Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

That is what apparently happened after another fatal Blackwater incident. On Christmas Eve 2006, inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, Andrew Moonen, 55an 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, 56where 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. 59Iraqi officials labeled the killing a “murder.” 60Blackwater 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.” 61But 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.” 63According 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. 65The 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.” 66But the U.S. government, relying on information from Blackwater, concluded that the sniper’s actions “fell within approved rules governing the use of force.” 67Blackwater 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 . 69In 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.” 71By 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. 73In all there were ten known deadly shootings involving Blackwater from June 2005 to September 2007. 74Among 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. 76However, U.S. Embassy spokesperson Mirembe Nantongo said, “We have no official documentation on file from our Iraqi partners requesting clarification of any incident.” 77But 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,” 78Degn said.

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.” 79The 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