Why is Obama Still Using Blackwater?

Two years ago on September 16, 2007, on a steamy hot Baghdad day with
temperatures reaching 100 degrees, a heavily armed Blackwater convoy
entered a congested intersection at Nisour Square in the Mansour
district of the Iraqi capital. The once-upscale section of Baghdad was
still lined with boutiques, cafes and art galleries dating back to
better days. The ominous caravan consisted of four large armored
vehicles with machine guns mounted on top.

As the Blackwater convoy was entering the square that day, a young Iraqi
medical student named Ahmed Hathem Al-Rubaie was driving his mother,
Mahasin, in the family's white sedan. As fate would have it, they found
themselves stuck near Nisour Square. The family were devout Muslims and
were fasting in observance of the holy month of Ramadan.

Ali Khalaf Salman, an Iraqi traffic cop on duty in Nisour Square that
day, remembers vividly when the Blackwater convoy entered the
intersection, spurring him and his colleagues to scramble to stop
traffic. But as the Mambas entered the square, the convoy suddenly made
a surprise U-turn and proceeded to drive the wrong way on a one-way
street. As Khalaf watched, the convoy came to an abrupt halt. He says a
large white man with a mustache, positioned atop the third vehicle in
the Blackwater convoy, began to fire his weapon "randomly."

Khalaf looked in the direction of the shots, on Yarmouk Road, and heard
a woman screaming, "My son! My son!" The police officer sprinted toward
the voice and found a middle-aged woman inside of a vehicle holding a
20-year-old man covered in blood, who had been shot in the forehead. "I
tried to help the young man, but his mother was holding him so tight,"
Khalaf recalled. Another Iraqi policeman, Sarhan Thiab, also ran to the
car. "We tried to help him,'' Thiab said. "I saw the left side of his
head was destroyed and his mother was crying out: 'My son, my son. Help
me, help me.'''

Officer Khalaf recalled looking toward the Blackwater shooters. "I
raised my left arm high in the air to try to signal to the convoy to
stop the shooting." He says he thought the men would cease fire, given
that he was a clearly identified police officer. The young man's body
was still in the driver's seat of the automatic vehicle and, as Khalaf
and Thiab stood there, it began to roll forward, perhaps as a result of
the dead man's foot remaining on the accelerator. Blackwater guards
later said they initially opened fire on the vehicle because it was
speeding and would not stop, a claim hotly disputed by scores of
witnesses. Aerial photos of the scene later showed that the car had not
even entered the traffic circle when it was fired upon by Blackwater,
while the New York Timesreported, "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," meaning Blackwater had already shot the man. "I tried to use
hand signals to make the Blackwater people understand that the car was
moving on its own and we were trying to stop it. We were trying to get
the woman out but had to run for cover," Thiab said.

"Don't shoot, please," Khalaf recalled yelling. But as he stood with his
hand raised, Khalaf says a gunman from the fourth Blackwater vehicle
opened fire on the mother gripping her son and shot her dead before
Khalaf's and Thiabs' eyes. "I saw parts of the woman's head flying in
front of me, blow up," Thiab said. "They immediately opened heavy fire
at us." Within moments, so many shots had been fired at the car from
"big machine guns" that Khalaf says it exploded, engulfing the bodies
inside in flames, melting their flesh into one. "Each of their four
vehicles opened heavy fire in all directions, they shot and killed
everyone in cars facing them and people standing on the street," Thiab
recalled. "When it was over we were looking around and about fifteen
cars had been destroyed, the bodies of the killed were strewn on the
pavements and road." When later asked by US investigators why he never
fired at the Blackwater men, Khalaf told them, "I am not authorized to
shoot, and my job is to look after the traffic."

The victims were later identified as Ahmed Hathem Al-Rubaie and his
mother, Mahasin. That attack on Ahmed and Mahasin's vehicle would be the
beginning of a fifteen-minute shooting spree that would leave seventeen Iraqis
dead and more than twenty wounded.

One of the Blackwater "shooters" that day, Jeremy Ridgeway, later
admitted in sworn testimony, that he had killed Mahasin by firing
"multiple rounds" into her vehicle and that "there was no attempt to
provide reasonable warning."

After Ahmed and Mahasin's vehicle exploded, sustained gunfire rang out
in Nisour Square as people fled for their lives. In addition to the
Blackwater shooters in the four Mambas, witnesses say gunfire came from
Blackwater's Little Bird helicopters. "The helicopters began shooting on
the cars," officer Khalaf said. "The helicopters shot and killed the
driver of a Volkswagen and wounded a passenger" who escaped by "rolling
out of the car into the street," he said. Witnesses described a
horrifying scene of indiscriminate shooting by the Blackwater guards.
"It was a horror movie," said officer Khalaf. "It was catastrophic,"
said Zina Fadhil, a 21-year-old pharmacist who survived the attack. "So
many innocent people were killed."

Another Iraqi officer on the scene, Hussam Abdul Rahman, said that
people who attempted to flee their vehicles were targeted. "Whoever
stepped out of his car was shot at immediately," he said.

"I saw women and children jump out of their cars and start to crawl on
the road to escape being shot," said Iraqi lawyer Hassan Jabar Salman,
who was shot four times in the back during the incident. "But still the
firing kept coming and many of them were killed. I saw a boy of about 10
leaping in fear from a minibus--he was shot in the head. His mother was
crying out for him. She jumped out after him, and she was killed."

Salman says he was driving behind the Blackwater convoy when it stopped.
Witnesses say some sort of explosion had gone off in the distance, too
far away to have been perceived as a threat. He said Blackwater guards
ordered him to turn his vehicle around and leave the scene. Shortly
after, the shooting began. "Why had they opened fire?" he asked. "I do
not know. No one--I repeat no one--had fired at them. The foreigners had
asked us to go back, and I was going back in my car, so there was no
reason for them to shoot." In all, he says, his car was hit twelve
times, including the four bullets that pierced his back.

Ridgeway, the Blackwater operative, admitted that he and the other
Blackwater operatives "opened fire with automatic weapons and grenade
launchers on unarmed civilians." None of the victims that day "was an
insurgent," he said, adding that "many were shot while inside of
civilian vehicles that were attempting to flee." Ridgeway said one Iraqi
was shot "while standing in the street with his hands up."

Mohammed Abdul Razzaq and his 9-year-old-son, Ali, were in a vehicle
immediately behind Ahmed and Mahasin, the first victims that day. "We
were six persons in the car--me, my son, my sister and her three sons.
The four children were in the back seat." He recalled that the
Blackwater forces had "gestured stop, so we all stopped.... It's a
secure area so we thought it will be the usual, we would stop for a bit
as convoys pass. Shortly after that they opened heavy fire randomly at
the cars with no exception." He said his vehicle "was hit by about thirty
bullets, everything was damaged, the engine, the windshield the back
windshield and the tires.

"When the shooting started, I told everybody to get their heads down. I
could hear the children screaming in fear. When the shooting stopped, I
raised my head and heard my nephew shouting at me 'Ali is dead, Ali is
dead.' "

"My son was sitting behind me," he said. "He was shot in the head and
his brains were all over the back of the car." Razzaq remembered, "When
I held him, his head was badly wounded, but his heart was still beating.
I thought there was a chance and I rushed him to the hospital. The
doctor told me that he was clinically dead and the chance of his
survival was very slim. One hour later, Ali died." Razzaq, who survived
the shooting, later returned to the scene and gathered the pieces of his
son's skull and brains with his hands, wrapped them in cloth and took
them to be buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. "I can still smell
the blood, my son's blood, on my fingers," Razzaq said two weeks after
his son died.

In all, the melee reportedly lasted about fifteen minutes. In an
indication of how out of control the situation quickly became, US
officials report that "one or more" Blackwater guards called on their
colleagues to stop shooting. The word cease-fire ''was supposedly called
out several times,'' a senior official told the New York Times.
"They had an on-site difference of opinion." At one point a Blackwater
guard allegedly drew his gun on another. "It was a Mexican standoff,"
said one contractor. According to an Iraqi lawyer who was in the square
that day, the Blackwater guard screamed at his colleague, "No! No! No!"
The Iraqi lawyer himself was shot in the back as he tried to flee.

As the heavy gunfire died down, witnesses say some sort of smoke bomb
was set off in the square, perhaps to give cover for the Blackwater
Mambas to leave, a common practice of security convoys. Iraqis also said
the Blackwater forces fired shots as they withdrew from the square.
"Even as they were withdrawing, they were shooting randomly to clear the
traffic," said an Iraqi officer who witnessed the shootings in Nisour
Square.

Within hours, Blackwater would become a household name the world over,
as word of the massacre spread. Blackwater claimed its forces had been
"violently attacked" and "acted lawfully and appropriately" and
"heroically defended American lives in a war zone." "The 'civilians'
reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed
enemies." In less than twenty-four hours, the killings at Nisour Square
would cause the worst diplomatic crisis to date between Washington and
its own puppet regime in Baghdad. Though its forces had been at the
center of some of the bloodiest moments of the war, Blackwater had
largely existed in the shadows. Four years after Blackwater's first
boots hit the ground in Iraq, it was yanked out of the darkness. Nisour
Square would send Erik Prince down the fateful path to international
infamy.

Jeremy Ridgeway later pled guilty to one count of manslaughter. Five
other Blackwater guards have been indicted on manslaughter and other
charges for their role at Nisour Square that day. Blackwater forces
"fired at innocent Iraqis not because they actually believed that they
were in imminent danger of serious bodily injury and actually believed
that they had no alternative to the use of deadly force, but
rather...because of their hostility toward Iraqis and their grave
indifference to the harm that their actions would cause," US prosecutors
allege. "The defendants specifically intended to kill or seriously
injure the Iraqi civilians that they fired upon at [Nisour] Square."
Prosecutors also allege that "defendant Nicholas Slatten made statements
that he wanted to kill as many Iraqis as he could as 'payback for 9/11,'
and he repeatedly boasted about the number of Iraqis he had shot."
Blackwater's owner, Erik Prince, has faced no consequences for the
actions of his forces.

Two years to the day after the Nisour Square massacre, Blackwater
remains in Iraq, armed and dangerous. As The Nation has reported,
the Obama administration recently extended the company's contract there
indefinitely. Blackwater has big-money contracts in Afghanistan as well,
working for the State Department, the Defense Department and the CIA. As
in Iraq, Blackwater forces are alleged to have shot and killed innocent
civilians there. We now know that Blackwater was hired as part of the
secret CIA assassination program that former Vice President Dick Cheney
ordered concealed from Congress and that the company continues to work
for the CIA as part of its drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and
Afghanistan.

A former Blackwater employee, known as John Doe #2, recently alleged in
a sworn statement originally obtained by The Nation that Erik Prince,
"views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims
and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies
"encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." Prince, the
former employee charged, "intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who
shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men
to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men
used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who
fought the Crusades.... Prince's executives would openly speak about
going over to Iraq to 'lay Hajiis out on cardboard.' Going to Iraq to
shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's
employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for
Iraqis and other Arabs, such as 'ragheads' or 'hajiis.' "

Another former Blackwater employee, an ex-US Marine, charged in a sworn
statement that "Blackwater was smuggling weapons into Iraq." He states
that he personally witnessed weapons being "pulled out" from dog food
bags. Doe #2 alleges that "Prince and his employees arranged for the
weapons to be polywrapped and smuggled into Iraq on Mr. Prince's private
planes, which operated under the name Presidential Airlines," adding
that Prince "generated substantial revenues from participating in the
illegal arms trade."

Meanwhile, a new lawsuit has been filed against Prince by four Iraqis
who claim they were shot by Blackwater operatives a week before Nisour
Square on September 9, 2007. According to Susan Burke, the lawyer for
the Iraqis who works with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Prince
runs the operations of his "heavily armed private army" in Iraq and
elsewhere from a twenty-four-hour command center known as the "war
room." Burke also alleges that in Iraq "Prince's private army of men
went 'night hunting' on more than one occasion. This 'night hunting'
entailed Mr. Prince's men, armed with night goggles and riding in Mr.
Prince's wholly-owned helicopters after 10 pm over the streets of
Baghdad, killing at random."

On the second anniversary of the single worst massacre of Iraqi
civilians committed by a private force since the US invasion, President
Obama should be forced to explain to the American people and the people
of Iraq and Afghanistan why he continues to pay hundreds of millions of
dollars to this company and why he permits them to remain on the ground,
representing the United States in these countries. At a recent hearing
of the bipartisan Wartime Contracting Commission, commissioner Linda
Gustitus asserted that in not canceling Blackwater's contracts after
Nisour Square, the State Department "helped to send a message to other
contractors that you can do a lot and not have your contract
terminated."