It was around noon in Baghdad on September 16, 2007, when “Raven 23”, a convoy of four SUVs and tactical support staff from the private military company Blackwater, approached Nisoor Square.
Blackwater guards jumped out of vehicles to disrupt traffic for a US diplomatic team. At 12:08 pm, Nicholas Slatten, the team’s sniper, started shooting a white Kia sedan.
For the next 20 minutes, guards used high-caliber machine guns and grenades to kill 17 Iraqi civilians – including two children – and wound 17 others. The FBI determined that there was no justification for at least 14 of the murders.
The massacre sparked a wave of international outrage at the culture of impunity that surrounded private security contractors. It took almost eight years, but five members of Raven 23 were convicted in the case and sent to prison.
On Tuesday night, President Trump forgave four of them, a decision that reflected his tolerance for illegal military violence and reignited anger over one of the most disturbing episodes of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq.
“President Trump has reached a shameful new low with Blackwater’s pardons,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the National Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “These military contractors were condemned for their role in the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians and their actions caused devastation in Iraq, shame and horror in the United States and a worldwide scandal.”
On a statement on Twitter Urging the US government to reconsider pardons, Iraq’s Foreign Ministry said the decision violates “the values of justice, human rights and the rule of law” and “ignores the dignity of the victims”.
Iraqi politicians and other figures have also turned to social media to criticize Trump for the change.
“To forgive the Blackwater killers is to renew the crime committed against the Iraqi people,” tweeted Muhammad Waeli, an Iraqi commentator.
US opponents used this as evidence of Washington’s hypocrisy.
“There must be a position not only by the Iraqi government, but by international societies and rights groups, that the United States operates with double standards,” Naeem Aboudi, Iraqi lawmaker and former spokesman for Asaib Ahl al Haq, a faction paramilitary allied with Iran, said in a telephone interview.
“These men were tried in US courts, they are murderers, and it was a very clear crime, with defenseless innocent civilians as victims killed in cold blood.”
In a statement announcing the pardons – in between 20 pardons or commutations that the president issued on Tuesday – the White House said they were “widely supported by the public”.
Revoking convictions has become a celebrated cause. Guards defenders have long insisted that the evidence has been distorted and are trying to cast doubt on the investigations conducted by the Iraqi police.
“God bless the President for having the courage – which many other presidents would not do – to forgive those men, those veterans who were there defending diplomats, placed in an impossible situation,” Pete Hegseth, former presenter of the Guard’s official Fox News Army National, said on the air Wednesday.
The investigation into the Nisoor massacre was the FBI’s largest and most expensive criminal investigation since the investigation of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Dozens of witnesses were transported from Iraq to Washington for trial, according to Paul Dickinson, a lawyer for the victims’ families.
“None of the victims had weapons,” he tweeted. “They were all shot and killed or injured in their cars.”
He said the youngest, 9-year-old Ali Kinani, was in the back seat of his father’s SUV when the car was hit by a volley of bullets. A bullet opened the boy’s head. Other victims include a 70-year-old farmer.
The charge was excruciating. Jeremy Ridgeway – a Blackwater contractor who was not pardoned – pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2008, received a one-year sentence and testified against his former colleagues.
A federal judge dismissed his case in 2009, but the Obama administration took it up again.
Three of the guards – Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – were eventually convicted of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Slatten was convicted of committing first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Ahmed Haithem Ahmed al Rubiay, a 19-year-old Iraqi medical student who was behind the wheel of the Kia, taking his mother to a medical consultation.
“By killing and maiming unarmed civilians, these defendants acted irrationally and without justification,” the US attorney’s office said in a statement at the time of the 2015 sentence.
“Combined, the amount of unnecessary human loss and suffering attributable to the defendants’ criminal conduct on September 16, 2007 is impressive.”
A federal appeals court halved sentences for Slough, Liberty and Heard and overturned Slatten’s conviction for first-degree murder. He was convicted again in 2019.
Speaking to the Tennessean newspaper that same year, Slatten’s girlfriend Whitney Judd said that lawyers for the four were pressuring Trump to grant presidential pardon.
“All are four dedicated combat veterans and the four are innocent men,” she said.
“Our goal is to bring Nick home, and now we feel that forgiveness is our best bet.”
In Iraq, Afghanistan and other stages of war, the United States came to rely heavily on contract security details that did not meet the same standards of discipline or responsibility as the American military.
The presence of contractors confused the lines of who was an officer and who was not, while eroding any sense of rules and regulations.
Military contracts have also become big business. Blackwater was founded by Erik Prince, a Trump ally whose sister, Betsy DeVos, is secretary of education.
The United States has consistently argued that it does not need to adhere to global judicial systems, such as the International Criminal Court, because it can bring its own people to justice when necessary.
Forgiveness seems to destroy that argument.
At times, Trump seemed to give his blessing to illegal military violence.
“We train our boys to be killing machines, so we process them when they kill!” he tweeted on October 12, 2019.
The following month, he intervened in three criminal or disciplinary cases involving United States military personnel.
He pardoned Mathew Golsteyn, a former Green Berets commander who faced charges for his role in the alleged execution of a suspected bomb maker in Afghanistan in 2010.
And he forgave Clint Lorance, a former Army lieutenant who was serving a prison sentence for ordering his soldiers to open fire on unarmed Afghan men in 2012. Two of them were killed and several members of Lorance’s platoon testified against him.
Trump also decided to undo disciplinary action against Edward Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who was acquitted of the murder of an ISP prisoner in Iraq in 2017, but convicted and demoted for breaking the rules by posing for body photos.
In an extraordinary example of presidential interference in the process of military discipline, Trump reversed the demotion and blocked an effort to expel him from his elite SEAL unit. Gallagher has since left the army.
Bulos reported from Amman and Megerian and Wilkinson from Washington.