Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Many questioned why—with four thousand Marines positioned around Fallujah—such a prolonged mutilation of the bodies of the Blackwater contractors was possible and why their charred corpses were left for hours to hang from the bridge. “[E]ven while the two vehicles burned, sending plumes of thick, black smoke over the shuttered shops of the city, there were no ambulances, fire engines or security dispatched to try and rescue the victims,” UPI reported. “This time, there were no Blackhawks to fly to the rescue. Instead, Fallujah’s streets were abandoned to the jubilant, chaotic, and violent crowds who rejoiced amid battered human remains.” 21Col. Michael Walker, a Marine spokesman, said: “Should we have sent in a tank so we could have gotten, with all due respect, four dead bodies back? What good would that have done? A mob is a mob. We would have just provoked them. The smart play was to let this thing fade out.” 22

Responding to a reporter’s question about whether the Marines did not go into Fallujah right after the ambush to confront the mob attacking the Blackwater men because it was “too dangerous,” Kimmitt shot back, “I don’t think that there is any place in this country that the coalition forces feel is too dangerous to go into.” 23That day on CNN, Crossfire host Tucker Carlson said, “I think we ought to kill every person who’s responsible for the deaths of those Americans. This is a sign of weakness. This is how we got 9/11. It’s because we allowed things like that to go unresponded to. This is a big deal.” 24

Within twenty-four hours, Kimmitt’s tone had changed. “We will respond. We are not going to do a pell-mell rush into the city. It’s going to be deliberate, it will be precise and it will be overwhelming,” he declared at a press briefing in Baghdad. 25“We will be back in Fallujah. It will be at the time and the place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them. And we will pacify Fallujah.” 26

Paul Bremer made his first public remarks on the killings during an address in front of nearly five hundred new graduates from the Iraqi police academy in Baghdad. “Yesterday’s events in Fallujah are a dramatic example of the ongoing struggle between human dignity and barbarism,” he declared, warning that the killing of the Blackwater men “will not go unpunished.” The dead contractors, he said, “came to help Iraq recover from decades of dictatorship, to help the people of Iraq gain the elections, democracy, and freedom desired by the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people. These murders are a painful outrage for us in the coalition. But they will not derail the march to stability and democracy in Iraq. The cowards and ghouls who acted yesterday represent the worst of society.” 27

In most U.S. news reports on the ambush, Fallujah was described as a Sunni resistance stronghold filled with foreign fighters and Saddam loyalists. The dominant narrative became that the Blackwater men were innocent “civilian contractors” delivering food who were slaughtered by butchers in Fallujah. At one point after the incident, Kimmitt told reporters that the Blackwater men were “there to provide assistance, to provide food to that local area,” 28as though the men were humanitarians working for the Red Cross. But inside Fallujah and elsewhere in Iraq, the ambush was viewed differently. The news that the men were technically not active U.S. forces did not change the fact that they were fully armed Americans who had traveled into the center of Fallujah at a time when U.S. forces were killing Iraqi civilians and attempting to take the city by force. The New York Times reported, “Many people in Falluja said they believed that they had won an important victory on Wednesday. They insisted that the four security guards, who were driving in unmarked sport utility vehicles, were working for the Central Intelligence Agency. ‘This is what these spies deserve,’ said Salam Aldulayme, a 28-year-old Falluja resident.” 29

On CNN’s Larry King Live, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, who had just returned from Iraq a few days before the Blackwater killings, said, “There is a sort of second army of Americans out there now in the form of security personnel, who can be seen almost anywhere in the country there is a member of the coalition doing something. And they struck me as being very high-profile targets. They’re armed to the teeth. A lot of them look like they come out of a Sylvester Stallone movie. And so, and they move around the country. And I think that the insurgents, whomever they are, have picked up on them and may be tracking them. So when it happened in Fallujah, as bad as it was, I must say I wasn’t deeply surprised.” 30

Others described the ambush as a response to the recent U.S. killing of civilians in Fallujah, particularly the gun battle the previous week that left more than a dozen Iraqis dead. “Children and women were killed. They were innocent,” said Ibrahim Abdullah al-Dulaimi. “People in Fallujah are very angry with the American soldiers.” 31Leaflets began circulating in Fallujah claiming that the killings were carried out as revenge for the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. 32A Fallujah shop assistant named Amir said, “The Americans may think it is unusual, but this is what they should expect. They show up in places and shoot civilians, so why can’t they be killed?” 33These sentiments were even echoed among the ranks of the U.S.-created Iraqi police force. “The violence is increasing against the Americans,” said Maj. Abdelaziz Faisal Hamid Mehamdy, a Fallujan who joined the police force in 2003 after Baghdad fell. “They took over the country and they didn’t give us anything. They came for democracy and to help the people, but we haven’t seen any of this, just killing and violence.” 34

A local Fallujan official, Sami Farhood al-Mafraji, who had been supportive of the occupation, said, “Americans are not meeting their promises here to help build up this country…. I used to support the military. But they have put me in a very difficult situation with my people. Now, they tell us to hand these people over?” 35He said the dire humanitarian situation and the violence of the occupation had “made people depressed and angry.” “Hungry people will eat you,” he said. “And people here are very hungry.” 36This context even seemed clear to some U.S. troops as well. “The people who did this heinous crime were looking for revenge,” said Marine Lt. Eric Thorliefson, positioned on the outskirts of Fallujah. He added, “We shall respond with force.” 37

While U.S. officials condemned the public mutilation of the bodies, they refused to answer questions about the U.S. policy of distributing gruesome photos of the mangled corpses of “high value” Iraqis killed by U.S. forces, like Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay in July 2003, as proof of death. Similar to the outrage expressed by Washington over the mauling of the Blackwater contractors, Iraqis were furious over this U.S. propaganda technique. At the White House the day of the Blackwater killings, McClellan was asked if the administration did “not see hypocrisy [when showing] embalmed bodies as proof of death is condemned but the dragging of American bodies through a street goes on without a comment?”

“It is offensive. It is despicable the way that these individuals have been treated,” McClellan responded, ignoring the question. “And we hope everybody acts responsibly in their coverage of it.” 38Indeed, most of the images of the ambush and its aftermath that were broadcast on U.S. networks and in newspapers were edited or blurred. Even so, the message was clear. With the Somalia comparisons increasing in the international media, the administration shot back. “We are not going to withdraw. We are not going to be run out,” Secretary of State Colin Powell, the first senior Bush administration official to comment directly on the Blackwater killings, told German television. “America has the ability to stay and fight an enemy and defeat an enemy. We will not run away.” 39