Fog of War” or Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″. U.S. history and political manipulation are the themes, respectively, of Morris’ and Moore’s films, but Greenwald’s thesis is that the George W. Bush administration’s love of privatisation is slowly and irrevocably destroying the democratic ideals of transparency and accountability.

Through interviews with Iraqi detainees, U.S. military personnel, former contract employees, and U.S. government whistleblowers like Bunnatine Greenhouse, former chief contracting officer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with charts showing the massive profits made by the four corporations highlighted in the film (Blackwater, CACI, Halliburton, and TITAN), Greenwald launches an assault on the advisability of outsourcing the goods and services needed to wage war to civilian-run corporations.

For example, CACI received a 60-million-dollar contract for U.S. Army intelligence services. Part of that money was parceled out to contract interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison complex, at least one of whom would later be implicated in the torture of prisoners there. (The company has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.)

Artists portraying war profiteers as evil is nothing new. Seventy years ago, in 1936, Robert Sherwood won a Pulitzer Prize for his anti-war play “Idiot’s Delight”, whose villain is an arms manufacturer (believed to be based on the German Krupp family) who gladly sells his wares to whatever government will buy them.

In Greenwald’s view, the “bad guys” are now U.S. corporations. Without question, the film’s most compelling section is its middle, in which Greenwald presents evidence that many of the alleged torturers of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison complex were private contractors.

Greenwald interviews two former U.S. military interrogators at Abu Ghraib, Anthony Lagouranis and Joshua Casteel, who describe a litany of mistakes in the U.S. intelligence-gathering process at the prison. “We were interrogating taxi drivers and pizza delivery guys,” Casteel says in the film.

“I was getting really angry because I knew that a lot of these prisoners that I saw with those injuries from abuse and torture really hadn’t done anything,” Lagouranis adds.

“Why aren’t the U.S. contractors, the civilian corporate personnel, why aren’t they being held accountable for their actions?” asks Shareef Akeel, a civil rights attorney who represented an Abu Ghraib detainee.

During the interviews with Lagouranis and Casteel, Greenwald shows some of the now notorious photos of naked Iraqi prisoners in distorted physical positions. Their interrogators also appear in some of these pictures, both military and private.

“What I have testimony of is that the private contractors (at Abu Ghraib) had more knowledge of the intelligence-gathering process than the Army soldiers stationed there,” Greenwald told IPS.

“Some of the private contractors had previous experience working at Guantanamo (Bay, the U.S. Army-run detention centre for alleged terrorists in Cuba) and that most of them were older than the soldiers. The Army soldiers were trained primarily to guard the prisoners. They were not trained to gather military intelligence.”

U.S. Army Brigadier General Janice Karpinski, who was assigned to the Abu Ghraib prison complex, notes in the film that, “The contractor (of the private interrogators at Abu Ghraib) is safely in an office in the U.S. somewhere with no direct supervision…. It seems to excuse all of that (allegations of torture).”

The subject of the U.S. government and torture was again in the news recently when Vice President Dick Cheney told a radio interviewer that the controversial interrogation method known as “water-boarding” (which gives the sensation of drowning to a detainee) was a “no-brainer”.

“Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” radio host Scott Hennen asked Cheney. “Well, it’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticised as being the vice president of torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in,” Cheney responded.

Cheney is a former CEO of Halliburton, whose subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root has received more money for rebuilding and troop support services in Iraq than any other contractor. In total, Halliburton received more than 18.5 billion dollars, including one no-bid contract worth seven billion dollars for restoring the country’s oil infrastructure.

According to one Defence Contract Audit Agency report, Halliburton overcharged the federal government by 1.4 billion dollars for its services, “and I’m sure that figure has climbed”, Greenwald told IPS.

TITAN got a two-billion-dollar contract for military services, much of which was for providing 4,000 linguists in Iraq and the surrounding area. Lagouranis says he did not like to work with TITAN linguists “because they were terrible”.

Since the U.S.-led coalition forces invaded Baghdad in 2003, not one piece of war profiteering oversight legislation has been passed in the U.S. Congress. Two candidates – amendments 3313 and 3292, which would have prohibited the use of contractors in Iraq and curtailed war profiteering, respectively- were voted down. Not a single Republican legislator supported either amendment.

For those viewers wondering if the makers of “Iraq for Sale” made an honest effort to get a response from the corporations named in the film, it closes with numerous film snippets of Greenwald and his colleagues working the phones.

“We were not able to speak with anybody,” Greenwald said. “We got one Blackwater guy on his cell phone, but he was in a rush to get off. Occasionally, we got an e-mail or a return telephone call from a media representative for these corporations, but we got nothing substantial from them which we could use in the film.”