Iraq

Report: Blackwater Manager Threatened to Kill State Dept. Investigator, Officials Blamed The Investigator

It’s 2014 and we’re still learning terrible things about the Bush administration.

According to the New York Times, a senior manager for Blackwater threatened to kill one of the State Department’s top investigators and, rather than scold or punish Blackwater, embassy officials scolded the investigator. I shit you not.

American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports. [...]

Mr. Carroll said “that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit. [...]

Mr. Thomas witnessed the exchange and corroborated Mr. Richter’s version of events in a separate statement, writing that Mr. Carroll’s comments were “unprofessional and threatening in nature.” He added that others in Baghdad had told the two investigators to be “very careful,” considering that their review could jeopardize job security for Blackwater personnel.

Mr. Richter was shocked when embassy officials sided with Mr. Carroll and ordered Mr. Richter and Mr. Thomas to leave Iraq immediately, according to the documents. On Aug. 23, Ricardo Colon, the acting regional security officer at the embassy, wrote in an email that Mr. Richter and Mr. Thomas had become “unsustainably disruptive to day-to-day operations and created an unnecessarily hostile environment for a number of contract personnel.” The two men cut short their inquiry and returned to Washington the next day.

Weeks after Blackwater manager Daniel Carroll threatened to kill State Department investigator Jean C. Richter — two weeks after the embassy told Richter and Donald Thomas to leave Iraq immediately for hurting their relationship with Blackwater — Blackwater contractors shot and killed 17 people in Nisour Square.

Richter and Thomas were not interviewed by the State Department after the shooting and the panel that investigated the shooting apparently did not consider the threat to kill Richter relevant.

If something like this happened today I cannot even envision the unholy shitstorm that would descend on the White House.

You should read the full report from the New York Times. It’s even worse than it seems.