Mercenaries

Blackwater said to approve Iraqi payoffs after shootings

WASHINGTON — Top executives at the private military security firm, Blackwater Worldwide, authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 16, 2007 incident in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded dozens more. The shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square was the bloodiest and most controversial episode involving Blackwater in the Iraq war. At midday a Blackwater convoy opened fire on Iraqi civilians in the midst of the crowded intersection, spraying automatic weapons fire in ways that investigators later claimed was indiscriminate and even launching grenades into a nearby school.

According to former company officials, Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, as protests over the deadly shootings stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified and top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country. Company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it needed to retain its no-bid contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department. From 2004 through now, the company has collected more than $1.5 billion for its work protecting American diplomats and providing air transportation for them inside Iraq.

Four former Blackwater executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then the company’s president, had approved the bribes, and the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where Blackwater maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. One of the executives said that officials in Iraq’s Interior Ministry, which is responsible for operating licenses, were the intended recipients.

Blackwater’s strategy of buying off the government officials, which would have been illegal under American law, created a deep rift inside the company, according to the former executives. They said that Cofer Black, who was then the company’s vice chairman and a former top CIA and State Department official, learned of the plan from another Blackwater manager while he was in Baghdad discussing compensation for families of the shooting victims with U.S. Embassy officials. Alarmed about the secret payments, Mr. Black cut short his talks and left Iraq. Soon after returning to the United States, he confronted Erik Prince, the company’s chairman and founder, who did not dispute that there was a bribery plan, according to a former Blackwater executive familiar with the meeting. Mr. Black resigned the following year.

The former officials said that Mr. Black and other former CIA officers working for the company believed that Blackwater had cultivated a cowboy culture that was contemptuous of government rules and regulations, and that some of the company’s leaders — former members of the Navy Seals including Mr. Prince and Mr. Jackson — had pushed the boundaries of legality.

The four former Blackwater executives, who had held high-ranking posts at the company, would speak only on condition of anonymity. Two of them said they took part in talks about the payments; the two others said they had been told by several Blackwater officials about the discussions. In agreeing to describe those conversations, the four officials said that they were troubled by a pattern of questionable conduct by Blackwater, which had led them to leave the company.

Five Blackwater guards involved in the shooting are facing federal manslaughter charges and their trial is scheduled to start in February in Washington. A sixth guard pleaded guilty.

Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced “z”) Services, has never faced criminal charges in the case. However, a federal grand jury in North Carolina, where Blackwater has its headquarters, has been conducting a lengthy investigation into the company. One of the former executives said he had disclosed to federal prosecutors the plan to pay Iraqi officials to drop their inquiries into the shooting case. If Blackwater followed through, the company or its officials could face charges of obstruction of justice and violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribes to foreign officials.

In late 2008, the outgoing Bush administration and the Iraqi government hammered out an agreement governing the role of security contractors in Iraq. Under the new rules, security contractors lost their immunity from Iraqi laws, which had been granted in 2004 by L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the country after the U.S. invasion.

In March 2009, the Iraqis said that Blackwater would not be awarded an operating license. Two months later, the State Department replaced the company with a competing security contractor, Triple Canopy.

– edited from The New York Times, 11 November 2009
PeaceMeal,Nov/December 2009

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Blackwater’s license to kill

Federal agents investigating the September 16 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians by operatives of the Blackwater security company have concluded that 14 were victims of unjustified and unprovoked shootings. Some died in a hail of bullets as they fled. The investigators also have rejected assertions by Blackwater that its forces were defending themselves, saying there is no evidence to support that claim.

This initial glimpse into the evidence uncovered by the FBI bolsters the Iraqi government’s claim (made within hours of the shootings in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square) that the killings were criminal, as well as the findings of a U.S. military investigation that called all 17 of the killings unjustified. But that raises a crucial and complicated question: Who will prosecute the killers?

The answer may be no one. That certainly seemed to be the view of veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy, who recently reviewed the State Department’s use of private security. Kennedy and his team came back from Baghdad concluding that they were “unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors accountable under U.S. law.”

Although the FBI conclusions appear damning, each of the three potential avenues for prosecuting Blackwater have fatal flaws:

1) U.S. civilian law applies only to contractors working for or directly accompanying the U.S. military, while Blackwater works for the State Department in Iraq as “diplomatic security.” 2) Applying U.S. military law to civilians has not been tested legally, although a 2006 amendment to the Defense Authorization Act places all U.S. contractors under the Uniform Code of Military Justice — the court-martial system. 3) Iraqi law: The Iraqi government wants to prosecute the Blackwater shooters in its courts, but an order issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in June 2004 grants all contractors sweeping immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

“These legal loopholes amount, in practice, to a license to kill with impunity,” says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing Blackwater for wrongful death and war crimes in federal court over the shootings. “There is no genuine deterrence to acting unlawfully.”

Even if the Justice Department moves forward, the investigation was contaminated from the start. The State Department’s initial report on the shooting was drafted by a Blackwater contractor on U.S. government stationery. Two weeks passed before the FBI was dispatched to investigate; for two weeks, the only people looking into this crime were from a non-law-enforcment agency, the State Department, which had potential culpability of its own.

Then there is this fact: The State Department inspector general, Howard Krongard, who previously has been accused of impeding investigations into Blackwater, has direct family ties to the company. His brother, A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, former CIA executive director, this year joined Blackwater’s advisory board as a paid consultant. While at the CIA, Krongard played a role in Blackwater’s first soldier-for-hire contract in Afghanistan in 2002.

In late October, it came out that the State Department had granted “limited use immunity” to some Blackwater operatives involved in the shootings before taking their statements. The result? Some Blackwater agents reportedly have refused to answer FBI questions, and those statements cannot be used as evidence, nor can any charges be based on them.

The immunity-for-statements deal calls the State Department’s motivation into question, says military law expert Scott Horton of Human Rights First. “It seems less to be to collect the facts than to immunize Blackwater and its employees.” This makes prosecution in any venue difficult, if not impossible.

The Bush administration has overseen a radical privatization of the U.S. war machine. There are now more private contractors in Iraq — tens of thousands of them armed — than U.S. troops. At the same time, the White House has militarized the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, staffing it with private warriors from Blackwater, DynCorp International and Triple Canopy. This force, conceived as a small-scale bodyguard operation for U.S. diplomats, now constitutes a paramilitary squad thousands strong, seemingly accountable to no one.

– edited from an article by Jeremy Scahill in the Los Angeles Times, November 15, 2007. Scahill is the author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.”

– PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2007

Witnesses testify in Blackwater lawsuit

WASHINGTON - A federal grand jury investigating the security firm Blackwater Worldwide heard witnesses Nov. 27, as a private lawsuit accused the government contractor’s bodyguards of ignoring orders and abandoning their posts shortly before taking part in a Baghdad shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead. Filed in U.S. District Court in Washington DC, the civil complaint also accuses Blackwater of failing to give drug tests to its guards in Baghdad — even though an estimated one in four of them was using steroids or other “judgment altering substances.”

Two Justice Department national security prosecutors handling the Blackwater case spent much of the afternoon in the grand jury room, which is off limits to the public. Two witnesses also spent hours behind closed doors in the District of Columbia’s federal courthouse. The Justice Department says it likely will be months before it decides whether it can prosecute the guards, and it is trying now to pinpoint how many shooters in the Blackwater convoy could face charges.

According to the lawsuit filed by lawyers working with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Blackwater bodyguards had already dropped off the State Department official they were tasked with protecting when they then headed to Nisoor Square where the shootings occurred. Blackwater and State Department personnel staffing a tactical operations center “expressly directed the Blackwater shooters to stay with the official and refrain from leaving the secure area,” the complaint says. “Reasonable discovery will establish that the Blackwater shooters ignored those directives.”

The lawsuit also notes: “One of Blackwater’s own shooters tried to stop his colleagues from indiscriminately firing upon the crowd of innocent civilians, but he was unsuccessful in his efforts.”

Lead plaintiff attorney Susan L. Burke said. “We’re looking for compensatory (damages) because the people who were killed were the breadwinners in their families. And we’re looking for punitive in a manner that suffices to change the corporation’s conduct,” she added. “We have a real interest in holding them accountable for what were completely avoidable deaths.”

– edited from The Associated Press, November 27, 2007
PeaceMeal, Nov/December 2007