Iraq for Sale: the War Profiteers (Robert Greenwald 2006)
Posted on April 30 at 18.43, 2007 by Eric Mahleb
War is an ugly thing and the business of profiting from death is even uglier. Iraq for Sale, directed by Robert Greenwald who previously took on the Fox TV channel with Outfoxed, exposes the lies, deceit and stratagems that took place during the Iraq war to ensure that a few large corporations with ties to the Bush administration would reap billions of dollars in profit by taking over several aspects of the war support operations in Iraq.
In most cases, it would seem that these contracts were awarded without a proper and fair bidding process to corporations that are somehow connected to the current administration, and that the services that these companies offered to the soldiers in Iraq were much below the quality levels of what would normally be expected. Examples are given of terrible living conditions for the soldiers, contaminated water supplied by the company hired to purify it, substandard food served to cut costs, empty trucks driving endlessly on the roads of Iraq so that the cost of driving and of gasoline can be billed back to the taxpayers, Halliburton executives driving leased luxury cars in nearby Kuwait (used as a training centre for their employees) at a cost of 250,000 dollars per vehicle for a three year lease…the list goes on. Ultimately, Halliburton, only one of several companies that have profited enormously from the war (others are CACI, TITAN, Blackwater…), has made billions of dollars in profit since 2001, by gratuitously overcharging a Bush government (and thus the taxpayers) that was more than willing to turn the blind eye. Why isn’t anyone made accountable?
http://iraqforsale.org/
HalliburtonWatch
http://www.robertgreenwald.org/
CorpWatch: War Profiteers site
My vote: 
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4 Responses to “Iraq for Sale: the War Profiteers”
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Sicko - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
September 9, 2007 at 9.30[…] Documentaries have the capacity to expose their filmmaker’s partiality, willingly or unwillingly, in a much stronger fashion than feature films can, for the simple reason that documentaries claim to portrait reality and to expose the truth. But what is the truth? Is one person, in this case, a filmmaker, capable of exposing the entire truth of a topic? Or do they simply expose mainly one side of it, their preferred side, their own understanding of the truth, which is usually a counterpoint to a dominant view or ideology? How effectively do documentaries reach out to people who do not share the views of the filmmaker and to the people who truly need to be made aware of a different angle to a certain situation? Many decent documentaries such as Why We Fight and Iraq for Sale end up mostly preaching to the choir, which certainly makes the choir feel good about their already more-or-less established convictions, but it does not do enough to make the other side question their own beliefs. […]
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No End in Sight - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
May 18, 2008 at 9.55[…] No End in Sight, a winner of several film prizes and on the top 10 lists of many critics in 2007, differentiates itself from the multitude of other documentaries that have come out over the past few years about the Iraq war in that it focuses on why things went wrong once the war started. It does offer the usual evidence that the war had been planned for a long time, at least on the surface, by the neo-cons and that 9/11 and Sadam were just convenient excuses to put this plan into action, but this accounts for only a small part of the documentary. […]
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The Future of Food - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
June 8, 2008 at 7.02[…] But this is not new. Monsanto’s main pesticide and herbicide, which has been used widely for decades in numerous countries, is based on military technology from World War Two, particularly on nerve gas and on the famous Agent Orange. Has Monsanto ever bothered to try to really understand what this means in the long term for the people eating crops or eating the animals that eat the crops sprayed with this stuff? Probably not. As one Monsanto executive stated about genetically modified foods, their only responsibility is to sell their product and to make money, not to ensure their safety, which they regard as the responsibility of the government. Unfortunately for all of us, most of the individuals with the real power in the three branches of the government that are supposedly looking after our safety (Federal Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture, ….) are ex-Monsanto employees or are directly affiliated with the corporate world, in a manner reminiscent of the Bush’s administration’s various ties to many corporations that benefited from the war in Iraq. We live at a time when compassion and empathy are badly needed, but these are clearly not a corporation’s forte. […]
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On The Future of Food - Quiet Please - Film reviews by Eric Mahleb Says:
June 8, 2008 at 7.11[…] But this is not new. Monsanto’s main pesticide and herbicide, which has been used widely for decades in numerous countries, is based on military technology from World War Two, particularly on nerve gas and on the famous Agent Orange. Has Monsanto ever bothered to try to really understand what this means in the long term for the people eating crops or eating the animals that eat the crops sprayed with this stuff? Probably not. As one Monsanto executive stated about genetically modified foods, their only responsibility is to sell their product and to make money, not to ensure their safety, which they regard as the responsibility of the government. Unfortunately for all of us, most of the individuals with the real power in the three branches of the government that are supposedly looking after our safety (Federal Drug Administration, Department of Agriculture, ….) are ex-Monsanto employees or are directly affiliated with the corporate world, in a manner reminiscent of the Bush’s administration’s various ties to many corporations that benefited from the war in Iraq. We live at a time when compassion and empathy are badly needed, but these are clearly not a corporation’s forte. […]