Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

Veteran journalist Allan Nairn, who exposed U.S.-backed death squads in Central America in the 1980s, said whether Negroponte was involved with the “Salvador option” in Iraq or not, “These programs, which backed the killing of foreign civilians, it’s a regular part of U.S. policy. It’s ingrained in U.S. policy in dozens upon dozens of countries.” 34Duane Clarridge, who ran the CIA’s “covert war against communism in Central America from Honduras,” visited his old colleague Negroponte in Baghdad in the summer of 2004. In Iraq, “[Negroponte] was told to play a low-key role and let the Iraqis be out front,” Clarridge told the New York Times . “And that’s what he likes to do, anyway.” 35According to the Times , “Negroponte shifted more than $1 billion to build up the Iraqi Army from reconstruction projects, a move prompted by his experience with the frailty of the South Vietnamese Army.” 36

Negroponte called the connection of his name to the “Salvador option” in Iraq “utterly gratuitous.” 37But human rights advocates who closely monitored his career said the rise in death-squad-type activity in Iraq during Negroponte’s tenure in Baghdad was impossible to overlook. “What we’re seeing is that the U.S. military is losing the war [in Iraq], and so the Salvador option was really a policy of death squads,” said Andres Contreris, Latin American program director of the human rights group Non-violence International. “It’s no coincidence that Negroponte, having been the Ambassador in Honduras, where he was very much engaged in this kind of support for death squads, was the Ambassador in Iraq, and this is the kind of policy that was starting to be implemented there, which is not just going after the resistance itself but targeting for repression and torture and assassination the underlying support base, the family members, and those in the communities where the resistance is. These kinds of policies are war crimes.” 38

Negroponte’s time in Iraq was short-lived—on February 17, 2005, President Bush nominated him as the first Director of National Intelligence. Some would say Negroponte had a job to do in Iraq, he did it, and then left. By May of that year, he was back in the United States, while reports increasingly appeared describing an increase in death-squad-style activity in Iraq. “Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country’s divide along ethnic and sectarian lines,” the Washington Post reported a few months after Negroponte left Iraq. 39“In 2005, we saw numerous instances where the behavior of death squads was very similar, uncannily similar to that we had observed in other countries, including El Salvador,” said John Pace, a forty-year United Nations diplomat who served as the Human Rights Chief for the UN Assistance Mission in Iraq during Negroponte’s time in the country. “They first started as a kind of militia, sort of organized armed groups, which were the military wing of various factions.” 40Eventually, he said, “Many of them [were] actually acting as official police agents as a part of the Ministry of Interior…. You have these militias now with police gear and under police insignia basically carrying out an agenda which really is not in the interest of the country as a whole. They have roadblocks in Baghdad and other areas, they would kidnap other people. They have been very closely linked with numerous mass executions.” 41

Shortly before Negroponte left Iraq, former chief UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter predicted that “the Salvador Option will serve as the impetus for all-out civil war. In the same manner that the CPA-backed assassination of Baathists prompted the restructuring and strengthening of the Sunni-led resistance, any effort by US-backed Kurdish and Shia assassination teams to target Sunni resistance leaders will remove all impediments for a general outbreak of ethnic and religious warfare in Iraq. It is hard as an American to support the failure of American military operations in Iraq. Such failure will bring with it the death and wounding of many American service members, and many more Iraqis.” 42Ritter’s vision would appear prophetic in the ensuing months, as Iraq was hit with an unprecedented and sustained level of violence many began describing as an all-out civil war.

In October 2005, correspondent Tom Lasseter from the Knight Ridder news agency spent a week on patrol with “a crack unit of the Iraqi army—the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division.” 43He reported, “Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.” The unit was responsible for security in Sunni areas of Baghdad, and Lasseter reported that “they’re seeking revenge against the Sunnis who oppressed them during Saddam Hussein’s rule.” He quoted Shiite Army Maj. Swadi Ghilan saying he wanted to kill most Sunnis in Iraq. “There are two Iraqs; it’s something that we can no longer deny,” Ghilan said. “The army should execute the Sunnis in their neighborhoods so that all of them can see what happens, so that all of them learn their lesson.”

Lasseter reported that many of the Shiite officers and soldiers said they “want a permanent, Shiite-dominated government that will finally allow them to steamroll much of the Sunni minority, some 20 percent of the nation and the backbone of the insurgency.” Lasseter described the First Brigade, which was held up by U.S. commanders as a template for the future of Iraq’s military, like this: “They look and operate less like an Iraqi national army unit and more like a Shiite militia.” Another officer, Sgt. Ahmed Sabri, said, “Just let us have our constitution and elections… and then we will do what Saddam did—start with five people from each neighborhood and kill them in the streets and then go from there.” By November 2006 an estimated one thousand Iraqis were being killed every week, 44and the Iraqi death toll had passed an estimated six hundred thousand people since the March 2003 invasion. 45

In retrospect, if one stepped back from the various substories playing out on the ground in Iraq in 2005, the big-picture reality was that the country was quickly becoming the global epicenter of privatized warfare with scores of heavily armed groups of various loyalties and agendas roaming Iraq. In addition to the U.S.-backed death squads, operating with some claim to legitimacy within the U.S.-installed system in Baghdad, there were the private antioccupation militias of various Shiite leaders, such as Muqtada al-Sadr, and the resistance movements of Sunni factions, largely comprised of ex-military officials and soldiers, as well as Al Qaeda-backed militias. The Bush administration made it a policy to denounce certain militias. “In a free Iraq, former militia members must shift their loyalty to the national government, and learn to operate under the rule of law,” Bush declared. 46Yet at the top of this militia pyramid were the official mercenaries Washington had imported to Iraq—the private military companies, of which Blackwater was the industry leader. While calling for the dismantling of some Iraqi militias, the United States openly permitted its own pro-occupation mercenaries to operate above the law in Iraq.

At the end of Negroponte’s time in Baghdad, with militia violence on the rise, Blackwater’s forces once again grabbed headlines in what would be—at the time—the deadliest incident the company acknowledged publicly in Iraq. On April 21, 2005, the day Negroponte was confirmed to his new position as Director of National Intelligence in Washington, some of his former bodyguards were dying in Iraq. 47That day, a Bulgarian-operated Mi-8 helicopter on contract with Blackwater was flying from the Green Zone to Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit. 48On board were six American Blackwater troops on contract with the U.S. government’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. 49With them were three Bulgarian crew members and two Fijian mercenaries. 50A day before they left, one of the Blackwater men, twenty-nine-year-old Jason Obert of Colorado, had called his wife, Jessica. He “told me that he was going to be sent on a mission. He had a bad feeling about it,” she recalled. “I begged him not to go. I just told him just to come home. But he would never quit; that’s not him.” 51Jessica Obert said her husband did not tell her the nature of the mission. Like many who signed up for work with Blackwater in Iraq, Jason Obert viewed it as a chance to build a nest egg for his wife and their two young sons. 52In February 2005, he quit his job as a police officer and signed up with Blackwater. “The financial gain was incredible,” said Lt. Robert King, Obert’s former boss at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department. “He had communicated to me and several other people that he would do one year, and his children and his wife would be taken care of. Their college education would be funded, houses paid off.” 53The day after he told his wife about his “bad feelings,” he boarded the Mi-8 helicopter with his Blackwater colleagues, the Fijians, and the Bulgarian crew.