U.S. Examines Whether Blackwater Tried Bribery
By MARK MAZZETTI and JAMES RISEN
Published: January 31, 2010
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is investigating whether officials of Blackwater Worldwide tried to bribe Iraqi government officials in hopes of retaining the firm’s security work in Iraq after a deadly shooting episode in 2007, according to current and former government officials.
The officials said that the Justice Department’s fraud section opened the inquiry late last year to determine whether Blackwater employees violated a federal law banning American corporations from paying bribes to foreign officials.
The inquiry is the latest fallout from the shooting in Nisour Square in Baghdad, which left 17 Iraqis dead and stoked bitter resentment against the United States.
A federal judge in December dismissed criminal charges against five former Blackwater guards implicated in the episode, but Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. recently announced that the Obama administration would appeal that decision.
The investigation, which was confirmed by three current and former officials speaking on condition of anonymity, follows a report in The New York Times in November that top executives at Blackwater had authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials to buy their support after the shooting. The newspaper account said it could not determine whether any bribes were actually paid or identify Iraqi officials who might have received the money.
The Justice Department has obtained two do ents from the State Department, which had security contracts with the company, that have raised questions about Blackwater’s efforts to influence Iraqi government officials after the Nisour Square shootings, according to two American officials familiar with the inquiry.
One do ent, a handwritten note, shows that a Blackwater representative told a senior official at the American Embassy in Baghdad that the company had hired a prominent Iraqi lawyer to help the firm make compensation payments to Iraqi victims of the shootings, a practice encouraged by the State Department.
According to the do ent, as described by the two government officials, the Blackwater official said the firm had hired the lawyer hoping that the lawyer’s close ties to top Iraqi officials, including Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, would help Blackwater obtain a license to continue operating in Iraq.
Several officials identified the Iraqi lawyer as Jaafar al-Mousawi, who had earlier served as the chief prosecutor in the trial of Saddam Hussein.
The second do ent is a response from a senior Embassy official, an e-mail message warning Blackwater officials not to bribe the Iraqi government, the officials said. In an interview in Baghdad on Friday, Mr. Mousawi said that in February 2008 he worked with top Blackwater officials to spend up to $1 million to compensate the families of the Nisour Square victims. He said he consulted with Mr. Maliki about the payments.
“He said, ‘Go ahead and help because these are poor people,’ ” Mr. Mousawi said.
Saying that 40 families received a total of about $800,000, he added that he believed that Blackwater hoped the compensation would help “moisten the situation with the Iraqi government to get the license.”
But he said that he was unaware of any efforts by Blackwater executives to bribe Iraqi officials, and that news reports misinterpreted the purpose of the victims’ fund as intended bribes.
Several former Blackwater employees, however, had told The Times that Blackwater’s president at the time, Gary Jackson, authorized about $1 million for payments to Iraqi officials, with only a small portion intended for victims. While the do ents apparently do not offer proof that Blackwater paid off any Iraqi officials, the American officials who have reviewed them say they suggest that officials at the United States Embassy in Baghdad were concerned enough about Blackwater’s plans to issue the warning to the company.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment. Stacey DeLuke, a spokeswoman for Blackwater, now called Xe Services, which is based in Moyock, N.C., did not respond to a request for comment.
The bribery investigation is still in its early stages, according to officials familiar with the inquiry. They said that lawyers in the fraud section at the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters were working with federal prosecutors in North Carolina, where a federal grand jury has been examining Blackwater’s activities for several years. The State Department is also cooperating with the bribery investigation, several officials said.
Securing convictions under the federal antibribery statute, called the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, is often difficult. Steven Tyrrell, who until December ran the Justice Department’s fraud section, said that there was seldom a paper trail of the illegal transactions and that prosecutors usually had to rely on whistle-blowers inside a company to testify about bribery payments.
Under the statute, the prosecutors must prove the “corrupt intent” of those making payments to the foreign officials, and the payment “must be intended to induce the recipient to misuse his official position” according to a statement on the Justice Department Web site. The statement notes that the mere offer or promise of a bribe can violate the statute.
Over the past year, the Justice Department has dramatically expanded its bribery investigations, placing a new emphasis on prosecuting individual executives rather than merely getting companies to pay large fines for paying off foreign officials.
“The fear of jail is more of a deterrent than the fear of having to pay a monetary fine, which many companies might see as the cost of doing business,” Mr. Tyrrell said. He declined to speak about the Justice Department’s inquiry into Blackwater or confirm its existence.
The Nisour Square shooting incited intense anger among Iraqis, and officials in Baghdad threatened to kick Blackwater out of the country. At the time, the security company had contracts in Iraq with the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
Families of the Nisour Square victims have said in interviews that Mr. Mousawi met with them and arranged compensation payments on behalf of Blackwater. The Iraqis said an American described as “Mr. Rich” sometimes joined Mr. Mousawi.
Several American officials have identified the man as Rich Garner, then Blackwater’s Iraq country manager. Former employees have previously said the money authorized for secret payments of Iraqi officials was sent to Mr. Garner in Baghdad from the firm’s office in Amman, Jordan.
Blackwater was able to keep its State Department contract in Iraq for nearly two years without obtaining the operating license Iraqi officials had said would be required.
In May 2009, Blackwater finally lost the deal. The firm still provides diplomatic security for the State Department in Afghanistan.
While the Justice Department’s investigation appears to focus on specific allegations of bribery after the Nisour Square shooting, several former Blackwater officials have said that questionable transfers of cash were frequent at Blackwater.
In interviews, former Blackwater officials described how the company over the years sent millions of dollars in cash into Iraq, usually carried by hand in paper bags, and kept few records of the transfers.
Some of the former employees told the prosecutors that they could not identify the recipients of the money, while others have said the money went to bribe Iraqi officials, according to current and former government officials and outside lawyers familiar with the matter.
The Justice Department’s decision to open an investigation of Blackwater came weeks before the judge in Washington dismissed criminal charges against five Blackwater guards.
They had been charged with manslaughter and related weapons violations in the Nisour Square shootings, but United States District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina threw out the case and harshly criticized prosecutors for relying on statements made by the guards under grants of immunity.
Separately, some Nisour Square victims have dropped a civil lawsuit against Blackwater after reaching a financial settlement with the company.
But the company’s legal troubles persist. Two former guards for a Blackwater subsidiary were charged in January in the deaths of two Afghans and the wounding of another in Afghanistan last year.
If DoD really had enough troops to fulfill the mission in Iraq, lawsuits arising from subcontracting security arrangements (like the Nisour Square shooting) wouldn't be much of an issue.
Instead, private security is a significant part of our force structure. Stuff like this will continue to come up, and the US will continue to walk a tightrope between keeping our security contractors on-board and pacifying pissed off Iraqi (and Afghan) politicians.
Last edited by Winehole23; 02-01-2010 at 02:23 PM.
Private security is a nice scam...
Until mandatory military service re-enters the picture, it's a sweet sweet deal for mercenaries.
I thought they did it for the country, not the money...
I'm tempted to say the two aren't mutually exclusive, but Xe is a security contractor. Without a signature on the dotted line, their sympathy probably doesn't translate to help.
I actually think it's a detriment to our national security (at the very least, a distraction) to have these people operate in military zones.
It could be. I'm more troubled by our de facto dependency on them.
I'm more troubled that there are private security contractors the size of the U.S. military that only pledge allegiance to the almighty dollar....what if they were used in a U.S. city like New Orleans, for instance? Or Washington?
Or what if China paid better?
Blackwater threatened State Department investigators before the Nisour Square massacre:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us...ater.html?_r=1Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.
American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed do ents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.
After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials do enting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.”
“The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves,” the investigator, Jean C. Richter, wrote in an Aug. 31, 2007, memo to State Department officials. “Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law,” he said, adding that the “hands off” management resulted in a situation in which “the contractors, instead of Department officials, are in command and in control.”
Of course they bribed the Iraqi's. You gotta pay to play.
getting State Department inspectors to back off by threatening their lives apparently made no impression on you
This just in: US to investigate whether water is wet.
If this is the worst blackwater did, I'd say we were in luck.
like you care
Terrible. Above the law sounds about right. One of these days they're going to kill an American or two, if they haven't already, but I guess it shouldn't matter since they don't wear a towel in their heads.
Mercenaries doing what mercenaries do. What's sad is we hired them.
Blackwater contractors found guilty in Nisour Square shooting trial:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/...rc=al_nationalSeven years after American security contractors killed 14 unarmed Iraqis by firing machine guns and grenades into a Baghdad traffic circle, a jury in Washington on Wednesday convicted all four Blackwater Worldwide guards charged in the incident on at least some of the charges.
The verdicts marked a victory for prosecutors, who argued in a 10-week trial that the defendants fired wildly and out-of-control in a botched security operation after one of them falsely claimed to believe the driver of an approaching vehicle was a car bomber.
The guards claimed they acted in self-defense and responded appropriately to the car bomb threat and the sound of incoming AK-47 gunfire, their defense said.
Overall, defendants were charged with the deaths of 14 Iraqis and the wounding of 17 others at Baghdad’s Nisour Square shortly after noon on Sept. 16, 2007. None was an insurgent.
Who is paying the defendants' defense costs? will they or somebody finance the probable appeal?
no idea
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