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it is just too nice to. see. him. in recent years as we have been actively engaging and war thanks the government used to do is now being done by private companies food laundry and allison were services provided within the military now in iraq you still need 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 the fixed 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 possible ties to 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 us military. forty cents out of every dollar congress controls most contractors. there's more than twenty thousand private military on the prowl so the second order starforce will rock or rather skirted the out scale before it's really.

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 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 is just that second of silence on the other end of the telephone and he said you want to go i was reading the bible greek and hebrew and studying those languages and 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 that 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 saddam 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 for with seven or eight other men and then they would these are 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 person i wear no army and then the other type would be in five billion clothing i go what do you mean civilian color he was like normal pants like an enormous panther 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. you know with the local autonomy. the day i was arrested i went to work in-house what you will with that i'm an electrical engineer the. i was transported to the abu ghraib prison on january the first two thousand and four. there was a person wearing civilian clothes and giving orders. i think it belonged to private companies that feel a lot about how 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 without single core. idea of what's the purpose of their what's the purpose of the injection they gave me so that to this day i can't have any more children idea. of the what is the military using private companies to interrogate detainees and. to 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 or 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 interrogator is a private contractor. present attempts to address what i believe is a very legitimate and serious concern 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 in 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 as is the interrogation of prisoners 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 what's the khaki chain of command. the formal. decision as because if these companies in these prisons have become training grounds for torture. i was surprised by my arrest 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 and. many a year elated at me and they put their weapons in my private parts in addition to the beating that this. would live up in i could hear people screaming for help. from beating torture and the barking of dogs. there was going to

approach we have these rules. but. i don't know about what's going on. there are about. the 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 of all of them. on the job posting as it was reprinted in the washington post. on the poster here behind me and let me read it says under minimal supervision. he were under minimal supervision in two thousand and three zero 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. the world with the. money it's technology. all the instant around russia we've got the.

morning's today violence is once again flared up. these are the images the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. operations. 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 that everything you thought you knew you don't know i'm tom harpur welcome to the big

picture. the for. the for. the from. 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 wished they were right by i think his long standing contract 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 linguists 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 through first people who maybe spoke the language but was brought in but could not read it overwrite it and thought about english. and they were they will know given a test nobody was given a test i was never given this but this a was given was a phone conversation from minute to trust the us military which 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 things really translating or doing of overeating out inflating given the opinion probably eight as a result a lot of people got hurt a lot of people get killed and medicine was stuck lost because someone wants to make money and wants to have affection in his pocket.

it's. 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 abused abu ghraib very explicitly saying 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 i'm 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 and 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 work afoot that they were excluded terry officers have one thing that officer is all major military contract is have a board of directors and the senior management that is composed of senior retired military posts the balance of the way and this allows them to be able to go get contracts. possible. because we are the kinds of people. washington is a phenomenally incestuous place where retired senior officers capitol hill staffers and defense industry. you know the usual suspects come back again and again. mostly for the next. practice three years. even off my. top recipients of money from halliburton titan

kake in blackwater are the two chairmen of the committees in congress in the house of representatives that oversee military matters and spending the major corporations he's a cartel of 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. i went to 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 that 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 dining facilities and really searching for any opportunity to take on what would be traditionally military role in the using 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 any 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 we're making one hundred forty grand. across the board people lost their jobs quartermaster companies mechanic it into logistics soldiers were involved with their jobs or outsource to k.b.r. if you don't know k.b.r. you should have never been to iraq. because he are everywhere. you have hundreds if not thousands of these trucks driving north and south in 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 a man tried to trust us civilians. heard about the job out of the truck to our 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 wanted to go be in a battle or fight or flight we wanted to take over for a loser makes money reconstruct iraq his brother was in the navy and so he

always wished that he had done something like that he's just a good ole boy and he thought it was such a great cause to go and help rebuild and got a job with halliburton and he was going to go drive a truck in iraq. steve said it over there to get us financially set for the retirement to you know help your kids go through college he would take anything he thought that it would benefit his family. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so 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 know. i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

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