"September 16, 2007, approximately 12:08 p.m., Nisour Square, Baghdad, Iraq: it was a steamy hot day with temperatures reaching 100 degrees. The heavily armored Blackwater convoy entered the congested intersection in the Mansour district of the Iraqi capital....
Ali Khalaf Salman, an Iraqi traffic cop on duty in Nisour Square that day, remembers vividly the moment when the Blackwater convoy entered the intersection, spurring him and his colleagues to scramble to stop traffic. But as the vehicles entered the square, the convoy suddenly made a surprise U-turn and proceeded to drive the wrong way on a one-way street, As Khalaf watched, the convoy came to an abrupt halt. He says a large white man with a mustache, positioned atop the third vehicle in the Blackwater convoy, began to fire his weapon "randomly."
Scahill plunges us right into the thick of the action with Blackwater.
20 were injured and 17 were killed. Thankfully, the number wasn't higher; tragically, this happened.
Immediately after the opening above, we are plunged further into the hellish scene in Nisour Square: cars were being struck randomly by bullets, but if people got out and tried to flee to safety, they were gunned down as targets. Iraqi police who tried to interfere, clearly marked, were ignored.
"Khalaf looked in the direction of the shots on Yarmouk Road and heard a woman screaming, "My son! My son!" ... found a middle-aged woman inside a vehicle holding a twenty-year-old man who had been shot in the forehead and was covered in blood... he thought the men would cease fire, given that he was a clearly identified police officer...
'Don't shoot, please!' Khalaf recalled yelling. But as he stood with his hands raised, Khalaf says, a gunman from the fourth Blackwater vehicle opened fire on the mother gripping her son and shot her dead before Khalaf and Thiab's eyes."
They can't even control their own fucking men, because this is how untrained mercenaries behave:
"In an indication of how out of control the situation quickly became, U.S. officials report that 'one or more' Blackwater guards called on their colleagues to stop shooting. The word 'cease-fire' 'was supposedly called out several times,' a senior official told the New York Times. 'They had an on-site difference of opinion.' At one point, a Blackwater guard allegedly drew his gun on another. 'It was a Mexican standoff,' said one contractor. According to Salman, the Iraqi lawyer who was in the square that day, the Blackwater guard screamed at his colleague, 'No! No! No!' The lawyer was shot in the back as he was trying to flee."
Even as they left, they kept firing randomly into the crowd.
Now, we've heard a lot over the years about terrorists, so I'm sure you're thinking maybe there was some terrorism involved. Let's get that right out of the way: the mother who was shot and killed? She was an allergist, a doctor. The son who was killed? He was going to school to become a doctor. His father was also a doctor, a pathologist. From Scahill: "Jawal says the family could have left Iraq, but they believed they were needed in the country. 'I feel pain when I see doctors leaving Iraq,' he said."
These are/were good people. Who embodied the ideal of improving their own nation instead of contributing to brain drain and the further degradation of Iraq. Killed. Brutally.
Wonder what happened to those killers?
Also included in those pardons was that navy fucker who posed with a corpse. Now, I don't care what your politics are: before that news story came out, the only time I'd heard of people treating bodies that way were historical accounts of atrocities, serial killers, and I believe it was Muammar Gaddafi that used to keep his enemy's corpses frozen in some creepy-ass basement.
That is extremely abnormal and disturbing behavior.
Both on the individual and group level, Blackwater is an organization rife with corruption and, unfortunately, fruitful with power. Their two primary issues I intend to discuss are those behind their founder and his political ties; additionally, the behavior of Blackwater's Hessians on-the-ground (as seen above) combined with their higher pay and how it, ultimately, makes life a helluva lot difficult for real soldiers.
Erik Prince, founder and shithead extraordinaire, is pictured above and might also ring some bells: he tried to establish a Trump-Putin backchannel back in 2016 (yeah, that doesn't seem sketchy AF at all) and his sister, Betsey DeVos, served as Secretary of Education, a job which she was unqualified for and godawful in performing. Naturally, in line of many right wingers, they are self-made individuals who worked hard to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which is how they earned such a prominent role in society and so much power—
Lol as fucking if. They inherited a shitload of money because their dad patented a built-in car sun visor with a mirror and light. And that wealth only grew when Betsy Prince became Betsy DeVos by marrying the guy who founded the pyramid/Ponzi scheme ScAmway. DeVos, as Secretary of Education, pushed for the privatization of the education system, which is just a lovely idea: dumber students and an easy avenue to segregation with extra steps.*
Shame old Bernie Madoff's not around or we could have him for Secretary of the Treasury!
Giving a man like Prince a private army—hell, giving anyone a private army is a stupid idea, so naturally, our genius nation being what it is, we let him set up a massive facility in North Carolina for training.
Remember the beginning of this. Remember those awful scenes like "something out of a horror movie," to quote another witness?
Now, consider this: Blackwater employees are given better equipment and training than standard US soldiers; they are paid more; and they are not held to the laws of combat.
What does that mean?
It means that shit like the Nisour Square Massacre happens. Innocent people are killed without cause. These mercenaries run through and abandon ship. Or sometimes, they're stationed in the area and both police officers and real military have to work PR and damage control with the very upset civilians who, understandably, see Blackwater with US flags gunning them down, our US soldiers refusing to help, and then the Iraqi police unable to even get them to stop.
Starting to get an idea how insurgencies get born or fed?
The widow-father of the deceased seems like a good man—but what about his son's friends? Or other distant family members? This becomes another innocent killed by the imperialist US and encourages them to hate us.
In one of his books, Rick Perlstein describes Vietnamese ignoring bombing flights overhead at some point, responding to warnings with, "No give damn." It was almost a form of learned helplessness: the bombs are going to come, this is how Americans are going to behave, but this is our land and sooner or later, these outsiders are going to get sick and tired of sending more and more people and leave us alone.
Or take John Kerry's Every Day is Extra, discussing some of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam who saw danger firsthand (unlike Champagne Squad Georgie B., Kerry went to the frontlines and served on the ground). At one point, he describes a Vietnamese fisherman's boat littered with bullet holes. When he asks soldiers, they said they weren't sure if he was with them or the Vietcong, so they shot to be safe. As Kerry points out, in essence: well, if the guy didn't have reason to support the Vietcong before, you sure as hell gave him one.
Who else used that tactic of guerrilla warfare?
Oh, right, that's how we beat the British in the Revolutionary War. There's a reason my military history class encouraged us to get past the "controversial" take of comparing the two to realize the similarities between the wars.
Now, let's return to our own soldiers: underpaid, under-equipped at times, and dealing with a stultified command structure.
(I can point to Uncultured for this or, ah, without divulging too much: I knew some of the people around the case of First Lieut. Bauders and my rough understanding was that he was an outstanding soldier and leader of men whose biggest crime was salvaging some abandoned gym equipment for his men when command dragged its feet. The last conversation he had was with a commanding officer who threatened to destroy both his civilian and military lives, allegedly, but anonymous sources on that one [they wouldn't talk to me again]).
Our real soldiers, frankly, are being asked to do an inhuman amount of work to compensate for these irresponsible jackasses that bloat our military budget to run around like bulls in a china shop. And our regular units are anything but perfect, either, plagued by both irresponsible command and a dangerous hyper-nationalism drilled in by boot camp.
Blackwater is a valuable read, but I'd also recommend Restrepo, another throwback to military history. It's a hard, grim watch with combat footage but it really does help to get an idea of the hostility and difficulty both of the terrain, living, interacting, everything in the Korangal Valley, one of the most dangerous in Afghanistan.
One moment that always stuck out to me—possibly because it was mentioned and discussed in class, admittedly—has to do with the [cow?] that gets caught in the military's fence, killed, and then turned into dinner. When the owner wants recompense for his lost cow, issues arise, and it's a great example of just how difficult it is to accomplish the military's goals in the Korangal Valley: build a road and establish trust.
They won't/can't give the man money—what if he gives it to a terrorist organization? But then they've also taken his livelihood, and that needs to be made up for. And, well, I can't say I know their culture but I know in ours: when we screw someone like that, we're generally expected to reimburse and make up for it a bit. But point being: we are, again, an outside force imposing its will on people who have lived there for generations and have customs. We are not building trust by behaving this way.
The Korangal Valley is in Afghanistan, a place known as the Graveyard of Empires. Maybe reason to be a little careful how we approach.
Or, and memory is elusive, we're talking a decade ago, but I believe it is the scene after a bombing, where a distraught family is encountered and told by the military that they are only killing terrorists. They're only getting terrorists.
And ultimately a father pulls a blanket off his young, dead children and asks which was the terrorist.
How is this going to help us make local alliances and build a reciprocal relationship? We're only pushing people away and toward more extremist groups because, even when we have absolute superiority of numbers and weapons, we won't act with mercy but with impunity.
Contrast, again, with Mestyanek Young's Uncultured: part of the reason she spots a planted IED and prevents her unit from wandering over it to disastrous consequence is because, generally, when units would approach villages, children would come out to greet them. They liked receiving candy and toys from the soldiers who were on peacekeeping missions. That day, something seemed odd—the kids weren't coming out. No one had given them a direct warning, but she connected the dots: parents weren't going to allow their children into danger.
I'm not saying the military is perfect—there are a lot of problems with it. But Blackwater is also an incredibly serious problem and, as the military budget continues to bloat, seem on the path to continue. With the current privatization, I suppose there might be more big mercenary companies out there soon, too—wonder how many more of them'll be subsidized by our tax dollars, which should've been going toward internal infrastructure most of the last 25 fucking years.
This all seems pretty troubling, doesn't it?
Let me give ya a little more: our new Defense Secretary, in addition to enjoying getting blackout drunk and beating women (his second wife was so afraid of him, she had a habit of hiding in closets and had set up a safeword to text friends in case he was on a real booze-fuelled rampage that night), has fantasized for years about setting loose the US military on domestic political opponents and treating peaceful protestors to a dose of murder. Hegseth, like his boss, belongs in a prison cell instead of the Oval Office, so great fucking work, America.
—
*Come on, did you really think it was a coincidence that the private schools movement rose around the time of Brown v. Board of Education? Private schools make it easy to say no based on loosely defined reasons—just like how my mom never had to give a specific reason beyond being "over-capacity" to the miority parents she'd refuse the daycare to, then behind closed doors, "They're all welfare queens on government assistance who never pay their bills on time."
Or, for another administration example: a bit like how Trump's companies got busted for segregating against Black couples by telling them no apartments were available or marking their folder—while not doing the same to white couples.
Comments
Post a Comment