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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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October 8th,
2007 - Blackwater Shootings ‘Murder,’ Iraq Says 1st news article by the
New York Times |
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Blackwater Shootings
‘Murder,’ Iraq Says By James Glanz and Alissa J. Rubin New York Times October 8, 2007 Baghdad, Oct. 7 - The Iraqi
prime minister’s office said Sunday that the government’s investigation had
determined that Blackwater USA private security guards who shot Iraqi
civilians three weeks ago in a Baghdad square sprayed gunfire in nearly every
direction, committed “deliberate murder” and should be punished accordingly. Iraqi investigators,
supported by Iraqi witness accounts, have said unofficially that they could
not find evidence of any attack on the Blackwater guards that might have
provoked the shooting on Nisour Square, which the Iraqis say killed 17 and
wounded 27. But the statement by Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the prime
minister, is the first indication that the government considers its
investigation completed and the shootings unprovoked. “This is a deliberate crime
against civilians,” Mr. Dabbagh said. “It should be tried in court and the
victims should be compensated.” Those conclusions contradict
Blackwater’s original statement on the shooting, which said that a convoy
operated by the company’s guards “acted lawfully and appropriately in
response to a hostile attack.” The Iraqi findings are also at odds with
initial assertions by the State Department that the convoy had received
small-arms fire. Blackwater provides security
for American diplomats in Iraq. A convoy carrying diplomats was approaching
the square when a second Blackwater convoy, positioned on the square in
advance to control traffic, opened fire. “Not even a brick was thrown
at them,” said Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim, the Iraqi defense minister. “And
until now we have been examining this matter.” But in an indication of the
legal uncertainties surrounding the case in Iraq, where the law gives
American contractors virtual immunity, Mr. Dabbagh said decisions on specific
legal steps would wait until the Americans completed their own investigation
of the shooting and conferred with the Iraqis. It is not clear which
provisions of American law would apply in this case. American officials have
cautioned against drawing conclusions until evidence from all witnesses in
the case, including the Blackwater guards, has been compiled. Mr. Jassim said that little
information had come from the Americans and that Iraqi investigators had not
been granted access to the guards. But he said the Americans had promised to
cooperate. 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. Although American diplomats
have worked with personal security companies for most of the time since the
American invasion in March 2003, it appears that State Department officials
only now have started to thoroughly look at every aspect of the relationship. As part of that effort,
Patrick Kennedy, who heads the State Department’s team reviewing the
relationship with personal security companies, met in recent days with the
private security industry in Iraq. He posed nearly 20 questions to
representatives of the firms that make clear that American diplomats have
been largely in the dark about some of the most basic procedures of the
people who protect them. A list of the questions was provided by a
participant. Using abbreviations for the
Department of State and personal security company, among the questions he
posed were: “Do we provide weapons for P.S.C.’s? Does the D.O.S. travel
outside the Green Zone too much? What is the ultimate method of discipline
for P.S.C. individuals?” “They were in complete
receive mode the entire time,” said an American official after meeting with
Mr. Kennedy and his colleagues. “They were saying, ‘Tell me more, tell me
more, tell me more.’” A joint commission of
American and Iraqi senior officials held their first meeting on Sunday with
the goal of agreeing on recommendations to ensure the safety of Iraqi
civilians when they encounter personal security guards escorting American
diplomats, a statement from the American Embassy said. An American official who has
met with Blackwater officials in the past several days said the company
appeared to be making plans for a rapprochement with the Iraqi government. Despite calls from some
Iraqi politicians to ban Blackwater because of several encounters including
the Sept. 16 shootings, the company is making long-term plans to stay, the
official said. “The first thing they need
to do is reach out to the host nation, but I don’t think they are going to do
that before the United States has concluded its investigation,” the official
said. Police investigators, some of whom arrived at the scene of the shooting
when it was still under way because the National Police headquarters is just
a couple of hundred feet from the square, said they were stunned at the
bloodshed. “They were shooting in every direction,” one investigator said.
“All four Blackwater vehicles were shooting.” A traffic policeman, Sarhan
Thiab, who was directing traffic in the square at the time, said that when he
ran to help a man and his mother, who were among those first shot, the
Blackwater guards began shooting toward him and another policeman, who was
similarly trying to aid the victims. The policemen took shelter behind a
traffic kiosk. Mr. Thiab said that as they
looked to their right, at the road entering the square from the west, they
saw the first of the Blackwater vehicles shooting at a red bus stopped on the
edge of the square. Also shot were two cars on the parallel road that heads
west. Two people were wounded in a silver Toyota and one was killed in
another car, a silver Hundai, Mr. Thiab said. In the center of the square
about 100 laborers were repairing a tunnel and beautifying the central
roundabout with shrubs and marigolds and other border flowers. Two laborers
were wounded by bullets that appeared to have been fired toward the square’s
center. At the edge of the
roundabout the bullets hit an old man riding a motor scooter, Mr. Thiab said. “The fourth vehicle killed
the old man,” he said. “There was a lot of traffic and he was trying to go
around it and they shot him.” Qais Mizher contributed
reporting. Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/world/middleeast/08blackwater.html Blackwater Chief at Nexus of
Military and Business By James Risen New York Times October 8, 2007 Washington, Oct. 7 - Erik D.
Prince, the crew-cut, square-jawed founder of Blackwater USA, the security
contractor now at the center of a political storm in both Washington and
Baghdad, is a man seemingly born to play a leading role in the private sector
side of the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is both a former member
of the Navy Seals and the scion of a fabulously wealthy, deeply religious
family that is enmeshed in Republican Party politics. As a result, the
38-year-old Mr. Prince stands at the nexus between American Special
Operations, which has played such a critical role in the war operations, and
the nation’s political and business elite, who have won enormous government
contracts as war operations have increasingly been outsourced. Republican political
connections ran deep in his family long before Mr. Prince founded Blackwater
in 1997. When he was a teenager, religious conservative leaders like Gary
Bauer, now the president of American Values, were house guests. James C.
Dobson, the founder of the evangelical organization Focus on the Family, gave
the eulogy at his father’s funeral in 1995. “Dr. and Mrs. Dobson are friends
with Erik Prince and his mother, Elsa Broekhuizen,” Focus on the Family said
in a statement. Mr. Prince’s sister, Betsy
DeVos, married into one of the most politically active conservative families
in the Midwest. She has served as the chairwoman of the Republican Party of
Michigan, and last year, her husband, Richard DeVos Jr., ran unsuccessfully
for governor of Michigan as the Republican candidate. Mr. Prince and his
family have given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates
and other conservative and religious causes, records show. One favorite: the
prison ministry of Charles Colson, the former Watergate felon turned
Christian prison evangelist. “They are conservative
Christians, and they have very strong views on the sanctity of human life and
the defense of marriage and the role of faith in the public square,” Mr.
Bauer said of the Prince family. “Those are issues I’ve been associated with,
and so it was a natural relationship,” he said of his ties to Mr. Prince’s
parents. Unlike many other young men
who inherit great wealth, Mr. Prince also struck out on his own and joined
the Navy Seals at a time when few other men of his economic class were
willing to serve in the military. After his father died and left him a
fortune, Mr. Prince’s experience in Special Operations led him to found
Blackwater, and he has made a point of hiring other former members of the
Navy Seals, including some who now play prominent management roles. But now that Blackwater is
under scrutiny for its involvement in the Sept. 16 shootings of as many as 17
Iraqis in downtown Baghdad, some critics are questioning whether Mr. Prince’s
political connections have propelled the company’s sudden rise. “He is an ideological foot
soldier, not only in the war on terror, but also in the broader Bush agenda,”
said Jeremy Scahill, the author of a new book called “Blackwater: The Rise of
the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” (Nation). “He is a visionary when
it comes to military technology and asymmetric warfare. But he is also a
bankroller of Republican and right-wing religious causes.” Yet supporters say the image
of Mr. Prince as a Republican carpetbagger and war profiteer is nothing more
than an inaccurate cartoon. “Republican connections have nothing to do with
Blackwater,” said Chris Taylor, a former Blackwater vice president. “In the senior positions at
Blackwater, there are Democrats,” he added. “If Erik is a conservative, I
never heard anybody say that you have to be a conservative to be here. People
need to know just how exceptional a guy he is. He’s very generous, and
greatly respected in the company.” Mr. Prince did not respond
to a request for an interview. But during his Congressional testimony last
week, when asked about his political connections, he responded by saying that
he did not think his political contributions were “germane” to the lawmakers’
inquiry into Blackwater’s operations in Iraq. Others who know him suggest
that there is a more complicated dynamic tension between Erik Prince, the aggressive,
no-holds-barred Navy Seals veteran, and Erik Prince, the well-mannered
wealthy son, that explains the man and the corporation he has built in his
image. “I think that he thinks he
is like Bruce Wayne in Batman,” said Robert Young Pelton, the author of
“Licensed to Kill” (Crown Publishing Group), a book on contractors in Iraq,
who is one of the few journalists to have interviewed Mr. Prince extensively.
“Bruce Wayne lives in a mansion and then at night he is out in the bat cave
with the Batmobile. And that is Erik. I think he is conflicted.” Mr. Prince grew up in
Holland, Mich., where his father, Edgar Prince, had founded the Prince
Corporation, an automotive parts supplier to the major car makers based in
Detroit. According to Mr. Scahill’s book, the trauma of suffering a serious
heart attack in the 1970s deepened Edgar Prince’s religious faith, and by the
1980s he was helping to finance conservative religious groups like the Family
Research Council. Erik entered the Naval
Academy, but later transferred to Hillsdale College, a small, conservative
school in western Michigan. He also became politically active, working on
campus for the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992. After college he made it
into the Navy Seals following Officer Candidate School, and seemed eager to
pursue a military career. But the death of his father, and the illness of Mr.
Prince’s first wife, who later died of cancer, intervened, and he left the
Navy. His family sold the Prince Corporation for more than $1 billion in
1996, a windfall that gave Erik Prince the financial freedom to create
Blackwater. Working with another former
Seal, Al Clark, Mr. Prince sought to create a world-class training facility
that could be used by American military and law enforcement personnel. They
built their facility in 1997 on a rural site in North Carolina, just south of
the Virginia border near Norfolk, which is home to a major Navy base and
other military posts. But it was only after the Sept. 11 attacks that
Blackwater began to emerge as a major security contractor in war zones. Mr. Pelton said it would be
wrong to assume that Mr. Prince’s political connections account for his
success. “It is a mistake to characterize him as his father, or by the
right-wing groups his father supported,” Mr. Pelton said. “Politically, I
think he is more of a libertarian. He hates government sloth, even as his
company gets most of its business from the government.” Copyright 2007 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/08/washington/08prince.html |