Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

But it wasn’t just the families who sensed something was off. In fact, the very day of the ambush, questions arose about “who is driving around in unprotected SUVs” in Iraq. 11On Fox News, retired Col. Ralph Peters said, “I have to give you a painful answer on this. Either the most foolish contractors in the history of mankind or frankly it may have been intelligence people doing intelligence work. I don’t know. I was talking to a colonel friend of mine who is over in the Gulf right now, today, about this. And he said, ‘If they’re contractors, this is Darwinian selection at work.’” 12Meanwhile, on NPR the next day, New York Times correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman came out of Fallujah asking the same questions. “What’s really mysterious, though, is why two unescorted, unarmored cars would be driving through the downtown of one of the most dangerous cities in Iraq without any serious protection,” Gettleman said. “If this could happen to these guys, who are, you know, well trained and had a lot of experience in dealing with things like this, you know, what does it mean for others like myself who walk into situations in places like Fallujah and don’t have the military background?” 13Other mercenary firms weighed in as well. “We have a policy with our international security division that requires that they use armored vehicles at all times,” said Frank Holder of Kroll on Fox News. “We won’t take an assignment unless there are armored vehicles.” 14

A few days later, London’s Observer newspaper ran a story referencing the Fallujah ambush, headlined “Veiled Threat: Why an SUV Is Now the Most Dangerous Vehicle in Iraq.” 15The article labeled SUVs “the occupation car of choice.” The Observer ’s correspondent noted, “Falluja is a centre of the anti-American resistance, where even the police don’t support the Americans. US soldiers don’t drive through Falluja much. When they do, they have helicopter back-up and heavy armour. ‘Almost every foreigner who has been killed here is an idiot,’ said one ex-Navy SEAL. Soldiers often show little sympathy for those who fail to follow the right procedure.” 16In a reaction piece written from Amman and Baghdad, Professor Mark LeVine wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, “[M]any here see last week’s carnage of Americans in Fallujah as suspicious. To send foreign contractors into Fallujah in late-model SUVs with armed escorts—down a traffic-clogged street on which they’d be literal sitting ducks—can be interpreted as a deliberate US instigation of violence to be used as a pretext for ‘punishment’ by the US military.” 17Amid the graphic scenes of mutilation and the dominant rhetoric of revenge emanating from the Pentagon and White House, the obvious questions about the Blackwater mission that day were overshadowed, but they certainly did not disappear. The company clearly knew it would have to offer some sort of an explanation.

A week after the ambush, Blackwater put forward a narrative that the New York Times said “could deflect blame for the incident from Blackwater.” 18“The truth is, we got led into this ambush,” Blackwater vice president Patrick Toohey, a decorated career military officer, told the Times . “We were set up.” 19According to Blackwater’s version of events, as reported by the Times , the four men killed in Fallujah “were in fact lured into a carefully planned ambush by men they believed to be friendly members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps… [who] promised the Blackwater-led convoy safe and swift passage through the dangerous city, but instead, a few kilometers later, they suddenly blocked off the road, preventing any escape from waiting gunmen.” 20According to the subsequent Congressional investigation, the CPA report on the ambush disputed this account, finding that “the evidence does not support the claim that the ICDC participated in the ambush, either by escorting the convoy into Fallujah or by using its own vehicle to block the convoy from escaping the ambush.” 21Despite the increasing hostilities in Fallujah at the time, the Times went along with the company’s line, reporting that the Blackwater convoy “had little cause for suspicion.” In the Times story, no questions were raised about the lack of armored vehicles or the fact that there were only four men on the mission instead of six. Lending credence to Blackwater’s story, the Times declared that “the company’s initial findings are in line with recent complaints from senior American officials about Iraqi forces”:

In testimony last month to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, spoke openly of his worries about the Iraqi security and police forces, now numbering more than 200,000. “There’s no doubt that terrorists and insurgents will attempt to infiltrate the security forces,” he said. “We know it’s happening, and we know it has happened. We attempt to do our best with regard to vetting people.” Also, the Pentagon has received new intelligence reports warning that Sunni and Shiite militia groups have been ransacking Iraqi police stations in some cities, and then handing out both weapons and police uniforms to angry mobs, government officials said. 22

But this story was soon directly contradicted by one of the most senior U.S. officials in Iraq at the time—Bremer’s deputy, Jim Steele, who had been sent covertly into Fallujah to recover the bodies and investigate. 23After Steele met with Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker magazine in Baghdad, Anderson reported that Steele had “concluded that there was no evidence that the Iraqi police had betrayed the contractors.” 24This was backed up by Malcolm Nance, a former naval intelligence officer and FBI terrorism adviser who headed a private security firm in Iraq at the time. “In Fallujah especially, an [Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] guarantee is of zero value,” Nance said. “You would never trust the word of local forces in a place like that—especially if you were driving a high-profile convoy, as these people were.” 25Richard Perry, another former naval intelligence officer, who worked with Scott Helvenston when he was still in the service, said, “[E]verything that happened in Fallujah that day was a serious mistake. I simply cannot understand why the hell they were driving through the most dangerous part of Iraq in just two vehicles without a proper military escort…. They were lightly armed, and yet they would be up against people who regularly take on the U.S. Army.” 26 Time magazine reported that “A former private military operator with knowledge of Blackwater’s operational tactics says the firm did not give all its contract warriors in Afghanistan proper training in offensive-driving tactics, although missions were to include vehicular and dignitary-escort duty. ‘Evasive driving and ambush tactics were not—repeat, were not—covered in training,’ this source said.” 27

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Chronicle reported from Baghdad that Control Risks Group, the firm Blackwater had taken over the ESS contract from, had warned Blackwater at the time that Fallujah was not safe to travel through: “According to senior executives working with other Baghdad security companies, Blackwater’s decision to press ahead anyway stemmed from a desire to impress its new clients. ‘There has been a big row about this,’ said one executive, who asked not to be named. ‘Not long before the convoy left, Control Risks said, “Don’t go through Fallujah, it’s not safe.” But Blackwater wanted to show… that nowhere was too dangerous for them.’” 28In response, Blackwater spokesman Bertelli said, “It is certainly not out of the question that some of Blackwater’s competitors would use this tragic occurrence as an opportunity to try and damage Blackwater’s reputation and secure contracts for themselves.” 29