What put Prince in the hot seat was undoubtedly Nisour Square. But amazingly, Prince would face no questions about that incident. On the eve of the hearing, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department announced it had launched a criminal investigation into the incident. Waxman said the Justice Department had asked him not to take testimony on the shootings to avoid tainting the investigation. Although Waxman asserted Congress “has an independent right to this information,” he nonetheless agreed to keep it off the table. The timing of the Bush administration’s announcement to investigate—a full two weeks after the alleged crime was committed and on the eve of the appearance of the man in charge of the alleged perpetrators—was suspect, to say the least.
Waxman banged his gavel and brought the meeting to order. “Over the past twenty-five years, a sophisticated campaign has been waged to privatize government services,” he declared. “The theory is that corporations can deliver government services better and at a lower cost than the government can. Over the last six years, this theory has been put into practice. The result is that privatization has exploded.”
“There may be no federal contractor in America that has grown more rapidly than Blackwater over the last seven years,” Waxman said at the hearing’s onset. “In 2000, Blackwater had just $204,000 in government contracts. Since then, it has received over $1 billion in federal contracts. More than half of these contracts were awarded without full and open competition. Privatizing is working exceptionally well for Blackwater. The question for this hearing is whether outsourcing to Blackwater is a good deal for American taxpayers, the military, and our national interest in Iraq.”
After opening statements, Erik Prince stood before the committee, raised his right hand, and vowed to tell the truth. Prince painted a picture of his company as a patriotic extension of the U.S. military whose men “play defense” in a dangerous war zone where they “bleed red, white, and blue” as they heroically protect “reconstruction officials” trying to “weave the fabric of Iraq back together, to get them away from that X, the place where the bad guys, the terrorists, have decided to kill them that day.” He used the phrase “bad guys” at least nine times during his testimony, at one point declaring, “The bad guys have figured out killing Americans is big media, I think. They are trying to drive us out. They try to drive to the heart of American resolve and will to stay there.”
During nearly four hours of testimony and questioning, Prince boldly declared that in Iraq his men have acted “appropriately at all times” and denied the company had ever killed innocent civilians. His hand never trembled, and he showed no sign of breaking a sweat. To say he was cool under fire would be an understatement. Prince was defiant.
“You do admit that Blackwater personnel have shot and killed innocent civilians, don’t you?” Illinois Democrat Danny Davis asked Prince.
“No, sir. I disagree with that,” Prince shot back. “I think there’s been times when guys are using defensive force to protect themselves, to protect the packages, trying to get away from danger. There could be ricochets, there are traffic accidents, yes. This is war.”
Prince added smugly, “We do not have the luxury of staying behind to do that terrorist crime-scene investigation to figure out what happened.”
The assertion by Prince that no innocents had been killed by Blackwater was simply unbelievable. And not just according to the eyewitnesses and survivors of the Nisour Square shootings and other deadly Blackwater actions. According to a report prepared by Waxman’s staff, from 2005 to the time of the hearing, Blackwater operatives in Iraq opened fire on at least 195 occasions.112 In more than 80 percent of these instances, Blackwater fired first. These statistics were based on Blackwater’s own reporting. But some alleged the company was underreporting its statistics. A former Blackwater operative who spent nearly three years in Iraq told the Washington Post his twenty-man team averaged “four or five” shootings a week—several times the rate of 1.4 incidents per week that Blackwater claimed.113 Waxman’s report also described an incident in which “Blackwater forces shot a civilian bystander in the head. In another, State Department officials report that Blackwater sought to cover up a shooting that killed an apparently innocent bystander.”114
Not surprisingly, Prince said he supported the continuation of Order 17 in Iraq, the Bremer-era decree immunizing forces like Blackwater from prosecution in Iraqi courts. At one point, Prince was asked whether Blackwater operated under the same “rules of engagement” as the military. “Yes, they’re essentially the same,” Prince said—before fumbling for words and admitting, “Well, well, sorry, Department of Defense rules for contractors. We do not have the same as a U.S. soldier at all.”
The truth is that while scores of U.S. soldiers had been court-martialed on murder-related charges in Iraq, not a single Blackwater contractor had ever been charged with a crime under any legal system—U.S. civilian law, military law, or Iraqi law. Prince said that Blackwater operatives who “don’t hold to the standard, they have one decision to make: window or aisle” on their return flight home. Indeed, that and being fired seem to have been the only consequences faced by Prince’s men for their actions in Iraq. In all, Blackwater had terminated more than 120 of its operatives in Iraq—more than one-seventh of its deployment at the time of the hearing.115
On this point, the committee focused on one incident at length: the Christmas Eve killing of the bodyguard to the Iraqi vice president. Prince confirmed that Blackwater had whisked him out of Iraq and fired him, and said the company had fined him and then billed the man for his return plane ticket. Prince said he did not know if the man had been charged with any crime (he hadn’t). “If he lived in America, he would have been arrested, and he would be facing criminal charges,” Democrat Carolyn Maloney told Prince. “If he was a member of our military, he would be under a court-martial. But it appears to me that Blackwater has special rules.” Prince said, “As a private organization, we can’t do any more. We can’t flog him, we can’t incarcerate him.” Maloney told Prince, “Well, in America, if you committed a crime, you don’t pack them up and ship them out of the country in two days.”
When asked directly whether this was a murder, which Iraqi officials had alleged, Prince said, “It was a guy that put himself in a bad situation.” Pressed further, Prince consulted with his advisers and said, “Beyond watching detective shows on TV, sir, I am not a lawyer, so I can’t determine whether it would be a manslaughter, a negligent homicide, I don’t know. I don’t know how to nuance that. But I do know he broke our rules, he put himself in a bad situation and something very tragic happened.”
The committee also released an internal e-mail from a Blackwater employee to a colleague just after the shooting, noting that an Iraqi TV report had erroneously attributed the killing of the bodyguard to a U.S. soldier. “At least the ID of the shooter will take the heat off us,” the Blackwater employee wrote. Representative Elijah Cummings concluded, “In other words, he was saying: ‘Wow, everyone thinks it was the military and not Blackwater. What great news for us. What a silver lining.’” Prince responded, “I don’t believe that false story lasted in the media for more than a few hours, sir.”
This exchange would set off a discussion about one of the main questions of the hearing: was Blackwater hurting the U.S. military’s stated counterinsurgency program in Iraq?
“It does appear from some of the evidence here that Blackwater and other companies sometimes, at least, conduct their missions in ways that lead exactly in the opposite direction that General Petraeus wants to go,” Democrat John Tierney told Prince. “That doesn’t mean you’re not fulfilling your contractual obligations.” Tierney then read numerous comments from U.S. military officials and counterinsurgency experts raising questions about Blackwater’s actions having a blowback effect on official U.S. troops.