Blackwater: Are they on your streets?

Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans
By Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo

t r u t h o u t | Report Saturday 10 September 2005

(see more on mercenaries here)

New Orleans – Heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous for their work in Iraq, are openly patrolling the streets of New Orleans. Some of the mercenaries say they have been “deputized” by the Louisiana governor; indeed some are wearing gold Louisiana state law enforcement badges on their chests and Blackwater photo identification cards on their arms. They say they are on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and have been given the authority to use lethal force. Several mercenaries we spoke with said they had served in Iraq on the personal security details of the former head of the US occupation, L. Paul Bremer and the former US ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte.

“This is a totally new thing to have guys like us working CONUS (Continental United States),” a heavily armed Blackwater mercenary told us as we stood on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. “We’re much better equipped to deal with the situation in Iraq.”

Blackwater mercenaries are some of the most feared professional killers in the world and they are accustomed to operating without worry of legal consequences. Their presence on the streets of New Orleans should be a cause for serious concern for the remaining residents of the city and raises alarming questions about why the government would allow men trained to kill with impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to operate here. Some of the men now patrolling the streets of New Orleans returned from Iraq as recently as 2 weeks ago.

What is most disturbing is the claim of several Blackwater mercenaries we spoke with that they are here under contract from the federal and Louisiana state governments.

Blackwater is one of the leading private “security” firms servicing the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It has several US government contracts and has provided security for many senior US diplomats, foreign dignitaries and corporations. The company rose to international prominence after 4 of its men were killed in Fallujah and two of their charred bodies were hung from a bridge in March 2004. Those killings sparked the massive US retaliation against the civilian population of Fallujah that resulted in scores of deaths and tens of thousands of refugees.

As the threat of forced evictions now looms in New Orleans and the city confiscates even legally registered weapons from civilians, the private mercenaries of Blackwater patrol the streets openly wielding M-16s and other assault weapons. This despite Police Commissioner Eddie Compass’ claim that “Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons.”

Officially, Blackwater says its forces are in New Orleans to “join the Hurricane Relief Effort.” A statement on the company’s website, dated September 1, advertises airlift services, security services and crowd control. The company, according to news reports, has since begun taking private contracts to guard hotels, businesses and other properties. But what has not been publicly acknowledged is the claim, made to us by 2 Blackwater mercenaries, that they are actually engaged in general law enforcement activities including “securing neighborhoods” and “confronting criminals.”

That raises a key question: under what authority are Blackwater’s men operating? A spokesperson for the Homeland Security Department, Russ Knocke, told the Washington Post he knows of no federal plans to hire Blackwater or other private security. “We believe we’ve got the right mix of personnel in law enforcement for the federal government to meet the demands of public safety.” he said.

But in an hour-long conversation with several Blackwater mercenaries, we heard a different story. The men we spoke with said they are indeed on contract with the Department of Homeland Security and the Louisiana governor’s office and that some of them are sleeping in camps organized by Homeland Security in New Orleans and Baton Rouge. One of them wore a gold Louisiana state law enforcement badge and said he had been “deputized” by the governor. They told us they not only had authority to make arrests but also to use lethal force. We encountered the Blackwater forces as we walked through the streets of the largely deserted French Quarter. We were talking with 2 New York Police officers when an unmarked car without license plates sped up next to us and stopped. Inside were 3 men, dressed in khaki uniforms, flak jackets and wielding automatic weapons. “Y’all know where the Blackwater guys are?” they asked. One of the police officers responded, “There are a bunch of them around here,” and pointed down the road.

“Blackwater?” we asked. “The guys who are in Iraq?”

“Yeah,” said the officer. “They’re all over the place.”

A short while later, as we continued down Bourbon Street, we ran into the men from the car. They wore Blackwater ID badges on their arms.

“When they told me New Orleans, I said, ‘What country is that in?,’” said one of the Blackwater men. He was wearing his company ID around his neck in a carrying case with the phrase “Operation Iraqi Freedom” printed on it. After bragging about how he drives around Iraq in a “State Department issued level 5, explosion proof BMW,” he said he was “just trying to get back to Kirkuk (in the north of Iraq) where the real action is.” Later we overheard him on his cell phone complaining that Blackwater was only paying $350 a day plus per diem. That is much less than the men make serving in more dangerous conditions in Iraq. Two men we spoke with said they plan on returning to Iraq in October. But, as one mercenary said, they’ve been told they could be in New Orleans for up to 6 months. “This is a trend,” he told us. “You’re going to see a lot more guys like us in these situations.”

If Blackwater’s reputation and record in Iraq are any indication of the kind of “services” the company offers, the people of New Orleans have much to fear.

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Jeremy Scahill, a correspondent for the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!, and Daniela Crespo are in New Orleans. Visit www.democracynow.org for in-depth, independent, investigative reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Email: jeremy@democracynow.org.

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From errand to fatal shot to hail of fire to 17 deaths in Iraq

From errand to fatal shot to hail of fire to 17 deaths in Iraq
International Herald Tribune

By James Glanz and Alissa J. Rubin
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
BAGHDAD: It started out as a family errand: Ahmed Haithem Ahmed was driving his mother, Mohassin, to pick up his father from the hospital where he worked as a pathologist. As they approached Nisour Square at midday on Sept. 16, they did not know that a bomb had gone off nearby or that a convoy of four armored vehicles carrying Blackwater guards armed with automatic rifles was approaching.

Moments later a bullet tore through Ahmed’s head, he slumped, and the car rolled forward. Then Blackwater guards responded with a barrage of gunfire and explosive weapons, leaving 17 dead and 24 wounded — a higher toll than previously thought, according to Iraqi investigators.

Interviews with 12 Iraqi witnesses, several Iraqi investigators and an American official familiar with an American investigation of the shootings offer new insights into the gravity of the incident in Nisour Square. And they are difficult to square with the explanation offered initially by Blackwater officials that their guards were responding proportionately to an attack on the streets around the square.

The new details include these:

- A deadly cascade of events began when a single bullet apparently fired by a Blackwater guard killed an Iraqi man whose weight probably remained on the accelerator and propelled the car forward as the passenger, the man’s mother, clutched him and screamed.

- The car continued to roll toward the convoy, which responded with an intense barrage of gunfire in several directions, striking Iraqis who were desperately trying to flee.

- Minutes after that shooting stopped, a Blackwater convoy — possibly the same one — moved north from the square and opened fire on another line of traffic a few hundred yards away, in a previously unreported separate shooting, investigators and several witnesses say.

The questions emerge from accounts of the outbreak of the shooting in the square.

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 the his vehicle. Not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around the square. And following a short initial burst of bullets, the Blackwater guards unleashed an overwhelming barrage of gunfire even as Iraqis were turning their cars around and attempting to flee.

As the gunfire continued, at least one of the Blackwater guards began screaming, “No! No! No!” and gesturing to his colleagues to stop shooting, according to an Iraqi lawyer who was stuck in traffic and was soon shot in the back as he tried to flee. The account of the struggle among the Blackwater guards corroborates preliminary findings of the American investigation.

Still, while the series of events pieced together by the Iraqis may be correct, important elements could still be missing from that account, according to the American official familiar with the continuing American investigation into the shootings.

Among the questions still to be answered, the official said, is whether at any time nearby Iraqi security forces ever began firing, possibly leading the Blackwater convoy to believe they were under attack and therefore justified in returning fire. It is also possible that as the car kept rolling toward the intersection, the Blackwater guards believed it posed a threat and intensified their shooting.

Blackwater has said that its guards were fired upon and responded appropriately.

Witnesses close to the places where most of the Iraqi civilians were killed directly facing the Blackwater convoy on the southern rim of the square all give a relatively consistent picture of how events began and unfolded.

The Blackwater convoy was in the square to control traffic for a second convoy that was approaching from the south. The second convoy was bringing diplomats who had been evacuated from a meeting after a bomb went off near the compound where the meeting was taking place. That convoy had not arrived at the square by the time the shooting started.

The events in the square began with a short burst of bullets that witnesses described as unprovoked. A traffic policeman standing at the edge of the square, Sarhan Thiab, saw that a young man in a car had been hit. In the line of traffic, that car was third in line from the intersection where the convoy had positioned itself.

“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.’”

Another traffic policeman rushed to the driver’s side to try to get her son out of the car, but the car was still rolling forward because her son had lost control, according to a taxi driver close by who gave his name as Abu Mariam (”father of Mariam”).

Then Blackwater guards opened fire with a barrage of bullets, according to the police and numerous witnesses. Ahmed’s father later counted 40 bullet holes in the car. Ahmed’s mother, Mohassin Kadhim, appears to have been shot to death as she cradled her son in her arms. Moments later the car caught fire after the Blackwater guards fired a type of grenade into the vehicle.

The taxi driver was a few feet ahead of Kadhim’s car when he heard the first gunshots. He was aware of cars behind him trying to back out of the street or turn around and drive away from the square. He tried frantically to turn his car, but ran into the curb.

Unable to escape, he pulled himself over to the passenger side, which was the one not facing the square, opened the door and crawled out, flattening his body to the ground.

“The dust from the street was coming in my mouth and as I pulled myself out of the area, my left leg was shot by a bullet,” he said.

Accounts in the initial days after the event described Kadhim as holding a baby in her arms. It now appears that those accounts were based on assumptions that the charred remains of Kadhim’s son were mistaken for an infant.

By then cars were struggling to get out of the line of fire, and many people were abandoning their vehicles altogether. The scene turned hellish.

“The shooting started like rain; everyone escaped his car,” said Fareed Walid Hassan, a truck driver who hauls goods in his Hyundai minibus.

He saw a woman dragging her child. “He was around 10 or 11. He was dead. She was pulling him by one hand to get him away. She hoped that he was still alive,” he said.

As the shooting started in earnest Jabber Salman, a lawyer on his way to the Ministry of Justice for a noon meeting, described people crying and shouting. “Some people were trying to escape by crawling, some people were killed in front of me,” he said.

As Salman tried to drive away from the shooting, bullets came one after another through his rear windshield, hitting his neck, shoulders, left forearm, and lower back. “I thought ‘I’m sorry they are going to kill me and I can do nothing.’ “

Iraqi investigators believe that during the shooting Blackwater helicopters flew overhead and fired into the cars from above. They say that at least one the car roofs had bullets through them.

Minutes after the first shootings, a Blackwater convoy arrived at the other side of the square, where civilian traffic was also backed up and shot into cars, according to an Iraqi official who is a member of the investigation committee set up by the Iraqi government.

“I found three people from that incident in Khadimiya hospital, one died and two were injured,” the Iraqi official said. “Why is the private security shooting again in this area?”

Two weeks after the events that claimed the life of Kadhim and her son, her husband Haithem Ahmed, her daughter Mariam and her younger son, Haider, are still bewildered.

“My son was very gentle, very clever, he was easy to be around, ” said Ahmed, looking down at the floor of the police investigation center where he had come to give more details at the request of Iraqi investigators. “He planned to be a surgeon.”

“She is a beautiful woman,” he said of his wife, speaking as if she were still alive.

Then, he looked at a picture of his son, captured on a memorial video made by a friend and stored on Haider’s cellphone camera. Seeming to forget there were was anyone else in the room, he spoke to the video image.

“I am waiting to meet you in paradise,” he said.<

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