Today’s Must Read

The State Department’s “first blush” investigation into the September 16 shootings at Baghdad’s Nisour Square, which left 11 Iraqi civilians dead at the hands of Blackwater security contractors, largely absolves Blackwater of blame for the incident.

According to the initial account by the Baghdad office of State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, a car bomb detonated 25 yards away from a Blackwater detail accompanying a U.S. diplomatic convoy leaving a “financial compound” and heading for the Green Zone. Two other teams were dispatched from the Green Zone to assist in the diplomat’s extraction. As the third team approached Nisour Square, it came under fire from between eight to ten assailants, who “fired from multiple nearby locations, with some aggressors dressed in civilian apparel and others in Iraqi police uniforms,” the report states, as provided to The Washington Post.

The chaos did not stop there.

Separately, a U.S. official familiar with the investigation said that participants in the shooting have reported that at least one of the Blackwater guards drew a weapon on his colleagues and screamed for them to “stop shooting.” This account suggested that there was some effort to curb the shooting, with at least one Blackwater guard believing it had spiraled out of control. “Stop shooting — those are the words that we’re hearing were used,” the official said.

The BDS report is dated the day of the incident — September 16. It is entirely separate from an ongoing joint U.S.-Iraqi investigation into Nisour Square, an event that has galvanized Iraqi opinion so greatly and so negatively that one senior U.S. military official warned it could be “worse than Abu Ghraib.” The report helps explain why State Department officials, including Secretary Rice, have backed Blackwater as strongly as they have. Rice and other U.S. diplomats successfully got the Iraqi government to withdraw its initial demand that Blackwater be expelled from Iraq.

But the account presented in the September 16 BDS report contrasts sharply with that of a later report issued by the Iraqi Interior Ministry and bolstered by video evidence from a nearby national-police command headquarters. In that report, Blackwater fired at a white car — carrying a man, a woman and their baby — that did not heed a traffic officer’s warning to stop.

Sarhan Thiab, a traffic policeman who was in the circle at the time, said Iraqi police did not fire on Blackwater. “Not a single bullet. They were the only ones shooting,” said Thiab, who said he and other traffic officers fled to nearby bushes once the shooting began.

“All the vehicles were shooting. They were shooting in every direction,” said a senior Iraqi police official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigations. “They used a rocket launcher or grenade launcher to hit the car. They were supported by two helicopters who were shooting from the air.”

In the BDS account, when the second Blackwater team was ordered to Nisour Square to assist the one ostensibly under attack, Iraqi police and Army units on-scene pointed machine guns at the Blackwater guards, possibly in confusion. Blackwater called for air support from its fleet of Little Bird helicopters. Eventually a U.S. Army quick-reaction force arrived and “mediated” an end to the violence.

Even assuming the BDS account is correct and the Interior Ministry’s is wrong, it puts a question mark around Blackwater’s procedures for when its convoys face danger.

Some U.S. officials have questioned why the Blackwater team decided to evacuate the principal and return to the Green Zone, rather than remaining inside the compound. “It doesn’t make sense,” said one U.S. official. “Why would they go back out there when they were already safe?”