Today’s Must Read

If Blackwater seems to have a bunker mentality, there are some ready explanations. First, the company has a lot to answer for. Second, it’s got a relentless inquisitor on its heels. And not to be forgotten: in Iraq, at least, its employees (sorry, “independent contractors”) actually live in a bunker.

Paul von Zielbauer and James Glanz of The New York Times provide a fascinating glimpse into the maze of stacked trailers that comprise Blackwater’s Green-Zone compound. It says a lot that the compound is surrounded by 25-foot high concrete barriers topped with razor wire inside the safest place in Iraq: denizens liken it to a minimum security prison. Outside is the enemy. Not merely insurgents, infuriated Iraqis, and disdainful Iraqi government officials, but frustrated U.S. troops, unreliable diplomats and FBI inquisitors delving into the company’s mistakes in last month’s Nisour Square shootings.

The bunker mentality, however, may be dissipating. Some Blackwater officials were openly critical of the company’s actions to the Times reporters:

“Some guys are thinking that it was not a good shoot, that it was not warranted,” said one Blackwater contractor, using military jargon for an episode that results in a wrongful death. “I don’t think there was criminal intent involved. I just think it was the application of the use of deadly force gone horribly wrong.”

He added, “To mitigate one threat, 17 people had to die?”

Outside the compound, the picture of Nisour Square painted by the U.S. military and the Iraqi government is disturbing, if not exactly clear (or multifaceted): Blackwater contractors overreacted to a misperceived threat and fired nearly indiscriminately on Iraqi civilians despite not taking hostile fire themselves. Inside the compound, though, there isn’t a united rejoinder — only confusion.

But in furtive discussions over recent weeks, certain details about the episode, [company employees] said, have gained currency among many Blackwater workers, many of whom would like to believe that their colleagues acted appropriately.

Those workers said, for example, that Blackwater guards who fired at Iraqis in Nisour Square described how an Iraqi driver had pulled up his car well after the Blackwater convoy had arrived and warned traffic to stay back. The encroaching car, the workers said, caused their colleagues to feel threatened and initiate machine-gun fire. They also said that friction between Blackwater convoys and groups of armed Iraqi police in the days before the shooting had created a mutual distrust, and that the police officers, perhaps as a result of earlier disputes, fired at the Blackwater convoy. “The Iraqi police were testing these guys at various intersections,” said one former Blackwater guard who has spoken with men on the convoy at Nisour Square.

That doesn’t explicitly contradict what Erik Prince, Blackwater’s CEO, has told Congress and the press all this month. But it’s not exactly congruent, either. Prince described a “complex attack” of insurgent small-arms fire and a nearby car bomb. The view from the compound is one of overreaction to the single, much-described approaching car. If Blackwater contractors told the Times reporters about taking insurgent fire, it didn’t make it to print. At least one Blackwater contractor suggested that the bodies at the square were insurgent bodies stripped of weapons to make them appear to be civilians, but that’s a hard thing to prove.

The confusion at the bunker is indicative of confusion among Blackwater guards at Nisour Square itself. Not everyone on the Blackwater team was on board with the degree of force employed:

The Blackwater employees said that talk about the Sept. 16 shootings had also focused on a heated dispute between members of the team in the square, pitting the men pouring gunfire into Iraqi vehicles against other Blackwater guards who were imploring them to stop.

“There was turmoil in the team, where half the guys were saying, ‘Don’t shoot,’” said a military veteran who spoke to a member of the Blackwater team on the convoy.

That’s sure to feature in the FBI report.