American Mercenaries Kill Two Iraqi Women

Blackwater, USA contractors attacked in Fallujah, Iraq during 2004
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October 10, 2007

U.S. Guards Kill 2 Iraqi Women in New Shooting

By ANDREW E. KRAMER and JAMES GLANZ
New York Times

BAGHDAD, Oct. 9 — Two women died here on Tuesday when their white Oldsmobile was riddled by automatic gunfire from guards for a private security company, just weeks after a shooting by another company strained relations between the United States and Iraq.

The guards involved in the Tuesday shooting were working for an Australian-run security company. But the people they were assigned to protect work under the same United States government agency whose security guards sprayed bullets across a crowded Baghdad square on Sept. 16, an episode that caused an uproar among Iraqi officials and is still being investigated by the United States.

In the Tuesday shooting, as many as 40 bullets struck the car, killing the driver and the woman in the front seat on the passenger side. A woman and a boy in the back seat survived, according to witnesses and local police officials in the Karada neighborhood, where the shooting took place on a boulevard lined with appliance stores, tea shops and money changers.

American government officials said the guards had been hired to protect financial and policy experts working for an organization under contract with the United States Agency for International Development, a quasi-independent State Department agency that does extensive aid work in Iraq.

The organization, RTI International, is in Iraq to carry out what is ultimately a State Department effort to improve local government and democratic institutions. But a Bush administration official said the State Department bore no responsibility for overseeing RTI’s security operations.

“A.I.D. does not direct the security arrangements of its contractors,” the official said. “These groups are contractually responsible for the safety and security of their employees. That responsibility falls entirely on the contractor.”

A priest and relatives near the scene said that all of the people in the car were Armenian Christians, who make up a small minority group in Iraq. The Oldsmobile was shot once in the radiator, witnesses said, in front of a plumbing supply store as it approached a convoy of white sport utility vehicles 50 yards away.

As the car kept rolling, a barrage of gunfire suddenly tore through its hood, roof and windshield, as well as the passenger side.

The guards who were in the convoy work for Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run company that has its headquarters in Dubai and is registered in Singapore, according to a statement by the company. Unity Resources was hired by RTI to provide security in Iraq.

In its statement, Unity Resources said that according to its initial information, the car had approached the convoy “at speed” and failed to stop in response to hand signals and a warning flare.

“Finally shots were fired at the vehicle and it stopped,” the company said.

The episode’s connection with the United States Agency for International Development is one of several parallels to the Sept. 16 shootings, in which the Iraqi government says 17 Iraqis died and 27 were wounded.

The Sept. 16 episode began when a convoy operated by Blackwater USA, an American private security company hired to protect the aid agency’s officials, entered Nisour Square in central Baghdad and fired several bullets toward a car the guards apparently considered a threat.

In the Tuesday shooting, like the one on Sept. 16, the car drifted forward after the initial burst, prompting guards to unleash a barrage of gunfire. And there were no government officials or policy experts in either of the convoys: the Nisour Square convoy was controlling traffic as part of a larger operation, and the convoy in Karada was on a routine movement that involved only security guards, according to American officials.

Although the United States Embassy in Baghdad has said almost nothing about the Nisour Square episode while an American investigation grinds on, the Iraqi government has said its own investigation concluded that the shootings were an act of “deliberate murder” and called on the Blackwater guards to be prosecuted.

Ali Jafar, a traffic policeman posted near the Karada shooting, said he thought the similarities between the cases were undeniable.

“They are killing the people just like what happened in Nisour Square,” Mr. Jafar said. “They are butchering the Iraqis.”

The new shootings happened at an extremely difficult time for the State Department, which relies heavily on Blackwater to protect its diplomats whenever they work outside the fortified Green Zone. As a result of new restrictions placed on Blackwater after the Nisour Square shootings, the State Department’s numerous programs for rebuilding Iraqi government and technical institutions have been seriously hampered.

Embassy officials have vowed to continue their operations even as they increase oversight of Blackwater operations. But Tuesday’s episode appears to show that the new oversight comes with many loopholes: Unity Resources is not working directly for the State Department, but for RTI International, which has been contracted by the aid agency to provide experts on local governing.

In fact, an American Embassy spokesman said, the State Department has no say in the operations of security companies employed by government contractors. “Their contract might be with A.I.D., but that doesn’t shed any light on their choice of security contractor,” he said.

A spokesman for Unity Resources, Martin Simich, said Tuesday that he was unsure whether the guards involved in the shooting had been interviewed by American authorities.

On Tuesday, the convoy of white S.U.V.’s was stopped in the eastbound lane of Karada Street at an intersection with an alley lined with low concrete homes, witnesses said. A man who works at the plumbing shop, who gave his name only as Muhammad, said the Oldsmobile was approaching the convoy from behind.

He said he heard no warnings. “They shot from the back door,” he said. “The door opened and they fired.”

Two witnesses said they heard a single shot first, which apparently punctured the Oldsmobile’s radiator, spilling coolant onto the street about 50 yards from where the convoy was parked. As the car continued rolling, the guards opened up with a barrage of sustained automatic fire. The car finally came to a stop about 10 yards from the convoy at a point that, three hours later, was marked by blood stains, broken glass and tufts of brown hair.

The plumbing shop employee said the convoy moved out right away, without checking to see what damage had been done or to offer medical help.

The Oldsmobile was towed to a nearby police station.

The priest and relatives near the scene identified the driver as Maruni Uhanees, 59, and the dead passenger as Jeniva Jalal, 30.

As twilight set in, family members gathered beside the car in a dirt alley outside the police station, staring at the blood and hair on the inside of the windshield.

A brother-in-law of the driver, Hrair Vartanian, said Ms. Uhanees was the mother of three grown daughters. As he spoke, one daughter arrived and looked at the blood stains, crying softly.

Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr., Qais Mizher and Ahmad Fadam from Baghdad, John M. Broder from Washington, and Graham Bowley from New York.

Reporting was contributed by Richard A. Oppel Jr., Qais Mizher and Ahmad Fadam from Baghdad, John M. Broder from Washington, and Graham Bowley from New York.


October 10, 2007

An Israeli Strike on Syria Kindles Debate in the U.S.

By MARK MAZZETTI and HELENE COOPER
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 — A sharp debate is under way in the Bush administration about the significance of the Israeli intelligence that led to last month’s Israeli strike inside Syria, according to current and former American government officials.

At issue is whether intelligence that Israel presented months ago to the White House — to support claims that Syria had begun early work on what could become a nuclear weapons program with help from North Korea — was conclusive enough to justify military action by Israel and a possible rethinking of American policy toward the two nations.

The debate has fractured along now-familiar fault lines, with Vice President Dick Cheney and conservative hawks in the administration portraying the Israeli intelligence as credible and arguing that it should cause the United States to reconsider its diplomatic overtures to Syria and North Korea.

By contrast, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her allies within the administration have said they do not believe that the intelligence presented so far merits any change in the American diplomatic approach.

“Some people think that it means that the sky is falling,” a senior administration official said. “Others say that they’re not convinced that the real intelligence poses a threat.”

Several current and former officials, as well as outside experts, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the intelligence surrounding the Israeli strike remains highly classified.

Besides Ms. Rice, officials said that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was cautious about fully endorsing Israeli warnings that Syria was on a path that could lead to a nuclear weapon. Others in the Bush administration remain unconvinced that a nascent Syrian nuclear program could pose an immediate threat.

It has long been known that North Korean scientists have aided Damascus in developing sophisticated ballistic missile technology, and there appears to be little debate that North Koreans frequently visited a site in the Syrian desert that Israeli jets attacked Sept. 6. Where officials disagree is whether the accumulated evidence points to a Syrian nuclear program that poses a significant threat to the Middle East.

Mr. Cheney and his allies have expressed unease at the decision last week by President Bush and Ms. Rice to proceed with an agreement to supply North Korea with economic aid in return for the North’s disabling its nuclear reactor. Those officials argued that the Israeli intelligence demonstrates that North Korea cannot be trusted. They also argue that the United States should be prepared to scuttle the agreement unless North Korea admits to its dealing with the Syrians.

During a breakfast meeting on Oct. 2 at the White House, Ms. Rice and her chief North Korea negotiator, Christopher R. Hill, made the case to President Bush that the United States faced a choice: to continue with the nuclear pact with North Korea as a way to bring the secretive country back into the diplomatic fold and give it the incentive to stop proliferating nuclear material; or to return to the administration’s previous strategy of isolation, which detractors say left North Korea to its own devices and led it to test a nuclear device last October.

Mr. Cheney and Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, also attended the meeting, administration officials said.

The Israeli strike occurred at a particularly delicate time for American diplomatic efforts. In addition to the North Korean nuclear negotiations, the White House is also trying to engineer a regional Middle East peace conference that would work toward a comprehensive peace accord between Arabs and Israelis.

The current and former American officials said Israel presented the United States with intelligence over the summer about what it described as nuclear activity in Syria. Officials have said Israel told the White House shortly in advance of the September raid that it was prepared to carry it out, but it is not clear whether the White House took a position then about whether the attack was justified.

One former top Bush administration official said Israeli officials were so concerned about the threat posed by a potential Syrian nuclear program that they told the White House they could not wait past the end of the summer to strike the facility.

Last week, Turkish officials traveled to Damascus to present the Syrian government with the Israeli dossier on what was believed to be a Syrian nuclear program, according to a Middle East security analyst in Washington. The analyst said that Syrian officials vigorously denied the intelligence and said that what the Israelis hit was a storage depot for strategic missiles.

That denial followed a similar denial from North Korea. Mr. Hill, the State Department’s assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs, raised the Syria issue with his North Korean counterparts in talks in Beijing in late September. The North Koreans denied providing any nuclear material to Syria.

Publicly, Syrian officials have said Israeli jets hit an empty warehouse.

Bruce Riedel, a veteran of the C.I.A. and the National Security Council and now a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, said that American intelligence agencies remained cautious in drawing hard conclusions about the significance of the suspicious activity at the Syrian site.

Still, Mr. Riedel said Israel would not have launched the strike in Syria if it believed Damascus was merely developing more sophisticated ballistic missiles or chemical weapons.

“Those red lines were crossed 20 years ago,” he said. “You don’t risk general war in the Middle East over an extra 100 kilometers’ range on a missile system.”

Another former intelligence official said Syria was attempting to develop so-called airburst capability for its ballistic missiles. Such technology would allow Syria to detonate warheads in the air to disperse the warhead’s material more widely.

Since North Korea detonated its nuclear device, Ms. Rice has prodded Mr. Bush toward a more diplomatic approach with North Korea, through talks that also include Japan, Russia, South Korea and China. Those talks led to the initial agreement last February for North Korea to shut down its nuclear reactor in exchange for fuel and food aid.

That deal angered conservatives who believed that the Bush administration had made diplomacy toward North Korea too high a priority, at the expense of efforts to combat the spread of illicit weapons in the Middle East.

“Opposing the Israeli strike to protect the six-party talks would be a breathtaking repudiation of the administration’s own national security strategy,” said John R. Bolton, former United States ambassador to the United Nations.

But other current and former officials argue that the diplomatic approach is America’s best option for dealing with the question of North Korean proliferation.

“You can’t just make these decisions using the top of your spinal cord, you have to use the whole brain,” said Philip D. Zelikow, the former counselor at the State Department. “What other policy are we going to pursue that we think would be better?”