Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers | |
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Directed by | Robert Greenwald |
Produced by |
Robert Greenwald Sarah Feeley Jim Gilliam Devin Smith |
Starring | Bud Conyers Janis Karpinski James Logsdon Bill Peterson Shane Ratliff Edward Sanchez |
Music by | Tree Adams |
Cinematography | Nick Higgins |
Edited by | Carla Gutierrez Sally Rubin |
Distributed by | Brave New Films |
Release date
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Running time
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75 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers is a 2006 documentary film made by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films. Produced while the Iraq War was in full swing, the film deals with the alleged war profiteering and negligence of private contractors and consultants who went to Iraq as part of the US war effort.
Specifically, the film claims four major contractors - Blackwater, K.B.R.-Halliburton, CACI and Titan - were over-billing the U.S. government and doing substandard work while endangering the lives of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and their own employees. These corporations were tasked with “virtually everything except the actual killing,” including food, laundry, housing, security, intelligence gathering and interrogation.
The film starts with the events of March 2004 in Fallujah, where four Blackwater contractors were ambushed, set afire, their burned corpses dragged through the streets and then finally displayed hanging from a bridge. In interviews, two of the contractors’ families contend that Blackwater, in search of higher profit, neglected to provide proper support and protection to their employees, including maps, decent translators, an armored vehicle, and sufficient security personnel (their convoy was short a machine gunner). The families contend that with such support, their loved ones might be alive today.
Iraq for Sale then takes contractors Titan and CACI to task for providing “interrogation support” for the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. These civilian contractors were outside the chain of military command, and were never held accountable for the amply documented, unsupervised torture they initiated.
According to interviews with survivors, Halliburton subsidiary KBR was responsible for the “Good Friday Massacre” deaths of six drivers who the corporation irresponsibly put into dangerous zones - zones which were supposed to be off limits to civilians. Also, in interviews, Halliburton’s former employees charge that while the company had a sole contract to provide purified water for US troops, they actually distributed contaminated drinking water.