Trump’s pardon of Blackwater ‘Four’ highlights deep divisions over Iraq War

WASHINGTON - As much as any incident during America’s long war in Iraq, the story of the Blackwater Four - or the Biden Four, depending on one’s perspective - illustrates the different ways in which the conflict came to be seen.

To many, the events of Sept. 16, 2007, in Baghdad’s Nisour Square were a microcosm of a mistaken war, an ill-advised invasion that began when a U.S. administration misled its own public; and a lesson on the extent to which Americans, dropped with guns and impunity into an unfamiliar culture in a danger zone, could lose their moral compass.

To others, those same events were an example of the righteousness of the war itself, where Americans put their lives on the line against barbaric insurgents, only to find themselves vilified and, in the case of the Four, imprisoned by their own government.

President Donald Trump’s pardon of the Four on Tuesday reopened many of those disputes. The men, all military veterans working in Iraq for the private security contractor Blackwater, were convicted of massacring 14 civilians in an unprovoked and unjustified rampage of gunfire and grenades that day in Baghdad.

Among the dead were a medical student and his mother. One man was shot in the chest while he raised his arms in the air, U.S. federal prosecutors said. Another was wounded when a contractor’s grenade detonated in a nearby girls school, and “many were shot inside of civilian vehicles while attempting to flee.”

“None of the victims of this shooting were armed,” said Jeffrey Taylor, U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who announced the 35-count indictment issued by a federal grand jury, according to a 2008 Washington Post report. “None of them was an insurgent.”

In Baghdad, where the Blackwater incident is remembered as an emblematic chapter of a dark period of American occupation, news of the pardons brought cynicism but little surprise.

“I have always known that his murderers would get away with it somehow even after they were prosecuted,” said a former schoolmate of Ahmed Haithem Ahmed al-Rubiay, the medical student who was killed. “The pardon was inevitable.”

The Iraqi Foreign Ministry, noting that the killings were “denounced on an international level,” called the pardons “inconsistent with the U.S. administration’s declared commitment to the values of human rights, justice and the rule of law” that “regrettably ignores the dignity of the victims and the feelings and rights of their relatives.”

The Iraqi government, it said, would urge the United States “to reconsider this decision.”

Human Rights Watch said in a statement that Trump’s action showed “contempt for the rule of law. The victims’ families finally saw some measure of justice” when the four men were convicted in 2014. “Now justice has been undone by the stroke of a pen.”

On the other side, the pardons were seen as much-deserved vindication.

“We are thrilled and grateful for the Presidential pardon of Dustin Heard,” David Schertier, an attorney for one of the four, said in an email. “We have always believed in Dustin’s innocence and have never given up the fight to vindicate him. He served his country honorably and, finally today, he has his well-deserved freedom.”

After a federal judge dismissed the initial charges against the men in 2009, then-vice president Joe Biden announced that the Obama administration would retry them. As the case continued, the contractors became known in conservative media as the “Biden Four.”

A website for supporters of the “Four”on Wednesday still headlined a plea for funds and presidential pardons.

“Four decorated veterans were sacrificed for politics and convicted by lies,” reads the supportraven23.com site, named for the call sign of the Blackwater team.

The site offers a vastly different account of the events in Nisour Square, one that has been echoed repeatedly by right-wing media, including Fox News host Peter Hegseth and a vocal group of conservative lawmakers since the men were convicted in 2014.

Last year, 30-year sentences for voluntary manslaughter were judged excessive, and three of the men received new terms: 12 years and seven months for Heard, a former Marine corporal; 14 years for former Marine Sgt. Evan Liberty, and 15 years for former Army and National Guard Sgt. Paul Slough.

Former U.S. Army Sgt. Nicholas Slatten, convicted of first-degree murder, was sentenced to life in prison.

According to supporters, prosecutors disregarded evidence that proved the men had fired in self-defense. By the time they initially went to trial, the administration of President George W. Bush - under which the war had been launched and private security contractors had multiplied - had been replaced by the Obama administration.

Bush had already started withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, whose number peaked at about 170,000 in 2007, even as the use of private security contractors expanded. President Barack Obama, who had pledged during his campaign to speed up the end of U.S. combat operations, had appointed Biden as his pointman in negotiations with the Iraqi government.

At the time, there were repeated reports of contractors who abused and attacked Iraqi civilians with impunity. Many of them concerned Blackwater, which had been contracted by the State Department to protect U.S. diplomats. Along with its founder, Erik Prince, the firm became synonymous with stories of uncontrolled security guards, most of whom were U.S. military veterans.

Iraqi leaders were already angry that the Bush administration had denied them the opportunity to try the Blackwater contractors. In 2009, several weeks after U.S. charges in the case were initially dismissed, Biden expressed outrage and said the administration would retry them.

To many supporters of the men, the move smacked of administration appeasement of Iraq. Alleged victims, they charged, came forward only when compensation was offered. An initial Iraqi police investigation was judged corrupt.

“Left-leaning media outlets,” the Raven 23 site recounts, “injected politics into the incident by labeling the men as mercenaries and killers and using it as an indictment of Blackwater generally.”

As the revived case moved through federal court, the basic facts of what happened at Nisour Square remained in dispute.

As recounted by the Raven 23 site, “In September 2007, insurgents detonated a car bomb near the venue where a U.S. diplomat was conducting government business.” The Blackwater team “deployed to secure the diplomat’s safe return.”

After they created “a checkpoint in the Nisour Square traffic circle . . . a White Kia drove toward their convoy and refused to stop. Raven 23 disabled the vehicle, but came under fire, which they returned, killing several Iraqis. A team vehicle was disabled by the incoming arms fire and had to be towed back to safety.”

The report that the team came under incoming small-arms fire was buttressed by radio logs and photographs of their disabled vehicle. Some Iraqi police were on the scene, and there were initial reports that they were insurgents in disguise.

At that point, accounts of the incident diverged.

According to prosecutors, the Raven 23 team, responding to a report of a car bombing a mile from Nisour Square, left its base without permission and ignored U.S. Embassy orders to return. The men set up a “blockade” to stop busy midday traffic, and when a white Kia sedan slowly approached, they opened fire with assault weapons and a grenade launcher. The car was carrying Rubiay and his mother, and both were killed.

“A reasonable person,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment, would have known that the Kia posed no threat. The diplomat in question, with a separate convoy of guards, was not near Nisour Square.

As their convoy departed the square, the Blackwater guards opened fire on additional “civilian vehicles that posed no threat,” prosecutors said, damaging at least 18 cars or trucks.

Joseph Persichini Jr., assistant director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office who spearheaded a bureau investigation of the incident that led to the prosecution, said at the time of the indictments that those charged “displayed a blatant disregard for the core values of the United States constitution and failed to adhere to the rule of law and the respect for human life.”

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The Washington Post’s Mustafa Salim and Louisa Loveluck, both in Baghdad, and Missy Ryan in Washington contributed to this report.