Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

As this case made its way through the legal labyrinth, Blackwater regularly switched legal teams and introduced new arguments and attempts to beat the case before it could make its way to trial. In January 2008 Blackwater lashed out at Wiley Rein, the firm that originally represented the company in the Fallujah suit. Blackwater sued the firm for malpractice; if the attorneys had done their job, the company asserted, the “lawsuit would have been dismissed and the litigation involving plaintiffs would have ended.” 128Blackwater sought $30 million in damages. Wiley Rein said the claim was without merit.

Given the uncounted tens of thousands of Iraqis who have died since the invasion and the multiple U.S. sieges in Fallujah that followed the Blackwater incident, some might say this lawsuit was just warmongers bickering. In the bigger picture, the real scandal wasn’t that these men were sent into Fallujah with only a four-person detail when there should have been six or that they didn’t have a powerful enough machine gun to kill their attackers. It was that the United States had opened Iraq’s door to mercenary firms whose forces roamed the country with apparent impunity. The consequences of this policy were not lost on the families of the four slain Blackwater contractors. “Over a thousand people died because of what happened to Scotty that day,” said Katy Helvenston-Wettengel. “There’s a lot of innocent people that have died.” While the lawsuit didn’t mention the retaliatory U.S. attack on Fallujah that followed the Blackwater killings, the case sent shockwaves through the corporate community that has reaped huge profits in Iraq and other war zones. At the time the lawsuit was filed, more than 428 private contractors had been killed in Iraq with U.S. taxpayers footing almost the entire compensation bill to their families. By February 2008, the U.S. Department of Labor adjusted the figure to 1,123 contractors killed and over 13,000 injured. “This is a precedent-setting case,” said attorney Miles. “Just like with tobacco litigation or gun litigation, once they lose that first case, they’d be fearful there would be other lawsuits to follow.” 129

U.S. ARMYSpc. Harley Miller made his way out of the mangled wreckage of Blackwater 61, a turboprop plane that minutes earlier had slammed into Baba Mountain, 14,650 feet high in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountain range. He passed the two other soldiers who had been on the flight with him, both dead from the impact and still strapped into their seats. The twenty-one-year-old Miller was suffering from injuries just a shade less severe than those that had killed them. Miller was all alone on the snow-covered mountain, 2,000 feet below its peak. The two pilots—Blackwater contractors—had been ejected 150 feet in front of the plane after its 400-foot skid and had died from the impact. The body of the aircraft’s engineer rested just outside the plane’s bulkhead. 1

Specialist Miller smoked a cigarette; urinated twice, once near the rear of the aircraft and once near the front; and unrolled two sleeping bags. He propped a metal ladder up against the fuselage, possibly so he could climb on top of it to call for help or to gauge his location. He lay down on the makeshift bed, suffering from massive internal bleeding, a broken rib, lung and abdominal trauma, and minor head injuries. Miller’s injuries would be compounded by the lack of oxygen and the frigid temperatures, and after more than eight hours alive and alone atop Baba Mountain, the crash claimed its final casualty. It would be three days before his body was recovered. 2

The November 27, 2004, crash of Blackwater 61, a privately owned plane on contract with the U.S. military, would attract scant media attention, mostly sugary obituaries in the hometown papers of those killed. While Blackwater had already become a familiar name because of the Fallujah ambush a few months earlier, the crash itself, a small speck of inaccessible wreckage in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, was a nonstory. It could scarcely have created a more opposite impression than that of the iconic killings in Fallujah. There were no gruesome images broadcast internationally and no declarations from the White House. It was, for all practical purposes, a minor tragedy in what had become—at least in the eyes of the media—a secondary, if not forgotten, war in Afghanistan. But the crash would nonetheless become a serious legal problem for Blackwater, for this time, unlike in Fallujah, there was an official paper trail.

The U.S. Army’s Collateral Investigations Board and the National Transportation Safety Board generated hundreds of pages of documents as they investigated the crash. A black box captured the final moments of the flight. Unlike in Fallujah, some of the victims of the incident were active-duty U.S. soldiers, and those who caused the deaths, even if not intentionally, were private contractors. On the surface, it would seem that with the exception of Blackwater being involved in both incidents, the crash atop Baba Mountain and the Fallujah massacre had little in common.

The similarities, though, began to reveal themselves after the families of the three U.S. soldiers killed in the crash filed a wrongful death lawsuit on June 10, 2005. In fact, the issues surrounding the crash would prove to be much the same as those surrounding Fallujah, though they would draw far less attention. The families of the soldiers killed in the Blackwater 61 crash alleged that the company had cut corners, sidestepped basic safety procedures, and recklessly caused the deaths of their loved ones in the process. 3At the center of the case, as in that of the Fallujah lawsuit, was once again Blackwater’s claim that its forces were immune from any lawsuits because the company was part of the U.S. “Total Force” in the war on terror. 4

Blackwater’s aviation division, Presidential Airways, has largely operated off of the public radar, though its aircraft overseas have frequented the same airports as those used in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. 5Blackwater’s pilots are required to have the same security clearances as those involved in renditions. David P. Dalrymple, the Bagram site manager for Presidential, said, “I, and all other Presidential personnel serving in Afghanistan, possess or are in the process of obtaining ‘secret’ or higher security clearances from the United States Government.” 6The company also asserted that it “holds a US DoD Secret Facility Clearance.” 7

The contract that Blackwater 61 operated under in Afghanistan had been inked in September 2004, just two months before the crash. 8After three months of negotiations, the Air Force agreed to a $34.8 million contract for Presidential Airways to provide “short take-off and landing” (STOL) flights in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. 9Presidential agreed to fly six regularly scheduled daily routes to small airfields throughout Afghanistan, and other flights as needed. It was estimated that Presidential’s three aircraft would fly about 8,760 hours per year under the contract. 10“With this contract, [Blackwater Aviation] has extended its reach out of Iraq and is providing much needed assistance to US Service men and women in Afghanistan and further into the southern countries of the former Soviet Union,” Blackwater boasted in October 2004 in its Tactical Weekly newsletter. 11

John Hight, Presidential’s director of operations, explained that the company based its bid on its “experience operating in and out of unimproved landing strips and work for the military carrying sky divers.” 12Once the company got word that its bid was successful, Hight said he started recruiting “experienced CASA pilots” for the Afghanistan missions. Five days after the contract was signed, “we arrived in Afghanistan with our first aircraft,” Hight recalled. 13