Jeremy Scahill - Blackwater

At about 1:45 in the afternoon, as the helicopter buzzed toward Tikrit, it passed near the Tigris River town of Tarmiya, a small community of Sunni Muslims twelve miles north of Baghdad. 54The pilots were flying the craft low to the ground, a common military tactic to thwart potential attackers. On an elevated plain nearby stood an Iraqi who reportedly had been waiting three days for an occupation aircraft to come close enough so that he could carry out his mission. 55When the chopper whizzed within range, the Iraqi fired off a Soviet-made Strela heat-seeking missile and directly hit the helicopter, setting it ablaze as it crashed into the flat desert. 56The attacker and his comrades filmed the attack and kept the cameras rolling as they jogged toward the crash site. On their video, they can be heard out of breath repeating the chant “Allah-u-Akbar! Allah-u-Akbar!” When they arrive at the site, helicopter parts are spread across the open field and several small fires continue to burn. A badly charred body of one of the dead men lies on the ground with one arm raised in an L shape as though cowering from some form of attack. 57“Look at this filth,” says one of the attackers. “See if there are any Americans left.” 58

The attackers continue to explore the remains of the helicopter when they come across the Bulgarian pilot, Lyubomir Kostov, in a dark blue flight suit lying in a patch of tall grass. One of the men, realizing Kostov is still alive, shouts in Arabic and English, “Any weapons?” The camera pans to the pilot as he winces in pain. “Stand up! Stand up!” one of the attackers shouts in accented English. “I can’t,” replies the pilot. Motioning to his right leg, Kostov tells them, “I can’t, it’s broken. Give me a hand.” One of the attackers replies, “Come here, come here,” as he helps Kostov to his feet. “Go! Go!” someone shouts at the pilot. Kostov turns around and begins to limp away with his back to the camera. As he hobbles forward, Kostov turns his head around and puts his hand up as though to say, “Stop!” when someone suddenly yells, “Carry out God’s judgment.” The attackers, shouting “Allah-u-Akbar,” open fire on Kostov, filming the execution as they pump eighteen bullets into his body, continuing to shoot the pilot even after he has fallen.

Within two hours, a group identifying itself as the Islamic Army in Iraq provided the video to Al Jazeera, which broadcast it. “Heroes of the Islamic Army downed a transport aircraft belonging to the army of the infidels and killed its crew and those on board,” the group said in a written statement that accompanied the video. “One of the crew members was captured and killed.” 59The group said it had executed the surviving pilot “in revenge for the Muslims who have been killed in cold blood in the mosques of tireless Fallujah before the eyes of the world and on television screens, without anyone condemning them.” 60The statement was interpreted as a reference to the apparent execution by a U.S. soldier of a wounded Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque in November 2004 (which was caught on tape) during the second U.S. assault on the city. 61

In a statement released shortly after the helicopter was shot down, Blackwater said the “Six were passengers in a commercial helicopter operated by Sky Link under contract to Blackwater in support of a Department of Defense contract.” 62Despite its obvious military use, media reports overwhelmingly referred to the helicopter as a “civilian” or “commercial” aircraft. Reporters at the Pentagon, meanwhile, began reporting that “these commercial aircraft fly without the type of air protective measures that military aircraft fly with.” 63Shortly after the helicopter was downed, retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, who once headed the Air National Guard, told CNN, “All of the airplanes over there, if possible, should have infrared countermeasures and flares to protect themselves against shoulder-fired missiles, which are the biggest threat to low-flying helicopters…. Once an infrared shoulder-fired missile is fired at you, you can confuse it and divert either with flares or with sophisticated maneuvers.” 64Shepperd added, “All those protect you.” 65At the Pentagon press briefing after the shoot-down, a reporter asked spokesman Larry Di Rita about the apparent lack of these “countermeasures” on the Blackwater-contracted helicopter:

REPORTER: The Department of Defense is contracting these folks. Are there any sort of restrictions that you have to force these contractors to make sure that the private individuals who are doing work on behalf of DOD have the same sort of protections that uniformed service members are getting? And shouldn’t somebody who is doing the work of the Department of Defense, same mission, just because they’re getting their paycheck from somewhere else, have the same—enjoy the same protections that somebody in a uniform would be?

DI RITA: I’m not sure that that premise is the basis on which people operate over there. In other words, there are contractors who assume a certain amount of risk. Everybody over there is—no, I don’t say everybody—there are a number of contractors to the U.S. military, to the Department of Defense, some to the Department of State, and they assume a certain risk by being over there. And I wouldn’t want to characterize exactly what status this particular—obviously we mourn the loss of life, and I’m sure that the contractor would have taken all of the appropriate precautions. I mean, I think that’s what—they have the same regard for their employees as we do for our forces. But I can’t say that that necessarily means they’re going to be on the same status. I just don’t think that’s the case.

REPORTER: They have the same countermeasures. Shouldn’t they have the same protective gear, shouldn’t they have the same kind of ballistic gear, shouldn’t they have the same—

DI RITA: As I said, I think contractors recognize the environment that they’re operating in. It’s like they’re around the world, and they make appropriate adjustments on their own determination. 66

Unlike the Pentagon—which was limited by budget constraints—Blackwater was limited in its ability to defend its personnel only by its own spending decisions and by how much it was willing to shell out for defensive countermeasures. “I have concerns for many of the contractors who are still over there,” said Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, who already was suing Blackwater for her son’s death in Fallujah. “Our government seems to be subcontracting out this war, and these companies have no accountability.” 67

The same day the helicopter was shot down, forty-two-year-old Curtis Hundley was working a Blackwater security detail outside the city of Ramadi, not far from the site of the helicopter shoot-down. He was just a few days away from a return trip home to his wife in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. 68“When the war in Iraq started, he wanted to fight for our country,” according to his father, Steve Hundley, a former helicopter pilot who fought in Vietnam. “Too old to rejoin the Army, he joined Blackwater Security. That put him on the roads in Iraq almost daily, the most dangerous place to be. I’ve never seen him more proud. He enjoyed throwing candy to kids along the road. Like me in Vietnam, at first, he thought progress was pretty good. But civilian miscalculations—such as not sending over enough troops to secure ammo dumps and borders, and then deactivating the entire Iraq army, which instantly created thousands of potential terrorists—began to take effect. I saw my happy-go-lucky son start to harden. His eyes, which always had had a twinkle, were different in the pictures he sent. When I could get him to talk about his job, he began to sound disgusted at the worsening situation. The last several weeks of his life, disgust had turned to anger.” 69Curtis Hundley died in Ramadi on April 21, when a bomb exploded near a company armored personnel carrier. 70Hundley’s death meant that with the helicopter crash, Blackwater had lost seven men in Iraq that day, its deadliest to date in the war. “Blackwater’s Black Day,” proclaimed one news headline. 71