Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

by Jeremy Scahill

  A local Fallujan official, Sami Farhood al-Mafraji, who had been supportive of the occupation, said, “Americans are not meeting their promises here to help build up this country. . . . I used to support the military. But they have put me in a very difficult situation with my people. Now, they tell us to hand these people over?”35 He said the dire humanitarian situation and the violence of the occupation had “made people depressed and angry.” “Hungry people will eat you,” he said. “And people here are very hungry.”36 This context even seemed clear to some U.S. troops as well. “The people who did this heinous crime were looking for revenge,” said Marine Lt. Eric Thorliefson, positioned on the outskirts of Fallujah. He added, “We shall respond with force.”37

  While U.S. officials condemned the public mutilation of the bodies, they refused to answer questions about the U.S. policy of distributing gruesome photos of the mangled corpses of “high value” Iraqis killed by U.S. forces, like Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay in July 2003, as proof of death. Similar to the outrage expressed by Washington over the mauling of the Blackwater contractors, Iraqis were furious over this U.S. propaganda technique. At the White House the day of the Blackwater killings, McClellan was asked if the administration did “not see hypocrisy [when showing] embalmed bodies as proof of death is condemned but the dragging of American bodies through a street goes on without a comment?”

  “It is offensive. It is despicable the way that these individuals have been treated,” McClellan responded, ignoring the question. “And we hope everybody acts responsibly in their coverage of it.”38 Indeed, most of the images of the ambush and its aftermath that were broadcast on U.S. networks and in newspapers were edited or blurred. Even so, the message was clear. With the Somalia comparisons increasing in the international media, the administration shot back. “We are not going to withdraw. We are not going to be run out,” Secretary of State Colin Powell, the first senior Bush administration official to comment directly on the Blackwater killings, told German television. “America has the ability to stay and fight an enemy and defeat an enemy. We will not run away.”39

  Meanwhile, reporters began questioning who these four contractors were and what they were doing in the middle of Fallujah. “I will let individual contractors speak for themselves on the clients they have inside Iraq. My understanding is Blackwater has more than one. But again, I would have you contact them to get that information. I certainly do not have it,” said Dan Senor, the occupation spokesperson in Baghdad. “They—we do have a contract with Blackwater, with—relating to Ambassador Bremer’s security. They are involved with protecting Ambassador Bremer,” Senor said.40 On CNN, Senor was asked, “So with all due respect to the men who lost their lives, any concern that this security company is up to the task?”

  “Absolutely,” Senor shot back. “We have the utmost confidence in Blackwater and the other security institutions that protect Mr. Bremer and provide security throughout the country.”41

  In North Carolina, meanwhile, Blackwater’s phones were ringing off the hook as the identities of the four “civilian contractors” became public. The company refused to officially confirm the names of the dead, a Blackwater policy. “The enemy may have contacts in the U.S.,” said former Blackwater vice president Jamie Smith. “If you start putting names out there—any names—and they start finding out who your friends are and asking questions, it could become a security problem.”42

  The day after the ambush, Blackwater hired the powerful, well-connected Republican lobbying firm the Alexander Strategy Group (founded and staffed by former senior staffers of then-House majority leader Tom DeLay) to help the company handle its newfound fame.43 Blackwater released a brief statement to the press. “The graphic images of the unprovoked attack and subsequent heinous mistreatment of our friends exhibits the extraordinary conditions under which we voluntarily work to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people,” the Blackwater statement said.44 “Coalition forces and civilian contractors and administrators work side by side every day with the Iraqi people to provide essential goods and services like food, water, electricity and vital security to the Iraqi citizens and coalition members. Our tasks are dangerous and while we feel sadness for our fallen colleagues, we also feel pride and satisfaction that we are making a difference for the people of Iraq.”45 Republican Congressman Walter Jones Jr., who represents Currituck County, North Carolina (where Blackwater has its headquarters), said the contractors had “died in the name of freedom.”46 Republican Senator John Warner, head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, praised the Blackwater men at a hearing, saying, “Those individuals are essential to the work that we’re performing in Iraq, primarily the rebuilding of the infrastructure.”47

  In the “Chaplain’s Corner” section of Blackwater’s newsletter, Blackwater Tactical Weekly, right after the ambush, Chaplain D. R. Staton continued the misleading characterization of the men as “humanitarian” workers who came to Iraq “to save a people,” writing, “Those four Americans were there because they were hired to provide security to food caravans delivering life giving substances to native Iraqis. . . . This one incident points up the hatred of Islamic militants for anyone not Islamic militant and especially those who are called by them the white devils or the ‘great Satan’ or simply ‘infidels. ’ Did you study those individuals in the mob as they were displayed to us via television? Did you note their attitudes and their ages? They are brainwashed from birth to hate all who are not with them. . . . And especially us!!! . . . And the Israelis!” The attackers’ message, Staton wrote, “is to discourage our forces from entering Fallujah and the special claimed area around that city!!! The message will backfire!!!” Staton ended his sermon with a plea to his readers: “Make the enemy pay dearly for every action brought against us as we stand for liberty and justice!!!”48

  But not everyone working for Blackwater was on the same page. “I think they’re dying for no reason,” said Marty Huffstickler, a part-time electrician for the company in Moyock. “I don’t agree with what’s going on over there. The people over there don’t want us there.”49

  To the Marines, which had just taken over command of Fallujah, the Blackwater ambush could not have come at a worse moment because it dramatically changed the course of Maj. Gen. James Mattis’s strategy. The local commanders wanted to treat the killings as a law enforcement issue, go into the city, and arrest or kill the perpetrators.50 But at the White House, the killings were viewed as a serious challenge to the U.S. resolve in Iraq—one that could jeopardize the whole project in the country. President Bush immediately summoned Rumsfeld and the top U.S. commander in the region, Gen. John Abizaid, to ask for a plan of action.

  According to the L.A. Times:

  Rumsfeld and Abizaid were ready with an answer, one official said: “a specific and overwhelming attack” to seize Fallouja. That was what Bush was hoping to hear, an aide said later. What the president was not told was that the Marines on the ground sharply disagreed with a full-blown assault on the city. “We felt . . . that we ought to let the situation settle before we appeared to be attacking out of revenge,” the Marines’ commander, Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, said later. Conway passed this up the chain—all the way to Rumsfeld, an official said. But Rumsfeld and his top advisors didn’t agree, and didn’t present [Lt. Gen. Conway’s reservations] to the president. “If you’re going to threaten the use of force, at some point you’re going to have to demonstrate your willingness to actually use force,” Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said later. Bush approved the attack immediately.51

  In Fallujah, word of the President’s go-ahead for an attack reached the Marine base positioned on the city’s outskirts. “The president knows this is going to be bloody,” Sanchez told the commanders there. “He accepts that.”52 One officer characterized the orders as, “Go in and clobber people.”53 By April 2, 2004, forty-eight hours after the ambush, “Operation Vigilant Resolve” was put on the fast track. Marine Sgt. Maj. Randall Carter began to pump his
men up for their mission. “Marines are only really motivated two times,” he declared. “One is when we’re going on liberty. One is when we’re going to kill somebody. We’re not going on liberty. . . . We’re here for one thing: to tame Fallujah. That’s what we’re going to do.”54 Inside the city, meanwhile, Fallujans, too, were preparing for a battle many believed was inevitable.

  Before the U.S. troops launched the full assault on the city, Bremer deputy Jim Steele, the senior adviser on Iraqi security forces, was sent covertly into Fallujah with a small team of U.S.-trained Iraqi forces and people Steele referred to as “U.S. advisors.”55 Steele had most recently been an Enron executive before being tapped for the Iraq job by Paul Wolfowitz.56 Perhaps most appealing to the administration, Steele had a very deep history with U.S. “dirty wars” in Central America. As a colonel in the Marines in the mid-1980s, Steele had been a key “counterinsurgency” official in the bloody U.S.-fueled war in El Salvador, where he coordinated the U.S. Military Group there,57 supervising Washington’s military assistance and training of Salvadoran Army death squads battling the leftist FMLN guerrillas.58 In the late 1980s, Steele was called to testify during the Iran-Contra investigation about his role in Oliver North’s covert weapons pipeline to the Nicaraguan Contra death squads, running through the Salvadoran Air Force base at Ilopango.59 He also worked with the Panamanian police after the United States overthrew Manuel Noriega in 1990.60

  Steele played a similar role with U.S.-trained Iraqi forces in the early days of the occupation and was central to a program some refer to as the “Salvadorization of Iraq.”61 Under this strategy, “U.S. soldiers are increasingly moving to a Salvador-style advisory role,” wrote Peter Maass in The New York Times Magazine. “In the process, they are backing up local forces that, like the military in El Salvador, do not shy away from violence. It is no coincidence that this new strategy is most visible in a paramilitary unit that has Steele as its main adviser; having been a central participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces.”62

  After the Blackwater ambush, Steele claimed his “undercover” mission in Fallujah in April 2004 was to recover the corpses of the Blackwater men and to “assess the enemy situation.”63 Shortly after that mission, he laid out what he thought should happen. “In Fallujah, a heavy hand makes sense,” he said. “That’s the only thing some of those guys will understand. Down south, too [where the United States faced a mounting Shiite rebellion]. We can’t be seen as weak. Otherwise, this kind of thing can happen everywhere.” 64 The “city of mosques” would soon find itself under siege as Bremer’s dreams of “cleaning out” Fallujah found their justification. While U.S. commanders readied their troops to attack, Blackwater’s stock was rising in Washington, and Erik Prince’s men would soon find themselves in the middle of the second major resistance front exploding against the occupation—this time in the Shiite holy city of Najaf.

  CHAPTER NINE

  NAJAF, IRAQ: 4.04.04

  AS THE Marines began preparing to invade Fallujah, back in Washington, D.C., Erik Prince’s stock was rising dramatically. In a matter of days, Prince and other Blackwater executives would be welcomed on Capitol Hill as special guests of some of the most powerful and influential Republican lawmakers—the men who literally ran Congress—where Blackwater would be hailed as a “silent partner” in the war on terror.1 As his schedule began to fill, Prince found himself monitoring yet another crisis with his mercenaries at the center. But unlike Fallujah, where the deaths of four Blackwater men had provided the spark for a U.S. onslaught, this time Blackwater forces would be active combatants in the fighting, engaging in a day-long battle against hundreds of followers of the fiery cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the Shiite holy city of Najaf, where Blackwater had been contracted to guard the U.S. occupation authority’s headquarters.

  In the weeks preceding the March 31 Fallujah ambush, the Bush administration had been building toward an intense crackdown on Sadr, whom Bremer and the White House viewed as an obstacle to the central U.S. goal at the time—the so-called “handover of sovereignty” scheduled for June 2004. The son of a revered religious leader assassinated by Saddam’s forces, Sadr had emerged in occupied Iraq as commander of the Mahdi Army—named for a Shiite messiah—and perhaps the most vocal and popular opponent of the U.S. occupation.2 The administration and Bremer believed that like the rebellious Sunnis of Fallujah, Sadr and his insurgent Shiite movement had to be stopped. In April 2004, as the U.S. launched simultaneous counterinsurgency wars in Iraq against the country’s main Sunni and Shiite resistance movements, Blackwater would play a decisive role in perhaps the most pivotal moments of the Iraq occupation, a period that would irreversibly alter the course of the war and go down as the moment the anti-U.S. insurrection exploded.

  While the killing of the Blackwater men in Fallujah grabbed international headlines for days and is remembered as an iconic moment of the war, the significant role of Blackwater’s forces in Najaf during the Shiite uprising five days later was barely noticed at all. And yet this episode, which found Blackwater mercenaries commanding active-duty U.S. soldiers in battle, starkly dramatized the unprecedented extent to which the Bush administration had outsourced the war. Like the ambush in Fallujah, the fate of Blackwater in Najaf was guided by history.

  During his year in Iraq, Paul Bremer presided over various U.S. policies that greatly accelerated the emergence of multiple antioccupation resistance movements. In April 2004, it all came to a head. “The British took three years to turn both the Sunnis and the Shias into their enemies in 1920,” wrote veteran British war correspondent Robert Fisk from Fallujah. “The Americans are achieving this in just under a year.”3 The disbanding of the Iraqi military combined with the firing of thousands of state employees under Washington’s “de-Baathification” program had put tens of thousands of Iraqi men of fighting age out of work and into the resistance. Iraqis watched as foreign corporations—most of them based in the United States—fanned out across their country to reap enormous profits while ordinary Iraqis lived in squalor and insecurity. What’s more, victims of U.S. crimes had almost no recourse as contractors were basically immunized from domestic prosecution, giving the overwhelming appearance of total impunity.4

  At the same time, the dire humanitarian situation in the country and killings and disappearances of Iraqi civilians had opened the door for religious leaders to offer security and social services in return for loyalty. This phenomenon was perhaps seen most clearly in the ascent of Muqtada al-Sadr to the status of a national resistance hero. In the chaos and horror that followed “Shock and Awe,” Sadr was one of the few figures within the country actually addressing the extreme poverty and suffering, establishing a sizable network of social institutions in his areas of influence, among them the vast Baghdad slum of Sadr City, whose 2 million residents had long been neglected by Saddam’s regime. At a time when Bremer’s de-Baathification was dismantling social institutions and protections, Sadr’s network was building alternatives and winning thousands of new followers. “Immediately after the invasion, Mr. Sadr deployed black-clad disciples to patrol the streets of Baghdad’s Shiite slums,” reported the New York Times. “His men handed out bread, water and oranges. They also provided much-needed security. Mr. Sadr had seen a void and filled it.”5 While other religious and political figures vied for power within the new U.S.-created institutions, Sadr rejected all components and supporters of the U.S. regime. In August 2003, his militia numbered roughly five hundred members. By April 2004, it had swelled to an estimated ten thousand.6

  Sadr’s rising credibility and popularity, combined with his fierce rhetoric against the occupation—and Bremer in particular—would soon earn him the U.S.-imposed label of “outlaw.”7 With the June 2004 “deadline” fast approaching, the United States believed that, like the militant Sunnis of Fallujah, Sadr had to be stopped.

  Washington had long viewed Sadr as a primary enemy in the “new”
Iraq, and top U.S. officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the senior commander in Iraq, Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, had for months discussed plans to neutralize him. “There was a conclusion early on that this guy was trouble and needed to be contained,” a senior U.S. official told the Washington Post. “But there was not a clear plan on how to go about it.”8 That changed in March 2004, when Bremer launched his all-out war on Sadr, his institutions, and his followers. As Bremer and the Bush administration engaged in a major propaganda campaign leading up to the “handover,” Sadr was railing against the occupation and its collaborators within the country. He was calling for the United States to pull out and had declared his Mahdi Army the “enemy of the occupation.”9 Sadr was not just a Shiite religious figure; he was also an Iraqi nationalist who spoke the language of the streets, often peppering his sermons with slang and cultural references.

  According to the Washington Post, there had long been concerns that if the United States went after Sadr, it would boost his already rising popularity and possibly make him into a martyr. By March, the Post said, “Bremer’s calculus had changed.”10 On March 28, U.S. troops raided the Baghdad office of Sadr’s small antioccupation weekly newspaper, Al Hawza (The Seminary), ejecting the staff and placing a large padlock on the door.11 In a letter written in “sparse, understated” Arabic, bearing the official stamp of the CPA,12 Bremer accused the paper of violating his Order 14, charging that Al Hawza had the “intent to disrupt general security and incite violence.” 13 While U.S. officials could not cite any examples of the paper encouraging attacks against occupation forces, Bremer provided two examples of what he characterized as false reporting. One of them was an article headlined “Bremer Follows in the Footsteps of Saddam.”14 The move against Sadr was carried out with senior Bush administration officials fully behind it. “We believe in freedom of press,” said Bremer spokesman Dan Senor. “But if we let this go unchecked, people will die. Certain rhetoric is designed to provoke violence, and we won’t tolerate it.”15 The crackdown would prove to be a disastrous miscalculation on Bremer’s part. Al Hawza was named for a thousand-year-old Shiite seminary that historically encouraged revolt against foreign occupiers, most notably in the 1920s against the British.16 “In recent months, al-Sadr had been losing popularity,” wrote Newsday’s veteran Iraq correspondent Mohamad Bazzi. “But after U.S. soldiers closed al-Sadr’s weekly newspaper in Baghdad on March 28, accusing it of inciting violence, the young cleric won new support and established himself as the fiercest Shiite critic of the U.S. occupation.”17 The shutdown of Al Hawza immediately sparked massive protests and fueled speculation that Bremer intended to arrest Sadr.18 Eventually the protests spread to the gates of the Green Zone, where demonstrators chanted, “Just say the word, Muqtada, and we’ll resume the 1920 revolution!”19