Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

An apparent deadly case of contractor impunity allegedly involving Blackwater guards took place in May 2004. The incident was thoroughly investigated and reported by Los Angeles Times correspondent T. Christian Miller. 65The U.S. Embassy spokesman in Baghdad, Robert J. Callahan, was finishing up his tour of duty and was making the rounds to say his good-byes to various journalists and media organizations around the Iraqi capital. “As was typical for State Department officials, Callahan relied on Blackwater for transport around Baghdad,” according to Miller. Returning from one media compound, Callahan’s “five-vehicle convoy turned onto a broad thorough-fare running through Baghdad’s Masbah neighborhood, an area of five-story office buildings and ground-level shops.” At the same time, according to Miller, a thirty-two-year-old Iraqi truck driver named Mohammed Nouri Hattab, who was moonlighting as a taxi driver, was transporting two passengers he had just picked up in his Opel. “Hattab looked up and saw Callahan’s five-car convoy speed out of a side street in front of him. He was slowing to a stop about fifty feet from the convoy when he heard a burst of gunfire ring out, he said. Bullets shot through the hood of his Opel, cut into his shoulder, and pierced the chest of nineteen-year-old Yas Ali Mohammed Yassiri, who was in the backseat, killing him,” according to Miller. “There was no warning. It was a sudden attack,” said Hattab.

Miller reported that, on background, “one US official said that embassy officials had reviewed the shooting and determined that two Blackwater employees in the convoy that day had not followed proper procedures to warn Hattab to stay back; instead they opened fire prematurely.” The official said the two had been fired and sent home. As of this writing, they have not been prosecuted. Miller obtained hundreds of pages of incident reports involving private military contractors in Iraq. He reported, “About 11 percent of the nearly two hundred reports involved contractors firing toward civilian vehicles. In most cases the contractors received no fire from the Iraqi cars.” 66

Blackwater’s style fit in perfectly with Bremer’s mission in Iraq. In fact, one could argue that Bremer didn’t just get protection from Blackwater’s highly trained mercenaries but also from the all-powerful realities of the free-market lab he was running in Iraq. Indeed, it seems that those forces were what Bremer banked on to survive the Iraq job—if he died, Blackwater’s reputation would be shot. “If Blackwater loses a principal (like Bremer), they’re out of business, aren’t they?” asked Colonel Hammes. “Can you imagine being Blackwater, trying to sell your next contract, saying, ‘Well, we did pretty well in Iraq for about four months, and then he got killed.’ And you’re the CEO who’s going to hire and protect your guys. You’ll say, ‘I think I’ll find somebody else.’… The problem for Blackwater [is] if the primary gets killed, what happens to Blackwater is they’re out of business. For the military, if the primary gets killed, that’s a very bad thing. There will be after-action reviews, etc., but nobody’s going out of business.” 67

For Blackwater, keeping Paul Bremer alive would provide the company with an incredible marketing campaign: If we can protect the most hated man in Iraq, we can protect anyone, anywhere. Indeed, in less than a year Osama bin Laden would release an audio tape offering a reward for Bremer’s killing. “You know that America promised big rewards for those who kill mujahedeen [holy warriors],” bin Laden declared in May 2004. “We in the Al Qaeda organization will guarantee, God willing, 10,000 grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier Bremer, or the American chief commander or his deputy in Iraq.” 68The resistance, too, reportedly offered a $50,000 reward for the killing of any Blackwater guards. 69“We had prices on our heads over there,” recalled ex-Blackwater contractor Capeheart. “We all knew it.” 70

Bremer said that soon after Blackwater took over his security, “at Rumsfeld’s request, the U.S. Secret Service had done a survey of my security and had concluded that I was the most threatened American official anywhere in the world…. One report Blackwater took seriously suggested that one of the Iraqi barbers in the palace had been hired to kill me when I got a haircut.” After that, Blackwater moved Bremer into a villa on the palace grounds that reportedly had housed Qusay Hussein’s mother-in-law. 71

In December 2003, a few months after Blackwater began guarding Bremer, came the first publicly acknowledged resistance attack on the proconsul. It happened the night of December 6, right after Bremer saw Defense Secretary Rumsfeld off at the Baghdad airport. “It was after 11:00 p.m. when [Bremer’s aide] Brian McCormack and I got into my armored SUV for the run back to the Green Zone,” Bremer recalled. “Our convoy, as usual, consisted of two ‘up-armored’ Humvees sheathed in tan slabs of hardened steel, a lead-armored Suburban, our Suburban, another armored Suburban following, and two more Humvees. Overhead, we had a pair of buzzing Bell helicopters with two Blackwater snipers in each.” 72Inside the SUV, Bremer and McCormack were discussing whether Bremer should attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Bremer was thinking that he “could now use some of the ski resort pampering” when a “deafening” explosion happened, followed by automatic gunfire. The lead vehicle in the convoy had its tire blown out by an improvised explosive device (IED), and resistance fighters were attacking with AK-47s. According to Bremer, a bullet had hit a side window in his SUV. “We’d been ambushed, a highly organized, skillfully executed assassination attempt,” wrote Bremer. “I swung around and looked back. The Suburban’s armored-glass rear window had been blown out by the IED. And now AK rounds were whipping through the open rectangle.” As he sped toward the safety of the palace, Bremer recalled that “with the stench of explosives lingering in the car, I considered. Davos, all those good meals…. Francie could fly over and we could ski. That was about as far from Baghdad’s Airport Road and IEDs as you could get.” 73

Bremer’s office intentionally concealed the attack until two weeks later, when news of the ambush leaked in the U.S. press and Bremer was confronted at a press conference in the southern city of Basra. 74“Yes, this is true,” he told reporters. 75“As you can see, it didn’t succeed,” 76adding, “Thankfully I am still alive, and here I am in front of you.” 77Despite Bremer’s later description of the attack as “a highly organized” assassination attempt, at the time his spokespeople dismissed it as a “random” attack that was not likely directed at Bremer personally, 78perhaps in an effort to downplay the sophistication of the resistance. After the attack was revealed, Bremer’s spokesperson, Dan Senor, praised Blackwater: “Ambassador Bremer has very thorough and comprehensive security forces and mechanisms in place whenever there is a movement, and we have a lot of confidence in those security personnel and those mechanisms. And in this particular case, they worked.” 79

As Bremer traveled Iraq, his policies and the conduct of his “bodyguards” and the other contractors he had immunized from accountability increasingly enraged Iraqis. Meanwhile, he continued to reinforce the Iraqi characterization of him as another Saddam, as he carried out expensive renovations to the Baghdad Palace. In December 2003, Bremer spent $27,000 to remove four larger-than-life busts of Saddam’s head from the palace compound. “I’ve been looking at these for six months,” said Bremer as the first head was being removed. “The time has come for these heads to roll.” 80With much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure in shambles, it seemed a questionable use of funds, but Bremer’s spokespeople characterized it as compliance with the law. “According to the rules of de-Baathification, they have to come down,” said Bremer deputy Charles Heatly. “Actually, they are illegal.” 81