The Secret Lives of Contractors

By Allen McDuffee, AlterNet. Posted October 3, 2008.

Last month, Iraqis commemorated the one-year anniversary of the Nisour Square massacre, where operatives of private security contractor Blackwater USA opened fire on Iraqi civilians, killing 17 and injuring another two dozen. We have come to know the names of such companies -- Blackwater, Halliburton, KBR -- but rarely have we been able to put a face with the name.

Lee Wang has changed that. Her documentary, God is My Safest Bunker puts a face on military contractors, but it is not Erik Prince on Blackwater or Dick Cheney on Halliburton. Instead, Wang introduces us to the scores of Filipinos, Nepalese, Indians and other TCNs -- jargon used by government contractors for workers known as "third country nationals" -- who provide the bulk of labor for American contractors. Not Americans and not Iraqis, TCNs are the workers from other countries who risk much, not for wealth, but in many cases for survival.

God is My Safest Bunker tracks the difficult decisions and lives of workers from nations commonly referred to as "third world" countries. Relying on extensive fieldwork in the Philippines and Iraq, smuggled video of contract workers, archival footage, and meticulous research, Wang has produced a documentary that simultaneously addresses issues of migration, war, foreign policy, labor, human rights and global and national economics. Wang traveled to the Philippines four times, twice in 2005 and twice in 2007, and to Iraq in late 2006. Much of her time in Iraq was spent at Camp Marez, a tiny outpost near Mosul where a couple hundred Filipinos work 12-hour days on average, without days off, often for $300 a month.

God is My Safest Bunker, under contract with PBS and expected to premiere in 2009, was originally a 30-minute student film called Someone Else's War, which Wang made as graduate journalism student at University of California, Berkeley. The short earned Wang a reputation among filmmakers, winning an award at the Tribeca Film Festival and selected as one of the top five shorts by New York magazine.

At Berkeley, Wang studied under noted documentary filmmaker Jon Else, whose films include Cadillac Desert, Sing Faster and The Day After Trinity. For Else, Someone Else's War was a student film because "a student made it, but it rose well above the ceiling nearly all student films hit." Else said, "Every once in a while, you suspect there is a student who is smarter than you are and I think that's true of Lee."

Else, who first met Wang in a first-year seminar and who later had Wang as a teaching assistant, said that one of her greatest attributes is that "nothing gets past Lee. She will catch everything, but she'll do it quietly and because of that, she can produce accounts that are quite complex while doing it simply."

The 30 year-old Manhattan native, whose younger brother is also a filmmaker, wrote for MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" in 2003 and 2004 where she covered the early parts of the Iraq invasion and now produces short videos on the campaign trail for Newsweek. Wang's small frame and calm demeanor may have misled viewers at the prestigious Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, where her film was featured earlier this month. According to Else, "Lee's tough. Very tough."

And while Wang might be tough, she opts for subtlety over the often in-your-face approach of her former MSNBC boss. She could have told us about the cases where workers from Nepal or Bangladesh thought they were going to Dubai to build a hotel only to deplane and find themselves in Baghdad. Or she could have told us about the gross human rights violations that provided water from the Tigris when bottled water ran out.

But she didn't.

Instead, Wang told a story that, in one way or another, was recognizable to nearly any American.

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Allen McDuffee writes about politics and Middle East affairs. He blogs at governmentalityblog.com and is currently working on a book project, No Child Left Unrecruited. He lives in Brooklyn.

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