In the meantime, in Baghdad, the survivors and victims’ families of Nisour Square were learning what U.S. justice really meant.
Nothing You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You in a Court of Law
Any criminologist will tell you that it is essential to seal off the scene of a crime as soon as possible. Evidence must be secured, witnesses interviewed, suspects identified and taken into custody. It is a race against the clock. The Bush administration’s handling of Nisour Square was a textbook case in how not to investigate a crime. Perhaps that was the point all along.
Ten days after the shooting, and with the administration facing a mounting scandal, the State Department’s “first blush” report on Nisour Square was leaked to the media. Dated September 16, 2007, the day of the shooting, and stamped “Sensitive but Unclassified,” it was titled “SAF [small-arms fire] attack on COM team.”
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The report alleged that the Blackwater team entered the square and was “engaged with small arms fire” from “8-10 persons” who “fired from multiple nearby locations, with some aggressors dressed in civilian apparel and others in Iraqi police uniforms. The team returned defensive fire.” It made no mention of any civilian deaths or injuries. While it appeared as though the State Department had investigated and was contradicting the widespread allegations of an unprovoked shooting, what was not revealed at the time was that the report was written by a Blackwater contractor, Darren Hanner, and printed on official State Department letterhead.
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It would be two weeks before the Bush administration would get around to deploying a ten-person team from the FBI—the official investigative body of the U.S. government—to Baghdad to investigate the shooting.
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As the FBI prepared to depart for Baghdad, reports emerged that the agents were to be guarded by none other than Blackwater itself.
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Senator Patrick Leahy quickly raised questions about the arrangement, forcing the Bureau to announce it would be guarded by official personnel and not personnel from the same company it was investigating.
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In the meantime, the official investigation of the Bush administration would be conducted by the State Department, whose personnel continued to depend on the chief suspects to keep them alive. “To rely on non-law enforcement to conduct sensitive law enforcement activities makes no sense if you want impartial justice,” said Melanie Sloan, a former federal prosecutor who currently serves as executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
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Normally when a group of people alleged to have gunned down seventeen civilians in a lawless shooting spree are questioned, investigators will tell them something along the lines of: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” But that is not what the Blackwater operatives involved in the Nisour Square shooting were told. They were questioned by State Department Diplomatic Security investigators with the understanding that their statements and information gleaned from them could neither be used to bring criminal charges against them nor even be introduced as evidence.
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ABC News obtained copies of sworn statements given by Blackwater guards in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, all of which began, “I understand this statement is being given in furtherance of an official administrative inquiry,” and “I further understand that neither my statements nor any information or evidence gained by reason of my statements can be used against me in a criminal proceeding.”
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CCR’s Ratner said the offering of so-called “use immunity” agreements by the State Department was “very irregular,” adding he could not recall a precedent for it.
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In normal circumstances, Ratner said, such immunity was granted only after a grand jury or Congressional committee had been convened and the party had invoked its Fifth Amendment right for protection against self-incrimination. Immunity would then be authorized by either a judge or the committee.
“What the State Department has done in this case is inconsistent with proper law enforcement standards. It is likely to undermine an ultimate prosecution, if not make it impossible,” said military law expert Scott Horton of Human Rights First. “In this sense, the objective of the State Department in doing this is exposed to question. It seems less to be to collect the facts than to immunize Blackwater and its employees. By purporting to grant immunity, the State Department draws itself more deeply into the wrongdoing and adopts a posture vis-à-vis Blackwater that appears downright conspiratorial. This will make the fruits of its investigation a tough sell.”
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One U.S. diplomat described the relationship between the U.S. Embassy’s security office in Baghdad and Blackwater to the
Los Angeles Times
. “They draw the wagon circle,” the diplomat said. “They protect each other. They look out for each other. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, that wall of silence. When it protects the guilty, that is definitely not a good thing.”
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But it wasn’t just that the State Department was apparently corrupting or stifling the investigation or hindering a successful prosecution of Blackwater. As Congress investigated Nisour Square, what emerged was evidence of a clear pattern of the State Department urging Blackwater to pay what amounted to hush money to Iraqi victims’ families. “In cases involving the death of Iraqis, it appears that the State Department’s primary response was to ask Blackwater to make monetary payments to ‘put the matter behind us,’ rather than to insist upon accountability or to investigate Blackwater personnel for potential criminal liability,” according to a report of the House Oversight Committee. “The most serious consequence faced by Blackwater personnel for misconduct appears to be termination of their employment.”
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Congressman Waxman charged that the State Department was “acting as Blackwater’s enabler.”
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On Christmas Day 2006, the day after Blackwater operative Andrew Moonen allegedly shot and killed the Iraqi vice president’s bodyguard, the State Department recommended that Blackwater pay off the guard’s family. The U.S. Embassy’s chargé d’affaires wrote to the regional security officer, Blackwater’s handler, “Will you be following in up [
sic
] Blackwater to do all possible to assure that a sizeable 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 able to work in Iraq.”
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It was a prophetic warning, coming a full nine months before the Iraqis would demand just that in the aftermath of Nisour Square. The chargé d’affaires initially suggested a $250,000 payment, but the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service said this was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed so as to set up their family financially.”
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In the end, the State Department and Blackwater reportedly agreed on a $15,000 payment. During his Congressional testimony, Prince corrected that figure, saying Blackwater had actually paid $20,000.
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In another case, in Al Hillah in June 2005, a Blackwater operator killed an “apparently innocent bystander” and the State Department requested that Blackwater pay the family $5,000.
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“Can you tell me how it was determined that this man’s life was worth $5,000?” Representative Davis asked Prince. “We don’t determine that value, sir,” Prince responded. “That’s kind of an Iraqi-wide policy. We don’t make that one.”
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In cases where the government and Blackwater claimed the guards fired in self-defense, though, no money was offered to victims’ families. The three victims of the Blackwater sniper at the Iraqi TV station in February 2007, for example, received nothing.
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Shortly after the Nisour Square shootings, the State Department began contacting the Iraqi victims’ families. Dr. Jawad, whose son and wife were the first victims that day, said U.S. officials asked him how much money he wanted in compensation. “I said their lives are priceless,” Jawad recalled.
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But the U.S. officials continued pressing him for a dollar amount. He said he told a State Department representative “if he could give me my loved ones, I would gladly give him $200 million.” To many Iraqis, the U.S. offers were an insult. “If you perceive marriage as half of your life, Mahasin was my best half,” Jawad said, talking about his wife. “We were always together. I don’t know how to manage my life or care for my other two children without her.”
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Mohammed Razzaq, whose nine-year-old son Ali was killed, asked, “Why should I ask for compensation? What would it do? Bring back my son? It will not.” Ali “was in school, but last year had to leave school because we were displaced. Now the Americans have killed him—why? What did he do? What did I do? After what I witnessed, I now jump out of bed at night, I have nightmares, it’s experiencing death, bullets are flying from here and there and here explosions, cars hit. Why? Why did they do this?” he asked. “I only ask why? [I] just want them to admit to the truth.”
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The Iraqi government eventually demanded $8 million in compensation for each victim.
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In the end, the State Department, on behalf of Blackwater, offered family members between $10,000 and $12,500,
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which many of them refused. A U.S. official said the monetary offer was “not an admission of culpability.”
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This would not be the last Blackwater would hear from the victims’ families of Nisour Square.
When the FBI finally arrived in Baghdad, some of the Blackwater guards involved in the shooting refused to be interviewed, citing promises of immunity from the State Department.
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The FBI also discovered that the crime scene had been severely compromised.
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Blackwater would later claim that proof it had been attacked by Iraqis could be found in damage to the company’s armored vehicles. Prince said three vehicles sustained gunfire damage and that the radiator on one had been “shot out and disabled.”
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The initial State Department report (written by the Blackwater contractor) alleged one had been “disabled during the attack” and had to be towed from the scene.
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But when the FBI went to investigate the vehicles, it found that Blackwater had already “repaired and repainted them.” The
Associated Press
reported, “The repairs essentially destroyed evidence that Justice Department investigators hoped to examine in a criminal case that has drawn worldwide attention.”
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Blackwater spokesperson Anne Tyrrell said any repairs “would have been done at the government’s direction.”
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The State Department would not comment on it.
In contrast to the Bush administration’s approach to Nisour Square, the Iraqi authorities began their investigation within moments of the massacre, interviewing scores of witnesses and piecing together a timeline of events. When the Iraqis released their findings, defenders of Blackwater quickly stepped up to cast aspersions on Baghdad’s integrity. “Iraqis claim that the Blackwaterites fired indiscriminately and without provocation. There is no reason to assume—as so many critics do—that the more damning version is true,” wrote Blackwater apologist Max Boot in the
Los Angeles Times
, “especially because the harshest condemnations have come from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a notorious hotbed of sectarianism.”
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While Blackwater refused to answer specific questions on the incident, citing an ongoing investigation, the company did, in fact, have its own version of events. The morning of Prince’s appearance before the Oversight Committee, his prepared remarks were released to the media. He would never publicly deliver them, but they would constitute the most comprehensive account of the incident Blackwater would provide. Prince alleged that his men came under fire in Nisour Square. “Among the threats identified were men with AK-47s firing on the convoy, as well as approaching vehicles that appeared to be suicide bombers. The Blackwater personnel attempted to exit the area but one of their vehicles was disabled by enemy fire,” Prince claimed in the statement. “Some of those firing on this Blackwater team appeared to be wearing Iraqi National Police uniforms, or portions of uniforms. As the withdrawal occurred, the Blackwater vehicles remained under fire from such personnel.”
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Two months after the shooting, ABC News obtained the sworn statement of Blackwater operative Paul Slough, a twenty-nine-year-old Army veteran. Slough was Blackwater’s turret gunner that day and is believed to be the main shooter in the square.
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His statement was given, with the promise of immunity, to the State Department three days after the incident. In it, he described his version of how the shooting began, describing the car driven by Ahmed, the medical student, and his mother, Mahasin. “As our motorcade pulled into the intersection I noticed a white four door sedan driving directly at our motorcade,” Slough alleged. “I and others were yelling, and using hand signals for the car to stop and the driver looked directly at me and kept moving toward our motorcade. Fearing for my life and the lives of my teammates, I engaged the driver and stopped the threat. . . . A uniformed individual then started pushing the vehicle toward the motorcade and again I shouted and engaged the vehicle until it came to a stop.”
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This stood in sharp contrast to the Iraqi version of events, including those of several eyewitnesses, who insisted the shooting was entirely unprovoked. It was also contradicted by major media investigations and aerial photos of the aftermath.
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Slough went on to describe several more instances in which he “engaged” Iraqis to “stop the threat.”
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