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State Dept. Tallies 56 Shootings Involving Blackwater on Diplomatic Guard Duty    [

    Blackwater Guards Killed 16 as US Touted Progress
    By Leila Fadel
    McClatchy Newspapers

    Thursday 27 September 2007

    Baghdad - On Sept. 9, the day before Army Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Congress that things were getting better, Batoul Mohammed Ali Hussein came to Baghdad for the day.

    A clerk in the Iraqi customs office in Diyala province, she was in the capital to drop off and pick up paperwork at the central office near busy al Khilani Square, not far from the fortified Green Zone, where top U.S. and Iraqi officials live and work. U.S. officials often pass through the square in heavily guarded convoys on their way to other parts of Baghdad.

    As Hussein walked out of the customs building, an embassy convoy of sport-utility vehicles drove through the intersection. Blackwater security guards, charged with protecting the diplomats, yelled at construction workers at an unfinished building to move back. Instead, the workers threw rocks. The guards, witnesses said, responded with gunfire, spraying the intersection with bullets.

    Hussein, who was on the opposite side of the street from the construction site, fell to the ground, shot in the leg. As she struggled to her feet and took a step, eyewitnesses said, a Blackwater security guard trained his weapon on her and shot her multiple times. She died on the spot, and the customs documents she'd held in her arms fluttered down the street.

    Before the shooting stopped, four other people were killed in what would be the beginning of eight days of violence that Iraqi officials say bolster their argument that Blackwater should be banned from working in Iraq.

    During the ensuing week, as Crocker and Petraeus told Congress that the surge of more U.S. troops to Iraq was beginning to work and President Bush gave a televised address in which he said "ordinary life was beginning to return" to Baghdad, Blackwater security guards shot at least 43 people on crowded Baghdad streets. At least 16 of those people died.

    Two Blackwater guards died in one of the incidents, which was triggered when a roadside bomb struck a Blackwater vehicle.

    Still, it was an astounding amount of violence attributed to Blackwater. In the same eight-day period, according to statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers, other acts of violence across the embattled capital claimed the lives of 32 people and left 87 injured, not including unidentified bodies found dumped on Baghdad's streets.

    The best known of that week's incidents took place the following Sunday, Sept. 16, when Blackwater guards killed 11 and wounded 12 at the busy al Nisour traffic circle in central Baghdad.

    Iraqi officials said the guards were unprovoked when they opened fire on a white car carrying three people, including a baby. All died. The security guards then fired at other nearby vehicles, including a minibus loaded with passengers, killing a mother of eight. An Iraqi soldier also died.

    In Blackwater's only statement regarding the Sept. 16 incident, Anne Tyrell, the company's spokeswoman, denied that the dead were civilians. "The 'civilians' reportedly fired upon by Blackwater professionals were in fact armed enemies," she said in an e-mail, "and Blackwater personnel returned defensive fire."

    A joint commission of five U.S. State Department officials, three U.S. military officials and eight Iraqis has been formed to investigate the incident, though almost two weeks later, the commission has yet to meet. A U.S. Embassy statement on Thursday, the first official written comment from the embassy since the al Nisour shooting, said that the group was "preparing" to meet.

    Blackwater and the U.S. Embassy didn't respond to requests for information about the other incidents.

    But interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors of each incident describe similar circumstances in which Blackwater guards took aggressive action against civilians who seemed to pose no threat.

    "They killed her in cold blood," Hussein Jumaa Hassan, 30, a parking lot attendant, said of Hussein.

    Hassan pointed to the bullet-pocked concrete column behind him. He'd hidden behind it.

    "I was boiling with anger, and I wished that I had a weapon in my hands in those minutes," he said. "They wanted to kill us all."

    Anyone who moved was shot until the convoy left the square, witnesses said. Also among the dead was Kadhim Gayes, a city hall guard.

    It took two days for Hussein's family to retrieve her body from the morgue. Before they could, her sister signed a sheet acknowledging the contents of her purse, which had been collected by security guards at the Baghdad city hall - a Samsung cell phone, a change purse with six keys and 37,000 Iraqi dinars ($30), gold bracelets, a notebook, pens, and photos of her and her children.

    Three days later, Blackwater guards were back in al Khilani Square, Iraqi government officials said. This time, there was no shooting, witnesses said. Instead, the Blackwater guards hurled frozen bottles of water into store windows and windshields, breaking the glass.

    Ibrahim Rubaie, the deputy security director at a nearby Baghdad city government office building, said it's common for Blackwater guards to shoot as they drive through the square. He said Blackwater guards also shot and wounded people in the square on June 21, though there are no official reports of such an incident.

    On Sept. 13 - the same day Bush gave his "ordinary life" speech - Blackwater guards were escorting State Department officials down Palestine Street near the Shiite enclave of Sadr City when a roadside bomb detonated, ripping through one of the Blackwater vehicles.

    The blast killed two Blackwater guards. As other guards went to retrieve the dead, they fired wildly in several directions, witnesses said.

    Mohammed Mazin was at home when he heard the bang, which shattered one of his windows.

    Then he heard gunfire, and he and his son, Laith, went to the roof to see what was going on.

    What they saw were security contractors shooting in different directions as a helicopter hovered overhead. Bullets flew through his home's windows, he said.

    No civilians were killed that day, but five were wounded, according to Iraq's Interior Ministry.

    The following Sunday, Blackwater guards opened fire as the State Department convoy they were escorting crossed in front of stopped traffic at the al Nisour traffic circle.

    While U.S. officials have offered no explanation of what occurred that day, witnesses and Iraqi investigators agree that the guards' first target was a white car that either hadn't quite stopped or was trying to nudge its way to the front of traffic.

    In the car were a man whose name is uncertain; Mahasin Muhsin, a mother and doctor; and Muhsin's young son. The guards first shot the man, who was driving. As Muhsin screamed, a Blackwater guard shot her. The car exploded, and Muhsin and the child burned, witnesses said.

    Afrah Sattar, 27, was on a bus approaching the square when she saw the guards fire on the white car. She and her mother, Ghania Hussein, were headed to the Certificate of Identification Office in Baghdad to pick up proof of Sattar's Iraqi citizenship for an upcoming trip to a religious shrine in Iran.

    When she saw the gunmen turn toward the bus, Sattar looked at her mother in fear. "They're going to shoot at us, Mama," she said. Her mother hugged her close. Moments later, a bullet pierced her mother's skull and another struck her shoulder, Sattar recalled.

    As her mother's body went limp, blood dripped onto Sattar's head, still cradled in her mother's arms.

    "Mother, mother," she called out. No answer. She hugged her mother's body and kissed her lips and began to pray, "We belong to God and we return to God." The bus emptied, and Sattar sat alone at the back, with her mother's bleeding body.

    "I'm lost now, I'm lost," she said days later in her simple two-bedroom home. Ten people lived there; now there are nine.

    "They are killers," she said of the Blackwater guards. "I swear to God, not one bullet was shot at them. Why did they shoot us? My mother didn't carry a weapon."

    Downstairs, her father, Sattar Ghafil Slom al Kaabi, 67, sat beneath a smiling picture of his wife and recalled their 40-year love story and how they raised eight children together. On the way to the holy city of Najaf to bury her, he'd stopped his car, with her coffin strapped to the top. He got out and stood beside the coffin. He wanted to be with her a little longer.

    "I loved her more than anything," he said, his voice wavering. "Now that she is dead, I love her more."

    --------

    Special correspondents Mohammed al Dulaimy, Hussein Kadhim and Laith Hammoudi contributed to this report.

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    State Dept. Tallies 56 Shootings Involving Blackwater on Diplomatic Guard Duty
    By James Risen
    The New York Times

    Friday 28 September 2007

    Washington - The State Department said Thursday that Blackwater USA security personnel had been involved in 56 shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq so far this year. It was the first time the Bush administration had made such data public.

    Blackwater, a large, privately held security contractor based in North Carolina, provided security to diplomats on 1,873 convoy runs in Iraq so far this year, and its personnel fired weapons 56 times, according to a written statement by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte.

    The State Department did not release comparable 2007 numbers for other security companies, but the new Blackwater numbers show a far higher rate of shootings per convoy mission than were experienced in 2006 by one of the company's primary competitors, DynCorp International. DynCorp reported 10 cases in about 1,500 convoy runs last year.

    The New York Times reported Thursday that Blackwater's rate of shootings was at least twice as high as the rates for other companies providing similar services to the State Department in Iraq.

    Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has asked Mr. Negroponte to oversee the department's response to problems with security contractors.

    A government official who was briefed on an hourlong meeting involving State Department officials on Thursday morning said that Ms. Rice had appeared surprised at the report that Blackwater had been involved in a higher rate of shootings than its competitors.

    "She needs to be convinced that Blackwater's hands are clean," the government official said. Ms. Rice was also said to be taken aback by pressure from Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, who issued an angry letter to her this week complaining about what he saw as the State Department's efforts to block his panel's investigation into Blackwater.

    The meeting on Thursday with Ms. Rice seems to signal that the State Department's leaders now recognize that the Blackwater issue is more serious than they had first thought, and that it may become harder for the Bush administration to defend Blackwater and allow the company to retain its prominent role in providing diplomatic security in Iraq.

    Since the Sept. 16 shooting in the streets of Baghdad involving an American convoy guarded by Blackwater that left at least eight Iraqis dead, the Bush administration has fended off public demands by the Iraqi government for Blackwater to be evicted from the country.

    Instead, the administration has said that it will conduct an investigation jointly with the Iraqis into the shooting, while American government officials have repeatedly indicated that they do not believe that the White House or the State Department would force Blackwater out of the contract.

    The Pentagon said on Wednesday that it had sent a team to Iraq to investigate the role of security contractors there, in what appeared to be an effort to put private contractors under greater control by the United States military. The State Department quickly joined the Pentagon, and said that it would also send a team to review the role of contractors in Iraq.

    Separately, a new study issued Thursday by Mr. Waxman's oversight committee was highly critical of the company's performance in a 2004 case in which four Blackwater contractors were killed in the restive Anbar Province city of Falluja. The committee concluded that witness accounts and investigative reports conflicted with Blackwater's assertion that its contractors had been sent to Falluja "with sufficient preparation and equipment."

    In a statement, Blackwater said that the committee's report was "a one-sided version of this tragic incident."

    "What the report fails to acknowledge is that the terrorists determined what happened that fateful day in 2004," Blackwater said. "The terrorists were intent on killing Americans and desecrating their bodies."

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    Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.