You would never imagine that California would need or want a Blackwater mercenary training facility. And you'd be right: California and the residents near where Blackwater wants to set up shop really don't want Blackwater. After all, the Marines at Pendleton, a few miles down the road, keep us pretty safe.

Blackwater West, as they call it, will be created and run by the same folks who brought us four dead Americans with corpses strung up from a bridge in Fallujah. But as with so much else Blackwater does, the wishes of the people matter not one whit. It's all about a buck and the ideology of fear.

I spent Thursday through Saturday night at the UNITE HERE Midwest convention in Detroit, joining Noel Beasley, the co-manager of the 45,000-strong organization, for workshops on how to use Iraq for Sale. Every so often in life, we get back much more than we give. This was certainly the case in Detroit. The 300 or so people at the convention are from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Missouri. They are the elected leaders of locals from those states. Each of them has a story about life in today’s corporatocracy that would have curled my hair, if I’d had any. While we showed them the long and twenty minute versions of the film and listened to them tell us they’ll use the film to make change this fall, they taught me about life in America today.

These folks have heart and soul and smarts. (For a view of the soul, see the photo of the choir decked out for Motown.) About fifteen percent have relatives who either have or do serve in the armed forces in Iraq. Many had been the targets of recruitment by Halliburton and others to work in Iraq so they were very familiar with the lies and the reality. They commented on the recruiting ads and pushes that promise high wages for no risk, because you’ll work far behind the lines. But as one Vietnam veteran commented, in this war there are no lines, so how can you work behind them?

Having lived with the making of the film, with considerable exuberance of over 3,000 of you who gave freely of your funds to assure that the issue of war profiteering is front and center right now, seeing the openings in DC and Philadelphia proved the point: a film lifts up a story as can no other medium.

I took the red eye for the second time in five days to be in DC for film-related work. I was there last Thursday to show a clip to the Democratic Policy Committee and for a quick meeting with Senators Reid and Dorgan. The Senators, led by Senator Dorgan, really understand that informing the public of the need for accountability by the Bush Administration is key. And only the Senate Democrats (with their House colleagues leading where the odious House rules allow) have held hearings and raised the issue. The film tells the general public not about the policy issues associated with single party rule in Washington, but about the human stories, the tragedies and the undermining of national security that come with lack of oversight and transparency. In short, the film is the human side of the terrific work Senator Dorgan and others have been conducting in the dry, isolated environment of Washington, D.C.

(Originally on Huffington Post)

It's worth pausing to recall the insidious nature of Halliburton's role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As with so much related to the Bush/Cheney Administration, the truth is stranger than fiction. We did not need Oliver Stone for this one; Robert Greenwald's fact-based documentary tells it better than any novelist could imagine.