in recent years as we have been actively engaging in

a war. thanks the government used to do is now being done by private companies food laundry now and similar services provided within the military now in iraq you still need a lot of support mechanisms and there's just not enough military infrastructure to do that private contractors come in and they fill the gap. but i saw the contractors doing anywhere from six tanks and helicopter mechanics pretty much any job that's in the military there's a civilian contractor right there there are over one hundred thousand private contractors working in iraq kuwait and the surrounding area. this war has been privatized to a greater extent than any other war in history they're part of a multi-billion dollar industry fueled by your tax dollars an industry very much of me by the u.s. military. forty cents out of every

dollar congress controls now goes to contractors. there's more than twenty thousand private military on the ground so the second largest armed force in iraq or probably skirting the out scale the brits are on the other to. my questions are going to is in regards to private military contractors the uniform code of military justice does not apply to these contractors in iraq i asked your secretary of defense a couple months ago what law. governs their actions mr i'm going to ask him go ahead. i was hoping your answer might be a little more specific. mr rumsfeld answered that iraq has its own domestic laws which he assumed applied to those private

military contractors however iraq is clearly not currently capable of enforcing its laws much less against you know over our american military contractors i would submit to you that in this case this is one case that privatization is not a solution and mr president how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law yeah i appreciate that very much i wasn't kidding. i found out. april of two thousand and three by a phone call to say well the goodness is congratulations you've been selected for promotion to brigadier general i said well that's good news what could possibly be the bad news and he said well the bad news is your unit you'll be commanding is assisting the prisons experts with the restoration of prisons for all of iraq. and

they're already deployed and i said well can i go. and there was just the second of silence on the other end of the telephone and he said you want to go i was reading the bible in greek and hebrew and studying those languages in hebrew sort of flip naturally into arabic i was also interested in student loan repayment. you know upwards of forty thousand dollars in student loans which the army promised to repay the option available to me was to get a secret clearance to become an interrogator and i agreed to this was pretty nine eleven i didn't really expect i'd have to interrogate someone or imagine if i did it would have been a conventional war where things would have been very different i received a telephone call. from mr assad he said can you help me he said the americans took my money and they are at me very bad and i just came from abu ghraib he told me of one incident where. you know he was strip nude and they tied

a rope to his penis with seven or eight other men and then they would these were american personalities telling me they would push one man and then all of them would fall in and they'd be joking and laughing and mocking him. i would ask him who was doing this to you mr sonner and he would say well they were there were two types of people one was dressed some type of military personnel wearing no army and then the other type would be in three billion clothing i go what do you mean three billion color he was like normal pants like an enormous panther a normal shirt. so that's the first time when it struck me that there is another element being involved here in abu ghraib another type of person there. with the hans used to the day i was arrested i went to work in the house well you know with that

i'm an electrical engineer the. they have it in i was transported to the abu ghraib prison on january the first of two thousand and four. there was a person wearing civilian clothes and giving the orders. i think it belongs to private companies that feel. they put me back in the cell with my hands again and ripped my clothes off in a savage way in which. one of their strategy is is to tie a rope around the penis and cut off the circulation with obstacle course you have an idea what's the purpose of this there what's the purpose of the injection they gave me so that to this day i can't have any more children idea. what is the military using private companies to interrogate detainees and. these two companies for certain. and say see. when i saw the photographs for the first time

and i said to their commander of the criminal investigation division who is showing them to me. i said why are the translators around the prisoners why were the translators in the cellblock and he said ma'am those aren't translators those are khaki interrogators. cauchy was hired by the department of interior out of a little town in arizona called syria vista and they were hired to do database work and that contract which was sort of a blanket contract that allowed them to do a whole bunch of different things was used to do interrogation abu ghraib. so what was a contract to do clerical work all the work turned out to be getting information not from a computer but from human beings in a notorious prison in iraq at the time of the scandals in the spring of two thousand and four roughly fifty percent of the interrogate is a private contractor it's. a present attempt to address what i believe is

a very legitimate and serious concern and come to light recent days back to the use or misuse of contractors in the treatment of detainees in iraq quite simply madam president this amendment would prohibit the use of contractors in interrogations of prisoners and offensive military operations it just seems to me abundantly clear that we cannot hire private contractors to perform a function here at the governmental inherently sensitive indeed inherently explosive and for which there must be accountability. is the interrogation of prison corporations exist to make a profit and in when they're hired to do jobs whether it's the provision of water. you know interrogation of prisoners their job is to get as much work as possible make as much profit as possible now that doesn't work in the field of intelligence

period you do not put personnel who do not have allegiance and one hundred percent loyalty to. america you do not put them in sensitive key government. i'm activities like military intelligence gathering it creates a conflict too because we were uncertain you know we knew what our chain of command was that was very clear and we were forced to memorize it and follow it but once the khaki chain of command. the formal. decision was because of these companies and these prisons have become training grounds for torture. i was surprised by my wrists when the next day i was transported to abu ghraib did they took the bag off my head. and i found myself in front of a military man interrogators

a group of about eight or ten. many a year in aid at me and they put their weapons on my private parts in addition to the beating that this. would live off and i could hear people screaming for help. from beating torture oh and the blocking of guards. there was going to approach we have these rules. but we're not going to spend that much time making sure that you. know about what's going on. there are about a bill with a contract tour is safely in an office in the united states somewhere so no direct supervision and to just simply say well i guess they got out of control i don't know what they were taking their instructions from it seems to excuse it all of them i have reproduced an excerpt on the job posting as it was reprinted in the

washington post i made ten on the poster here behind me and let me read it says under minimal supervision when. he were under minimal supervision in two thousand and three pentagon essentially panicked and a very desperate secretary of defense did whatever he had to do very very quickly to try to get more intelligence and that meant running out and hiring a bunch of contractors who didn't know what they were doing and putting them wrongly in the chain of command military intelligence that's what they did they were desperate.

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you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for lengthly you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harvey welcome to the big

picture.

the contracting business in iraq is very very lucrative. i was getting really angry i mean especially because i knew that a lot of these prisoners that i saw with ease injuries from from abuse and torture really hadn't done anything they were part of the insurgency they were just picked up for no reason at all who were interrogating taxi drivers and pizza delivery guys . it was just you know we call them average off it using methods such as torture and also using people who are not qualified to do this job has resulted bad

information and therefore. problems for national security and for the soldiers because you're you're getting information that's no good in a lot of areas where you start noticing a lot of you know a lot of hostility against american soldiers it's not because the soldiers are doing a lot of long things it's because something maybe the communication that had been transmitted to them is going to transmit it to them probably and professionally as surface so most of us interest these i think they wish they were high i think his long standing contracts providing critical information technology and support services for some of our nation's most valuable defense assets. under a contract with the u.s. army's intelligence and security command titan is over four thousand linguists that provided valuable mission critical services titan is the company that provides the link was and continues to drive the linguists throughout iraq they're the biggest

provider in this business. they were so desperate to get people to fill these positions as translators that they were just hiring anybody that. approached somebody and obviously had command of the english language in addition to the arabic language or farsi or whatever it may have been the toughest people who maybe spoke the language but. it's broken but could not read it over right. english. and they were uttered they will know given a test no one was given a test i was never given a test but this i was given was a phone conversation from in a. small it was supplied by did work closely with titan all year long while i was in iraq. and i can say that a lot of the translators weren't trained at all there was no managers there was no soldiers agent there was no training there was no follow up even a system of if these teams really translating or doing a reading out inflating given their opinions probably as a result

a lot of people got hurt a lot of people get killed and their son was stuck last because someone wants to make money and wants to have affection in his pocket. here you have the m.p.'s who engage and participated in horrific conduct are being held accountable for their actions why aren't they u.s. contractors the civilian corporate personnel why aren't they being held accountable for their actions if you are a u.s. soldier and you heard an iraqi civilian and that becomes know it you will be court martialed but if you are a u.s.

contractor and you kill iraqi civilian that becomes known you will be sent home and then you can come back the following week and you can work for a different contractor so here we have the two ringleaders or abuse abu ghraib very explicitly sang and sit in many cases what was happening was they were being ordered to abuse these detainees by civilian contractors these guys are in prison for eighteen years total between the two of them and there's no contractors in prison. i asked your secretary of defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions and this we're going to ask him . are any of these allegations being investigated. there my recollection is and i think it's ok to say this is that the investigations are ongoing and that. time will tell somehow these contractors have leverage power in washington and the government feels like they want to protect

these people maybe they want to protect these the security of these contracts and they want to protect them from prosecution also if the managers and most of the people we dealt with were foot that they were exploratory officers have one thing that officer is all major books the contract is have a board of directors and the senior management that is composed of c.b. and retired military posts the balance the way and this allows them to be able to go get contracts as. possible. as we are told. washington is a phenomenally incestuous place where retired senior officers capitol hill staffers and defense industry men you know the usual suspects come back again to get. us really next. three years to.

keep me off my. top recipients of money from halliburton titan cauchy and blackwater are the two chairmen of the committees in congress and the house of representatives that oversee know what terry matters and spending the major corporations he's cartel about uppity corporations they've figured out how to legally buy influence.

i would echo the words of pope john paul the second profit by itself is not a sufficient motivation for business endeavors you're operating in the realm of greed you're not operating the realm of morality. which iraq and came back was so heartbreaking was that i found that we weren't that we weren't always the good guys and it was very disillusioning for me because i'd grown up with this like dream of america what america was. and i saw a dream and upgrade and i wasn't become i felt heartbroken i feel like i didn't know what it was to be an american because i saw what i had thought america was destroyed and disgraced.

when they went into iraq a subsidiary of halliburton which is k.b.r. kellogg brown and root. on the scene immediately. they were logistics people they were mechanics and they were also contracted to speak in the process of setting up shower points laundry facilities mess halls dining facilities and really searching for any opportunity to take on what would be traditionally military role when they use these contractors you gain a lot of efficiencies you gain a lot of expertise and specializations it was devastating because they took over my job when i could be actively becoming a better soldier and be becoming more proficient in my job and set up on guard duty to wait around while k.b.r.

contractors are doing the job that i had to train them to do and there was so much money being given away over there to contractors they were very often sit down with soldiers particularly from reserve or national guard same and you know what do you make it three thousand dollars a month over here you know i make that in a week it's certainly affected retention because i don't know i don't know why anyone any military person when re-enlist. to do the same job when they could get out of the military and make you know six times the money and do the same job talk about how you know and in eight more months going to be out of here and making a hundred forty grand. across the board people lost their jobs quartermaster companies mechanic and any logistics soldiers were involved with their jobs or outsource to k.b.r. if you don't know k.b.r. you have never been to iraq. because he are everywhere.

you have hundreds if not thousands of these trucks driving north and south from these routes every day bringing supplies to other military bases. most of the people who are trying for. foreign workers they are from pakistan. india. sometimes there would be americans driving trucks u.s. civilians. heard about the job through another truck driver friend in calexico california we were sitting there waiting for a load he told me this was his last load he was going over scenes from there you know i sent my resume and. i thought i was really going to be doing a lot of reconstruction in iraq. well i could see me holy fuel maybe to

a place i had loaders and dozers you know. we never were to go. direct. his brother was in the navy and so he always wished that he had something like a good old boy. thought it was such a great cause to go and help rebuild got a job with halliburton he was going to go drive a truck in iraq. they're. financially set for retirement. because. he would take anything but that it would benefit his family. today. these are the images.

mission. critical patients three. three. three. three. three.

three. british. market. happening to the global economy.