Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers

It is astonishing what the American public has been willing to tolerate throughout this long war in Iraq. A great crime is in progress. This documentary collects the evidence of war profiteering on a scale never before seen or dreamt. As an example, U.S. taxpayers pay $100 for each washer load of clothing cleaned for our troops in Iraq by contractors who work for Halliburton. You could do that wash for $3 in quarters, but the government prefers to pay a $97 profit to the corporation that once had Vice President Cheney at its head. The clothes don’t even come back clean, but soldiers are forbidden from washing their own clothes in the sinks that are also supplied by Halliburton or subsidiaries, with water provided by Halliburton (or Kellogg, Brown & Root) that is loaded with contaminants. There are roughly 150,000 soldiers in Iraq, but there are nearly as many American civilians working for contractors, most of them doing jobs the military used to do for itself. But for any job they do, the contracted workers are paid six times what their military counterparts are paid, and that doesn’t count the profit added to every penny spent.