While the shooting in Nisour Square put the issue of private forces in Iraq—and Blackwater’s name specifically—on the front pages of newspapers around the world, this was hardly the first deadly incident involving these forces. What was new was that the pro-U.S. Iraqi government responded powerfully. Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, Iraq’s Interior Ministry announced that it was expelling Blackwater from the country; Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called the firm’s conduct “criminal.” 52 For the Iraqi government it was the final straw.
The Baghdad government’s anger would be understandable even if the only incident involving Blackwater were Nisour Square. But this was a four-year pattern, one that had intensified in its lethality the year preceding the killing of the seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad. And, particularly enraging to the Iraqis, there had been no consequences for the company’s actions. Contractors in Iraq reportedly had a motto: “What happens here today, stays here today.”53 As one armed contractor informed the Washington Post, “We were always told, from the very beginning, if for some reason something happened and the Iraqis were trying to prosecute us, they would put you in the back of a car and sneak you out of the country in the middle of the night.”54
That is what apparently happened after another fatal Blackwater incident. On Christmas Eve 2006, inside Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, Andrew Moonen,55 an off-duty Blackwater operative, had just left a holiday party. Witnesses said he was drunk as he walked through the “Little Venice” section of the zone,56 where he encountered Raheem Khalif, an Iraqi bodyguard of Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi.57 “Between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m., the Blackwater contractor, carrying a Glock 9 mm pistol, passed through a gate near the Iraqi Prime Minister’s compound and was confronted by the Iraqi guard, who was on duty,” according to a U.S. Congressional investigation. “The Blackwater contractor fired multiple shots, three of which struck the guard, then fled the scene.”58
Blackwater officials confirmed that within days they whisked the contractor safely out of Iraq, which they say Washington ordered them to do.59 Iraqi officials labeled the killing a “murder.”60 Blackwater said it fired the contractor, but as of early 2008, he had yet to be charged with any crime. A year after the incident, Erik Prince would say that Blackwater had gotten Moonen’s security clearance revoked, which Prince said meant Moonen would “never work in a clearance capacity for the U.S. government again,” or that it would be “very, very unlikely.”61 But weeks after the fatal shooting, Moonen was rehired by a Defense Department contractor and was back working on a U.S. government contract in the Middle East.62
Representative Dennis Kucinich, a member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, suggested that by facilitating Moonen’s secret departure from Iraq, “There’s a question that could actually make [Blackwater’s] corporate officers accessories… in helping to create a flight from justice for someone who’s committed a murder.”63 According to a memo from the U.S. Embassy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, after the shooting, Iraqi Vice President Abdul-Mahdi tried to keep the story under wraps because he believed “Iraqis would not understand how a foreigner could kill an Iraqi and return a free man to his own country.”64
Six weeks later, on February 7, a Blackwater sniper shot and killed a guard with a bullet through the head at the state-funded Iraqi Media Network and then proceeded to snipe two other guards who responded to the initial shooting.65 The Iraqi government investigated the incident, as did the media network, which concluded, “On Feb. 7, members of Blackwater opened fire from the roof of the Ministry of Justice building, intentionally and without any provocation, shooting three members of our security team which led to their deaths while they were on duty inside the network complex.” 66 But the U.S. government, relying on information from Blackwater, concluded that the sniper’s actions “fell within approved rules governing the use of force.”67 Blackwater says its forces were fired upon, a claim contested by witnesses and the Iraqi government. Neither the U.S. Embassy nor Blackwater interviewed any of the Iraqi witnesses.68
In May 2007, Blackwater forces engaged in back-to-back deadly actions in a Baghdad neighborhood near the Iraqi Interior Ministry, according to a report by Steve Fainaru and Saad al-Izzi of the Washington Post.69 In one incident, Blackwater forces fired on an Iraqi vehicle they said had veered too close to their convoy, killing a civilian driver. As with the September 16 shooting, witnesses said it was unprovoked. In the ensuing chaos, the Blackwater operatives reportedly refused to give their names or details of the incident to Iraqi officials, sparking a tense standoff between Blackwater and Iraqi forces, both of which were armed with assault rifles. It might have become even bloodier if a U.S. military convoy hadn’t arrived on the scene and intervened. A day before that incident, in a nearby neighborhood, Blackwater operatives found themselves in a nearly hourlong gun battle that drew in U.S. military and Iraqi forces, in which at least four Iraqis are said to have died. U.S. sources said the Blackwater forces “did their job,” keeping the officials alive.70
Shortly after Nisour Square, Ambassador Ryan Crocker said, “I’m the ambassador here, so I’m responsible…. Yes, I certainly do wish I’d had the foresight to see that there were things out there that could be corrected.”71 By that point, however, evidence of a serious problem had become impossible to ignore.
According to the Washington Post, by early June 2007, three months before Nisour Square, “concerns about Blackwater had reached Iraq’s National Intelligence Committee, which included senior Iraqi and U.S. intelligence officials, including Maj. Gen. David B. Lacquement, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Maj. Gen. Hussein Kamal, who heads the Interior Ministry’s intelligence directorate, called on U.S. authorities to crack down on private security companies. U.S. military officials told Kamal that Blackwater was under State Department authority and outside their control, according to notes of the meeting. The matter was dropped.”72
Iraqi officials alleged that there had been at least six deadly incidents involving Blackwater in the year leading up to Nisour Square.73 In all there were ten known deadly shootings involving Blackwater from June 2005 to September 2007.74 Among these was a February 4, 2007, shooting allegedly resulting in the death of Hana al-Ameedi, an Iraqi journalist, near the Foreign Ministry; and a September 9, 2007, shooting during which five Iraqis were killed near a government building in Baghdad. There was also a September 12, 2007, shooting that wounded five people in eastern Baghdad.75