The State Department explores new frontiers of lawlessness.
Two days ago, the AP broke the story that the State Department had offered immunity to Blackwater guards for their statements following the September 16th Nisour Square shootings that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.
The State Department didn't have an immediate reply to the story and seemed to be caught off guard. A "senior State Department official" told ABC that "If anyone gave such immunity it was done so without consulting senior leadership at State." Immunity? Who authorized such a thing?
But apparently such a move wasn't so unprecedented. In fact, it was "routine," reports the AP:
Limited immunity has been routinely offered to private security contractors involved in shootings in Iraq, State Department officials said Tuesday, denying such actions jeopardized criminal prosecution of Blackwater USA guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians....
At the State Department, [State Department spokesman Sean] McCormack said "these kinds of issues are not new." He said Justice Department officials "can take steps to work around" any limited immunity agreements. "They provide limited protections that would not preclude a successful criminal prosecution," he said.
A second senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing inquiry, said the agency has for years required its security contractors to give written statements within hours of any so-called "use of deadly force" in Iraq.
Waivers granting a security worker limited immunity — by barring those statements in a criminal case against the worker — are a "routine part" of the investigations by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the official said.
So now the full scope of the lawlessness which State Department contractors in Iraq enjoy becomes clear. Not only do those contractors operate in a legal gray zone apparently beyond the reach of current law, but the State Department routinely offered immunity to guards involved in incidents in order to get their version of the story, making the prospect of prosecution all the more improbable.
Since news broke yesterday that the State Department had offered immunity deals to the Blackwater guards involved in the September 16th Nisour Square shooting, which left seventeen Iraqis dead, inquiries from Democrats have mounted, and the State Department has evidently been scrambling to respond.
And it's evident what their response is: at least we didn't offer absolute, blanket immunity to the guards from prosecution. As part of the PR offensive, two "senior State officials" stressed just that point to CNN earlier today. But the AP, which broke the story, never reported any such thing.
The type of immunity offered the guards was "use" immunity, meaning that the guards were offered the ability to talk with the promise that their statements couldn't be used in a criminal prosecution. ABC got a hold of the statements today and confirms this.
So State Department spokesman Sean McCormack tried to look on the bright side in a press briefing:
"The kinds of, quote, 'immunity' that I've seen reported in the press would not preclude a successful criminal prosecution," he insisted.
"The Department of State cannot immunize an individual from federal criminal prosecution," he added.
There are a couple of problems with that, however.
You might remember that the first official word from U.S. officials about the Nisour Square shootings was a preliminary investigation by the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security (BDS) that relied primarily on statements from Blackwater witnesses. Now we find out that the BDS offered immunity to those guards for those statements. So not only did the State Department rush to release what appears from the military's review of the incident to be a whitewash -- but it might have also fatally compromised the FBI's investigation of the incident. From the AP:
The FBI took over the case early this month, officials said, after prosecutors in the Justice Department's criminal division realized it could not bring charges against Blackwater guards based on their statements to the Diplomatic Security investigators.
Officials said the Blackwater bodyguards spoke only after receiving so-called "Garrity" protections, requiring that their statements only be used internally — and not for criminal prosecutions.
At that point, the Justice Department shifted the investigation to prosecutors in its national security division, sealing the guards' statements and attempting to build a case based on other evidence from a crime scene that was then already two weeks old....
It's not clear why the Diplomatic Security investigators agreed to give immunity to the bodyguards, or who authorized doing so.
Bureau of Diplomatic Security chief Richard Griffin last week announced his resignation, effective Thursday. Senior State Department officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said his departure was directly related to his oversight of Blackwater contractors.
For a company that was supposed to be outside the law, investigations of Blackwater have been proliferating like wild ever since the September 16th Nisour Square shooting, which left seventeen Iraqis dead. The number has been growing so fast, in fact, that we lost count.
So we decided to catch up. Here, then, is our rundown of the ongoing investigations that have been reported. If we miss one, let us know and we'll update our tally.
House oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) has, of course, been leading the charge over the preceding months in an investigation that has followed a number of strands. Waxman's probe of the 2004 ambush in Fallujah led to the conclusion that Blackwater's cost-cutting was at the heart of the debacle. And he's continued to widen the scope of the probe since the Nisour Square shootings. As such, it's impossible to detail all of its aspects here. It's concentrated, however, on four main areas:
The mad proliferation of Blackwater investigations continues.
Earlier this week, House sleuth Henry Waxman (D-CA) accused Blackwater of hiding "tens of millions of dollars, if not more" in Social Security, Medicare and retirement taxes by classifying its security guards in Iraq as independent contractors.
Today, Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL), Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) piled on, asking for investigations of Blackwater's alleged tax dodge.
Obama and Durbin asked U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson for a full investigation and audit of the company's tax setup. Noting that legislation they introduced earlier this year would forbid contractors from using this kind of loophole, they write (the full letter is below):
It is difficult to fathom how Blackwater employees in Iraq can be considered independent contractors. They are trained by Blackwater, paid by Blackwater, and told whom to guard by Blackwater. These are not independent small businessmen establishing their own individual working relationships with those they are hired to protect.
As for Kerry, he wants the Senate Finance Committee, of which he's a member, to dig in and investigate too. So he wrote Chairman Max Baucus (R-MT) and ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to request an investigation.
All of the senators don't think much of Blackwater's reliance on a determination by the Small Business Administration that they could classify guards as independent contractors. First of all, as Spencer reported earlier this week, the SBA determination only dealt with an employee in Guam. More importantly, the SBA says it carries "no legal weight."
Unfortunately for Blackwater, Kerry is also the Chairman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and he's on the case. Now he wants Blackwater to explain what the SBA finding has to do with anything. His letter to Prince, sent today, is also below.
Man, is it a good thing Condoleezza Rice expressed "regret" that State waited until last month to start reviewing its relationship with Blackwater. And it's particularly nifty that she isn't "personally following" every little multi-million dollar discrepancy, shenanigan or blooper. Because then she might have to explain why State Department officials, back in 2005, chatted in internal e-mails about how Blackwater was killing Iraqi civilians and yet were outside the law:
Internal State Department e-mails, obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com, show top officials were extensively briefed about repeated incidents of Blackwater security guards killing innocent civilians more than two years ago. ...
Yet, the e-mails show that State Department officials had extensive knowledge of a growing problem in the summer of 2005, and complained about a lack of a compensation program for civilian victims.
"Obviously it is not pleasant meeting with these individuals with nothing more to offer than apologies, condolences and vague promises," wrote a State Department security officer based in al Hillah, Michael Bishop, to his superiors at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.
Two years later, the State Department recommends making appropriate "condolence or compensation" payments, as well. And Iraqis love that!
It took two different questioners -- and a reversal of her initial position -- but Condoleezza Rice finally acknowledged that State should have acted earlier to rein in Blackwater. "I certainly regret that there was not the oversight that there should have been," she said. Was that so difficult?
Even as she accepted the resignation of State's security chief Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quietly promoted two senior staffers who directly oversaw controversial Blackwater security operations, sources tell ABC News....
Current and former officials were outraged.
"It is ironic; on the day the assistant secretary for DSS resigns, the two people with oversight responsibility for the program get promoted," said one current State Department official who asked not to be named....
"They both got promoted in the face of all this mismanagement and controversy -- talk about government B.S.," said another. "What does it say when State promotes the two people into DS' most senior positions, when if they had properly managed the programs under the responsibility, we wouldn't be in this mess?"
Paul von Zielbauer and James Glanz of The New York Times provide a fascinating glimpse into the maze of stacked trailers that comprise Blackwater's Green-Zone compound. It says a lot that the compound is surrounded by 25-foot high concrete barriers topped with razor wire inside the safest place in Iraq: denizens liken it to a minimum security prison. Outside is the enemy. Not merely insurgents, infuriated Iraqis, and disdainful Iraqi government officials, but frustrated U.S. troops, unreliable diplomats and FBI inquisitors delving into the company's mistakes in last month's Nisour Square shootings.
The bunker mentality, however, may be dissipating. Some Blackwater officials were openly critical of the company's actions to the Times reporters:
“Some guys are thinking that it was not a good shoot, that it was not warranted,” said one Blackwater contractor, using military jargon for an episode that results in a wrongful death. “I don’t think there was criminal intent involved. I just think it was the application of the use of deadly force gone horribly wrong.”
He added, “To mitigate one threat, 17 people had to die?”
Blackwater is continuing its aggressive public-relations push. And it needs your help.
Earlier today, the company sent out an e-mail to supporters urging them to contact their Congressional representatives (who are otherwise misinformed by "negative propaganda") and get the word out about Blackwater's value to U.S. national security. The email is posted in full below.
The private security industry is trying to make sense of the announcement today from Baghdad that the Iraqi government is revoking a CPA-era edict, known as Order 17, immunizing contractors from prosecution in Iraqi courts. Some believe that the State Department will succeed in an anticipated attempt to prevent Americans from appearing before an Iraqi judge, while warning that if a full revocation succeeds, American companies or individual contractors might simply up and leave Iraq rather than potentially face charges in an immature justice system.
Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association -- otherwise known as the private-security lobby -- took a cautious approach, saying he wanted to reserve judgment until the State Department and the Pentagon made its views known. But he pointed out that most contractors -- not just security contractors, but contractors involved in reconstruction, as well -- hire Iraqis to do significant amounts of grunt work, which westerners supervise. "If you say anyone not Iraqi is now under Iraqi law -- such as it is -- you'll lose a lot of oversight and management capabilities," Brooks says. That's because he expects his member organizations on the ground in Iraq to either shed their American staff or experience difficulty recruiting Americans to go to Iraq in the future. "It would be enormously risky to stay. Individual contractors would have to take a hard look" at remaining in Iraq.
That's how private-security expert P.W. Singer sees it as well. Two models for Iraq security contracting exist: what Singer calls the ArmorGroup model, where Americans supervise Iraqis and so-called "third country nationals," who are neither Iraqi nor American; and the Blackwater model, where nearly all aspects of the job are filled by Americans. (Blackwater's workforce in Iraq is 80 percent American, according to the company.) "One corporate response could be a shift more and more towards model one," Singer says.
Only 38 days after the Nisour Square shootings and a myriad of sub-scandals and related controversy, and someone at the State Department has finally lost his job. ABC News reports that Richard Griffin, the top diplomatic security official at Foggy Bottom, has agreed to resign after Amb. Patrick Kennedy's recommendations on overhauling State's relationship with its security contractors amounted to a tacit rebuke of his tenure.
The AP, reporting on an internal e-mail announcing the resignation, adds:
"He read his letter of resignation at the weekly Diplomatic Security staff meeting," said the e-mail, which was read to The Associated Press by one its recipients. "There was no detailed reason provided and no effective date identified at this time."
When testifying to the House oversight committee earlier this month about contractor operations, Griffin copped an attitude. As Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) pressed him on why the State Department helped Blackwater evacuate a contractor who'd drunkenly killed an Iraqi vice president's bodyguard, Griffin all but told Waxman that he wouldn't answer questions about it:
The metaphorical statue of L. Paul Bremer III has come crashing down. Today the Iraqi government formally revoked one of the Coalition Provisional Authority's enduring vestiges -- a decree of immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts for U.S. security contractors.
The Iraqi government announced on Wednesday that it has decided to formally revoke the immunity from prosecution granted to private security companies operating in the war-ravaged country.
"The cabinet held a meeting yesterday and decided to scrap the article pertaining to security companies operating in Iraq that was issued by the CPA (Coalition Provision Authority) in 2004," government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in a statement.
"It has decided to present a new law regarding this issue which will be taken in the next cabinet meeting."
Expect a massive controversy to follow. What will the State Department do if Iraqi judges issue arrest warrants for American contractors? Will heavily-armed contractors submit to Iraqi warrants, or will they openly defy the law of an allegedly sovereign country? More to come.
Seriously this time: Ambassador Patrick Kennedy has unveiled his recommendations on the State Department's relationship with security contractors DynCorp, Triple Canopy and Blackwater. They represent a step back from Defense Secretary Bob Gates' reported suggestion that the military take control of State's security contractors and instead emphasize greater oversight of the existing system.
The Washington Postreports that Kennedy concluded that there's no alternative to contracting security for U.S. diplomats. The military doesn't consider that mission "feasible or desirable," preferring to actually fight the war. That leaves bolstering oversight as the department's option -- something that's been sorely lacking, as Special Inspector General for Iraq Stuart Bowen found. Bowen released a report yesterday finding that only seventeen State Department officials oversee the hundreds of security contractors working on a billion-plus dollar contract to train the Iraqi police -- and, earlier this year, that oversight office consisted of a whopping two people.
As spoofed yesterday, Kennedy's recommendations do include cultural-awareness training. But more substantively -- and significantly for the contracting industry -- Kennedy recommended that State begin a dialogue with the Justice Department and Congress to clarify the legal rules under which contractors operate overseas. That contradicts both Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, who has repeatedly that he has a clear "understanding" of his company's legal responsibilities, and George W. Bush, who has threatened to veto a House measure passed earlier this month that allows alleged contractor misdeeds overseas to be tried in U.S. courts. "We don't see the clarity here," Kennedy told reporters.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday ordered new measures to improve government oversight of private guards who protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq, including extensive cultural awareness training for contractors.
The AP got an advance description of the recommendations made by Ambassador Patrick Kennedy, Rice's adviser on contractor oversight. But TPMmuckraker goes a step beyond. We've got an advance look at the cultural-awareness lesson plan for Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp.
Ambassador Patrick Kennedy has finally delivered his assessment of the State Department's relationship with security contractors in Iraq to Condoleezza Rice. Behind closed doors yesterday, the ambassador, who was tasked with making a comprehensive review of State's contractors following the Nisour Square shooting, told the secretary of state that there were serious problems "with virtually every aspect of the department’s security practices, especially in and around Baghdad, where Blackwater has responsibility," reportsThe New York Times.
Combined with today's report from Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, that finds an "environment" conducive to waste and fraud in the oversight of DynCorp's $1.2 billion Iraq contract, it's easy to see why one State Department official told the paper that the department's contracting process is caught in "a perfect storm of bad events."
Among Kennedy's recommendations is to create a "special coordination center" with the U.S. military to ensure that contractor movements within a military commander's area of operations don't conflict with the commander's orders. It's unclear whether that means the military would actually control contractor operations, as Defense Secretary Bob Gates is reportedly considering, but it would move Blackwater, DynCorp and Triple Canopy contractors out of the exclusive control of the State Department for the first time. When Gates returns from his European trip, he and Rice will discuss the future of State contractors in Iraq.
In a great understatement, Kennedy also recommends closer coordination with the Iraqi ministries:
“They don’t have the right communications, they don’t have the right procedures in place, and you’ve got people operating on their own,” said one official who has been briefed on the report but who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it has not been released yet. “This is not up to the degree it should be.”
And, needless to say, they're also vulnerable to being murdered by drunken Blackwater contractors during rip-roaring Green Zone Christmas parties.
Earlier today, Blackwater's Anne Tyrrell disputed an allegation from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) that the company has committed tax fraud by classifying guards as independent contractors instead of employees with the following statement:
The U.S. Small Business Administration has determined in an official finding applying "the criteria used by the IRS for Federal income tax purpose," that "Blackwater security contractors are not employees."
But according to the Small Business Administration, that's not exactly true.
SBA spokeswoman Christine Mangi says that SBA did make such a determination -- on November 2, 2006. But it was in reference to a dispute about who was a company employee on a project to provide services to Navy vessels in Guam, not Iraq. The ruling, she says, "was for this particular procurement," not an SBA finding about Blackwater personnel in general, contrary to the suggestion of Blackwater's response to Waxman.
Furthermore, Mangi explains, the IRS hardly has to defer to the SBA determination about who's an independent contractor and who's an employee. "Our findings are for the sole purposes of our small business contracting programs and, to the best of our knowledge, carry no legal weight outside of our programs," she says.
It's not just Blackwater! Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) has another State Department security contractor in his sights -- industry pioneer DynCorp, which, in addition to guarding diplomats in northern Iraq, has reaped over $1 billion from State since 2004 to help train the Iraqi police.
Corruption and mismanagement in the Iraqi police is an old story. The U.S.'s special inspector general for Iraq, Stuart Bowen, told Waxman's House oversight committee earlier this year that DynCorp had significantly overbilled the State Department. But the extent of the misconduct is unknown: department officials have failed for months to provide documentation about the origins and terms of the contract to the committee, despite numerous promises. Making matters even fishier, State representatives told Waxman's staff that a single official handles all DynCorp contracts with the department and has for a decade -- far longer than is typical in agency-contractor relationships.
Waxman wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today to remind her that the committee wants the documents on the DynCorp contract that the department promised it in May. There's an urgency here: last month, a commission headed by Marine General James Jones found the Iraqi police in serious disarray.
Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell just released the following statement in response to Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-CA) allegations that Blackwater has committed tax evasion:
Chairman Waxman has released a new thirteen page letter alleging that Blackwater cannot treat its personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan as “independent contractors,” and contends that they must be treated as employees for IRS purposes. The Chairman’s contention is incorrect.
It just gets worse and worse for Blackwater's relationship with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Today, committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) accused Blackwater CEO Erik Prince of hiding "tens of millions of dollars, if not more" in Social Security, Medicare and retirement taxes by classifying its security guards in Iraq as independent contractors. In a letter (pdf) to Prince, Waxman also called a financial settlement reached with one such former independent contractor "deplorable." The settlement required that the ex-guard not disclose a March 2007 IRS ruling that Blackwater's tax records were out of whack; and the guard was specifically prevented from disclosing that to any "politician" or "public official."
Either last year or early this year (it's not clear from the letter), a former Blackwater guard sought to determine whether the tax code designates him a Blackwater employee, which would entitle him to compensation for the money he spent paying his own taxes in 2005. The company received the IRS arbitration (pdf) in March: the services rendered by the ex-guard for the company in Iraq qualified him as an employee. That would explain why the non-Blackwater private guards in Iraq on the same State Department contract, working for DynCorp and Triple Canopy, work as full-time employees of their companies, which take care of their tax liability.
In testimony earlier this month to the committee, Blackwater CEO Erik Prince described the company's decision to classify Blackwater's guards as independent contractors as a "model that works," preferred by the guards for providing flexibility. He did not mention the IRS ruling in his sworn testimony, despite questions from Washington, D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton into Blackwater's hiring practices.
How did Blackwater end up guarding U.S. diplomats in Iraq? The answer's becoming clearer.
The Washington Postreported yesterday that the State Department, under the gun to create an embassy security staff after the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded in June 2004, decided to stick with the CPA's Blackwater bodyguards, awarding the firm a no-bid contract. That much State Department logistics official William H. Moser told Congress earlier this month. But the Post supplies a wealth of detail about just how dependent State is on security contractors for conducting diplomacy in war zones.
State's diplomatic security service (DS) is too small to protect the hundreds of U.S. embassy personnel in Baghdad: only 1400 agents exist to operate in over 300 diplomatic offices domestically and abroad. That's just barely more than the 1000 or so Blackwater operatives in Iraq alone. Little wonder that last month, the company received another $112 million contract for Iraq security, which surges the number of Blackwater guards by over 200 and expands its helicopter fleet.
In previous conflicts -- Vietnam, for instance -- U.S. diplomats were guarded by U.S. soldiers. But the U.S. sent up to a half million troops during the Vietnam war, supplied by a draftee military. With the end of the draft and subsequent troop reductions, State had to turn to the dawning security-contractor industry, first hiring former industry leader DynCorp to protect Jean-Bertrand Aristide when the U.S. returned him to power in Haiti in 1994. Instead of expanding DS personnel or arguing that diplomatic security was a job for the U.S. military, State took the easier route of purchasing it on the (not always) open market. That was a choice that suited Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld well, as Rumsfeld believed the military had more important work to do. By 2002, Blackwater was on the ground in Afghanistan, guarding Hamid Karzai.
One lingering question is how Blackwater managed, in only 10 years of existence, to top former security-industry giants DynCorp and Triple Canopy in Iraq and elsewhere. Erik Prince, Blackwater's CEO, insists that the company hasn't benefited from his family's deep GOP connections. The piece doesn't exactly answer that question. But it does reveal that Blackwater has learned that sometimes it pays to get the competition on its side:
The State Department is floating the idea that Blackwater's Iraq contract should be allowed to expire in May. But Blackwater clearly doesn't want that to happen. And it's seeking some new blood to reignite the spark that's gone out of their relationship.
Via R.J. Hillhouse's excellent contractor blog, it seems that Blackwater is investing in a new head of Iraq contracts. Yesterday, Blackwater posted a job opening for a regional coordinator on State's Worldwide Protective Services Contract, the official title for State contractor services on Iraq. Perhaps Blackwater just wants to have a good caretaker during its final months in Baghdad. Or maybe, as Hillhouse writes, it's "a sign that Blackwater is not planning on leaving Iraq anytime soon."
The job will operate out of Blackwater's Moyock, North Carolina offices. Interested applicants should be able to work "in a busy office environment" that's "subject to frequent interruptions" (which may or may not include FBI agents executing search warrants).
Douglas Feith once reportedly quipped that the State Department should be called the Department of Nice. To Blackwater, however, it might be better termed the Department of Passive-Aggressive. According to the AP, State won't exactly ask Blackwater to leave Iraq, but in true awkward-breakup fashion, it's indicating that Blackwater should get out if it wants to do the honorable thing:
Blackwater's work escorting U.S. diplomats outside the protected Green Zone in Baghdad expires in May, one [State Department] official said, and other officials told The Associated Press they expect the North Carolina company will not continue to work for the embassy after that.
It is likely that Blackwater does not compete to keep the job, one official said. Blackwater probably will not be fired outright or even "eased out," the official added, but there is a mutual feeling that the Sept. 16 shooting deaths mean the company cannot continue in its current role.
Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell responded, "We will follow the lead of our client. If they want us to stay we will stay. If they want us to leave we will do so." Translated from the contractor-speak, that's "Fine. Be that way."
It took a catastrophe that some say may ultimately prove "worse than Abu Ghraib," but finally the administration is thinking long and hard about oversight of security contractors in war zones. Bob Gates has a simple plan: put them under Defense Department control.
The New York Timesreports this morning that the defense secretary, who shortly after the Nisour Square shootings pronounced himself dissatisfied with the apparent impunity exercised by private-security firms, wants a single, unified authority overseeing all security companies in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not clear if the military would exercise command authority over security contractors -- something some ex-contractors support -- under Gates' nascent plan. But the State Department isn't so hot on relinquishing control over the contractors, like Blackwater, that guard its diplomats:
That idea is facing resistance from the State Department, which relies heavily for protection in Iraq on some 2,500 private guards, including more than 800 Blackwater contractors, to provide security for American diplomats in Baghdad. The State Department has said it should retain control over those guards, despite Blackwater’s role in a September shooting in Baghdad that exposed problems in the current oversight arrangements.
In practical terms, placing the private security guards who now work for the military, the State Department and other government agencies under a single authority would mean that those armed civilians would no longer have different bosses and different rules. Pentagon advisers say it would also allow better coordination between the security contractors and American military commanders, who have long complained that the contractors often operate independently.
Gates is still making up his mind over how changes in contractor oversight should work. One as-yet-unresolved issue is whether additional legal clarification is needed to ensure that contractors don't operate in legal black holes:
Some military commanders in Iraq favor using the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a system they know well and trust. Other Defense Department officials support the model being considered by Congress, which would make clear that the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act would extend federal law to civilians supporting military operations.
The Times reports that Gates and Rice haven't spoken about the issue yet, as Rice is traveling in the Middle East. But apparently Gates is prepared to make a strong push for total DOD control over contractors: the paper says he's willing to go to President Bush directly for a decision.
It's hard to keep track of all the different Blackwater probes. But the government of Nouri al-Maliki says that its own investigation of the September 16 Nisour Square shootings has concluded, and it found that Blackwater committed "unprovoked and random killings," CNN reports. Its stance on Blackwater, which the State Department is apparently no longer challenging, is that the private-security firm has to leave Iraq
Adviser Sami al-Askari told CNN al-Maliki has asked the U.S. State Department to "pull Blackwater out of Iraq."
Al-Askari said the United States is still waiting for the findings of the American investigation, but the Iraqi leader and most Iraqi officials are "completely satisfied" with the findings of their probe and are "insisting" that Blackwater leave the country.
It was Askari who said over the weekend that the State Department is no longer "insisting on Blackwater staying" in Iraq -- not a U.S. official. We'll see if it actually happens. The Iraqi probe's recommendations include the departure of Blackwater within six months.
Earlier this month, The Washington Postreported on an Air Force procurement official, Charles Riechers, who received $16,788 from a defense intelligence contractor while he was awaiting Senate confirmation. The Air Force defended Riechers' arrangement with the company, although a contracting-law expert told the paper it was "seriously questionable."
The second-highest ranking member of the Air Force’s procurement office was found dead of an apparent suicide at his Virginia home Sunday, Air Force and police officials said today.
The official, Charles D. Riechers, 47, came under scrutiny by the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month after the Air Force arranged for him to be paid $13,400 a month by a private contractor, Commonwealth Research Institute, while he awaited review from the White House of his appointment as principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition. He was appointed to the job in January. ...
The Air Force has disputed The Post’s portrayal of Mr. Riechers’s role and said in a statement today that he was “employed in a scientific and engineering technical assistance capacity to the Air Force and made recommendations that were instrumental in engineering our acquisition transformation and continuing the Air Force’s modernization of our aging fleet.”
Specifically, the Air Force said that Mr. Riechers, a retired Air Force officer and master navigator, provided technical advice on several programs including converting commercial aircraft to military using and modernizing the C-130 transport plane. Loren Thompson, an expert on the military at The Lexington Institute said it was unclear whether Mr. Riechers’s suicide had anything to do with the inquiry. However, he said that Mr. Riechers’s death would cast a further shadow over the Pentagon’s beleaguered procurement system.
Blackwater's Erik Prince is all over television these days, making the rounds on Late Edition, 60 Minutes and, tonight, Charlie Rose. His line is that Blackwater is a responsible security firm operating under duly constituted legal authority in Iraq. The trouble, as always, is Nisour Square, where Blackwater guards, apparently believing they were under attack, killed 17 Iraqi civilians. In particular: were Blackwater guards even fired on by Iraqis?
The U.S. military and the Iraqi government say no. In fact, the U.S. unit on the scene says that Blackwater fired on Iraqis as they ran from the square. But Blackwater says its convoys came under "complex attack" -- first from a nearby car bomb that put the convoy on notice, and then from small arms fire. It was a line that Prince reiterated in his television appearances. "At least three of our armored vehicles were hit by small arms fire incoming," Prince told Wolf Blitzer yesterday. "There was definitely incoming small arms fire from insurgents."
Here's Prince:
Both eyewitness accounts and an Iraqi investigation -- reliant on videotape, interviews and other unspecified investigative methods -- have discounted the idea that Iraqis fired on Blackwater. Prince was pressed on the forensic evidence on the scene: the spent rounds that reportedly match Blackwater weapons, and not Iraqi ones. (If the small arms fire came from insurgents, chances are you would find Kalashnikov rounds littering the square, and Blackwater guards aren't known to fire the inferior, non-U.S. weapon.)
His reply? It would probably take a "battalion" to thoroughly secure the square sufficiently for a thorough forensic search, so "the jury's still out." He told 60 Minutes' Lara Logan that neither the U.S. military nor the Iraqis performed a "C.S.I."-like investigation.
Blackwater's once-reclusive Erik Prince has launched a PR offensive, bringing the press to the private-security firm's Moyock, N.C. compound and showing up on TV chat shows. (More on that in a moment.) The strategy is clear enough: Prince wants to debunk Blackwater's image as out-of-control mercenaries in the wake of the Nisour Square shootings. And that's because Prince is prepping his company for even more lucrative contracts than the billion dollars Blackwater has received from the U.S. government since 9/11. As The Wall Street Journalreports today, Prince is looking to take on the biggest defense contractors in the country.
According to the Blackwater founder and CEO, private security -- guarding U.S. personnel in war-torn countries, as Blackwater does in Iraq -- shouldn't be what defines the company. "We see the security market diminishing," he told the paper. Instead, Blackwater wants to grow its training and logistics work, placing Blackwater in the center of what the WSJ terms "missions to which the [U.S. military] won't commit American forces." For example, Blackwater recently outbid Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman and Raytheon for a five-year, $15 billion contract to "fight terrorists with drug ties." Get ready to see a lot of Blackwater in Colombia.
Signs of Blackwater's expansion -- even amidst the Nisour Square controversy -- are evident, the paper reports:
The company has a fleet of 40 aircraft, including small turboprop cargo planes that can land on runways too small or rough for the Air Force. The company's aviation unit has done repeat business with the Defense Department in Central Asia, flying small loads of cargo between bases.
Also in the North Carolina compound: an armored-car production line that Mr. Prince says will be able to build 1,000 of the brutish-looking Grizzly vehicles a year. The project arose out of a need for Blackwater to protect its security convoys in Iraq. Drawing on Mr. Prince's family history in the automotive industry, Blackwater made sure that the vehicles are legal to drive on U.S. highways.
Mr. Prince bought a 183-foot civilian vessel that Blackwater has modified for potential paramilitary use. Mr. Prince sees the ship as a possible step into worlds such as search-and-rescue, peacekeeping and maritime training.
It's not clear whether Blackwater would seek, or get, private-security roles in its Defense Department contracts akin to those it has from the State Department in Iraq. Nor is it clear how exactly Blackwater managed to beat such established defense giants for the narco-terrorism contract.
But it is looking more like Blackwater might actually be kicked out of Iraq. For the first time since the shootings on September 16, U.S. and Iraqi officials are seriously negotiating the company's expulsion. Evidently, Prince is preparing for such a loss by fighting Blackwater's reputation in the court of public opinion -- and then laying the ground for much, much bigger things.
It didn't seem to make much sense when Blackwater announced it was withdrawing from the International Peace Operations Association, a lobbying and public-relations firm for private military companies. After all, the firm was under public scrutiny like never before after its guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians on September 16, igniting an international furor.
But as much as Blackwater might have wanted some PR help, it appears what it wanted more was for IPOA to mind its own business.
This morning, the lobby group released its first statement on Blackwater's departure. On Monday, it opened a "review" into whether Blackwater was following the code of conduct for IPOA members. That code emphasizes "human rights, corporate ethics, International Humanitarian Law, transparency, accountability, and responsibility and professionalism in relationships with employees, clients, and partner companies." Two days later, Blackwater quit the group.
Here's the statement in full:
We have received notification from Blackwater USA that they are formally withdrawing from the membership of the International Peace Operations Association, effective October 10, 2007.
Blackwater USA joined IPOA in August 2004 and was a member in good standing.
In recent weeks, IPOA was actively engaged with senior management at Blackwater USA, both through our Standards Committee and our Executive Committee, to ensure that they were fully compliant with the IPOA Code of Conduct. On October 8, 2007 the IPOA Executive Committee authorized the Standards Committee to initiate an independent review process of Blackwater USA to ascertain whether Blackwater USA's processes and procedures were fully sufficient to ensure compliance with the IPOA Code of Conduct.
All IPOA member companies are required to follow the IPOA Code of Conduct. The Code of Conduct is a set of ethical and professional guidelines for companies in the peace and stability operations industry. The Code stresses human rights, corporate ethics, International Humanitarian Law, transparency, accountability, and responsibility and professionalism in relationships with employees, clients, and partner companies.
Families of Nisour Square victims, along with one survivor, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit this morning against Blackwater in federal district court. The suit represents one of the first times any Iraqi has taken legal action against a private military company working under contract from a U.S. government agency.
It's unclear whether Judge Reggie Walton (yup, the Scooter Libby judge) will allow the lawsuit to proceed. Families of U.S. troops who died in a 2004 Blackwater plane crash in Afghanistan filed a negligence suit. But it's rare for Iraqis to sue private-military companies in U.S. courts. One of the only precedents is a lawsuit filed by the same lawyers in the Blackwater case: a suit against contractors CACI and Titan for their role in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. And that case, filed in 2004, is still snarled up in legal challenges over whether the Iraqi victims have standing to sue.
Attorneys with the Philadelphia firm Burke O'Neill and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed the suit (pdf) in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It claims Blackwater is responsible for "the extrajudicial killing of Oday Ismail Ibraheem, Himoud Saed Atban, and Usama Fadhil Abbas," and for mental and physical damages suffered by Talib Mutlaq Deewan, who survived the shooting. Deewan and the families are seeking compensatory and punitive damages, but no monetary amount is specified in the suit. The case has "great implications for the application of the rule of law and the rebuilding of the U.S.'s reputation abroad," says Vincent Warren, CCR's executive director and an attorney on the case. Contacts of CCR and Burke O'Neill on the ground in Iraq from the Abu Ghraib lawsuit reached out to the September 16 victims' families to offer legal assistance.
The plaintiffs rely on the Alien Tort Statute for their suit, part of a 1789 law passed to give foreigners standing to sue U.S. persons or organizations if they can't seek legal action in their own country. Thanks to a Coalition Provisional Authority edict known as Order 17, Blackwater is effectively outside Iraqi law.
Blackwater's Nisour Square shootings and the more recent killing of two Iraqi women by contractors for the Australian-run Unity Resources Group has raised the ire of the United Nations. AFP:
The UN called Thursday for rogue security guards in Iraq to face prosecution as the Australian-run firm involved in the latest civilian shooting insisted its staff stuck by clear rules of engagement.
"We would like the US government and other governments that have contractors in Iraq... to apply rules of engagement on them and to prosecute them in their own countries," UN spokesman Said Arikat told a press conference in Baghdad.
In the harshest criticism yet of private military companies in Iraq by any government or international body, UN human rights official Ivana Vaco said there needed to be an investigation into "whether crimes against humanity or war crimes have been committed." She didn't say who should spearhead such an inquiry.
Blackwater and the State Department say one thing -- namely, that Blackwater guards were under attack by Iraqi insurgents at Nisour Square on September 16. The Iraqi government and the U.S. military say another: Blackwater didn't come under fire on that fateful day, and instead used deadly force against a misperceived threat. So as a joint U.S.-Iraqi investigation gets underway, maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that the Iraqis and the U.S. military feel shunted aside by a hard-charging State Department and its FBI allies.
The New York Timesreports that the joint inquiry, with the predominant U.S. component coming from the military, hasn't had access to initial State Department reports (at least one of which was written by Blackwater), nor has it had access to a separate investigation into the incident that State asked the FBI to lead. Furthermore, the military has neither been allowed to interview the four Blackwater guards at Nisour Square, nor been allowed to inspect the vehicle that they drove. That last point is crucial: examining the vehicle would easily determine whether any ballistic damage to it resulted from the kinds of weapons Iraqis typically fire or the sort that Blackwater is issued, which probably aren't the same. (There was another Blackwater convoy on the opposite end of the square.)
There's been a fair amount of friction over the past year between the Iraqi government and the U.S. military. But when it comes to the Blackwater investigation, they appear united in frustration.
“We haven’t received any information from the Americans about their own two investigations,” [a] senior Iraqi investigator said. “F.B.I. investigators have asked us to help them and share our information, as they have started a third investigation.”
[A] senior American military officer said the State Department had also refused to provide details of its investigation. “We have asked questions,” the official said. “They have not responded back on those.” Both the Iraqi investigator and the American military officer spoke on condition of anonymity because neither was authorized to discuss the investigations publicly.
Everything old in the Blackwater case is new again.
After the September 16 shooting at Nisour Squar, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government first demanded that Blackwater be expelled from Iraq, only to quickly reverse itself under State Department pressure. The Iraqis, seeking a graceful retreat from their initial position, claimed that a post-Blackwater "security vacuum" necessitated that Blackwater remain in the country. (In truth, Iraq has no power to kick Blackwater out, despite being, in theory, a sovereign nation.)
Ever since, the Iraqis adopted the fallback position that Blackwater was guilty of murder and needed to be punished by an international court. But the same Iraqi investigation that called the shootings a murder also says that the government should kick Blackwater out of Iraq within six months, according to the AP, which obtained a draft of the investigation's recommendations.
Iraqi authorities want the U.S. government to sever all contracts in Iraq with Blackwater USA within six months and pay $8 million in compensation to each of the families of 17 people killed when the firm's guards sprayed a traffic circle with heavy machine gun fire last month.
The demands _ part of an Iraqi government report examined by The Associated Press _ also called on U.S. authorities to hand over the Blackwater security agents involved in the Sept. 16 shootings to face possible trial in Iraqi courts.
The tone of the Iraqi report appears to signal further strains between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the White House over the deaths in Nisoor Square _ which have prompted a series of U.S. and Iraqi probes and raised questions over the use of private security contractors to guard U.S. diplomats and other officials.
Al-Maliki ordered the investigation by his defense minister and other top security and police officials on Sept. 22. The findings _ which were translated from Arabic by AP _ mark the most definitive Iraqi positions and contentions about the shootings last month.
The Blackwater security detail at Nisour Square on September 16 didn't just commit a "crime," as Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki initially said. It committed murder, according to the Iraqi government's official account of the incident.
Ali al-Dabbagh, Maliki's spokesman, told reporters yesterday that Blackwater was guilty of "deliberate murder" when its guards fired upon the square, leaving 17 civilians killed. Dabbagh said the judgment was the verdict of the Iraqi government's investigation into the shootings, which are also under review by a joint American-Iraqi panel. Those investigators met for the first time over the weekend.
Both the Iraqi investigation and initial U.S. military reviews have found that Blackwater did not come under small-arms fire at the square, contradicting the company's account of Iraqi insurgents provoking the attack. Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim told The New York Times that "Not even a brick was thrown at them." Blackwater continues to deny wrongdoing -- let alone illegality -- and urges judgment be suspended until all inquiries are complete.
Dabbagh, however, was disinclined to accept the company's admonishments: the shootings were "a deliberate crime against civilians" that should be "tried in court." The Iraqi investigation would seem to support that conclusion.
In previously undisclosed details in the government’s final report, the Iraqi police documented that Blackwater guards shot in almost every direction, killing or wounding people in a near 360-degree circle around Nisour Square.
The thick file amassed for the investigation asserts that bullets reached bystanders who were as far as 200 feet away and nearly on the opposite side of the square.
The police investigation also shows that a second shooting, in which one person was killed and two wounded, occurred about 600 feet from the initial one on the opposite side of the square, along the departure route that the Blackwater team took from the first shooting.
The Blackwater guard who drunkenly shot a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi in December 2006 was back working for a Department of Defense contractor by February, CNN reported this morning.
And in a letter House oversight committee Chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice today, he asks why. He suggests that the reason it was so easy for the guard, Andrew J. Moonen, to get back to work, was because the State Department didn't inform the Defense Department about what the ex-Blackwater employee did to get initially expelled from Iraq. Moonen returned to Kuwait in February, CNN reported, working for Defense Department contractor Combat Support Associates (CSA).
During this week's Congressional hearing on Blackwater, a State official refused to tell Waxman anything about the incident -- including whether State had helped Moonen flee Iraq after the shooting.
"It is hard to reconcile this development with the State Department’s claim that 'We are scrupulous in terms of oversight and scrutiny not only of Blackwater but all of our contractors,'" Waxman writes.
Waxman requested all of the Departments documents concerning Moonen and the Christmas Eve, 2006 shooting.
Not that State is conceding Blackwater or other private-security contractors protecting U.S. diplomats have done anything wrong, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is leaning in the direction of imposing a few restrictions on their activity in Iraq:
An internal State Department review ordered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice recommends overhauling U.S. diplomatic security practices in Iraq after the Blackwater USA shooting incident in which 13 Iraqis were killed, a senior U.S. official said Friday.
Rice has ordered the recommendations be followed, including requiring U.S. diplomatic security agents to accompany Blackwater-escorted convoys of U.S. diplomats in Baghdad, said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.
The government security service also will bolster monitoring of the private security escorts by installing video cameras in cars and recording radio traffic between convoys and the U.S. embassy.
"She wants to make sure there is a management feedback loop," McCormack told reporters.
What's not changed? Oh, yeah -- the rules of engagement that allow private firms to use lethal force with apparently minimal provocation, which U.S. military officials consider a liability. On the other hand, those video cameras are sure to capture some wacky bloopers:
While the State Department has frequently covered for Blackwater, particularly over the Nisour Square incident, the military has tended to be more candid. "It may be worse than Abu Ghraib," a senior officer said last week, at a time when diplomats were, at most, conceding "there's an issue here" and urging calm in the aftermath of the shooting. That shouldn't be surprising: after all, it's the 160,000 troops in Iraq who suffer by association with reckless contractors.
Now, after Blackwater got off lightly at a Congressional hearing Tuesday -- in which Nisour Square was not explored -- the military is pressing the point harder. U.S. military reports from the scene at Nisour Square, separate from the initial Blackwater-penned "first blush" inquiry, portray Blackwater guards as out of control and trigger-happy, firing on Iraqi civilians and Iraqi security forces almost indiscriminately. "It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong," a U.S. military official tells The Washington Post.
The most significant new detail added by the U.S. military account about the chaos at Nisour Square on September 16: Contrary to Blackwater's frequently-repeated account, no Iraqi civilian or policeman fired upon its guards. The small-arms fire was, in other words, all coming from the contractors.
It's a prime example of the lawlessness in Iraq. The details are sketchy and disputed, but here they are: An Iraqi corruption judge, continually thwarted in his pursuit of justice, finally helps convict a high-ranking official. But then the official breaks out of jail. Or, rather, the official is helped out of jail by guards working for one defense contractor, but is then returned -- only to leave jail with the help of another. Allegedly.
Testimony today from Iraqi corruption judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi touched on the conviction of
Ayham al-Samarrai, the former Iraqi electricity minister. al-Radhi helped put al-Samarrai away for what the judge called "wasting" public funds. al-Samarrai is the highest-ranking official to be convicted of corruption in Iraq.
His name may be familiar to Blackwater watchers. Last month, an Iraqi defense official told McClatchy's Leila Fadel that Blackwater helped break al-Samarrai out of prison in the Green Zone last December. Today, however, al-Radhi suggested that the defense official was wrong. A rival private-security company, DynCorp, assisted al-Samarrai's prison break, al-Radhi said.
But DynCorp says it's a huge misunderstanding. "It's absolutely untrue," says spokesman Gregory Lagana. "We are absolutely 100 percent convinced it wasn't us." However, Lagana says, he knows why al-Radhi thinks DynCorp was behind it. Two DynCorp employees, one named George Dillman and another whom Lagana didn't recall, were stationed in Iraq to assist in training Iraqi policemen. Among the police stations the two were detailed to was the Green Zone station where al-Samarrai was detained. In October, al-Samarrai, who holds dual U.S.-Iraqi citizenship, told the DynCorp employees that he would be murdered if he was convicted.
Rep. David Price's (D-NC) bill putting private-security companies' activities overseas under U.S. civilian law has passed the House:
The House passed a bill on Wednesday that would make all private contractors working in Iraq and other combat zones subject to prosecution by U.S. courts. It was the first major legislation of its kind to pass since a deadly shootout last month involving Blackwater employees.
Democrats called the 389-30 vote an indictment in connection with a shooting incident there that left 11 Iraqis dead. Senate Democratic leaders said they planned to follow suit with similar legislation and send a bill to President Bush as soon as possible.
"There is simply no excuse for the de facto legal immunity for tens of thousands of individuals working in countries" on behalf of the United States, said Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas.
Some farces, it turns out, can be avoided. The FBI team traveling to Iraq at the behest of the State Department to assist in the investigation of Blackwater's September 16 shooting at Nisour Square was supposed to be guarded by... Blackwater. (Shades of Darrell Issa's threat hover over that one.) However, the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security realized yesterday that the ensuing conflict of interest would be just too egregious.
Under Blackwater's State Department contract, the company provides security for all official travel outside the U.S.-protected Green Zone. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that security for the team would be handled by the department's Diplomatic Security Service.
Of course, the DSS needed a bit of prompting, which is perhaps to be expected after chief Richard Griffin's vigorous defense of Blackwater on Tuesday. In a letter, Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT) urged (pdf) Condoleezza Rice to step back from the precipice of absurdity.
The New York Times has a piece out today adding new details about the September 16 Blackwater shootings in Nisour Square. Relying largely on 12 Iraqis described as eyewitnesses, Iraqi investigators and a U.S. official familiar with one of the American investigations, the account suggests Blackwater's rules of engagement worked against both the Blackwater convoy and the Iraqis left dead and wounded.
The State Department's rules of engagement for Blackwater call for a series of escalating measures starting with signaled and verbal warnings to halt and progressing to the use of deadly force.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry account of the shooting is familiar by now: a car carrying a young family was ordered to stop by a traffic policeman so a Blackwater convoy could pass through. But the car rolled forward, resulting in Blackwater guards killing the driver, his wife and their young child -- and sparking the melee that followed.
But the Times reports that the car may have proceeded because its driver was already dead:
The car in which the first people were killed did not begin to closely approach the Blackwater convoy until the Iraqi driver had been shot in the head and lost control of his vehicle. Not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around the square. And following a short initial burst of bullets, the Blackwater guards unleashed an overwhelming barrage of gunfire even as Iraqis were turning their cars around and attempting to flee.
As the gunfire continued, at least one of the Blackwater guards began screaming, “No! No! No!” and gesturing to his colleagues to stop shooting, according to an Iraqi lawyer who was stuck in traffic and was shot in the back as he tried to flee. The account of the struggle among the Blackwater guards corroborates preliminary findings of the American investigation.
Yesterday, Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, said that it's far from clear that Blackwater did anything wrong. That response might be self serving, but it's not necessarily false -- at least from the perspective of the State Department-issued "escalation of force" policy.
Yesterday Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) asked if Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) "really" wanted to investigate Blackwater, since if he went to Iraq to snoop around, "Blackwater will be his support team."
When a team of FBI agents lands in Baghdad this week to probe Blackwater security contractors for murder, it will be protected by bodyguards from the very same firm, the Daily News has learned.
Half a dozen FBI criminal investigators based in Washington are scheduled to travel to Iraq to gather evidence and interview witnesses about a Sept. 16 shooting spree that left at least 11 Iraqi civilians dead.
The agents plan to interview witnesses within the relative safety of the fortified Green Zone, but they will be transported outside the compound by Blackwater armored convoys, a source briefed on the FBI mission said.
"What happens when the FBI team decides to go visit the crime scene? Blackwater is going to have to take them there," the senior U.S. official told The News.
It was a major talking point for Erik Prince at yesterday's Blackwater hearing: Blackwater contractors discharged their weapons during only about one percent of the 16,000 missions they've undertaken since 2005. Relying on his company's statistics, Blackwater owner/CEO pointedly told the House oversight committee that his contractors fired their guns an average of 1.4 times a week, a discharge rate hardly befitting the company's reputation for recklessness.
Prince may have accurately reported his company's weapons-discharge statistics to the committee. But, reports Steve Fainaru in The Washington Post, contract employees for private-security companies in Iraq, including Blackwater, frequently under-report how many often they open fire.
[T]wo former Blackwater security guards said they believed employees fired more often than the company has disclosed. One, a former Blackwater guard who spent nearly three years in Iraq, said his 20-man team averaged "four or five" shootings a week, or several times the rate of 1.4 incidents a week reported by the company. The underreporting of shooting incidents was routine in Iraq, according to this former guard.
"The thing is, even the good companies, how many bad incidents occurred where guys involved didn't say anything, because they didn't want to be questioned, or have any downtime today to have to go over what happened yesterday?" he said. "I'm sure there were some companies that just didn't report anything."
Defense and State Department officials conceded that the terms of most contracts require the security firm to report their shooting incidents, but in practice, few comply. The apparent silence among contractors has led to a lack of understanding by the U.S. about the true rates of contractor violence in Iraq. Last year, for instance, officials with the Army Corps of Engineers grew concerned that their bodyguards from Aegis, a British-run firm, had turned "out of control" because of their high numbers of reported shootings. But a closer look determined that Aegis only appeared trigger-happy because of its high pace of operations and under-reporting by its competitors. Functionally, whether or not contractors tell responsible officials in the State or Defense Departments about their shooting incidents "is up to them," according to an ex-ACE program manager.
Perhaps it slipped Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-CA) mind when he was detailing Blackwater CEO Erik Prince's Republican bona fides*, but Prince is not only a supporter of Republican candidates. Last summer, he and his wife shelled out $10,000 in contributions for a Green.
It was part of an effort by connected Republicans (lobbyists and millionaire CEOs among them) to recruit Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli to enter the 2006 Senate race. Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) was trailing Dem moderate Bob Casey in the polls -- and Romanelli, the scheme went, could take some of those liberal votes away from Casey.
Ultimately Republicans raised more than $150,000 for Romanelli (who once told me, "This is America, money is like air. It's out there. You just have to be tenacious enough to go get it.") in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to get him on the ballot.
*Update: Actually, Prince's Green contributions didn't slip Issa's mind. Or rather, Issa appeared to at least be remotely familiar with them -- which, unfortunately, ended up making him look rather silly. Here's Issa during a second round of questioning:
Amb. Satterfield has a unique vantage point here. In 2005, he was the deputy chief of mission in Baghdad -- the No. 2 official at the U.S. Embassy. During that time, the Democratic staff on the committee determined (pdf), Blackwater personnel shot and killed an "innocent bystander" in the central-south city of al-Hilla. According to a State Department email that the committee obtained, the Blackwater guards "failed to report the shooting, covered it up" and were subsequently fired. But there wasn't evidence that State investigated, although Satterfield said State "thoroughly" investigates each discharge of a firearm. So, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), wanted to know: was there an investigation of the al-Hilla incident?
"We will get back to you," Satterfield said.
Lynch was incredulous. Didn't Satterfield, the former deputy chief of mission, recall whether the embassy investigated an improper shooting and subsequent apparent cover-up? "Not with the detail it deserves," he said. "I would prefer to respond to you in writing." Pressed repeatedly, Satterfield finally said he "cannot recall" if the incident was ever investigated.
Waxman complained that the committee received "a better response from Blackwater than the State Department."
Diplomatic security chief Richard Griffin, at long last, confirmed Blackwater's rules of engagement for dealing with potential vehicular threats. The bottom line? "One does not have to wait until the protectee or co-worker is physically harmed before taking action," Griffin said. His account corroborated one given by Blackwater CEO Erik Prince during Prince's testimony
On the back of every motorcade, State's Griffin said, there should be a warning in Arabic and English to stay back, with lights and sirens indicating drivers not to approach. Security officials are supposed to give hand signals and verbal commands to approaching vehicles to stay back. "If they still haven't gotten the driver's attention," security officials will shoot flares or shine a bright light into the vehicle. If the driver continues, Blackwater guards might "throw a bottle of water" at the car, and from there, if "that all fails," the guards are to fire into the radiator to disable the car. Should that not work, the guards are authorized to shoot into the windshield. It's "an escalation of force policy," Griffin said.
Blackwater CEO Erik Prince might have been unable to shed light on it. But William H. Moser, the deputy assistant secretary for logistics management, confirmed that in 2004, Blackwater received a "sole-source" contract for security -- in other words, a no-bid contract.
It was an "urgent situation," Moser explained. In 2004, the State Department had to make a rapid transition to assume diplomatic responsibilities with the demise of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and so "we decided to do a sole-source contract for Blackwater's services." He said that State was uncomfortable with the award, and asked the inspector-general to perform an audit at the end of 2004 -- which found that Blackwater had overbilled State for an undisclosed amount of money. (The company charged the government separately for "drivers" and "security specialists" who were in fact the same people.)
The next year, Blackwater was incorporated into State's Worldwide Protective Services contracting process, and its contract was "competitively awarded."
Blackwater CEO Erik Prince completed his testimony, and now State Department officials are explaining the scope of their contract with Blackwater.
Ambassador David Satterfield, Condoleezza Rice's special adviser on Iraq, wanted to emphasize "how seriously" Secretary Rice takes investigating the September 16 incident. He announced that Ambassador Patrick Kennedy -- a longtime diplomat and intelligence official -- is opening a separate investigation into State's broader practices in Iraq, including "how we provide security for our employees, including the rules of engagement" and the relevant laws that apply.
Unfortunately for Satterfield, the next State representative, Richard Griffin, the assistant secretary for diplomatic security -- whose bureau hired Blackwater in Iraq -- didn't appear as eager to shed light on an arguably antecedent incident: the December 2006 shooting by a drunken Blackwater employee of a guard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi. Why, Waxman wanted to know, did the State Department facilitate the departure of the Blackwater contractor from Iraq?
"It's not appropriate for me to comment," Griffin said, citing an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department. (In which, it's worth saying, no charges have yet been brought.) That individual "no longer had reason to be in Iraq" was about all that Griffin would say. "The area about what laws are available for prosecution is very murky," he added. "Lack of clarity is part of the problem."
So, Waxman asked, was there any question among state officials whether a potential crime had occurred? "That's your judgment as to what happened," Griffin said. "I was not there. That's why the Justice Department is investigating." Griffin added that he doesn't know what State has told the Justice Department about the incident.
Two bits of testimony Prince would come to regret: He said earlier today that Blackwater gets about 90 percent of its business from federal contracts, and he said that, "as an example," under some of the contracts Blackwater has, it earns about a 10 percent profit margin. But Prince balked at saying how much money Blackwater actually makes in Iraq. Since the beginning of the war, Blackwater has been awarded contracts worth roughly $1 billion. "We're a private company," he said. "The key word there is private."
Reps. Peter Welch (D-VT) and Christopher S. Murphy (D-CT) pounded on the question. "How can you say that information isn't relevant?" Murphy said, saying "my constituents pay 90 percent of your salary. Welch, "just trying to do the math," pointed out that 10 percent of $1 billion is $100 million, but Prince repeatedly backed off the figure, saying that he couldn't factor in "depreciation" off the top of his head for when, for instance, Blackwater loses armored cars or helicopters. Murphy said Prince's plea of ignorance is "hard to believe."
Prince's reply? "I'm not a financially driven guy." He did, however, offer that, last year, his salary was in the ballpark of $1 million.
Blackwater CEO Erik Prince said his "understanding" is that his company is subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act and the War Crimes Act. Well, asked Betty McCollum (D-MN), is the State Department, who hired Blackwater, under the UCMJ?
"I wouldn't be presumptuous to answer for the State Department," Prince replied. So it's just a "feeling" Prince has, that Blackwater is under the UCMJ, McCollum asked? "Legal opinions I respect" indicate as such, he said. But he couldn't state that for a fact? "That's correct."
During Darrell Issa's second go-round, he raised an issue that no other member of Congress did: Prince's long family ties to the GOP. Only Issa didn't make the point he wanted to.
Prince seemed uncomfortable about the line of questioning, and confused about its source being a Republican. Was his sister, Betsy DeVos, a "large contributor" to President Bush? "Probably." Did she attend the Republican National Convention in 2000 and 2004? "Probably did." Is it generally the case that his family is known as a Republican family? He paused. "Yes." And is he aware that Blackwater is known as a Republican company?
"Blackwater's not a partisan company," Prince said. "We execute the mission given us. ... Yes, I have given individual political contributions in college, and when I was a member of the active-duty armed services, and probably will in the future." He said he "did not give up that right when I became a defense contractor."
Issa ran out of time, but scrambled to say that he was trying to make the point that "labeling some company as Republican" because of a family's background "is inappropriate." To laughter, Waxman replied, "The only one doing that is you!"
Defense Secretary Bob Gates recently said that he thought future defense contracts with the Defense Department (Blackwater has non-Iraq contracts with DOD) should include "non-compete" clauses so private-security companies don't poach U.S. troops out of the overtaxed military. What does Prince think about that?
It might be onerous for the troops, Prince responded. It would be "fine" with him, he testified, "but not everyone who joins the military serves 20 years." There isn't direct evidence, he said -- truthfully -- that contractor recruiting has led to greater departures from the military than would otherwise exist. What's more "it would be upsetting to a lot of soldiers if they didn't have the ability to use the skills they learned in the in military in the private sector." It would be akin to telling an engineer on a nuclear submarine that he or she couldn't become a civil engineer post-retirement, Prince contended.
Gates, however, never said that future contracts with DOD should ban U.S. troops from eventually going into any profession -- only that companies in-theater not actively recruit U.S. troops serving in that theater.
Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) read out a raft of quotes from U.S. military counterinsurgency experts -- Gen. David Petraeus and Col. Pete Mansour, to name two -- who say it's better for counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq if contractors fell within the military chain of command. Running Iraqis off the road, Mansour said, according to Tierney, comes at the "detriment of the mission" of convincing Iraqis that the U.S. is looking out for their best interests.
"We know we're part of the total force," Prince replied, but he didn't say that his efforts don't come into conflict with the mission. Instead, he said that Blackwater guards have only discharged their weapons in one percent of their 16,000 missions in Iraq. (He didn't say anything about running Iraqis off the road.) Similarly, he asked for understanding about the dangers that Blackwater guards face in Iraq, and to illustrate the point, displayed a photo of the carnage after a suicide car bombing successfully attacked a Blackwater-operated Chevy Suburban. The broader question of whether Blackwater hurts counterinsurgency efforts, as some experts contend, went unaddressed.
Although the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) called Blackwater's contracts with State -- and before that with the Coalition Provisional Authority -- "no-bid contracts," Blackwater CEO Erik Prince wouldn't comment on SIGIR's definitions. But he said that because his company's security services were on the "GSA Schedule" -- that's the General Services Agency's list of services that contractors offer to the government for purchase -- they are "considered a bid." Prince said, "[I]t's like buying something from the Sears catalog," and he expected that his competitors had the same arrangement with State.
Waxman read from a July 2004 SIGIR assessment that said several Blackwater contracts were "sole-source directed." Prince said that no member of his company, to his knowledge, reached out to anyone in the White House or Congress for assistance in getting contracts (nor, he added, did his wife's well-connected GOP family), despite how rapidly Blackwater's contracts in Iraq ballooned from 2003 to the present.
Update: Prince, after conferring with aides, said that "one of the contracts I said was GSA schedule was in fact sole-source." He said he didn't know anything further and would get information to the committee about which contract that was and why.
Prince wouldn't make excuses for the drunken Blackwater contractor who, last December, killed -- and possibly murdered -- a security guard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi. He was fired, Prince said, since "he violated our policies." But Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) asked why Blackwater flew the now-ex-employee out of Iraq, which sounded to Maloney like he was fleeing a crime scene, as the Justice Department had started an investigation. "We can fire, we can fine, but we cannot detain," was Prince's answer. Did Blackwater help him flee the country? "It could easily be," Prince said.
How restrictive are Blackwater's rules of engagement for using force? Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican from Blackwater's home state of North Carolina, asked Prince what he meant by the "use of force continuum" that his contractors in Iraq used. Are their rules dictated by the State Department? "Yes sir," Prince replied.
Are they similar to the Defense Department's rules of engagement? McHenry asked.
"Yes, they're essentially the same," Prince said -- before correcting himself. "Sorry, that's the Department of Defense rules for contractors. We do not have the same rules as soldiers."
Late Update: Prince just testified that State's ROE is limited to "-- defensive fire, sufficient force to extricate ourselves from situation."
It didn't seem at the beginning of this hearing that any part of Blackwater's operations in Iraq had a thing to do with MoveOn.org's "Betray Us" ad. But that impression didn't account for the vigorous argumentation of Rep. Darrell Issa.
Issa brought out a massive placard of the ad showing General David Petraeus and launched into a full-bore assault on his Democratic colleagues, who, he implied, ran the ad themselves in the New York Times. "What they couldn't do to our men in women in uniform," he said -- presumably meaning run their names through the dirt -- they'll now do to Blackwater. "I'm not here to defend Blackwater," Issa said with the utmost sincerity, "but I am here to defend General Petraeus and members of the military." (Blackwater contractors, by the way, make on average six times more than U.S. troops in Iraq.)
The hearing is simply "a repeat of the MoveOn ad," Issa says, which seems to be the line the GOP is taking. One of Issa's GOP colleagues said that the Democrats first tried to discredit the President, then the U.S. military, then the Iraqi government and "they're trying to discredit contractors now." Several GOP members of the panel moved to adjourn the hearing, for fear of slander. Some kinds of slander, anyway.
Welcome to the Rayburn House Office Building, where Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater, and a clutch of State Department officials are getting grilled by the House oversight committee about proper procedure -- and potential wrongdoing -- for Blackwater and other private security companies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The thin, baby-faced Prince walked in wearing a crisp blue suit, a starched white shirt, and his shoulders square. He gave a quick smile before sitting at the witness table. An associate in a black suit behind him clapped him on the back for support during what's sure to be an uncomfortable hearing.
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) started the hearing by paying Prince a backhanded compliment. So many of the scions of the nation's "wealthy and politically connected families" don't join the military, Waxman said, before thanking Prince, who was a Navy SEAL before founding Blackwater, for his service.
Waxman said that at the request of the FBI, which has just announced the opening of an investigation into the September 16 shootings by Blackwater at Baghdad's Nisour Square, the hearing will not take public testimony from Prince or from State Department officials on that incident. However, Waxman said he wanted to assure the families of those Blackwater guards killed in Fallujah in 2004 that "Blackwater will be accountable today."
When Blackwater CEO Erik Prince marches up to the Hill for a hearing today, he's sure to be confronted a portrayal of his guards as trigger-happy, remorseless, greedy mercenaries -- or as one former Blackwater employee put it, "lazy f**ks [who] care about one thing, money."
Prince's response, as indicated by his prepared statement (pdf), is to counter that with an image of U.S. military men and women "volunteering" to serve their country (although for a pot of money):
Under the direction and oversight of the United States Government, Blackwater provides an opportunity for military and law enforcement veterans with a record of honorable service to continue their support to the United States. Words alone cannot express the respect I have for these men and women who volunteer to defend U.S. personnel, facilities, and diplomatic missions. I am proud to be here today to represent them.
And countering Henry Waxman's numbers, Prince defends Blackwater's performance with his own numbers. Waxman's House oversight committee report showed that Blackwater had been involved in 195 "escalation of force" incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 shooting incidents per week. From January 2005 to April 2007, Blackwater employees used their weapons 168 times. Waxman also reported that, in 80 percent of those incidents, Blackwater fired first.
Prince offers a different metric: in 2007, his guards have opened fire during only 56 of the their 1,873 security details for diplomatic visits outside the Green Zone. That's "less than three percent of movements," he says. (Think of all the times they didn't shoot.) As to what percentage of those incidents had Blackwater guards firing first, he doesn't say. Thirty Blackwater guards have been killed in Iraq, he says.
And, of course, Prince offers a version of the September 16th Mansour incident. According to the Iraqis, the Blackwater fired first, after a car didn't slow down enough at a traffic stop. In Prince's telling, the Blackwater guards came under fire first and from a variety of attackers (men toting AK-47s and "approaching vehicles that appeared to be suicide bombers"), some of whom "appeared to be wearing Iraqi National Police uniforms, or portions of such uniforms. Only five of the twenty Blackwater guards at the scene that day fired their weapons, Prince says. Based on "everything we currently know," he concludes, "the Blackwater team acted appropriately while operating in a very complex war zone in September 16."
The hearing starts at 10 this morning; we'll be providing running updates throughout.
To the rapidly growing number of overlappingprobes of Blackwater (some more probing than others), you can add this one:
Amid questions of reckless behavior by U.S contractors, the FBI is sending a team to Iraq to investigate the role of Blackwater USA in last month's shoot-out in Baghdad that killed 11 Iraqis, an FBI spokesman said Monday.
FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko said the agency was making the move at the request of the State Department to examine evidence in the Sept. 16 shooting and to pursue possible criminal charges in light of allegations that guards working for Blackwater might have shot innocent Iraqi citizens.
"The results of the investigation will be reviewed for possible criminal liability and referred to the appropriate legal authority," Kolko said.
In addition to Blackwater's Erik Prince, the House oversight committee will hear testimony from top State Department officials -- including the Iraq coordinator, David Satterfield -- about Blackwater's contracts with State. Material found by the committee's Democratic staff suggests that State officials helped create an environment where Blackwater guards could use deadly force with minimum reprisal.
After an infamous December incident wherein a drunken Blackwater contractor shot and killed a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, one U.S. embassy official wrote to another:
Will you be following in up Blackwater [sic] to do all possible to ensure that a sizable compensation is forthcoming? If we are to avoid this whole thing becoming even worse, I think a prompt pledge and apology -- even if they want to claim it was accidental -- would be the best way to assure the Iraqis don't take steps, such as telling Blackwater that they are no longer allowed to work in Iraq.
Tomorrow morning, the House oversight committee will hear testimony from Erik Prince, the owner of embattled private-security company Blackwater, about his company's operations in Iraq. Blackwater is in the news right now for the disputed shootings on September 16 in Baghdad that left 11 Iraqis dead. But the committee's Democratic staff has put together a compendium (pdf) of questionable incidents and practices that Prince will surely be asked about tomorrow. Here's a sampling:
* Blackwater has been involved in 195 "escalation of force" incidents since 2005, an average of 1.4 shooting incidents per week. From January 2005 to April 2007, Blackwater employees used their weapons 168 times, compared to 102 times for rival DynCorp and 36 for rival Triple Canopy during that same time frame.
According to the majority staff, Blackwater operatives fired the first shot in 80 percent of those cases, though its contract with the State Department only permits the use of "defensive" force.
* A single Blackwater security contractor costs the government $1,222 every day to guard U.S. civilian personnel, or $445,000 per year. That's six times the cost of getting a U.S. Army soldier to perform the same function. As P.W. Singer observed last week, private security companies increasingly exist to free up tasks for U.S. troops, ensuring a sort of dependence on contracting occurs for a military coping with the strain of deployments for two wars.
* The State Department's attitude to Blackwater shootings is most often a directive to compensate the victim's family, "rather than to insist upon accountability or to investigate Blackwater personnel for potential criminal liability."
* Blackwater's initial contract to protect U.S. diplomats in Iraq, in 2003, was a no-bid contract. So was its 2004 successor. On that one, Blackwater stood to earn a maximum of $338 million, but actually received $488 million from State between June 2004 and June 2006. In total, Blackwater has earned upwards of $1 billion in government contracts since 2001.
Today's Must Read
State Defends Immunity Deal for Blackwater Guards
State Dept. Immunized Blackwater Guards
Obama, Durbin, Kerry Call for Investigations of Alleged Blackwater Tax Dodge
ABC: State Officials Concerned about BW Shootings in 2005
Contractors Could Leave Iraq in Wake of Immunity Change
Top Security Official at State Resigns
Today's Must Read
Waxman Wants State Dep't DynCorp Documents
Waxman Accuses Blackwater of Millions in Tax Fraud, Cover-Up
Today's Must Read
Contractor-Linked Air Force Official Commits Suicide
Blackwater CEO: Iraqis Fired on Us at Nisour Square, But I Can't Prove It
UN: Prosecute Rogue Contractors
State Dep't Takes Baby Steps to Rein in Contractors
Prince, Solid Republican, Also Supported Green
