Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (26 page)

But that was the last thing about the investigation to follow established protocol. Those WPPS reporting procedures allowed State to question an individual, but it was unheard of for the department’s personnel to interview every member of a unit following a shooting.
DipSec agent Ted Carpenter
, who conducted those interviews, would later testify that this was the first time he’d ever been directed to speak to each team member. When he subsequently reviewed the investigations into other shooting incidents,
Carpenter found the case files
“consisted mainly of the statements of those involved that had fired their weapon, an after-action report by the team leader, and maybe a statement from another teammate in the detail.” It seemed evident to my men that State personnel were merely fishing for details to fit the narrative they’d already mapped out.

Meanwhile, dozens of Iraqi National Police had flooded into the traffic circle at Nisour Square immediately after the convoy’s departure to collect evidence and launch an investigation of their own. Within thirty minutes of the shootings,
those blue shirts had been joined
by U.S. Army colonel David Boslego, who’d been at the Iraqi police headquarters when the firefight erupted. By one thirty p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Michael
Tarsa, the battalion commander
overseeing military operations in that area of Baghdad, had also arrived on the scene.

In sharp contrast to the events my men described, the military vividly outlined for the media what it said was a one-sided fight. “
It had every indication
of an excessive shooting,” Tarsa told the
Washington Post
. The lieutenant colonel added, “
I did not see anything
that indicated [the contractors] were fired upon.” The military report concluded there was “
no enemy activity involved
” and described the shootings as
a “criminal event
.” It’s safe to say that my men, and I, disagree with that assessment.

Two days after the shoot-out, State’s DipSec agents interviewed more than a dozen Iraqis—many of them police officers posted at the traffic circle—who claimed to have seen everything. That same day, the members of Raven 23 were told to submit written statements to State regarding their actions in Nisour Square—and Slough, Slatten, Ball, and Heard began the first round of what would be repeated questioning by various government agents.

Practically overnight,
confidential sworn statements from convoy members
were leaked—in part or in full—to a media ravenous for dirt on the latest Blackwater scandal.
Headlines blared
, “Blackwater Massacre Spotlights Mercenary Role in Iraq.”
Bloggers wondered
, “Will Mass Murder in Nisour Square Slow the Growth of Blackwater?”

Meanwhile, amid the intense scrutiny, three of the men on the convoy—Adam Frost, Matt Murphy, and Mark Mealy—confided that they were upset about the actions of their team members that day. One report said a member of Raven 23 had even yelled “
No! No! No
!” in an effort to stop the firing. It’s also true, however, that those memories were colored by the dramatic media coverage. Years later a
D.C. Circuit judge would rule
, “The witnesses that the government relied on most heavily before the grand jury—Raven 23 members Adam Frost, Matthew Murphy and Mark Mealy—admitted to having read these news reports, and it soon became apparent that parts of their testimony may have been tainted by their exposure.”

Four days after the shooting, DipSec agents finally inspected the traffic circle, focusing intently on the areas Blackwater’s men had
identified as locations of opposing fire. Contrary to the military and Iraqi police findings, “
We searched in these areas
and collected what appeared to be AK-47 shell casings,” agent Carpenter later said. “Photographs of the area were taken to include bullet strikes and the AK-47 shell casings that were collected.” Back at Blackwater’s base, we also took pictures of our armored vehicles pockmarked from enemy fire—proof that the convoy had been under direct attack.

However, as stipulated in the WPPS, we had to keep those vehicles free of damage at all times. Raven 23’s armored trucks had to be back on the streets immediately. That meant fixing the radiator of the lead vehicle, adding a fresh coat of matte paint to the vehicles—and effectively destroying evidence in an ongoing investigation. The State Department RSO instructed us to do just that. So we did.

Soon, State asked the FBI to take over its investigation into the shooting, and by early October roughly a dozen FBI investigators were on the ground in Baghdad, on “
a fact-finding mission to determine
whether any of the Blackwater employees had engaged in activity in violation of American laws,” as the
New York Times
described it. The FBI interviewed more than seventy-five Iraqi witnesses and victims identified by Iraqi police, and conducted dozens of interviews of my men. Of course, whenever they ventured outside the Green Zone, those State Department–associated investigators needed protection. So in a bitter irony, the FBI agents investigating Blackwater were initially going to be escorted by Blackwater guards. (The agency ultimately made other arrangements.)

In the end, the government’s
forensic scientists were unable to determine
whether the .30-caliber bullets collected in Nisour Square were fired from our M4s or insurgent AK-47s. “
FBI scientists were unable to match bullets
from a deadly 2007 shooting in Iraq to guns carried by guards for U.S. government contractor Blackwater Worldwide, according to laboratory reports that leave open the possibility that insurgents also fired in the crowded intersection,” read the lead to one Associated Press story about the research. At the FBI’s lab, however, they did discover a bullet that had become lodged in
the grille of the radiator from Raven 23’s lead vehicle during the shooting—the same enemy round that had skipped off the pavement beneath the truck and split its coolant hose, disabling the vehicle.

Still, the
Justice Department eventually charged
Ball, Heard, Liberty, Slatten, and Slough each with fourteen counts of voluntary manslaughter, twenty counts of attempted manslaughter, and the use and discharge of a firearm during a crime of violence. (Investigators concluded that three of the killings—the pair in the Kia and a civilian standing nearby—could have been a legitimate response to perceived threats.)

The charges against Slatten were later dropped. For reasons I still don’t understand, Jeremy Ridgeway, the lead turret gunner in the fourth vehicle,
pleaded guilty to one count
of manslaughter, along with attempting to commit murder and aiding and abetting. He agreed to testify against his fellow convoy members.

Upon hearing of the charges—and Ridgeway’s plea—
I released a statement
saying that we at Blackwater were “extremely disappointed and surprised to learn that an individual independent contractor has said he committed wrongdoing related to his activities on September 16, 2007.”
We remained fully behind the indicted men
, we insisted, because “these individuals acted within the rules set forth for them by the government and . . . no criminal violations occurred.”

Beyond the individual charges, however, neither my company nor I was charged with any wrongdoing—which infuriated congressional Democrats hungry for blood. “
While it is important to hold these individual
contractors accountable for their actions, we must also hold Blackwater accountable for creating a culture that breeds this type of reckless and illegal behavior,” Representative Schakowsky said in a statement. “These contractors could spend the rest of their lives in jail if they are convicted, but Blackwater will probably not even receive a slap on the wrist for its role in this and other incidents.”

That wasn’t the only response from Washington. Shortly after the shooting, the newly Democratic-controlled House of Representatives moved swiftly to approve a bill to bring all U.S. government
contractors in Iraq under the jurisdiction of American criminal law. Contractors operating under the Defense Department, existing law held, could be charged with federal crimes under the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), but for employees of companies like Blackwater who had been hired by other agencies, the oversight was far less certain. So the MEJA Expansion and Enforcement Act of 2007, sponsored by North Carolina Democrat David Price, sought to extend MEJA to all contractors in war zones. “Just because there are deficiencies in the law, and there certainly are,”
Price said at the time
, “that can’t serve as an excuse for criminal actions like [the Nisour Square incident] to be unpunished.”

Despite the Bush White House insisting the bill would have “
unintended and intolerable consequences
for crucial and necessary national security activities and operations,” it passed the House by a vote of 389 to 30 before ultimately
withering on the legislative vine
.

Certain senators capitalized on the chance to grandstand. When Price’s bill made headlines, then senator and presidential hopeful Barack Obama followed a few days later with his own
Security Contractor Accountability Act of 2007
. The bill, a reboot of his earlier proposed
Transparency and Accountability in Military and Security Contracting Act of 2007
, which had the same goal of expanding MEJA, followed in its predecessor’s footsteps and went nowhere.

Not to be outdone, in early 2008 Hillary Clinton, then a Democratic senator from New York, went one step further with an all-out assault on contractors. Along with Independent senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, she cosponsored a bill called the
Stop Outsourcing Security Act
. The impractical legislation would have required that only military personnel—and not “private mercenary firms,” as she described them—could provide security services for State Department missions in Iraq. “From this war’s very beginning, this administration has permitted thousands of heavily armed military contractors to march through Iraq without any law or court to rein them in or hold them accountable,”
Clinton’s office said in a statement
. “These private security contractors have been reckless
and have compromised our mission in Iraq. The time to show these contractors the door is long past due.”

Overnight, Blackwater became useful as more than a simple political whipping boy. Now my company had been turned into a full-fledged presidential campaign issue.

•   •   •

M
any things never sat right with me about the charges from Nisour Square. Most of all, this:
The thirty-five-count indictment against my men
represented the first prosecution under MEJA ever filed against non–Defense Department contractors. There had been plenty of earlier contractor shootings in Iraq and Afghanistan the government could have trotted out for public spectacle, had the Justice Department wanted to. I still don’t think Blackwater’s men ever should have been charged at all.

So why go after my men? Why then? The answer, I believe, is that they were sacrificed by the State Department.

In a charged interview days after the shoot-out, Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki contended that the Nisour Square incident was nothing short of a direct challenge to his nation’s independence. “
The Iraqi government is responsible
for its citizens, and it cannot be accepted for a security company to carry out a killing,” he told the Associated Press. “There are serious challenges to the sovereignty of Iraq.” He added: “We have coordinated with the American side to establish a joint committee to ascertain the facts and hold accountable” those responsible. That American side was represented by Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state, who called al-Maliki to personally express regret about the shooting. She assured him of “a
fair and transparent investigation
into this incident” and that those responsible would be punished.

By that time, however, everyone involved knew the essential and difficult role Blackwater played in State’s work in Iraq. After the shooting, the department placated the Iraqis by immediately shutting down land missions outside the Green Zone, thus keeping the
perceived Blackwater menace off the streets of Baghdad. Except, when we didn’t run, the State Department didn’t run. Grounding us benched U.S. diplomats. So that lockdown lasted exactly three days.

Even the Iraqi government, which by that time reviled us, didn’t want us to actually
leave
. “
If Blackwater left at this moment
, it might leave a security gap because most of the embassies and most of the foreign organizations that are working in Iraq” rely on its contractors, Tahseen al-Sheikhly, a spokesman for the Iraqi security forces, conceded at a news conference soon after Nisour Square. “This will create a security imbalance.”

Additionally, upset as they were, the Iraqis had no authority to punish us. Shortly after the incident, Interior Ministry spokesman Major General Abdul-Karim Khalaf made global headlines when he insisted, “
We have revoked Blackwater’s license
to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq. The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday’s killing will be referred to Iraqi justice.” But that was smoke and mirrors: Blackwater didn’t have a license from the Interior Ministry to be revoked. Months before Nisour Square, our license renewal had been held up by repeated demands for bribes from within the crooked ministry. At the time, State’s regional security officer told us to simply carry on without one—we worked for the State Department, after all.

That focus on licenses and Iraqi consent for contractors to operate within the country gave the Interior Ministry a moment of leverage, however. By the start of 2008, American diplomats had a far larger problem to sort out than determining what happened in Nisour Square, and solving it relied on Iraqi cooperation.

Back in June 2004, as Paul Bremer’s CPA prepared to hand over power to the Iraqi Interim Government, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution reaffirming permission for the multinational military force to remain in the country “
at the request of the incoming Interim Government of Iraq
.” All of the CPA directives—including the much discussed Order 17 regarding
contractor “immunity”—had carried over as a legal framework for the sovereign nation. But the resolution was set to expire on December 31, 2008. And in order for U.S. troops to remain in Iraq beyond that, a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, had to be forged between the two nations.