1115.org

One of the obvious questions arising out of the September 16 Blackwater shootings that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead is: How on earth could Blackwater guards have acted like this, how could they possibly have hoped to get away with it?

We are, after all, talking about a public rampage. Blackwater guards opened fire without provocation on unarmed civilians before hundreds of witnesses. They deliberately gunned down unarmed civilians from behind as they tried to flee from the scene of the carnage.

They did so, apparently, secure in the belief that all they had to do later was claim that they had been fired upon, and that would be the end of the matter.

Steve Fainaru of WaPo has a chilling and very detailed account of an earlier incident which helps explain why Blackwater guards might have harbored such beliefs:

Last Feb. 7, a sniper employed by Blackwater USA, the private security company, opened fire from the roof of the Iraqi Justice Ministry. The bullet tore through the head of a 23-year-old guard for the state-funded Iraqi Media Network, who was standing on a balcony across an open traffic circle. Another guard rushed to his colleague’s side and was fatally shot in the neck. A third guard was found dead more than an hour later on the same balcony.

Eight people who responded to the shootings — including media network and Justice Ministry guards and an Iraqi army commander — and five network officials in the compound said none of the slain guards had fired on the Justice Ministry, where a U.S. diplomat was in a meeting. An Iraqi police report described the shootings as “an act of terrorism” and said Blackwater “caused the incident.” The media network concluded that the guards were killed “without any provocation.”

The U.S. government reached a different conclusion. Based on information from the Blackwater guards, who said they were fired upon, the State Department determined that the security team’s actions “fell within approved rules governing the use of force,” according to an official from the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. Neither U.S. Embassy officials nor Blackwater representatives interviewed witnesses or returned to the network, less than a quarter-mile from Baghdad’s Green Zone, to investigate.
[…]
U.S. officials were “overwhelmingly convinced” that the Blackwater guards acted appropriately, based on information they had provided, according to the diplomatic security official….
[…]
“The embassy conducted a review of the circumstances surrounding the whole shooting incident and essentially what happened is, after going over all the reports, interviewing all the personnel that were involved in it, talking with people that were coming back in the motorcade, they concluded that the actions of the security team fell within the approved rules,” the official said.

“To say Blackwater was the only source of information for this investigation is completely false,” the security official added. U.S. officials declined to say who else was contacted as part of the probe or to provide any details about the assertions of Blackwater guards that they came under fire.

This seems to have been the generic plot, which was played out repeatedly. Blackwater guards shoot Iraqis. The Iraqi government protests. Blackwater guards claim they were fired at. The U.S. government — personified by Condi Rice’s State. Department — shrugs, yawns and looks the other way. No one ever investigates. No one is ever held to account.

And Blackwater guards learn, by personal experience, that the U.S. government has given them a free license to engage in the ultimate bloodsport—hunting man. You shoot, you kill. And you live to shoot and kill another day.

Is it at all far-fetched to speculate that after a few years this was the scuttlebutt in mercenary recruiting circles too? To speculate that Blackwater attracted the kind of scum to whom this bloodsport would appeal. That, by a process of self-selection, Blackwater naturally ended up hiring the kind of scum who would perpetrate something like the September 16 Nisoor Square killings, just for fun.

So what was different about the September shootings, why didn’t the usual plot play out again this time?

It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying by the State Dept., that’s for sure. These sentences, from Fainaru’s article, could just as easily have been lifted from early reports of the September 16 shootings: “The U.S. government reached a different conclusion. Based on information from the Blackwater guards, who said they were fired upon, the State Department determined that the security team’s actions “fell within approved rules governing the use of force,” according to an official from the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.”
The State Dept. worked very hard to make the September 16 shootings end just like all the previous ones.

But someone in the Iraqi government came up with the brilliant strategy of threatening to expel Blackwater from Iraq, and the Iraqi government executed this strategy brilliantly. Brilliantly enough to force the State Dept. to abdicate its SOP of dealing with Blackwater shootings by shrugging and looking the other way. Of course, being Condi Rice’s State Dept., they were only moved to launch pretend investigations that sought to whitewash the whole incident, and to stamp the self-serving version of Blackwater guards as the officially-certified version of events. But the Iraqi government had managed to make such a stink about the incident, and the media had managed to shine enough light on it, that the U.S. government was forced to disavow the State Dept.’s public statements about the shootings, and their mickey mouse investigation. And once the U.S. military made it clear they had no interest in conspiring to support a false version of events, or in burying the facts deep under a series of never-ending investigations, the game was pretty much over as far as a cover-up attempt was concerned.

I’m sure the perpetrators of Nisoor Square felt rightfully aggrieved by this turn of events. It was like someone suddenly changed the rules of the game. At what was, for them, the most inconvenient time possible.