'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.'
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WASHINGTON ? "Just 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 documents 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 documenting 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.?
His memo and other newly disclosed State Department documents make clear that the department was alerted to serious problems involving Blackwater and its government overseers before the Nisour Square shooting, which outraged Iraqis and deepened resentment over the United States? presence in the country.
Today, as conflict rages again in Iraq, four Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square shooting are on trial in Washington on charges stemming from the episode, the government?s second attempt to prosecute the case in an American court after previous charges against five guards were dismissed in 2009.
The shooting was a watershed moment in the American occupation of Iraq, and was a factor in Iraq?s refusal the next year to agree to a treaty allowing United States troops to stay in the country beyond 2011. Despite a series of investigations in the wake of Nisour Square, the back story of what happened with Blackwater and the embassy in Baghdad before the fateful shooting has never been fully told.
The State Department declined to comment on the aborted investigation. A spokesman for Erik Prince, the founder and former chief executive of Blackwater, who sold the company in 2010, said Mr. Prince had never been told about the matter."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/us...lackwater.html