Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

SEPTEMBER 16, 2007, approximately 12:08 p.m., Nisour Square, Baghdad, Iraq: It was a steamy hot day, with temperatures reaching 100 degrees. The heavily armed Blackwater convoy entered the congested intersection in the Mansour district of the Iraqi capital. The once upscale section of Baghdad was still lined with boutiques, cafes, and art galleries dating back to better days. The ominous caravan consisted of four large South African-made “Mamba” armored vehicles with 7.62-millimeter machine guns mounted on top.¹ For Iraqi police, it had become a standard part of their workday in occupied Iraq to stop traffic to make room for U.S. VIPs, protected by heavily armed private soldiers, to blaze through. Ask U.S. officials and they’ll say the reason was to prevent an insurgent attack on U.S. convoys. More often, though, the Iraqi police did this for the safety of Iraqi civilians who risked being gunned down merely for getting too close to the most highly valued lives in their country—those of foreign occupation officials.

As the Blackwater convoy was entering the square that day, a young Iraqi medical student named Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie was driving his mother, Mahasin, in the family’s white Opal sedan. They had just dropped off Ahmed’s father, Jawad, a successful pathologist, near the hospital where he worked. They then had gone on their way to run errands, including picking up college applications for Ahmed’s sister. The plan was to finish up and return later to pick up Jawad. As fate would have it, they found themselves stuck near Nisour Square. The Rubaies were devout Muslims and were fasting in observance of the holy month of Ramadan. Ahmed was multilingual, a soccer fan, and was in his third year of medical school, where he was training to become a surgeon. Medicine was in his DNA. Like his father, Ahmed’s passenger that day, his mother, was also a doctor—an allergist. Jawad says the family could have left Iraq, but they believed they were needed in the country. “I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq,” he said.²

Ali Khalaf Salman, an Iraqi traffic cop on duty in Nisour Square that day, remembers vividly the moment when the Blackwater convoy entered the intersection, spurring him and his colleagues to scramble to stop traffic. But as the Mambas entered the square, the convoy suddenly made a surprise U-turn and proceeded to drive the wrong way on a one-way street.³ As Khalaf watched, the convoy came to an abrupt halt. He says a large white man with a mustache, positioned atop the third vehicle in the Blackwater convoy, began to fire his weapon “randomly.”⁴

Khalaf looked in the direction of the shots, on Yarmouk Road, and heard a woman screaming, “My son! My son!”⁵ The police officer sprinted toward the voice and found a middle-aged woman inside a vehicle holding a twenty-year-old man who had been shot in the forehead and was covered in blood. “I tried to help the young man, but his mother was holding him so tight,” Khalaf recalled.⁶ Another Iraqi policeman, Sarhan Thiab, also ran to the car. “We tried to help him,” Thiab said. “I saw the left side of his head was destroyed and his mother was crying out, ‘My son, my son! Help me, help me!’”⁷

Officer Khalaf recalled looking toward the Blackwater shooters: “I raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to stop the shooting.”⁸ He says he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer.⁹ The young man’s body was still in the driver’s seat of the automatic vehicle and, as Khalaf and Thiab stood there, it began to roll forward, perhaps because the dead man’s foot remained on the accelerator.¹⁰ Blackwater guards later said they initially opened fire on the vehicle because it was speeding and would not stop, a claim disputed by scores of witnesses.¹¹ Aerial photos of the scene later showed that the car had not even entered the traffic circle when it was fired upon by Blackwater, ¹² while the New York Times reported, “The car in which the first people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of his vehicle.”¹³ Thiab explained, “I tried to use hand signals to make the Blackwater people understand that the car was moving on its own and we were trying to stop it. We were trying to get the woman out but had to run for cover.”¹⁴

“Don’t shoot, please!” Khalaf recalled yelling.¹⁵ But as he stood with his hand raised, Khalaf says, a gunman from the fourth Blackwater vehicle opened fire on the mother gripping her son and shot her dead before Khalaf’s and Thiab’s eyes.¹⁶ “I saw parts of the woman’s head flying in front of me, blow up,” Thiab said. “They immediately opened heavy fire at us.”¹⁷ Within moments, Khalaf says, so many shots had been fired at the car from “big machine guns” that it exploded, engulfing the bodies inside in flames, melting their flesh into one.¹⁸ “Each of their four vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street,” Thiab recalled. “When it was over we were looking around and about fifteen cars had been destroyed, the bodies of the killed were strewn on the pavements and road.”¹⁹ When later asked by U.S. investigators why he never fired at the Blackwater men, Khalaf told them, “I am not authorized to shoot, and my job is to look after the traffic.”²⁰

The victims were later identified as Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie and his mother, Mahasin. Ahmed’s father, Jawad, has a brother, Raad, who worked in a nearby hospital where victims of the shooting were being taken. “He heard the shots,” Jawad recalls. “It was a battle, a fight, a war. And, of course, it didn’t occur to him that my wife and my son were the victims—among the victims of the incident.”²¹ Raad “went to the morgue, and the person who was responsible for the morgue told him that they received sixteen bodies as casualties from the incident that day. They were all identified, identifiable, except for two. Two bodies completely burnt…. They were put in black plastic bags.”²² Raad suspected that it could be Ahmed and Mahasin but, he said, “my heart didn’t want to believe it.”²³ He and his wife drove to Nisour Square and found a badly burnt white sedan. The license plate was not on the vehicle, but Raad’s wife found an imprint of the numbers in the sand. Raad called Jawad and began reading the numbers on the vehicle and confirmed his worst fears.²⁴

Jawad raced to the morgue, where he viewed the charred bodies. He identified his wife through her dental bridge and his son by the remains of one of his shoes.²⁵ In all, Jawad says, there were some forty bullet holes in their vehicle.²⁶ He said he never returned to claim the vehicle because he wanted “it to be a memorial to the painful event caused by people who, supposedly, came to protect us.”²⁷

That attack on Ahmed and Mahasin’s vehicle spiraled into a shooting spree that would leave seventeen Iraqis dead and more than twenty wounded.

After Ahmed and Mahasin’s vehicle exploded, sustained gunfire rang out in Nisour Square as people fled for their lives. In addition to the Blackwater shooters in the four Mambas, witnesses say gunfire came from Blackwater’s Little Bird helicopters. “The helicopters began shooting on the cars,” Khalaf said. “The helicopters shot and killed the driver of a Volkswagen and wounded a passenger” who escaped by “rolling out of the car into the street,” he said.²⁸ Witnesses described a terrifying scene of indiscriminate shooting by the Blackwater guards. “It was a horror movie,” said Khalaf.²⁹ “It was catastrophic,” said Zina Fadhil, a twenty-one-year-old pharmacist who survived the attack. “So many innocent people were killed.”³⁰

Another Iraqi officer on the scene, Hussam Abdul Rahman, said that people who attempted to flee their vehicles were targeted. “Whoever stepped out of his car was shot at immediately,” he said.³¹

“I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on the road to escape being shot,” said Iraqi lawyer Hassan Jabar Salman, who was shot four times in the back during the incident. “But still the firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about ten leaping in fear from a minibus—he was shot in the head. His mother was crying out for him. She jumped out after him, and she was killed.”³²

Salman says as he entered the square that day he was driving behind the Blackwater convoy when it stopped. Witnesses said some sort of explosion had gone off in the distance, too far away to have been perceived as a threat. He said Blackwater guards ordered him to turn his vehicle around and leave the scene. Shortly after, the shooting began. “Why had they opened fire?” he asked. “I do not know. No one—I repeat, no one—had fired at them. The foreigners had asked us to go back, and I was going back in my car, so there was no reason for them to shoot.”³³ In all, he says, his car was hit twelve times, including the four bullets that pierced his back.

Mohammed Abdul Razzaq and his nine-year-old son, Ali, were in a vehicle immediately behind Ahmed and Mahasin, the first victims that day. “We were six persons in the car—me, my son, my sister, and her three sons. The four children were in the back seat,” Razzaq said.³⁴ He recalled that the Blackwater forces had “gestured stop, so we all stopped…. It’s a secure area, so we thought it will be the usual: we would stop for a bit as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at the cars with no exception.”³⁵ He said his vehicle “was hit by about thirty bullets. Everything was damaged: the engine, the windshield, the back windshield, and the tires.³⁶

“When the shooting started, I told everybody to get their heads down. I could hear the children screaming in fear. When the shooting stopped, I raised my head and heard my nephew shouting at me, ‘Ali is dead, Ali is dead!’”³⁷

“My son was sitting behind me,” he said. “He was shot in the head and his brains were all over the back of the car.”³⁸ Razzaq remembered, “When I held him, his head was badly wounded, but his heart was still beating. I thought there was a chance and I rushed him to the hospital. The doctor told me that he was clinically dead and the chance of his survival was very slim. One hour later, Ali died.”³⁹ Razzaq, who survived the shooting, later returned to the scene and gathered the pieces of his son’s skull and brain with his hands, wrapped them in cloth, and took them to be buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. “I can still smell the blood, my son’s blood, on my fingers,” Razzaq said two weeks after his son died.⁴⁰

In all, the melee reportedly lasted about fifteen minutes.⁴¹ In an indication of how out of control the situation quickly became, U.S. officials report that “one or more” Blackwater guards called on their colleagues to stop shooting.⁴² The word “cease-fire” “was supposedly called out several times,” a senior official told the New York Times. “They had an on-site difference of opinion.”⁴³ At one point a Blackwater guard allegedly drew his gun on another. “It was a Mexican standoff,” said one contractor.⁴⁴ According to Salman, the Iraqi lawyer who was in the square that day, the Blackwater guard screamed at his colleague, “No! No! No!” The lawyer was shot in the back as he tried to flee.⁴⁵

As the heavy gunfire died down, witnesses say, some sort of smoke bomb was set off in the square, perhaps to give cover for the Blackwater Mambas to leave, a common practice of security convoys.⁴⁶ Iraqis also said the Blackwater forces fired shots as they withdrew from the square. “Even as they were withdrawing, they were shooting randomly to clear the traffic,” said an Iraqi officer who witnessed the shootings.⁴⁷

Within hours, Blackwater would become a household name the world over, as news of the massacre spread. Blackwater claimed its forces had been “violently attacked”⁴⁸ and “acted lawfully and appropriately”⁴⁹ and “heroically defended American lives in a war zone.”⁵⁰ “The ‘civilians’ reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies.”⁵¹ In less than twenty-four hours, the killings at Nisour Square would cause the worst diplomatic crisis to date between Washington and the regime it had installed in Baghdad. Though Blackwater’s forces had been at the center of some of the bloodiest moments of the war, they had largely operated in the shadows. Four years after Blackwater’s first boots hit the ground in Iraq, it was yanked out of the darkness. Nisour Square would propel Erik Prince down the path to international infamy.

A Deadly Pattern

Even though tens of thousands of mercenaries have deployed in Iraq, private security forces faced no legal consequences for their deadly actions in the first five years of the Iraq occupation. As of Spring 2008, not a single one had been prosecuted for a crime against an Iraqi. In fact, they seldom faced any public outcry from Iraqi officials. Within the Bush administration they were either praised or unmentioned. In Congress, privatized war was almost a nonissue despite the efforts of a few prescient legislators who realized the threat. The belligerent politicians who did pay attention primarily did so to win even more business for the war contractors. Media coverage of mercenary activities in Iraq was sporadic and incident-oriented. Almost no one was looking at the bigger picture. But following Nisour Square, Blackwater and other mercenary firms suddenly lost their fiercely guarded covert status.

While the shooting in Nisour Square put the issue of private forces in Iraq—and Blackwater’s name specifically—on the front pages of newspapers around the world, this was hardly the first deadly incident involving these forces. What was new was that the pro-U.S. Iraqi government responded powerfully. Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, Iraq’s Interior Ministry announced that it was expelling Blackwater from the country; Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called the firm’s conduct “criminal.” ⁵² For the Iraqi government it was the final straw.

The Baghdad government’s anger would be understandable even if the only incident involving Blackwater were Nisour Square. But this was a four-year pattern, one that had intensified in its lethality the year preceding the killing of the seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad. And, particularly enraging to the Iraqis, there had been no consequences for the company’s actions. Contractors in Iraq reportedly had a motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.”⁵³ As one armed contractor informed the Washington Post, “We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night.”⁵⁴

That is what apparently happened after another fatal Blackwater incident. On Christmas Eve 2006, inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, Andrew Moonen,⁵⁵ an off-duty Blackwater operative, had just left a holiday party. Witnesses said he was drunk as he walked through the “Little Venice” section of the zone,⁵⁶ where he encountered Raheem Khalif, an Iraqi bodyguard of Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi.⁵⁷ “Between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m., the Blackwater contractor, carrying a Glock 9 mm pistol, passed through a gate near the Iraqi Prime Minister’s compound and was confronted by the Iraqi guard, who was on duty,” according to a U.S. Congressional investigation. “The Blackwater contractor fired multiple shots, three of which struck the guard, then fled the scene.”⁵⁸

Blackwater officials confirmed that within days they whisked the contractor safely out of Iraq, which they say Washington ordered them to do.⁵⁹ Iraqi officials labeled the killing a “murder.”⁶⁰ Blackwater said it fired the contractor, but as of early 2008, he had yet to be charged with any crime. A year after the incident, Erik Prince would say that Blackwater had gotten Moonen’s security clearance revoked, which Prince said meant Moonen would “never work in a clearance capacity for the U.S. government again,” or that it would be “very, very unlikely.”⁶¹ But weeks after the fatal shooting, Moonen was rehired by a Defense Department contractor and was back working on a U.S. government contract in the Middle East.⁶²

Representative Dennis Kucinich, a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, suggested that by facilitating Moonen’s secret departure from Iraq, “There’s a question that could actually make [Blackwater’s] corporate officers accessories… in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who’s committed a murder.”⁶³ According to a memo from the U.S. Embassy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after the shooting, Iraqi Vice President Abdul-Mahdi tried to keep the story under wraps because he believed “Iraqis would not understand how a foreigner could kill an Iraqi and return a free man to his own country.”⁶⁴

Six weeks later, on February 7, a Blackwater sniper shot and killed a guard with a bullet through the head at the state-funded Iraqi Media Network and then proceeded to snipe two other guards who responded to the initial shooting.⁶⁵ The Iraqi government investigated the incident, as did the media network, which concluded, “On Feb. 7, members of Blackwater opened fire from the roof of the Ministry of Justice building, intentionally and without any provocation, shooting three members of our security team which led to their deaths while they were on duty inside the network complex.” ⁶⁶ But the U.S. government, relying on information from Blackwater, concluded that the sniper’s actions “fell within approved rules governing the use of force.”⁶⁷ Blackwater says its forces were fired upon, a claim contested by witnesses and the Iraqi government. Neither the U.S. Embassy nor Blackwater interviewed any of the Iraqi witnesses.⁶⁸

In May 2007, Blackwater forces engaged in back-to-back deadly actions in a Baghdad neighborhood near the Iraqi Interior Ministry, according to a report by Steve Fainaru and Saad al-Izzi of the Washington Post.⁶⁹ In one incident, Blackwater forces fired on an Iraqi vehicle they said had veered too close to their convoy, killing a civilian driver. As with the September 16 shooting, witnesses said it was unprovoked. In the ensuing chaos, the Blackwater operatives reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between Blackwater and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles. It might have become even bloodier if a U.S. military convoy hadn’t arrived on the scene and intervened. A day before that incident, in a nearby neighborhood, Blackwater operatives found themselves in a nearly hourlong gun battle that drew in U.S. military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. U.S. sources said the Blackwater forces “did their job,” keeping the officials alive.⁷⁰

Shortly after Nisour Square, Ambassador Ryan Crocker said, “I’m the ambassador here, so I’m responsible…. Yes, I certainly do wish I’d had the foresight to see that there were things out there that could be corrected.”⁷¹ By that point, however, evidence of a serious problem had become impossible to ignore.

According to the Washington Post, by early June 2007, three months before Nisour Square, “concerns about Blackwater had reached Iraq’s National Intelligence Committee, which included senior Iraqi and U.S. intelligence officials, including Maj. Gen. David B. Lacquement, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, who heads the Interior Ministry’s intelligence directorate, called on U.S. authorities to crack down on private security companies. U.S. military officials told Kamal that Blackwater was under State Department authority and outside their control, according to notes of the meeting. The matter was dropped.”⁷²

Iraqi officials alleged that there had been at least six deadly incidents involving Blackwater in the year leading up to Nisour Square.⁷³ In all there were ten known deadly shootings involving Blackwater from June 2005 to September 2007.⁷⁴ Among these was a February 4, 2007, shooting allegedly resulting in the death of Hana al-Ameedi, an Iraqi journalist, near the Foreign Ministry; and a September 9, 2007, shooting during which five Iraqis were killed near a government building in Baghdad. There was also a September 12, 2007, shooting that wounded five people in eastern Baghdad.⁷⁵

“We tried several times to contact the U.S. government through administrative and diplomatic channels to complain about the repeated involvement by Blackwater guards in several incidents that led to the killing of many Iraqis,” said Kamal.⁷⁶ However, U.S. Embassy spokesperson Mirembe Nantongo said, “We have no official documentation on file from our Iraqi partners requesting clarification of any incident.”⁷⁷ But that statement was contradicted by another U.S. official, Matthew Degn, who served as a liaison to the Iraqi Interior Ministry until August 2007. Degn told the Washington Post that Iraqi officials had sent a flurry of memos to Blackwater and U.S. officials well before the September 16 shootings and had been rebuffed in their requests for action. “We had numerous discussions over [Iraqi government] frustrations with Blackwater, but every time [Iraqi officials] contacted the [U.S.] government, it went nowhere,”⁷⁸ Degn said.

“Blackwater Provides a Valuable Service”

The day after the Nisour Square shootings, the U.S. State Department ordered all non-U.S. military officials to remain inside the Green Zone, and diplomatic convoys were halted. It was a stark reminder of how central Blackwater was to the U.S. occupation. As one Iraqi observer joked, the Green Zone became the “Green Zoo.”⁷⁹ The Iraqi government, acting as though it was in control of the country, announced that it intended to prosecute the Blackwater men responsible for the killings. “We will not allow Iraqis to be killed in cold blood,” Maliki said. “There is a sense of tension and anger among all Iraqis, including the government, over this crime.”⁸⁰

But getting rid of Blackwater would not prove to be so easy. Four days after being grounded, Blackwater was back on Iraqi streets. After all, Blackwater is not just any security company in Iraq; it is the leading mercenary company of the U.S. occupation. It first took on this role in the summer of 2003, after receiving a $27 million no-bid contract to provide security for Ambassador Paul Bremer, who headed the Coalition Provisional Authority from May 2003 to June 2004. Since then, it has kept every subsequent U.S. Ambassador, from John Negroponte to Ryan Crocker, alive. It protected Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she visited the country, as well as scores of U.S. Congressional delegations. From its original Iraq contract to late 2007, Blackwater had won $1 billion in “diplomatic security” contracts through the State Department alone.⁸¹

Blackwater’s presence on Iraqi streets days after Maliki called for its expulsion served as a potent symbol of the utter lack of Iraqi sovereignty. Maliki quickly found himself under heavy U.S. pressure to back off his initial demands of expulsion and prosecution. While Rice immediately called the Iraqi prime minister to apologize, she made a point of emphasizing publicly that “we need protection for our diplomats.”⁸² A few days later, Tahseen Sheikhly, a representative of Maliki’s government, stated, “If we drive out this company immediately, there will be a security vacuum. That would cause a big imbalance in the security situation.”⁸³ Given the carnage of September 16, it was a difficult statement to wrap one’s head around.

In a telling 180-degree turn, Maliki swiftly agreed to withhold judgment on Blackwater’s status, pending the conclusion of a “joint” U.S.-Iraqi investigation. But he was also under intense pressure from Iraqis, with leading political and resistance figures demanding that Blackwater leave immediately. Clearly aware of this, while visiting the United States a week after the shootings, Maliki went so far as to call the situation “a serious challenge to the sovereignty of Iraq” that “cannot be accepted.”⁸⁴

Despite Maliki’s wavering, back in Baghdad there seemed to be great and genuine determination to bring the perpetrators of the Nisour Square slaughter to justice. An investigative team made up of officials from Iraq’s Interior, National Security, and Defense ministries said in a preliminary report that “the murder of citizens in cold blood in the Nisour area by Blackwater is considered a terrorist action against civilians just like any other terrorist operation.”⁸⁵ But, as with other deadly incidents, Iraqi investigators claimed that they had received little or no information from the U.S. government and were being denied access to the Blackwater operatives involved in the shootings. A U.S. official appeared to dismiss the validity of the Iraqi investigation, telling the New York Times, “There is only the joint investigation that we have with the Iraqis.”⁸⁶

Still, Iraqi officials announced their intent to bring criminal charges against the Blackwater forces involved in the shooting, and the Iraqi ministries’ report stated, “The criminals will be referred to the Iraqi court system.”⁸⁷ Abdul Sattar Ghafour Bairaqdar, a member of Iraq’s Supreme Judiciary Council, the country’s highest court, declared, “This company is subject to Iraqi law, and the crime committed was on Iraqi territory, and the Iraqi judiciary is responsible for tackling the case.”⁸⁸

Unfortunately, things were not quite so simple.

On June 27, 2004, the day before Bremer skulked out of Baghdad, he issued a decree known as Order 17.⁸⁹ This directive granted sweeping immunity to private contractors working for the United States in Iraq, effectively barring the Iraqi government from prosecuting contractor crimes in domestic courts. The timing was curious, given that Bremer was leaving after allegedly “handing over sovereignty” to the Iraqi government. The immunity conferred by Order 17 continues to this day and was firmly in effect at the time of Nisour Square. Industry representatives and U.S. officials have long argued that Iraq does not have a fair and stable judiciary system in place to handle prosecutions of foreign private contractors. Regardless of the legitimacy of that claim, if the United States took contractor crimes seriously, it would have pursued avenues of alternative prosecution or sanction of alleged killers—if for no other reason than to show the Iraqis that the United States would not simply shrug off their concern and outrage. But the fact is that not a single armed contractor, for Blackwater or any other firm, has ever been charged in any court anywhere with any crime against an Iraqi. As a result, these forces operate in a climate of total impunity, which some observers allege is deliberate and serves a larger purpose for the occupation. “The fact that they have immunity means that there is not even the possibility of them fearing any consequences for acts of killing and brutalization,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “None of this is by chance; their very purpose is to brutalize and strike fear into the people of Iraq.”⁹⁰

At the time of the Nisour Square shooting, Blackwater was one of more than 170 mercenary firms offering their services in Iraq. While it was viewed widely as the most elite of these companies, there were two U.S. competitors, DynCorp and Triple Canopy, that would gladly have stepped in to fill its shoes in one of the most lucrative private security contracts in modern history. But what happened behind the scenes in the days and weeks after September 16 spoke volumes as to how deeply embedded Blackwater was in the occupation apparatus and how important Erik Prince’s company had become to the White House. Blackwater “has a client who will support them no matter what they do,” H.C. Lawrence Smith, deputy director of the industry-funded Private Security Company Association of Iraq, told the Washington Post shortly after Nisour Square.⁹¹

The dirty open secret in Washington was that Blackwater had done its job in Iraq: to keep the most hated U.S. occupation officials alive by any means necessary. “What they told me was, ‘Our mission is to protect the principal at all costs. If that means pissing off the Iraqis, too bad,’” recalled former U.S. occupation adviser Ann Exline Starr, who was protected in Iraq by both Blackwater and DynCorp.⁹² This “mission” encouraged conduct that placed U.S. lives at an infinitely higher premium than those of Iraqi civilians, even in cases where the only Iraqi crime was driving too close to a VIP convoy protected by Blackwater guards. “Those guys guard my back,” Ambassador Ryan Crocker said shortly after Nisour Square. “And I have to say they do it extremely well. I continue to have high regard for the individuals who work for Blackwater.”⁹³ He was hardly alone in coming to the company’s defense. “Zero individuals that Blackwater has protected have been killed” in Iraq, said Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry, who represents Blackwater’s home state of North Carolina. “That is, I think, the operable number here.”⁹⁴ “That’s a perfect record,” said Connecticut Republican Chris Shays, asserting Blackwater didn’t “get any credit for it for some reason.”⁹⁵

As media scrutiny of the Nisour Square shootings intensified and Congressional Democrats woke up to the activities of Blackwater in Iraq, it appeared for a moment as though the company’s days in Iraq were numbered. Even on a practical level, U.S. officials had to be concerned at the prospect of Washington’s bodyguards becoming greater targets than the personnel they were tasked with keeping alive.

A few days after Nisour Square, another scandal involving Blackwater erupted, this one centered in Washington and highlighting the close relationship between the company and the Bush administration. Allegations surfaced that weapons brought into Iraq by Blackwater may have ended up in the hands of the Kurdish militant group the PKK, which is designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the State Department.⁹⁶ According to a September 18 letter sent by Representative Henry Waxman to State Department Inspector General Howard “Cookie” Krongard, a federal investigation into whether Blackwater “was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq” was obstructed by Krongard, who, Waxman charged, was a “partisan” operative with close ties to the Bush administration.⁹⁷

Waxman cited a July 2007 e-mail from Krongard in which he ordered his staff to “stop IMMEDIATELY” cooperating with the federal prosecutor investigating Blackwater until Krongard himself could speak to him. Waxman said Krongard’s actions had caused “weeks of delay” and that by subsequently assigning a media relations staffer instead of an investigator to aid the prosecutor, Krongard had “impeded the investigation.”⁹⁸ It was later revealed that Krongard’s brother, Alvin “Buzzy” Krongard, had accepted a position as a paid adviser to Blackwater, a position from which he resigned after Waxman’s committee exposed it. ⁹⁹ (As discussed in Chapter 3, Alvin Krongard, who served as the number-three man at the CIA, was a player in helping Blackwater win its first private security contract in Afghanistan in 2002.) Howard Krongard subsequently resigned from his State Department post in late 2007.¹⁰⁰ Blackwater, for its part, denied that it was “in any way associated or complicit in unlawful arms activities” and said it was cooperating in the federal investigation.¹⁰¹

While Blackwater got hammered for these scandals in the media, behind the scenes, a series of events was unfolding that reeked of a major-league cover-up of the Nisour Square massacre, an effort that appeared to emanate from some of the highest levels of power in Washington. As Waxman prepared for Erik Prince’s October trip to Capitol Hill, he discovered that after the shooting, the State Department had ordered Blackwater “to make no disclosure of the documents or information” regarding its Iraq security contract without written authorization.¹⁰² Waxman protested to Rice, saying Congress had a “constitutional prerogative” to investigate Blackwater and telling her, “You are wrong to interfere with the committee’s inquiry.”¹⁰³ Under fire, the State Department shifted its position the day Waxman wrote to Rice, saying that the restriction applied only to classified information.¹⁰⁴

Unlike many private companies working for the occupation in Iraq, Blackwater reported directly to the White House, not to the military. They “are really an arm of the administration and its policies,” charged Kucinich.¹⁰⁵ Both Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker made clear that without Blackwater and its ilk, the occupation would not be tenable. “I have a great deal of respect for their work,” said Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte, who was guarded by Blackwater during his time in Iraq. Blackwater, he said, “kept me safe—to get my job done.” Without them, he said, “the civilians of the Department of State would not be able to carry out our critical responsibilities in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.”¹⁰⁶ Nicholas Burns, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, said, “We have lots of people in Baghdad, it’s our largest embassy in the world, and they have to be well protected.”¹⁰⁷

While George W. Bush had, at times, displayed a willingness to throw his allies overboard when his own survival—or that of his pet policies—was on the line, Blackwater would not join Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet in the open waters of collateral damage. “Blackwater provides a valuable service,” Bush said after the Nisour Square massacre. “They protect people’s lives. And I appreciate the sacrifice and the service that the Blackwater employees have made.”¹⁰⁸ What was probably dawning on members of the Bush administration at this point was that, like it or not, they needed Blackwater. Even if it was politically expedient to let them go, the occupation of Iraq would have been practically impossible to carry on without them. The company and its ilk had become that integral to the military operations of the United States.

Prince of the Hill

The first time Erik Prince was summoned to appear before Congress to answer questions about Blackwater’s activities, in February 2007, he sent his lawyer. That was before most people had ever heard of his company. After Nisour Square, he had no choice but to show up in person. On October 2, 2007, the world would meet Mr. Prince.¹⁰⁹ Security was heavy inside the Committee room, and a line of would-be spectators and journalists stretched through the corridors of the Rayburn building. Many would be corralled into an overflow room, but most remained in the halls. Only a few dozen people were permitted to witness the event in person, among them the family members of Blackwater operatives killed in Fallujah, who were suing Blackwater for wrongful death. The entire seating section behind the leather chair where Prince would sit was blocked off with signs that read, “Reserved for Blackwater USA.” Several of those chairs would remain empty for the duration of the hearing.

Prince arrived surrounded by lawyers and advisers, including Barbara Comstock, a veteran Republican operative and crisis communications expert, and a number of senior Blackwater executives, among them Prince’s right-hand men, vice president Bill Matthews and president Gary Jackson. Prince’s consigliere would repeatedly interrupt the proceedings to huddle the advisers around the Blackwater chief like a sports team plotting its next play. In preparation for his appearance that day, Prince’s lawyers had enlisted the services of BKSH, the political consulting arm of Burson-Marsteller, a PR giant controlled by one of the barons of spin, Mark Penn.¹¹⁰ It was an interesting choice, given that Penn was Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, a man some observers have called “Hillary’s Rove.” Perhaps more telling was the fact that BKSH was led by Charles Black Jr., an adviser to both presidents Bush.¹¹¹

What put Prince in the hot seat was undoubtedly Nisour Square. But amazingly, Prince would face no questions about that incident. On the eve of the hearing, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department announced it had launched a criminal investigation into the incident. Waxman said the Justice Department had asked him not to take testimony on the shootings to avoid tainting the investigation. Although Waxman asserted Congress “has an independent right to this information,” he nonetheless agreed to keep it off the table. The timing of the Bush administration’s announcement to investigate—a full two weeks after the alleged crime was committed and on the eve of the appearance of the man in charge of the alleged perpetrators—was suspect, to say the least.

Waxman banged his gavel and brought the meeting to order. “Over the past twenty-five years, a sophisticated campaign has been waged to privatize government services,” he declared. “The theory is that corporations can deliver government services better and at a lower cost than the government can. Over the last six years, this theory has been put into practice. The result is that privatization has exploded.”

“There may be no federal contractor in America that has grown more rapidly than Blackwater over the last seven years,” Waxman said at the hearing’s onset. “In 2000, Blackwater had just $204,000 in government contracts. Since then, it has received over $1 billion in federal contracts. More than half of these contracts were awarded without full and open competition. Privatizing is working exceptionally well for Blackwater. The question for this hearing is whether outsourcing to Blackwater is a good deal for American taxpayers, the military, and our national interest in Iraq.”

After opening statements, Erik Prince stood before the committee, raised his right hand, and vowed to tell the truth. Prince painted a picture of his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military whose men “play defense” in a dangerous war zone where they “bleed red, white, and blue” as they heroically protect “reconstruction officials” trying to “weave the fabric of Iraq back together, to get them away from that X, the place where the bad guys, the terrorists, have decided to kill them that day.” He used the phrase “bad guys” at least nine times during his testimony, at one point declaring, “The bad guys have figured out killing Americans is big media, I think. They are trying to drive us out. They try to drive to the heart of American resolve and will to stay there.”

During nearly four hours of testimony and questioning, Prince boldly declared that in Iraq his men have acted “appropriately at all times” and denied the company had ever killed innocent civilians. His hand never trembled, and he showed no sign of breaking a sweat. To say he was cool under fire would be an understatement. Prince was defiant.

“You do admit that Blackwater personnel have shot and killed innocent civilians, don’t you?” Illinois Democrat Danny Davis asked Prince.

“No, sir. I disagree with that,” Prince shot back. “I think there’s been times when guys are using defensive force to protect themselves, to protect the packages, trying to get away from danger. There could be ricochets, there are traffic accidents, yes. This is war.”

Prince added smugly, “We do not have the luxury of staying behind to do that terrorist crime-scene investigation to figure out what happened.”

The assertion by Prince that no innocents had been killed by Blackwater was simply unbelievable. And not just according to the eyewitnesses and survivors of the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly Blackwater actions. According to a report prepared by Waxman’s staff, from 2005 to the time of the hearing, Blackwater operatives in Iraq opened fire on at least 195 occasions.¹¹² In more than 80 percent of these instances, Blackwater fired first. These statistics were based on Blackwater’s own reporting. But some alleged the company was underreporting its statistics. A former Blackwater operative who spent nearly three years in Iraq told the Washington Post his twenty-man team averaged “four or five” shootings a week—several times the rate of 1.4 incidents per week that Blackwater claimed.¹¹³ Waxman’s report also described an incident in which “Blackwater forces shot a civilian bystander in the head. In another, State Department officials report that Blackwater sought to cover up a shooting that killed an apparently innocent bystander.”¹¹⁴

Not surprisingly, Prince said he supported the continuation of Order 17 in Iraq, the Bremer-era decree immunizing forces like Blackwater from prosecution in Iraqi courts. At one point, Prince was asked whether Blackwater operated under the same “rules of engagement” as the military. “Yes, they’re essentially the same,” Prince said—before fumbling for words and admitting, “Well, well, sorry, Department of Defense rules for contractors. We do not have the same as a U.S. soldier at all.”

The truth is that while scores of U.S. soldiers had been court-martialed on murder-related charges in Iraq, not a single Blackwater contractor had ever been charged with a crime under any legal system—U.S. civilian law, military law, or Iraqi law. Prince said that Blackwater operatives who “don’t hold to the standard, they have one decision to make: window or aisle” on their return flight home. Indeed, that and being fired seem to have been the only consequences faced by Prince’s men for their actions in Iraq. In all, Blackwater had terminated more than 120 of its operatives in Iraq—more than one-seventh of its deployment at the time of the hearing.¹¹⁵

On this point, the committee focused on one incident at length: the Christmas Eve killing of the bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president. Prince confirmed that Blackwater had whisked him out of Iraq and fired him, and said the company had fined him and then billed the man for his return plane ticket. Prince said he did not know if the man had been charged with any crime (he hadn’t). “If he lived in America, he would have been arrested, and he would be facing criminal charges,” Democrat Carolyn Maloney told Prince. “If he was a member of our military, he would be under a court-martial. But it appears to me that Blackwater has special rules.” Prince said, “As a private organization, we can’t do any more. We can’t flog him, we can’t incarcerate him.” Maloney told Prince, “Well, in America, if you committed a crime, you don’t pack them up and ship them out of the country in two days.”

When asked directly whether this was a murder, which Iraqi officials had alleged, Prince said, “It was a guy that put himself in a bad situation.” Pressed further, Prince consulted with his advisers and said, “Beyond watching detective shows on TV, sir, I am not a lawyer, so I can’t determine whether it would be a manslaughter, a negligent homicide, I don’t know. I don’t know how to nuance that. But I do know he broke our rules, he put himself in a bad situation and something very tragic happened.”

The committee also released an internal e-mail from a Blackwater employee to a colleague just after the shooting, noting that an Iraqi TV report had erroneously attributed the killing of the bodyguard to a U.S. soldier. “At least the ID of the shooter will take the heat off us,” the Blackwater employee wrote. Representative Elijah Cummings concluded, “In other words, he was saying: ‘Wow, everyone thinks it was the military and not Blackwater. What great news for us. What a silver lining.’” Prince responded, “I don’t believe that false story lasted in the media for more than a few hours, sir.”

This exchange would set off a discussion about one of the main questions of the hearing: was Blackwater hurting the U.S. military’s stated counterinsurgency program in Iraq?

“It does appear from some of the evidence here that Blackwater and other companies sometimes, at least, conduct their missions in ways that lead exactly in the opposite direction that General Petraeus wants to go,” Democrat John Tierney told Prince. “That doesn’t mean you’re not fulfilling your contractual obligations.” Tierney then read numerous comments from U.S. military officials and counterinsurgency experts raising questions about Blackwater’s actions having a blowback effect on official U.S. troops.

Tierney quoted Army Col. Peter Mansoor: “If they push traffic off the roads or if they shoot up a car that looks suspicious, they may be operating within their contract, but it is to the detriment of the mission, which is to bring the people over to our side.” He quoted retired Army officer Ralph Peters: “Armed contractors do harm COIN—counterinsurgency efforts. Just ask the troops in Iraq.” Brig. Gen. Karl Horst: “These guys run loose in this country and do stupid stuff. There is no authority over them, so you can’t come down on them when they escalate force. They shoot people and someone else has to deal with the aftermath. It happens all over the place.” And Col. Thomas X. Hammes: “The problem is in protecting the principal, they had to be very aggressive. And each time they went out they had to offend locals, forcing them to the side of the road, being overpowering and intimidating, at times running vehicles off the road, making enemies each time they went out. So they were actually getting that contract exactly as we asked them to—it was at the same time hurting our counterinsurgency effort.”

Tierney told Prince, “So when we look at Blackwater’s own records that show that you regularly move traffic off the roads and you shoot up cars—in over 160 incidents of firing on suspicious cars—we can see, I think, why the tactics you use in carrying out your contract might mitigate [sic] against what we’re trying to do in the insurgency.”

“I understand the challenges that the military faces there,” Prince responded, adding, “We strive for perfection, but we don’t get to choose when the bad guys attack us. You know, the bad guys have figured out—the terrorists have figured out how to make a precision weapon with a car, load it with explosives with a suicidal driver.”

Representatives also raised the issue of cost, pointing out that each Blackwater operative cost taxpayers $1,222 per day. “We know that sergeants in the military generally cost the government between $50,000 to $70,000 per year,” Waxman said. “We also know that a comparable position at Blackwater costs the federal government over $400,000, six times as much.” Prince was confronted with Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s statement a week earlier on the issue of the disparity in pay between soldiers and private forces. “I worry that sometimes the salaries they are able to pay in fact lures some of our soldiers out of the service to go to work for them,” Gates had said, adding that he was seeking legal advice on whether a “noncompete” clause could be put into security contracts. Prince said it would be “fine” with him but asserted that “it would be upsetting to a lot of soldiers if they didn’t have the ability to use the skills they learned in the military in the private sector.”

Toward the end of the hearing, it was noted that General Petraeus makes about $180,000 a year. When asked his own salary, Prince said he didn’t know exactly and then, when pressed, offered that it was “more than $1 million.” He estimated that about 90 percent of the business of the Prince Group empire (Blackwater’s parent company) comes from federal contracts. He wouldn’t say how much the company had made for its work in Iraq, but “as an example” he said under some contracts Blackwater earns a profit margin of about 10 percent, which one Congressman remarked could mean more than $100 million. Prince adamantly refused to answer the profit question directly. “We’re a private company,” he said. “The key word there is ‘private.’”

Connecticut Democrat Christopher Murphy, incredulous, asked, “How can you say that information isn’t relevant?” adding, “my constituents pay 90 percent of your salary.” Finally, Prince quipped, “I’m not a financially driven guy.”

While Blackwater’s actions in Iraq over the past four years have consistently resulted in an escalation of violence and bloodshed there, many of the most infamous incidents involving the company were not discussed or only brought up in passing at the hearing. Some of the Democrats on the committee appeared to be reading their briefing papers while Prince was testifying, giving the impression that they were ill-prepared to address Blackwater’s central role in the U.S. war machine. Prince did face some tough and important questions, but often his answers were left to stand with no credible follow-up or challenge. All the while, the very reason Prince found himself before Congress that day and the reason the world watched his testimony—the Nisour Square massacre—went undiscussed, the Iraqi victims unmentioned.

The Republicans did their best to portray the hearing as a witch-hunt and heaped praise on Prince for his patriotism and service. “This is not about Blackwater,” said conservative California Republican Darrell Issa. “What we are hearing today is, in fact, a repeat of the MoveOn.org attack on General Petraeus’s patriotism.” Several Republicans thanked Prince for keeping them alive when they toured Iraq, the irony of how this could impact their impartiality apparently lost on them.

It wasn’t lost on Massachusetts Democrat Stephen Lynch. He said in his trips to Iraq, he too had been protected by Blackwater, which he acknowledged “did a very, very good job.” He added, “I find myself right now with this committee having a difficult time criticizing those employees, because I am in their debt… which brings me to my problem. If I have a problem criticizing Blackwater and criticizing the employees and some of the times that you have fouled up, what about the State Department?” Lynch questioned how any effective investigations into Blackwater’s conduct could be expected when Blackwater itself is responsible for the safety of those tasked with investigating the company. “The State Department employees, you protect them every single day. You protect their physical well-being, you transport them, you escort them. And I am sure there is a heavy debt of gratitude on the part of the State Department for your service,” Lynch told Prince. “And yet they are the very same people who are in our system responsible for holding you accountable in every respect with your contract and the conduct of your employees…. That is an impossible conflict for them to resolve.” Prince never addressed the matter because Lynch’s time expired. But Lynch’s point was an important one. According to the Oversight Committee’s investigation, “There is no evidence” that “the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting incidents involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation.” ¹¹⁶ Indeed, the State Department had not only failed to effectively investigate or rein in Blackwater; there was evidence that it had done the reverse, covering for the company when it landed in the hot seat.

As the duration of the hearing neared four hours, Prince was asked if he wanted to take a break or deal with the remaining questions. “I’ll take them, and then let’s be done,” he shot back. Moments later, Prince’s lawyer shot up from his chair behind the Blackwater chief and frantically directed a “T” for “time” with his hands toward the committee. With that, the hearing came to an end. Prince stood up, grabbed the paper with his name on it from the table, and marched with his entourage from the room.

There is no question the Justice Department’s intervention at the eleventh hour took some of the heat off Prince over Nisour Square. “He gave a very self-serving testimony to us,” said Waxman. “I can understand that that’s what he wanted to do. That was in his interest to do it.”¹¹⁷ Blackwater clearly felt its man had won the day. Emboldened by Prince’s defiant appearance before Congress, Blackwater would launch a new PR campaign to defend its image, and its star would be Prince himself. Far from facing the heat of a critical media, Prince would find friendly faces and softball questions as he met the press. Shortly after his Congressional testimony, Prince’s longtime friend archconservative California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher compared the Blackwater chief to another controversial figure who had once been forced to raise his right hand before Congress. “Prince,” Rohrabacher said, “is on his way to being an American hero just like Ollie North was.”¹¹⁸

In the meantime, in Baghdad, the survivors and victims’ families of Nisour Square were learning what U.S. justice really meant.

Nothing You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Court of Law

Any criminologist will tell you that it is essential to seal off the scene of a crime as soon as possible. Evidence must be secured, witnesses interviewed, suspects identified and taken into custody. It is a race against the clock. The Bush administration’s handling of Nisour Square was a textbook case in how not to investigate a crime. Perhaps that was the point all along.

Ten days after the shooting, and with the administration facing a mounting scandal, the State Department’s “first blush” report on Nisour Square was leaked to the media. Dated September 16, 2007, the day of the shooting, and stamped “Sensitive but Unclassified,” it was titled “SAF [small-arms fire] attack on COM team.”¹¹⁹ The report alleged that the Blackwater team entered the square and was “engaged with small arms fire” from “8-10 persons” who “fired from multiple nearby locations, with some aggressors dressed in civilian apparel and others in Iraqi police uniforms. The team returned defensive fire.” It made no mention of any civilian deaths or injuries. While it appeared as though the State Department had investigated and was contradicting the widespread allegations of an unprovoked shooting, what was not revealed at the time was that the report was written by a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, and printed on official State Department letterhead.¹²⁰

It would be two weeks before the Bush administration would get around to deploying a ten-person team from the FBI—the official investigative body of the U.S. government—to Baghdad to investigate the shooting.¹²¹ As the FBI prepared to depart for Baghdad, reports emerged that the agents were to be guarded by none other than Blackwater itself.¹²² Senator Patrick Leahy quickly raised questions about the arrangement, forcing the Bureau to announce it would be guarded by official personnel and not personnel from the same company it was investigating.¹²³

In the meantime, the official investigation of the Bush administration would be conducted by the State Department, whose personnel continued to depend on the chief suspects to keep them alive. “To rely on non-law enforcement to conduct sensitive law enforcement activities makes no sense if you want impartial justice,” said Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who currently serves as executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.¹²⁴

Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down seventeen civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But that is not what the Blackwater operatives involved in the Nisour Square shooting were told. They were questioned by State Department Diplomatic Security investigators with the understanding that their statements and information gleaned from them could neither be used to bring criminal charges against them nor even be introduced as evidence.¹²⁵

ABC News obtained copies of sworn statements given by Blackwater guards in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, all of which began, “I understand this statement is being given in furtherance of an official administrative inquiry,” and “I further understand that neither my statements nor any information or evidence gained by reason of my statements can be used against me in a criminal proceeding.”¹²⁶ CCR’s Ratner said the offering of so-called “use immunity” agreements by the State Department was “very irregular,” adding he could not recall a precedent for it.¹²⁷ In normal circumstances, Ratner said, such immunity was granted only after a grand jury or Congressional committee had been convened and the party had invoked its Fifth Amendment right for protection against self-incrimination. Immunity would then be authorized by either a judge or the committee.

“What the State Department has done in this case is inconsistent with proper law enforcement standards. It is likely to undermine an ultimate prosecution, if not make it impossible,” said military law expert Scott Horton of Human Rights First. “In this sense, the objective of the State Department in doing this is exposed to question. It seems less to be to collect the facts than to immunize Blackwater and its employees. By purporting to grant immunity, the State Department draws itself more deeply into the wrongdoing and adopts a posture vis-à-vis Blackwater that appears downright conspiratorial. This will make the fruits of its investigation a tough sell.”¹²⁸ One U.S. diplomat described the relationship between the U.S. Embassy’s security office in Baghdad and Blackwater to the Los Angeles Times. “They draw the wagon circle,” the diplomat said. “They protect each other. They look out for each other. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, that wall of silence. When it protects the guilty, that is definitely not a good thing.”¹²⁹

But it wasn’t just that the State Department was apparently corrupting or stifling the investigation or hindering a successful prosecution of Blackwater. As Congress investigated Nisour Square, what emerged was evidence of a clear pattern of the State Department urging Blackwater to pay what amounted to hush money to Iraqi victims’ families. “In cases involving the death of Iraqis, it appears that the State Department’s primary response was to ask Blackwater to make monetary payments to ‘put the matter behind us,’ rather than to insist upon accountability or to investigate Blackwater personnel for potential criminal liability,” according to a report of the House Oversight Committee. “The most serious consequence faced by Blackwater personnel for misconduct appears to be termination of their employment.”¹³⁰ Congressman Waxman charged that the State Department was “acting as Blackwater’s enabler.”¹³¹

On Christmas Day 2006, the day after Blackwater operative Andrew Moonen allegedly shot and killed the Iraqi vice president’s bodyguard, the State Department recommended that Blackwater pay off the guard’s family. The U.S. Embassy’s chargé d’affaires wrote to the regional security officer, Blackwater’s handler, “Will you be following in up [sic] Blackwater to do all possible to assure that a sizeable compensation is forthcoming? If we are to avoid this whole thing becoming even worse, I think a prompt pledge and apology—even if they want to claim it was accidental—would be the best way to assure the Iraqis don’t take steps, such as telling Blackwater that they are no longer able to work in Iraq.”¹³²

It was a prophetic warning, coming a full nine months before the Iraqis would demand just that in the aftermath of Nisour Square. The chargé d’affaires initially suggested a $250,000 payment, but the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service said this was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed so as to set up their family financially.”¹³³ In the end, the State Department and Blackwater reportedly agreed on a $15,000 payment. During his Congressional testimony, Prince corrected that figure, saying Blackwater had actually paid $20,000.¹³⁴ In another case, in Al Hillah in June 2005, a Blackwater operator killed an “apparently innocent bystander” and the State Department requested that Blackwater pay the family $5,000.¹³⁵ “Can you tell me how it was determined that this man’s life was worth $5,000?” Representative Davis asked Prince. “We don’t determine that value, sir,” Prince responded. “That’s kind of an Iraqi-wide policy. We don’t make that one.”¹³⁶ In cases where the government and Blackwater claimed the guards fired in self-defense, though, no money was offered to victims’ families. The three victims of the Blackwater sniper at the Iraqi TV station in February 2007, for example, received nothing.¹³⁷

Shortly after the Nisour Square shootings, the State Department began contacting the Iraqi victims’ families. Dr. Jawad, whose son and wife were the first victims that day, said U.S. officials asked him how much money he wanted in compensation. “I said their lives are priceless,” Jawad recalled.¹³⁸ But the U.S. officials continued pressing him for a dollar amount. He said he told a State Department representative “if he could give me my loved ones, I would gladly give him $200 million.” To many Iraqis, the U.S. offers were an insult. “If you perceive marriage as half of your life, Mahasin was my best half,” Jawad said, talking about his wife. “We were always together. I don’t know how to manage my life or care for my other two children without her.”¹³⁹

Mohammed Razzaq, whose nine-year-old son Ali was killed, asked, “Why should I ask for compensation? What would it do? Bring back my son? It will not.” Ali “was in school, but last year had to leave school because we were displaced. Now the Americans have killed him—why? What did he do? What did I do? After what I witnessed, I now jump out of bed at night, I have nightmares, it’s experiencing death, bullets are flying from here and there and here explosions, cars hit. Why? Why did they do this?” he asked. “I only ask why? [I] just want them to admit to the truth.”¹⁴⁰

The Iraqi government eventually demanded $8 million in compensation for each victim.¹⁴¹ In the end, the State Department, on behalf of Blackwater, offered family members between $10,000 and $12,500,¹⁴² which many of them refused. A U.S. official said the monetary offer was “not an admission of culpability.”¹⁴³ This would not be the last Blackwater would hear from the victims’ families of Nisour Square.

When the FBI finally arrived in Baghdad, some of the Blackwater guards involved in the shooting refused to be interviewed, citing promises of immunity from the State Department.¹⁴⁴ The FBI also discovered that the crime scene had been severely compromised.¹⁴⁵ Blackwater would later claim that proof it had been attacked by Iraqis could be found in damage to the company’s armored vehicles. Prince said three vehicles sustained gunfire damage and that the radiator on one had been “shot out and disabled.”¹⁴⁶ The initial State Department report (written by the Blackwater contractor) alleged one had been “disabled during the attack” and had to be towed from the scene.¹⁴⁷ But when the FBI went to investigate the vehicles, it found that Blackwater had already “repaired and repainted them.” The Associated Press reported, “The repairs essentially destroyed evidence that Justice Department investigators hoped to examine in a criminal case that has drawn worldwide attention.”¹⁴⁸ Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said any repairs “would have been done at the government’s direction.” ¹⁴⁹ The State Department would not comment on it.

In contrast to the Bush administration’s approach to Nisour Square, the Iraqi authorities began their investigation within moments of the massacre, interviewing scores of witnesses and piecing together a timeline of events. When the Iraqis released their findings, defenders of Blackwater quickly stepped up to cast aspersions on Baghdad’s integrity. “Iraqis claim that the Blackwaterites fired indiscriminately and without provocation. There is no reason to assume—as so many critics do—that the more damning version is true,” wrote Blackwater apologist Max Boot in the Los Angeles Times, “especially because the harshest condemnations have come from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a notorious hotbed of sectarianism.”¹⁵⁰

While Blackwater refused to answer specific questions on the incident, citing an ongoing investigation, the company did, in fact, have its own version of events. The morning of Prince’s appearance before the Oversight Committee, his prepared remarks were released to the media. He would never publicly deliver them, but they would constitute the most comprehensive account of the incident Blackwater would provide. Prince alleged that his men came under fire in Nisour Square. “Among the threats identified were men with AK-47s firing on the convoy, as well as approaching vehicles that appeared to be suicide bombers. The Blackwater personnel attempted to exit the area but one of their vehicles was disabled by enemy fire,” Prince claimed in the statement. “Some of those firing on this Blackwater team appeared to be wearing Iraqi National Police uniforms, or portions of uniforms. As the withdrawal occurred, the Blackwater vehicles remained under fire from such personnel.”¹⁵¹

Two months after the shooting, ABC News obtained the sworn statement of Blackwater operative Paul Slough, a twenty-nine-year-old Army veteran. Slough was Blackwater’s turret gunner that day and is believed to be the main shooter in the square.¹⁵² His statement was given, with the promise of immunity, to the State Department three days after the incident. In it, he described his version of how the shooting began, describing the car driven by Ahmed, the medical student, and his mother, Mahasin. “As our motorcade pulled into the intersection I noticed a white four door sedan driving directly at our motorcade,” Slough alleged. “I and others were yelling, and using hand signals for the car to stop and the driver looked directly at me and kept moving toward our motorcade. Fearing for my life and the lives of my teammates, I engaged the driver and stopped the threat…. A uniformed individual then started pushing the vehicle toward the motorcade and again I shouted and engaged the vehicle until it came to a stop.”¹⁵³ This stood in sharp contrast to the Iraqi version of events, including those of several eyewitnesses, who insisted the shooting was entirely unprovoked. It was also contradicted by major media investigations and aerial photos of the aftermath.¹⁵⁴ Slough went on to describe several more instances in which he “engaged” Iraqis to “stop the threat.”¹⁵⁵

In his Congressional statement, Prince insisted that “based on everything we currently know, the Blackwater team acted appropriately while operating in a very complex war zone.” He alleged that “Blackwater and its people have been the subject of negative and baseless allegations reported as truth” and that “many public reports have wrongly pronounced Blackwater’s guilt for the death of varying numbers of civilians.” Prince concluded there had been a “rush to judgment based on inaccurate information.”¹⁵⁶

There was one force that did rush to the scene to obtain information. And, unlike the Iraqi government, the media, or witnesses, this investigator could not be easily dismissed or discredited: the U.S. military, which arrived on the scene the day of the incident at 12:39 p.m., moments after the shooting ended.¹⁵⁷

Amid the carnage of Nisour Square, soldiers from the Third Battalion, 82nd Field Artillery Regiment of the Second Brigade, First Cavalry Division, interviewed witnesses, conducted an on-site investigation, and held talks with Iraqi police. The forces under the command of Lieut. Col. Mike Tarsa contradicted almost every one of Prince’s and Slough’s assertions. They bluntly concluded there was “no enemy activity involved,” determined that all of the killings were unjustified and labeled the shootings a “criminal event.” Tarsa’s investigation found that many Iraqis were shot as they attempted to flee, saying “it had every indication of an excessive shooting.” Combing the scene, Tarsa’s soldiers found no bullets from AK-47 assault rifles or BKC machine guns used by Iraqi military and police that Prince had alleged were fired. But they did find an abundance of evidence of ammunition from U.S.-manufactured weapons, including M4 rifle 5.56-millimeter brass casings, M240B machine gun 7.62-millimeter casings, and M203 40-millimeter grenade-launcher casings. Tarsa’s soldiers also said they were “surprised at the caliber of weapon being used.”¹⁵⁸ Blackwater said at the time, in early October, it would not comment until the FBI had concluded its investigation, but Prince did attempt to cast aspersions on Tarsa’s conclusions. “It’s from one colonel,” Prince said. “And I don’t know what his experience is in doing crime scene investigations.”¹⁵⁹

In November, the first glimpse into the conclusions of the FBI probe emerged in the New York Times, which reported that the federal agents had “found that at least 14 of the shootings were unjustified and violated deadly-force rules in effect for security contractors in Iraq.”¹⁶⁰ The report added, “Investigators found no evidence to support assertions by Blackwater employees that they were fired upon by Iraqi civilians,” quoting one official as saying, “I wouldn’t call it a massacre, but to say it was unwarranted is an understatement.” A military investigator “said the F.B.I. was being generous to Blackwater in characterizing any of the killings as justifiable.” The military was clearly outraged at the shootings, and some officials believed it would have a blowback effect on U.S. soldiers. “It was absolutely tragic,” Maj. Gen. Joseph Fil, the Army’s top commander for Baghdad, told the Washington Post. “In the aftermath of these, everybody looks and says, ‘It’s the Americans.’ And that’s us. It’s horrible timing. It’s yet another challenge, another setback.”¹⁶¹ During this period, a chorus of voices rose against Blackwater from within the ranks of the military. The pay disparity between private contractors and official soldiers was hurting morale, and senior commanders complained that the misconduct of Blackwater and other private forces was damaging the U.S. “counterinsurgency” campaign. This critique was sounded from the highest levels of the military. In an unusually blunt comment a month after Nisour Square, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the mission of many private security contractors was “at cross-purposes to our larger mission in Iraq,” adding that “in the objective of completing the mission of delivering a principal safely to a destination, just based on everything I’ve read and what our own team has reported, there have been instances where, to put it mildly, the Iraqis have been offended and not treated properly.”¹⁶²

What was particularly troubling (aside from the loss of Iraqi civilian life) was that even if Blackwater were not so politically connected to the White House and even if there were a truly independent U.S. Justice Department and even if immunity had not been offered and even if there had been an aggressive investigation, it would not have been enough. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dispatched a team to Baghdad, led by veteran diplomat Patrick Kennedy, to review the department’s private security force in the aftermath of Nisour Square, the team returned with the conclusion that it “is unaware of any basis for holding non-Department of Defense contractors [like Blackwater] accountable under US law.”¹⁶³

While a fierce debate over the use of private forces raged in the United States, legal scholars debated what—if any—court could hold Blackwater and other mercenary forces accountable for their crimes in Iraq. Not only had the State Department’s immunity offerings early on in the Nisour Square investigation potentially compromised the chance of prosecution, as the Justice Department acknowledged in early 2008, but the bottom line was that Blackwater operated in a legal gray zone, seemingly outside the scope of both U.S. civilian and military law and immune from Iraqi law.¹⁶⁴ While a federal grand jury was convened in late 2007 to investigate, serious questions about the potential for a successful prosecution abounded. Many legal analysts concluded that U.S. civilian law on contractors abroad covered only contractors working for the military—Blackwater worked for the State Department.

While the House voted shortly after Nisour Square to expand the law to apply to all contractors, it could not be applied retroactively and still had to clear the Senate. The Bush administration “strongly oppose[d]” the legislation, saying in a statement released the day after Prince appeared before Waxman’s committee that the law would have “intolerable consequences for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations.”¹⁶⁵ A court-martial seemed unlikely and could possibly meet resistance from civil liberties advocates who would view it as a step toward applying military law to civilians (though some would argue that such a label should not apply to armed mercenaries). Washington was clear it would not hand over U.S. personnel to Iraqi courts, and the Bremer-era ban on Iraq prosecuting contractors remained in place. Some analysts believed the Justice Department would attempt to prosecute at least one Blackwater operative for Nisour Square—indeed, Slough was identified as being “at the center of the investigation”—as a token symbol of accountability. But because of the way the law governing contractors was phrased at the time of the killings, the possibility of failure was significant. Some legal experts argued that the shooters could be prosecuted for war crimes under U.S. law, but that would require not only political will from the Bush administration but also a de facto indictment of the whole system of privatized war, which seemed highly unlikely to happen. The possibility that private soldiers could face prosecution, particularly for war crimes, would also have presented a major disincentive for mercenary companies to work for the Bush administration. “There clearly is jurisdiction and a basis to act against them under the War Crimes Act,” said military law expert Scott Horton. “But the Bush administration doesn’t want to go there, doesn’t want to touch that. I think they’ve made that point clear.”¹⁶⁶ The State Department’s acting Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Gregory Starr, admitted, “It might be the case that Blackwater can’t be held accountable” for the killings.¹⁶⁷

Some of the Iraqi victims’ families and Nisour Square survivors did not want to wait for Congress and the Bush administration to resolve these questions and didn’t have faith justice would be done. So they took the only action they could—they sued Blackwater, not in Iraq but in Washington, D.C.

“War Crimes” and “Extra-judicial Killing”

Days after the shootings, some of the Iraqi survivors and victims’ families contacted local Iraqi human rights lawyers who worked with U.S. law firms that had filed cases against other Iraq War contractors for alleged abuses. Attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights and two other firms, led by attorney Susan Burke of Burke O’Neil, began interviewing survivors, witnesses, and victims’ families. CCR was no stranger to cases involving contractors’ crimes in Iraq, having filed a major lawsuit against some of the private forces who were among the alleged perpetrators of the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib Prison. Burke spearheaded that case as well. “[The Nisour Square families] came to us because they know of our work representing the torture victims at Abu Ghraib, and they asked us whether it would be possible to try to get some form of justice, some form of accountability, against this rogue corporation,” Burke recalled.¹⁶⁸

On October 11, 2007, Blackwater was sued by Iraqi civilians. Burke and CCR filed the groundbreaking lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of five of the Iraqis killed at Nisour Square and two of the survivors wounded in the attack. The suit alleged that Blackwater’s actions amounted to “extra-judicial killing” and “war crimes.”¹⁶⁹ It was filed in part under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows for litigation in U.S. courts for violations of fundamental human rights committed overseas.

“Blackwater created and fostered a culture of lawlessness amongst its employees, encouraging them to act in the company’s financial interests at the expense of innocent human life,” the suit charged. “This action seeks punitive damages in an amount sufficient to punish Erik Prince and his Blackwater companies for their repeated callous killing of innocents.” The suit was believed to be the first U.S. case brought by Iraqi civilians against a private “security” company.

It alleged that “Blackwater heavily markets the fact that it has never had any American official under its protection killed in Iraq” and “views its willingness to kill innocent people as a strategic advantage setting Blackwater apart and above other security companies.” Blackwater, the suit alleged, “was and is willing to kill innocent bystanders in order to preserve that ‘no death’ statistic for marketing purposes. Blackwater benefits financially from its willingness to kill innocent bystanders.”

Among the plaintiffs were the estates of the first victims, Ahmed Hathem al-Rubaie and his mother, Mahasin. “She was shot to death by Blackwater shooters as she cradled her dead son’s body, calling for help,” the suit alleged. The three other Iraqis named in the lawsuit who were killed on September 16—Oday Ismail Ibraheem, Himoud Saed Atban, and Usama Fadhil Abbass—had fourteen children among them, one an infant, according to Burke.

“The rule of law in every civilized nation in the world is that there is no legitimate reason to indiscriminately kill innocent bystanders,” Ratner said. “We believe that the acts of Blackwater at Nisour Square were deliberate, willful, intentional, wanton, malicious, and oppressive, and constitute war crimes. Blackwater is harming the United States by its repeated and consistent failure to act in accord with the law of war, the laws of the United States, and international law.”¹⁷⁰

Among the allegations in the suit:

• Despite Blackwater’s claim that it is a defensive force, its “mobile armed forces” are “consistently referred to by Blackwater management and employees as ‘shooters.’”

• Blackwater should not have been at Nisour Square and defied orders not to go there. At the time of the shootings, “Blackwater shooters were not protecting any State Department official. The Blackwater shooters had already dropped off the official under its protection prior to arriving at Nisour Square.” The “Tactical Operations Center” (manned by both Blackwater and State Department personnel) “expressly directed the Blackwater shooters to stay with the official and refrain from leaving the secure area. Blackwater personnel were “obliged” to follow the directive and did not.

• “Blackwater routinely sends heavily-armed ‘shooters’ into the streets of Baghdad with the knowledge that some of those ‘shooters’ are chemically influenced by steroids and other judgment-altering substances. Reasonable discovery will establish that Blackwater knew that 25 percent or more of its ‘shooters’ were ingesting steroids or other judgment-altering substances, yet failed to take effective steps to stop the drug use. Reasonable discovery will establish that Blackwater did not conduct any drug-testing of its ‘shooters’ before sending them equipped with heavy weapons into the streets of Baghdad.” (Blackwater rejected the steroid allegations, saying its forces face drug tests during their application process and on a quarterly basis while working for the company. A spokesperson said, “Blackwater has very strict policies concerning drug use, and if anyone were known to be using illegal drugs, they would be fired immediately.”)

• Blackwater does not have “a valid contract” with the United States: “The Anti-Pinkerton Act… prohibits the United States from doing business with ‘[a]n individual employed by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, or similar organization.’ The legislative history of the Act makes it clear that a ‘similar organization’ means any mercenary or quasi-mercenary organization. Blackwater constitutes such a ‘similar organization’ and therefore lacks any valid contractual relationships with the United States.” (Ironically, a few months after the suit was filed, Blackwater vice president Martin Strong actually compared Blackwater’s work directly to Pinkerton’s. “Well, I can remember a time when Abraham Lincoln tried to get to his inaugural and he couldn’t find anybody to protect him except for the Pinkertons, who were a private-sector solution to protecting the new president of the United States,” he said. “This has been going on for a long, long time.”¹⁷¹)

Blackwater publicly declined to respond to the allegations in the suit, citing ongoing government investigations, but its spokesperson, Anne Tyrrell, said Blackwater “will defend itself vigorously.”¹⁷² Erik Prince, however, went on the attack—against the Iraqi victims’ lawyers. “The lawyers, the trial lawyers that filed this lawsuit are the same guys that defended the World Trade Center bombings in 1993, the blind sheikh, and defended a bunch of killers of FBI agents and other cops,” Prince said on CNN two days after the suit was filed. “So this is very much a politically motivated lawsuit, for media attention.”¹⁷³ In fact, Prince was dead wrong. CCR did not represent “the blind sheikh,” nor did it “defend” the 1993 WTC bombing. But Prince’s spin was promptly adopted by his right-wing defenders and disseminated in the media.

A few days later, J. Michael Waller, vice president of the Center for Security Policy—a hard-line conservative think tank with deep connections to the Bush administration—wrote an op-ed in the New York Post called “Lawyers for Terror.”¹⁷⁴ In it, he accused CCR and Michael Ratner of having “a four-decade record of aiding and abetting terrorists, spies and cop-killers” and said they “specialize in defending the enemies of American society.” Waller wrote, “As we await the facts to establish responsibility for the Sept. 16 tragedy in Nisour Square, we must demand answers to another question: Of the million-plus lawyers in the United States they could have chosen to sue Blackwater, how did ordinary Iraqis manage to pick the few who aid cop-killers and terrorists?”

Ratner said these claims were “transparent attempts to try and divert attention from Blackwater’s actions in Iraq and particularly its role in the Nisour killings. I don’t think character attacks fool anyone. Such attempts at character assassination are a smokescreen to cover up the killings. At trial the facts will speak for themselves and the truth will be revealed.”¹⁷⁵

On December 19, 2007, CCR and Burke filed yet another lawsuit against Blackwater. This one stemmed from Blackwater’s alleged killing of five Iraqis on September 9 in Baghdad’s Watahba Square, one week before the Nisour Square killings. “Blackwater shooters shot, without justification, and killed five innocent civilians,” the suit alleged. “Numerous other innocent civilians were… injured in the incident.”¹⁷⁶ Burke filed the case on behalf of the family of Ali Hussamaldeen Albazzaz. “This gentleman was a rug merchant, and he was gunned down for absolutely no reason, leaving behind a twenty-day-old baby daughter and family. It is again another instance in which Blackwater shooters shot first, asked questions later,” Burke alleged.¹⁷⁷

“If the Government Doesn’t Want Us to Do This, We Will Go Do Something Else”

Despite the massive controversy surrounding Blackwater, its forces—and lucrative contracts—remained firmly in place on the ground in Iraq. One Blackwater employee described to the New York Times a conversation company representatives had with the State Department’s Gregory Starr in November 2007. “He said Blackwater has not lost the contract here in Iraq, and that it entirely depends on our actions from here on out.”¹⁷⁸ On December 3, Blackwater posted job listings for “security specialists” and snipers as a result of its State Department diplomatic security “contract expansion.”¹⁷⁹

Rather than hiding out and hoping for the scandals to fade, Blackwater launched a major rebranding campaign, changing its name to Blackwater Worldwide and softening its logo: once a bear paw in the site of a sniper scope, it would become a bear claw wrapped in two half ovals—sort of like the outline of a globe, with a United Nations feel. Its overhauled website boasted of a corporate vision “guided by integrity, innovation, and a desire for a safer world.”¹⁸⁰ Blackwater operatives were referred to as “global stabilization professionals.” Prince did a series of interviews, many of them conducted by mainstream journalists who were fawning and uncritical, in which he spun Blackwater as a patriotic extension of the military, often repeating almost verbatim his carefully crafted lines. He was named number eleven in Details magazine’s “Power 50,” the men “who control your viewing patterns, your buying habits, your anxieties, your lust… the people who have taken over the space in your head.”¹⁸¹

In one of the company’s most bizarre actions in this period, on December 1, Blackwater paratroopers staged a dramatic aerial landing, complete with Blackwater flags and parachutes—not in Baghdad or Kabul but in San Diego at Qualcomm Stadium during the halftime show at the San Diego State/BYU football game. The company also sponsored a NASCAR racer and teamed up with gun manufacturer Sig Sauer to create a Blackwater Special Edition full-sized 9-millimeter pistol with the company logo on the grip. It came with a limited lifetime warranty. For $18, parents could purchase infant onesies from the Blackwater ProShop emblazoned with the firm’s logo.¹⁸²

During his media blitz, Prince indicated that Blackwater might quit Iraq. “We see the security market diminishing,” he told the Wall Street Journal in October.¹⁸³ One way of looking at it was that Blackwater had gotten what it needed out of its Iraq work. As Prince told Congress, “If the government doesn’t want us to do this, we will go do something else.”¹⁸⁴ While its name had become mud in the human rights world, Blackwater had not only already made big money in Iraq; it had secured a reputation as a company that kept U.S. officials in an extremely hostile war zone alive by any means necessary. It’s an image that could serve Blackwater well as it expands globally.

Prince vowed that in the future Blackwater “is going to be more of a full spectrum” operation.¹⁸⁵ Amid the cornucopia of scandals, Blackwater was bidding for a share of a five-year $15 billion contract with the Pentagon to “fight terrorists with drug-trade ties.”¹⁸⁶ This “war on drugs” contract would put Blackwater in the same league as the godfathers of the war business, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon.

In addition to its ongoing robust business in law enforcement, military, and homeland security training, Blackwater is branching out. Among its current projects and initiatives:¹⁸⁷

• Blackwater affiliate Greystone Ltd., registered offshore in Barbados, is an old-fashioned mercenary operation offering “personnel from the best militaries throughout the world” for hire by governments and private organizations. It also boasts of a “multinational peacekeeping program,” with forces “specializing in crowd control and less than lethal techniques and military personnel for the less stable areas of operation.”

• Prince’s Total Intelligence Solutions, headed by three CIA veterans (among them Blackwater’s number-two, Cofer Black), puts CIA-TYPE services on the open market for hire by corporations or governments. (See Epilogue.)

• Blackwater is launching an armored vehicle called the Grizzly, which the company characterizes as the most versatile in history. Blackwater intends to modify it to be legal for use on U.S. highways.

• Blackwater’s aviation division has some forty aircraft, including turboprop planes that can be used for unorthodox landings. It has ordered a Super Tucano paramilitary plane from Brazil, which can be used in counterinsurgency operations. In August 2007, the aviation division won a $92 million contract with the Pentagon to operate flights in Central Asia.

• In late 2007, it flight-tested the unmanned Polar 400 airship, which may be marketed to the Department of Homeland Security for use in monitoring the US-Mexico border and to “military, law enforcement, and non-government customers.”

• A fast-growing maritime division has a new 184-foot vessel that has been fitted for potential paramilitary use.

What Blackwater has done since it first opened for business in the late 1990s is to build up a privatized parallel structure to the U.S. national security apparatus. As of this writing, it continues to receive major contracts for its various divisions, and the U.S. government remains the greatest consumer of its services. In December 2007, it registered a new high-powered lobbying firm, Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice.¹⁸⁸ The disclosure form, filed with the U.S. Senate in January 2008, indicated the firm would be lobbying for Blackwater on a wide range of contracts in: defense, homeland security, aerospace, disaster planning, foreign relations, and law enforcement.

War Is Business. Business Is Good.

In many ways, Blackwater is the embodiment of the Bush administration’s “revolution in military affairs,” which has entailed aggressive outsourcing of core military functions. The company’s centrality to the U.S. occupation of Iraq was emblematic of the new face of the U.S. war machine. But it is also a symbol of the times in which we live, where every aspect of life is being radically privatized—schools, healthcare, prisons, homeland security operations, intelligence, municipal services. While Blackwater certainly owes its stunning success to the belligerent, offensive foreign policies of the Bush administration, it is important to remember that Blackwater opened for business during President Bill Clinton’s time in office. It was Clinton’s administration that authorized Blackwater as a vendor to the federal government and awarded the firm its first government contracts.

The fact is that privatization is not just a Republican or a Bush administration agenda—it was rapidly escalated by Bush, but it has been embraced and nurtured by the power structures of both political parties for decades. “Even under the Clinton administration, this was a standard operating procedure,” said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, one of the sharpest Congressional critics of war contracting. “But we’ve seen this enormous escalation of this industry so that now it’s billions and billions of dollars. This is definitely an expansion.”¹⁸⁹ The U.S. government pays contractors as much as the combined taxes paid by everyone in the United States with incomes under $100,000, meaning “more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to [contractors] rather than to the [government],” according to a 2007 investigative report in Vanity Fair.¹⁹⁰ As journalist Naomi Klein put it, “According to this radical vision, contractors treat the state as an ATM, withdrawing massive contracts to perform core functions like securing borders and interrogating prisoners, and making deposits in the form of campaign contributions.”¹⁹¹

“I think it’s extraordinarily dangerous when a nation begins to outsource its monopoly on the use of force and the use of violence in support of its foreign policy or national security objectives,” said veteran U.S. diplomat Joe Wilson, who served as the last Ambassador to Iraq before the 1991 Gulf War. The billions of dollars being doled out to war companies, Wilson argues, “makes of them a very powerful interest group within the American body politic and an interest group that is in fact armed. And the question will arise at some time: to whom do they owe their loyalty?”¹⁹²

While the bipartisan privatization virus spreads further, companies like Blackwater become ever more deeply embedded in the most sensitive sectors of government. Blackwater is moving ahead at full steam. Individual scandals clearly aren’t enough to slow it down. Even if Blackwater were to go out of business tomorrow, there are scores of companies that would gladly step in to take over its work.

While radical privatization is having a devastating impact throughout society, the privatization of the war machine has been lethal. Blackwater is a company whose business depends on war and conflict to thrive. It operates in a demand-based industry where corporate profits are intimately linked to an escalation of violence. That demand has been tremendous during the presidency of George W. Bush. In particular, the unprecedented militarization of the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, which has occurred in tandem with the process of rapid privatization, has enriched Blackwater. The department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Services was originally envisioned as a small-scale bodyguard operation to protect small groups of U.S. diplomats and other U.S. and foreign officials. In Iraq, the administration turned it into a paramilitary force several thousand strong. Spending on the program jumped from $50 million in 2003 to $613 million in 2006.¹⁹³ According to the Congressional Oversight Committee’s investigation, “In fiscal year 2001, Blackwater had $736,906 in federal contracts. By 2006, Blackwater had over $593 million in government contracts, an increase of more than 80,000%.”¹⁹⁴ In 2007, Blackwater had two-thirds as many operatives deployed in Iraq as the U.S. Bureau of Diplomatic Security had in all other countries in the world combined. As Ambassador Ryan Crocker said in late 2007, “There is simply no way at all that the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security could ever have enough full-time personnel to staff the security function in Iraq. There is no alternative except through contracts.”¹⁹⁵

As of summer, 2007, there were more “private contractors” deployed on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq (180,000) than there were actual soldiers (160,000).¹⁹⁶ These contractors worked for some 630 companies and drew personnel from more than 100 countries around the globe.¹⁹⁷ Tens of thousands were armed operatives like those who work for Blackwater—exactly how many was unknown, because neither the administration nor the military could or would provide those numbers. This meant the U.S. military had actually become the junior partner in the coalition that occupies Iraq. The existence of a powerful shadow army enabled the waging of an unpopular war with forces whose deaths and injuries went uncounted and unreported. It helped keep a draft, which could make the continuation of the war politically untenable, off the table. It also subverted international diplomacy because the administration didn’t need to build a “coalition of the willing”: it rented an occupation force. Private soldiers were hired from countries that had no direct stake in the war or whose home governments opposed it, and were used as cheap cannon fodder.

War is business, and business has been very good. It is not just the actions of Blackwater and its ilk that need to be investigated, exposed, and prosecuted. It is the whole system. If the insatiable demand for these mercenary “services,” which derives from offensive, unpopular wars of conquest, is not forcefully challenged, Blackwater and other mercenary firms have little to fear. In street parlance, they are the dealers, but the government is the addict. These companies are not simply bad apples. They are the fruit of a very poisonous tree. This system depends on a wedding of immunity and impunity. If the government started slapping mercenary firms with indictments for war crimes or murder or human rights violations—and not just in a token manner—the risk for the companies would be tremendous. This, in turn, would make wars like the one in Iraq far more difficult and arguably impossible. But even after the outrage of Nisour Square, there was no sign of this happening. In early 2008, President Bush once again sought to force the Iraqi government to extend immunity to private contractors, as he negotiated a new “Status of Forces” agreement with Baghdad.¹⁹⁸ He also said he would “waive” a provision of a 2008 law—which he signed—that would have established a bipartisan Wartime Contracting Commission to investigate war contractors, as well as one that provided protections for whistleblowers working for government contractors. In a statement, Bush said these provisions would “inhibit the President’s ability” to “protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and to execute his authority as Commander in Chief.”¹⁹⁹

While Bush undoubtedly has been the war industry’s greatest supporter, the prospect for the aggressive action required to confront the mercenary menace, whether a Democrat or Republican replaces him in the White House, is slim. The war industry is an equal-opportunity campaign contributor and has solid support from influential politicians on both sides of the aisle. Representative Schakowsky introduced legislation in late 2007 called the Stop Outsourcing Security (SOS) Act, which sought to end the use of Blackwater and other mercenary firms in U.S. war zones by 2009. “Private contracting companies have forfeited their right to represent the United States,” Schakowsky said, asserting that they “put our troops in harm’s way, and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of many innocent Iraqi civilians. They have become a liability instead of an asset.”²⁰⁰ Only a small fraction of the 435 legislators in the House signed on to support her bill and, as of spring 2008, only two senators—Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders and New York’s Hillary Clinton.

Because of the Bush administration’s refusal to hold mercenary forces accountable for their crimes in Iraq and the Democrats’ unwillingness to effectively challenge the radically privatized war machine, the only hope the victims of Nisour Square have for justice lies in the lawsuit they filed against Blackwater in Washington, D.C. In some ways, that is the most logical place for such a trial to take place, because the violence unleashed by Blackwater in Iraq is ultimately rooted in the for-profit war machine based in the U.S. capital. Shortly after Nisour Square, Erik Prince was asked by an interviewer, “How many Iraqi civilians have been killed by Blackwater employees?” “That’s an unknowable number,” Prince replied, in a rare moment of candor on the subject.²⁰¹ The significance of that acknowledgment was not lost on the lawyers suing Blackwater for Nisour Square. “What these Iraqi families are doing is a civil service to all Iraqis because they don’t want anyone else to be killed by Blackwater,” attorney Susan Burke said. “We are going to expose the corporate culture that is leading to all this death and destruction in Iraq.”²⁰²

As the United States debates an Iraq withdrawal, Blackwater doesn’t appear threatened. Some leading Democrats have advocated a gradual military withdrawal that would leave in place a counterterrorism “strike force,” the Green Zone, and security for U.S. Embassy personnel, who would staff the largest embassy in the world—potentially tens of thousands of armed forces. In fact, one of Blackwater’s senior executives, Joseph Schmitz, seemed to find a gold lining for Blackwater and other war contractors in a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: “There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint and there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.”²⁰³