''Private Warriors" is the closest thing to must-see TV that ''
And let it be noted that in doing their jobs in Iraq, he, coproducer Marcela Gaviria, and crew display uncommon braveness that only hints at what reporters stationed there must marshal every day.
What Smith does is explore the roots and implications of the contractor phenomenon, as well as bring us the sour fear that rides with private security guards who travel Iraqi roads in SUVs, like sitting ducks. How dangerous is it? He and Gaviria are asked their blood types before making a trip with one contingent.
There are as many as 100,000 civilian contractors and another 20,000 private security forces in the country who exist outside of the military chain of command and who are thus largely unaccountable to military leaders. The security cadre shows up from Russia, South Africa, and Europe, as well as the United States. Some are well-trained, others are disasters. Many are former soldiers, others are debtors desperate for cash.
With luck, they'll live to spend it. Some, like the top guards for the high-profile American firm Blackwater Security Consulting, can be paid $1,000 a day. Others, like Scott Helvenston and three colleagues at Blackwater, were killed and their charred bodies were hung from a bridge in Fallujah by insurgents last year.
Smith doggedly tries to unravel the tangled chain of contracts to determine accountability in their deaths, but comes up empty. This is a world for Kafka.
Other contractors do laundry and provide tae kwan do lessons for the troops. They offer three kinds of ice cream for dessert and cost American taxpayers a fortune. The biggest outfit, the Halliburton subsidiary of
A federal watchdog body has found that KBR had charged for $88 million of meals it had not provided during a four-month period.
More troubling are the rules the security types follow: There aren't many. ''They don't communicate in the same networks. They don't get the same intelligence information," one expert says on the program. Adds another: ''They can decide to leave when and where they want. . . . And so what you've done is put a level of uncertainty into your military operation. And military operations are not a place that you want uncertainty."