1115.org

(1)
As more reports emerge about what actually went down in the Blackwater USA “convoy protection” incident, things are not looking so good for the secretive well-connected company that has pretty much done exactly what it liked with no accountability of any kind whatsoever for years.

Not looking so good either for the increasingly red-faced U.S. Embassy in Baghdad which has cheerfully aided and abetted Blackwater’s reign of whatever-you-want-to-call-it all these years, which has cheerfully conspired to protect Blackwater from any consequences for its actions. It is now looking like they may also have cheerfully conspired to invent an entirely fictitious account of what happened in Mansour on Sunday afternoon.

It is possible that State Department heads may not roll over this, but that’s entirely because this is the Bush administration we’re talking about, the folks who believe that accountability is not only a cardinal sin but sets a very bad precedent, to boot.

It’s a safe assumption that Blackwater has been in full damage-control mode ever since news of the incident broke. It’s a safe assumption that in the lawless poverty-stricken environs of Baghdad in the time of Bush, full damage control includes bribing, blackmailing and/or coercing “witnesses”. So it’s all the more striking that all the witnesses the international media deems credible enough to quote:
1) call into question the version(s) previously retailed by Blackwater and the U.S. embassy
2) are consistent with each other

(This is a good time to remember that in the first 24 hours two different U.S. Embassy spokesmen had trouble being consistent with each other.)

The NYT’s Sabrina Tavernise and James Glanz filed this report:

A preliminary Iraqi report on a shooting involving an American diplomatic motorcade said Tuesday that Blackwater security guards were not ambushed, as the company reported, but instead fired at a car when it did not heed a policeman’s call to stop, killing a couple and their infant.

The report, by the Ministry of Interior, was presented to the Iraqi cabinet and, though unverified, seemed to contradict an account offered by Blackwater USA that the guards were responding to gunfire by militants. The report said Blackwater helicopters had also fired.
[...]
“There was not shooting against the convoy,” said Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government’s spokesman. “There was no fire from anyone in the square.”
[...]
American Embassy officials had said Monday that the Blackwater guards had been responding to a car bomb, but Mr. Dabbagh said the bomb was so far away that it could not possibly have been a reason for the convoy to begin shooting.

Instead, he said, the convoy had initiated the shooting when a car did not heed a police officer and moved into an intersection.

“The traffic policeman was trying to open the road for them,” he said. “It was a crowded square. But one small car did not stop. It was moving very slowly. They shot against the couple and their child. They started shooting randomly.”

In video shot shortly after the episode, the child appeared to have burned to the mother’s body after the car caught fire, according to an official who saw it.

In interviews on Tuesday, six Iraqis who had been in the area at the time of the shooting, including a man who was wounded and an Iraqi Army soldier who helped rescue people, offered roughly similar versions.

If these accounts turn out to be true, this means that every word Blackwater and the U.S. Embassy have said about the incident so far is a concocted falsehood. (Maybe this is why Sean McCormack kept saying for the entire duration of his press conference on Monday: “I don’t know a damn thing, okay?”)

And let’s remember that the convoy didn’t consist entirely of Blackwater’s people. There were Embassy staffers too. And presumably all of them didn’t get together with Blackwater’s people and pledge to produce a fictional account of coming under small arms fire and bombs exploding close by. And presumably some of these people are eventually going to tell the truth. On the record.

I’ll hazard a guess that those inquiries we have been repeatedly told are being conducted by American authorities — those inquiries that Condi Rice described as “fair and transparent” and Sean McCormack described as “open and transparent and cooperative” — will:
a) take a very long time to be completed
b) find that initial statements by Blackwater and the U.S. Embassy may not have been completely accurate. (Of course, by current standards, 17% — that’s 3 out of 18, in case you were wondering — may be an acceptable level of accuracy.)

(2)
You may or may not have noticed in the storm of other comments yesterday, but yesterday’s Blackwater post was blessed by a comment from Bill Mathews, Executive Vice President, Blackwater USA. As far as we can tell, the comment is on the level. Normally, we wouldn’t qualify for visitations from the EVP of the secretive and well-connected company no matter what we had written, but yesterday:
a) they were in full damage-control mode
b) the post was featured in Salon’s “The Blog Report”.

Salon.com is a site that you would take seriously if you were in full damage-control mode.

The reason why I bring this up is that I am now struck by the very first comment (from Drew, who has never commented before, under that or any other name):

Sarabeth: Better analysis than most–including some “professional” news outlets. Although if you really want to be fair, not just snarky, I think the “attacked by armed insurgents” comment was released because this story was being spun as if they just got a wild hair and started shooting orphans and school-crossing guards for no reason. Yes, people really are that stupid.

And what strikes me is that Drew was immediately rushing to tamp down any notion that Blackwater’s people started shooting for no reason at all, which of course is precisely the version of events that is surfacing now.

Could Drew have been an anonymous damage-control agent for Blackwater?

Bill Mathews’ comment also starts out: “Sarabeth: Your analysis is, indeed, very accurate.”

Maybe that’s what they teach at Blackwater Damage-Control School? “Always address the poster by name. Start with a compliment, no matter how badly they shafted us. Make only one single point.”

Entirely speculative, of course, all this. But I do have $5 that says I think I’m right…