On Iraq: A past question revived

The New York Times and Washington Post both lead today with stories about Blackwater, the private military contractor, being contracted in 2004 by the CIA to run an assassination program against Al Qaeda operatives in Iraq. 

The story did not surprise me but it revived a question in my mind that neither article addresses. 

On March 31, 2004 four Blackwater operatives were ambushed at high noon in downtown Fallujah. Their mutilated, charred bodies were hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.  Within days, at explicit White House orders, the U.S. Marines were sent into town to find their murderers. 

The Marine Corps' senior officer in Iraq at the time has not been shy about expressing his distress at the mission (see Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City). Fallujah was flattened, civilian casualties were heavy, and the Sunni part of the long-simmering insurgency exploded all over Anbar province. 

What the unfortunate Blackwater guys were doing there has never been explained. 

I was in Iraqi Kurdistan at the time and it seemed bizarre to my Iraqi friends and myself that the men should be on their own in that part of Fallujah in broad daylight. The immediate massive response — just as the U.S. was planning to use military force against the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr — seemed very bad timing.

If they were part of the assassination program shouldn't we be told?  The Sunni insurgency would have happened anyway, but would it have been as massive, at the cost of hundreds of American lives, if the four mercenaries not been avenged with such savagery?

This is a critical question that reflects on the use of private military contractors, like Blackwater, now rebranded as Xe, so controversial were its actions in Iraq.

If you read this, pass it along ... preferably to a senior editor at the Times or the Post. We need more reporting to get to the bottom of  this. Or better yet, call CIA director Leon Panetta's office and ask for full disclosure of all the facts in this case.

http://www.globalpost.com/notebook/united-kingdom/090820/iraq-past-question-revived