Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

The trouble was, it was a fraud. Congressional investigators and independent scientists soon revealed the truth. “The data that the report highlights are ill-defined and subject to manipulation—and give disproportionate weight to the least important terrorist acts,” wrote Alan Krueger and David Laitin, two independent experts, from Princeton and Stanford, in the Washington Post shortly after the report was released. “The only verifiable information in the annual reports indicates that the number of terrorist events has risen each year since 2001, and in 2003 reached its highest level in more than 20 years…. The alleged decline in terrorism in 2003 was entirely a result of a decline in non-significant events.” 84Instead of a 4 percent decrease in terrorist acts, as Black’s report claimed, there had actually been a 5 percent increase . 85Attacks classified as “significant,” meanwhile, hit the highest level since 1982. 86What’s more, the report stopped its tally on November 11, 2003, even though there were a number of major terrorist incidents after that date. 87Despite the fact that in speeches, U.S. officials routinely referred to resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan as “terrorists,” in Black’s report attacks on forces in Iraq were classified as combat, not terrorism. Black said they “do not meet the longstanding U.S. definition of international terrorism because they were directed at [combatants], essentially American and coalition forces on duty.” 88California Democratic Representative Ellen Tauscher later said this was evidence that the administration “continues to deny the true cost of the war and refuses to be honest with the American people.” 89

On May 17, 2004, in a letter to Black’s direct supervisor, Secretary of State Colin Powell, California Democratic Representative Henry Waxman, the ranking member of the House Government Reform Committee, blasted the report, saying its conclusions were based on a “manipulation of the data” that “serve the Administration’s political interests…. Simply put, it is deplorable that the State Department report would claim that terrorism attacks are decreasing when in fact significant terrorist activity is at a 20-year high.” 90

“The erroneous good news on terrorism also came at a very convenient moment,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “The White House was still reeling from the revelations of the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke, who finally gave public voice to the view of many intelligence insiders that the Bush administration is doing a terrible job of fighting Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, Bush was on a ‘Winning the War on Terror’ campaign bus tour in the Midwest.” 91By June, the White House was forced to issue a major correction of the report, acknowledging there had actually been a significant increase in terror attacks since the launch of Bush’s “war on terror.” The revised report said that 3,646 people were wounded by terror attacks in 2003, more than double the number in Black’s original report, while 625 were killed, dwarfing the report’s original count of 307. 92As Krugman observed, Black and other officials blamed the errors on “‘inattention, personnel shortages and [a] database that is awkward and antiquated.’ Remember: we’re talking about the government’s central clearinghouse for terrorism information, whose creation was touted as part of a ‘dramatic enhancement’ of counterterrorism efforts more than a year before this report was produced. And it still can’t input data into its own computers? It should be no surprise, in this age of Halliburton, that the job of data input was given to and botched by private contractors.” 93Bush’s Democratic challenger in the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry, charged through a spokesperson that Bush was “playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to the war on terror,” adding that the White House “has now been caught trying to inflate its success on terrorism.” 94There was talk of heads rolling at the State Department over the report, but not Black’s. “It was an honest mistake,” Black claimed, “not a deliberate deception.” 95

Despite the controversy, the State Department post allowed Black to remain at the center of U.S. counterterror policy. Black worked directly under Colin Powell, with whom he reportedly shared a common adversary within the administration—Donald Rumsfeld. As the Pentagon attempted to change U.S. policy after 9/11 to allow the military to insert Special Operations forces into countries without approval from the U.S. ambassador or CIA mission chief, Black became the point person in thwarting Rumsfeld’s plan. “I gave Cofer specific instructions to dismount, kill the horses and fight on foot—this is not going to happen,” Powell’s deputy, Richard Armitage, told the Washington Post, describing how he and others had stopped a half dozen Pentagon attempts to weaken chief-of-mission authority. 96(Interestingly, Black, Armitage, and Powell all resigned within two weeks of one another in November 2004 after Bush’s reelection, while Rumsfeld continued on for another two years.)

Among Black’s other duties in his new post was coordinating security for the 2004 Olympics in Greece. He traveled to Athens and oversaw the training of more than thirteen hundred Greek security personnel under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Assistance (ATA) program. 97More than two hundred of those trained were instructed in handling underwater explosives and responding to possible WMD attacks. 98Blackwater was awarded a contract for an undisclosed amount of money in 2003 to train “special security teams” in advance of the international games. 99The company denied there was anything untoward about that contract and that Black’s subsequent hiring was unrelated. 100

On April 1, 2004, a day after the Blackwater Fallujah ambush, Black was testifying before the House Committee on International Relations in a hearing on “The Al Qaeda Threat” when he made his first public comments about Blackwater. “I can’t tell you how sad we all are to see that. And this takes me back; I have seen these things before,” he said. “I think since it specifically happened in the Fallujah area, which is very Saddam Hussein-oriented, tribally oriented, they do see us as the enemy, and their natural inclination, until we prove them otherwise, is to vent their frustration, what they see as their humiliation and defeat against an outside force, against representatives of that entity. It’s not that uncommon.” 101Black continued, “The people that did this were not, you know, three guys, you know, on an excellent adventure. You know, these are people that have had the training, have a vested interest.” Asked about “any relationship you see between Al Qaeda and that kind of Islamic terrorism” evidenced in Fallujah, Black responded, “I think it is, from our perspective, it’s associated, it’s in proximity. There’s not, specifically, a direct tie between that crowd and Al Qaeda as we know it. They just find themselves with the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” 102

The next month, Black was giving a keynote dinner address at Blackwater’s World SWAT Challenge. In a mass e-mail announcing the speech, Blackwater president Gary Jackson wrote, “Dinner on Thursday night at Water-side has a fantastic guest speaker in Ambassador Cofer Black. Ambassador Black’s responsibilities include coordinating U.S. Government efforts to improve counterterrorism cooperation with foreign governments, including the policy and planning of the Department’s Antiterrorism Training Assistance Program.” 103

In late 2004, two months before the U.S. presidential election, Black grabbed headlines after claiming on Pakistani television that the United States was near to capturing bin Laden. “If he has a watch, he should be looking at it because the clock is ticking,” Black declared. “He will be caught.” 104These bold declarations were controversial and quickly put senior White House and Pakistani officials on the defensive in the media. In November 2004, Black resigned his State Department post, he said, to explore new professional opportunities. “He thought it would be a good time between administrations to go,” said State Department spokesperson Adam Ereli. “He has a number of offers in the private sector, and he’s going to take some time to think about them.” 105