U.S. INVESTIGATOR SAYS BLACKWATER THREATENED HIM WITH DEATH TO HALT STATE DEPT PROBE IN IRAQ

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East County News Service

Photo, left: Carl Meyer, leader of successful "stop Blackwater" effort in Potrero at a 2008 victory celebration

July 6, 2014 (San Diego's East County)--Blackwater, the private military contractor that has sparked considerably controversy through the years, is back in the headlines.Many East County residents recall the successful battle waged by residents in rural Potrero to prevent Blackwater from building a paramilitary training camp in San Diego's backcountry. 

Potrero residents held a recall election and removed all five planning group members who voted for the Blackwater facility and staged a march through adjacent federal forest lands that would be threatened by the project, drawing international attention before Blackwater ultimately withdrew its plans.

Now, the New York Times reports that around that same time back in 2007, Blackwater blocked a State Department inquiry into allegations of violence against civilians in Iraq by the company’s personnel.  The investigation was halted after Blackwater’s top manager in Iraq threatened that he “could kill” the government’s chief investigator—and that “no one could or would do anything about it” according to State Department reports, the New York Times article states.

U.S. embassy officials backed Blackwater, telling the State Department personnel to leave the country because they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor, the documents reveal.  Blackwater had been hired to protect U.S. diplomats, though they have been likened by critics to mercenary soldiers trained to kill.

The chief investigator returned to Washington D.C., where he wrote a scathing report to the State Department documenting misconduct including negligence by Blackwater employees, and warned that lax oversight of the company could lead to liability since the company considered itself “above the law.”

Just a few weeks later, Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, inflaming resentment among Iraqis over the U.S. military presence.  Four Blackwater guards involved in those shootings are now set to stand trial, though charges against five other guards in a prior case were dismissed in 2009.

There have been serious ramifications from this failure to rein in these and other abuses linked to Blackwater, which has also been blamed for an incident that fueled the bloody siege of Fallujah. That incident occurred after Blackwater guards defied orders to remain within a protected zone, traveling outside to fetch pots and pans for a military officer.  They were seized by insurgents and killed, their bodies hung off a bridge, triggering the siege of Fallujah in retaliation.

The shootings in Bagdhad were a key reason why Iraq’s newly formed government later refused to approve a treaty allowing U.S. troops to stay in the county with immunity from prosecution after 2011.  The 17 victims of those shootings included a 9-year-old boy. Blackwater first claimed they fired back in self defense, but U.S. officials who investigated found zero evidence of any insurgents at the scene and federal prosecutors accused Blackwater’s convoy of shooting without cause into the crowd using machine guns and grenade launchers.

Blackwater’s founder, Erik Prince, claimed he was never told about the death threat reportedly made by a Blackwater representative against the Chief Investigator for the U.S. State Department, the New York Times reports.

Blackwater forced its workers to sign a military-type oath to battle the war on terror.

Prince sold the company in 2010.  Blackwater later went through several name changes, most recently emerging as Constellis Holdings after merging with Triple Canopy, a rival private military security contractor.

There were more troubling allegations. One investigation found Blackwater guards carried weapons that they hadn’t been certified to carry, or authorized to use. Allegations of boozing and womanizing surfaced, as well as concerns that Blackwater overbilled the federal government, failed to properly maintain vehicles and scrimped on the size of its security detail protecting U.S. diplomats.  The company was also accused of filthy living conditions for its workers.

The threat against Chief U.S. inspector Jean Richter was reportedly made by Daniel Carroll, Blackwater’s project manager in Iraq during a meeting in August 2007 over complaints that included cleanliness and food quality served up at Blackwater’s compound. 

Richter wrote in his report to the State Department that Caroll, a former Navy Seal, stated that “he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq.” He said he was “alarmed” by the threat.  Richter’s statement was confirmed by a witness.  All three men declined to speak with the Times for its article.

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State at that time under President George W. Bush, appointed a panel to investigate the Nisour Square shootings and recommend reforms – but strangely, the panel’s members never interviewed Richter or the witness about the threats.  Yet a state department official later told reporters that many people had been interviewed and found no indications of concern about Blackwater’s conduct before the Nisour shootings.

Martin Eder (photo, right), founder of Activist San Diego, which owns KNSJ radio, was a leader in the bipartisan opposition to Blackwater’s efforts to set up a training camp in Potrero. East County Magazine editor and radio show host Miriam Raftery was the primary reporter covering the Blackwater saga in Potrero with a series of investigative reports. Leon Thompson was instrumental in gaining support of the Courage Campaign, a statewide organization, to bolster community organizing efforts. Potrero Planning Group member Jan Hedlun sounded the initial alarm alerting the community that planners had voted to approve the Blackwater facility, while Carl Meyer launched the recall effort and successfully ran to become the new Potrero Planning Group chair as head of an anti-Blackwater slate.  

These efforts helped draw international media attention to the issue at the very time when Blackwater was fast gaining notoriety in Iraq.  An interesting outcome of this story is that Raftery formed East County Magazine in 2008 after encountering censorship by other local media on the controversies involving Blackwater—with one local paper refusing to run any more Blackwater stories just weeks before the recall election in Potrero.

One curious incident in the Potrero saga occurred when a car bomb exploded beneath a vehicle owned by a San Diego County planner, whose wife narrowly escaped injury. The bomb blast occurred on the eve of a key vote and the planner hastily announced he was leaving the planning department the next day. People on each side suggested the other might be to blame.  The incident led to heavy police presence at the hearing in 2007, to assure protection of both planners and members of the public protesting outside (photo, left).

Could a Blackwater representative have committed a violent action locally to intimidate a public planning official, just at it is accused of threatening the chief investigator in Iraq with violence around the same time period?  We may never know, since the crime was never solved.

Shortly before the recall election against Potrero Planners, the Harris wildfire roared through the town, destroying many residences. Cal Fire’s last official update in November 2007 still lists cause of this fire as undetermined. 

Some residents questioned whether the fire might have been an intentional effort to prevent townspeople from voting in the impending recall election, though unofficially fire officials indicated the fire’s most likely cause was a campfire lit by human traffickers. The fire scorched Blackwater’s proposed project site in Round Potrero Valley where the company wanted to story ammunition and hold live fire training exercises—a rocky cliff-lined valley that Blackwater’s vice president insisted to media would not burn –until photos of the blackened, smoldering site proved that it already had.   

The ouster of Blackwater from Potrero was not the end of the company’s local involvement. 

Blackwater went on to open an indoor shooting range in Otay Mesa. A similar company formed by a former Blackwater official leased land to train paramilitary personnel on the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation--until the Eagle Fire led to tribal efforts to revoke the lease.

Blackwater or its offshoots also received contracts to train officers for some local law enforcement departments here in San Diego County, as well as at other locations as part of its global operations.

 


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