Lawsuit targets Blackwater mercenaries

In the first lawsuit brought by Iraqi civilians against U.S. mercenary forces, on Oct. 11 an Iraqi survivor and the families of three Iraqi men slain by Blackwater personnel in a Sept. 16 attack sued in a U.S. federal court, charging the private military contractor with “assault and battery, wrongful death, intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, and negligent hiring, training and supervision.”

Talib Mutlaq Deewan and the estates of Himoud Saed Atban, Usama Fadhil Abbass and Oday Ismail Ibraheem are being represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the firms of Burke O’Neil LLC and Akeel & Valentine, P.C.

Also Oct. 11, the United Nations called on the U.S. to prosecute private security contractors for serious crimes. One of the first laws foisted on Iraq by the U.S. occupation exempted Washington’s mercenaries from prosecution in that country.

The attack took place in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square. Some 19 people were killed and dozens more were injured. The Iraqi government and the first U.S. military personnel on the scene said the massacre appeared unprovoked. Blackwater denies the charges, saying its agents were responding in “self defense.”

But an investigation of security photos and other materials by the Washington Post, published Oct. 12, showed that civilian automobiles were fired upon through their back windows as they were fleeing the area. The only evidence of weapons fire was from Blackwater agents.

Attorney Susan Burke, at a news conference in Washington, D.C., announcing the lawsuit, said: “This senseless slaughter was only the latest incident in a lengthy pattern of egregious misconduct by Blackwater in Iraq. At the moment of this incident, the Blackwater personnel responsible for the shooting were not protecting State Department officials. We allege that Blackwater personnel were not provoked, and that they had no legitimate reason to fire on civilians.

“We look forward to forcing Blackwater and [founder Erik Prince] to tell the world under oath why this attack happened, particularly since a Blackwater guard tried to stop his colleagues from indiscriminately firing.”

The Bush administration quickly strong-armed its puppet regime in Baghdad to drop the initial demand for Blackwater to leave the country. According to the Washington Post, the official U.S. investigation into the Sept. 16 massacre “has already proven to be severely compromised,” with a Blackwater contractor writing the State Department’s initial report on the incident and many witnesses not being interviewed.

Col. Steve Lyons, a retired military analyst, told CBS News, “A lot of that evidence has been destroyed.”

Burke emphasized that she wants to expose that a pattern of “excessive and unnecessary use of deadly force by [Blackwater] employees is not investigated or punished in any way.”

Attorneys also plan to expose, as further evidence of this pattern, the brutal role of Blackwater agents in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, where they served as judge, jury and sometimes executioners in facilities housing refugees.

The increasing scrutiny of Blackwater, a darling of the Bush administration, is just one symptom of the growing crisis for the illegal, U.S.-led occupation of Iraq that began with the invasion and overthrow of the sovereign Iraqi government in 2003.

There are at least 1,000 armed Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq. The company was hired in 2003 to guard L. Paul Bremer, the U.S.-appointed colonial governor of the so-called Coalition Provisional Authority, for $25 million. Later, as the Iraqi resistance grew and Baghdad became ungovernable, Blackwater became the official hired gun for State Department personnel.

These hired killers are an especially despised arm of the hated U.S. occupation. On March 31, 2004, after resistance fighters killed four Blackwater mercenaries in Falluja, a crowd of people publicly burned and hung their bodies.

An increasing number of military personnel and officials have now begun to criticize Blackwater, attempting to draw a line of differentiation between the “private” and “official” occupation forces.

Yet on the same day that Blackwater victims filed their lawsuit in Washington, U.S. military air strikes northwest of Baghdad killed nine Iraqi children and six women civilians while supposedly targeting “al Qaeda leaders.”

To read the lawsuit, visit www.ccr-ny.org.