Surprise, surprise! It’s business as usual in the most lucrative war America has ever fought. Blackwater is already receiving new government contracts:

Earlier this month, Blackwater USA was involved in the fatal shooting of 11 Iraqi civilians. While the Iraqi government swiftly condemned the contractor, the Bush administration has continued to back Blackwater’s story that it was “defensive fire.”

Last Thursday, Gen. Peter Pace told reporters, “Blackwater has been a contractor in the past with the department and could certainly be in the future.” The next day, that future was already here. The Pentagon had issued a new list of contracts, including one worth $92 million to Presidential Airways, the “aviation unit of parent company Blackwater.”

Words like “amazing” and “astounding” would not be out of place here. But there will be enough people to apply those words, no doubt. So let’s focus on a different issue.

How come the Bush administration chose to back Blackwater’s story that it was “defensive fire”, and continues to do so?

As the State Department’s first-blush report makes clear, the only witnesses to the shooting are various Iraqis (both private citizens and government servants of various stripes) and the Blackwater guards who are accused of the wanton and indiscriminate slaughter of civilians.

Apart from a couple of early press reports, Iraqi witnesses are unanimously testifying that the Blackwater guards shot at Iraqi civilians without provocation, that the Blackwater guards never came under fire, that the Blackwater guards did all the shooting.

The Blackwater guards — surprise, surprise — claim they were attacked first, that they fired only in response to the attack, and that they fired only carefully aimed shots at the attackers.

Iraqi officials claim to have videotape of the incident that supports the testimony of Iraqi witnesses.

Blackwater says, in effect: “Go to hell, U.S. authorities are supporting our story, and that’s all that counts.” (Can’t blame them at some level; that’s how it’s always worked in the past.)

It’s hard to see this as an evenly balanced, knife-edge situation, where either side is equally likely to be telling the truth. Apart from the alleged videotape, consider this argument, made by an anonymous Iraqi official:

The senior Iraqi police official also rejected Blackwater’s account of being ambushed by gunmen. Nisoor Square, he said, sits in front of the National Police headquarters. There were checkpoints, Iraqi army and police, nearby in nearly every direction, making it hard for gunmen to take positions to ambush the convoy.

The police guards in the square, he added, would not shoot without orders. The square is a common route for dozens of heavily armored U.S. military and embassy convoys. Anyone planning an attack would use heavy weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades — not guns, the official said. “To attack body-armored vehicles with bullets? No one can believe this,” the police official said.

There’s also Blackwater USA’s well-deserved reputation for being trigger-happy. Attacking Blackwater USA body-armored vehicles with bullets would be even more far-fetched.

And then there’s the testimony of the Blackwater guards themselves that one of the guards went berserk, and wouldn’t stop shooting at civilians till someone pulled a gun on him.

Under the circumstances, it’s ludicrous that Condi Rice‘s State Department’s immediate response to the incident was to wholeheartedly embrace the Blackwater version. And that they have still not retreated from that position to a neutral corner.

Of all the possible responses to the Blackwater shooting, that has to be the most colossally stupid response possible. By a very wide margin. Trust Condi Rice, Ph.D., to pick precisely that response.

Whether you want to call them mercenaries, or whether you want to go with the priceless sanitization paramilitary NGOs, given a situation with sharply conflicting accounts of what happened, the State Department chooses to take sides and to embrace the unsupported word of those who have been accused of what sounds very much like a war crime?

Whatever else one believes or does not believe about the shooting incident, it clearly would have made a lot more sense to stay neutral, and not take sides. And been a lot more diplomatic. If only we had someone high up in our government whose job it was to take a diplomatic approach to such issues, especially when they involve other countries.

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See also: The Moral Bankruptcy Of The State Department (October 2)