Eight years ago, in Baghdad, American contractors working for the Blackwater USA security company were driving in a convoy near the Nisour Square roundabout, when they suddenly opened fire with automatic weapons. First, a Blackwater sniper, Nicholas Slatten, shot at a car and hit the driver, a medical student named Ahmed Haithem, in the head. Others in the convoy started shooting, too, and struck Haithem's mother, who was riding in the front seat, next to her son, and died screaming for someone to help him. The Americans then fired on other vehicles, although at least one contractor, according to witnesses, yelled at the others to stop. A few minutes later, when the shooting stopped, Mohammed Kinani, who was in a car with several family members, turned around to see that his nine-year-old son, Ali, was dead. A bullet had shattered the child's skull. In all, the Blackwater contractors killed seventeen people. Blackwater initially claimed that there had been fire from insurgents; witnesses have consistently said that there was not.
On Monday, at a federal court in the District of Columbia, Slatten was sentenced to life in prison for murder. Three other contractors were convicted of manslaughter and given sentences of thirty years, which was the mandatory minimum for a charge involving the use of machine guns in that crime. (The law dates from the drug wars of the nineteen-eighties.) “These defendants appear to be good young men," Judge Royce Lamberth said in court. That had stopped him from imposing an even longer sentence. But, he said, “The overall wild thing that went on here just cannot ever be condoned by the court.”
At the sentencing hearing, the convicted contractors continued to deny responsibility. "I cannot say in all honesty to the court that I believe I did anything wrong," one of them, Dustin Heard, said. Another, Evan Liberty, said that he had been "utterly betrayed" by the government. The verdict and the sentence will be appealed, a process that may be complicated; the charges were dismissed once, due to the U.S. government’s messy handling of the case in the early days, when there was something approaching insouciance, on all sides, toward the possibility that anyone would be held accountable in a court of law. (Without much thought, the contractors were offered limited immunity in return for their statements.) The assumption seems to have been that, even though civilians had died, all that Blackwater had to do was to say, however vaguely, that its employees were under threat from insurgents. Then no one particular American would really be to blame. (Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services, then it was sold, and is now called Academi.) It took time, and an appeal to the Supreme Court, but the Justice Department got the case to court. As the Times reported earlier this week, it also took resistance to political pressure, from within the D.O.J. itself, to reduce the charges, particularly the one with the thirty-year sentence. The Times quoted memos from late 2008 in which investigators wondered whether it would make sense to wait for a Democratic Administration. In another memo, an agent wrote, “I think of Mohammad and his son every time they pull the rug a bit further out from under us.”
The Blackwater case is a reminder of two things: how very badly we conducted ourselves in Iraq, too many times and in too many ways; and how slow we have been, in the years since 9/11, to remember the most practical and the most just tools that we have at our disposal. We have, it is often said, the best and most well-trained military in the world. But we sent it into Iraq for reasons that proved false, and then swerved toward reliance on a fake army of mistrained mercenaries. The government acted as though Blackwater, in particular, was sophisticated and efficient—privatization at its best—even as its careless violence helped to dismantle America’s reputation in Iraq. Similarly, we have a justice system that can, if haltingly, get us where we ought to go. But we have bypassed it, defending a place like Guantanamo as a savvy, fast-moving response to modern threats of terrorism, even though the military tribunals there have proved far clumsier than civilian courts at prosecuting terrorists.
In this case, those courts were able to get something like justice, even if it came more than seven years after what Judge Lamberth called the "overall wild thing." (That term might be applied to that entire chapter of America's involvement in Iraq.) But the verdict was possible only because many Iraqis agreed to come to the United States to testify about what they saw that day. One of them was Ali's father, who was also in court for the sentencing. So were Ali's mother and two of his siblings. His mother held up his picture and cried. Her older surviving son looked at the four contractors and said, "Do you know my brother?"
