Some might’ve wondered how it is Blackwater managed to hang around in Iraq for so long after the Nisour Square shootings in late 2007 that killed seventeen Iraqis. The answer is simple; they bribed Iraqi officials to the tune of a million bucks:

Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees. American and Iraqi investigators had already concluded that the shootings were unjustified, top Iraqi officials were calling for Blackwater’s ouster from the country and company officials feared that Blackwater might be refused an operating license it would need to retain its contracts with the State Department and private clients, worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Four former Blackwater executives said in interviews that Gary Jackson, who was then the company’s president, had approved the bribes, and the money was sent from Amman, Jordan, where Blackwater maintains an operations hub, to a top manager in Iraq. The executives, though, said they did not know whether the cash was delivered to Iraqi officials or the identities of the potential recipients.
Blackwater’s strategy of buying off the government officials, which would have been illegal under American law, created a deep rift inside the company, according to the former executives. They said that Cofer Black, who was then the company’s vice chairman and a former top C.I.A. and State Department official, learned of the plan from another Blackwater manager while he was in Baghdad discussing compensation for families of the shooting victims with United States Embassy officials.

Alarmed about the secret payments, Mr. Black cut short his talks and left Iraq. Soon after returning to the United States, he confronted Erik Prince, the company’s chairman and founder, who did not dispute that there was a bribery plan, according to a former Blackwater executive familiar with the meeting. Mr. Black resigned the following year.

Stacy DeLuke, a company spokeswoman, dismissed the allegations as “baseless” and said the company would not comment about former employees. Mr. Black did not respond to telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking comment.

Reached by phone, Mr. Jackson, who resigned as president of Blackwater early this year, criticized The New York Times and said, “I don’t care what you write.”

I doubt that very much, given that bribery of foreign officials is quite illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; the Blackwater officials who approved of such payments could see the inside of a prison for their behavior.

Jeremy Scahill at the Nation documents how such behavior was hardly unprecedented:

As The Nation has reported, following Nisour Square, evidence emerged of a clear a pattern of the State Department urging Blackwater to pay what amounted to hush money to Iraqi victims’ families. “In cases involving the death of Iraqis, it appears that the State Department’s primary response was to ask Blackwater to make monetary payments to ‘put the matter behind us,’ rather than to insist upon accountability or to investigate Blackwater personnel for potential criminal liability,” according to a report of the House Oversight Committee released in late 2007.

After a drunken Blackwater guard allegedly shot and killed an Iraqi bodyguard inside the Green Zone on Christmas Eve 2006, the Chargé d’Affaires of the US embassy in Iraq initially suggested Blackwater make a $250,000 payment but the Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security said this was too much and could cause Iraqis to “try to get killed so as to set up their family financially.” In the end, the State Department and Blackwater reportedly agreed on a $15,000 payment. During his Congressional testimony in October 2007, Erik Prince corrected that figure, saying Blackwater had actually paid $20,000. In another case, in al Hillah in June 2005, a Blackwater operator killed an “apparently innocent bystander” and the State Department requested that Blackwater pay the family $5,000. “Can you tell me how it was determined that this man’s life was worth $5,000?” Rep. Davis asked Prince. “We don’t determine that value, sir,” Prince responded. “That’s kind of an Iraqi-wide policy. We don’t make that one.”

He also details the relationship between the State Department and Blackwater:

Blackwater and the US State Department had a mutual interest in keeping the company in Iraq. The company provided the elite bodyguards for occupation officials and when Blackwater stopped work for three days after Nisour Square, those officials could not leave their fortress in the Green Zone. For Blackwater, the contract meant big money–more than $1 billion. In the aftermath of Nisour Square, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other officials basically read the riot act to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Blackwater was back to business in Iraq on the fourth day after the massacre and remains in the country. After Nisour Square, one US diplomat described the relationship between the US Embassy’s security office in Baghdad and Blackwater. “They draw the wagon circle,” the diplomat said. “They protect each other. They look out for each other. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, that wall of silence. When it protects the guilty, that is definitely not a good thing.”

Of course making “restitution” to the families of Iraqis killed, even in a shady and underhanded manner, is quite different from bribing foreign officials. But given the routine communication between Blackwater and the State Department regarding Blackwater’s killing of Iraqi civilians in the past, one can only state that it would be…interesting, to know what State Department officials might or might not have known about these particular arrangements.