[Note: On September 16th, 2007, 17 Iraqi civilians were slaughtered and at least 27 wounded, in an unprovoked attack by para-military contractors (mercenaries) employed by a US government contract with a company in North Carolina called Blackwater USA (now Blackwater Worldwide). The dead and wounded were simply sitting in their cars in a traffic jam in Nisour Square when the Blackwater contingent approached in military vehicles and opened fire. To this day, no Blackwater employee has been prosecuted by any court for this atrocity, one of dozens which have allegedly been perpetrated by such military contractors with impunity. On October 20th, 2007, seven activists (Steve Baggarly, Elizabeth Brockman, Mark Colville, Peter DeMott, Mary Grace, Laura Marks and Bill Streit) entered the property of Blackwater's headquarters and staged a dramatic re-enactmant of the Nisour Square Massacre. After arrest and two trials, they were found guilty of trespass and resisting or refusing to comply with an officer. Prior to sentencing, Steve Baggarly offered the following statement:]
A joint study released in October 2006 by the Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al
Mustansiriya University in Baghdad estimated Iraqi
casualties from the March 2003 US invasion to July
2006 at 655,000. Using internationally accepted
methods for determining casualties in war zones, and
with 90% of interviewees presenting death
certificates, the study found that about 2.5% of
Iraq’s population died as a consequence of the war up
to that point. It estimated that over 1/3 of those
were killed by US violence. During that time, Iraq
suffered the equivalent of 17 Virginia Tech massacres
per day. The US invasion created the climate of
violence and abuse against all of Iraq’s people which
the occupation sustains daily. The past 18 months the
violence has continued. It stands to reason that
several times the number of fatalities have been
wounded, orphaned, widowed, blinded, raped,
terrorized, tortured, or driven mad by the war. Add to
that some 4.2 million Iraqi refugees and one gets a
picture of an entire nation being destroyed, its
people killed, maimed, and forced out, its children
targeted and traumatized.
In Nisoor Square Mohammed Hafiz was driving four
children when Blackwater mercenaries riddled the car
with bullets. His 10 year old son Ali was shot in the
head. Mohammed had to gather up pieces of the child’s
skull and brains for the burial. During one point in
the massacre Blackwater operatives concentrated fire
on a passenger bus. A small boy fled the bus in terror
and was shot down as was his mother who ran after him.
The Nisoor Square massacre is the Iraq war in
microcosm.
As the rubble of World War II still smoldered, French
philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “What the world
expects of Christians is to get out of their
abstractions and stand face to face with the bloody
mess that is our history today. Christians must speak
out and utter their condemnation in such a way that
never a doubt, never a single doubt, can arise in the
heart of even the simplest person.”
On October 20th we tried to speak out clearly by
reenacting the Nisoor Square massacre on Blackwater’s
front doorstep. We tried to vividly depict for the
American people that the Nisoor Square massacre and
the vast suffering our nation has heaped on Iraq is no
abstraction. We also hoped to condemn the 2003 US
invasion and occupation of Iraq as an illegal war of
aggression under International Law and to expose US
law and courts as complicit in their execution.
Indeed, US law has immunized Blackwater, both in Iraq
and at home, allowing it unrestricted license to kill
and a five year reign of terror. For starters, under
Nuremburg Principles VI and VII the Nisoor Square
massacre and the shooting of hundreds if not thousands
of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater are crimes against
peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The courts pretend that adherence to the law is what
makes for an orderly and peaceable world, while, in
fact, US law and courts stand idly by while the US
military and private armies like Blackwater have
killed, maimed, brutalized, and destroyed the homes
and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. In
the end US courts trample International Law, as well
as God’s law of love for all people, by
rubber-stamping every US war and military
intervention, invasion, incursion, occupation, police
action, and special forces operation coming out of the
Pentagon—and they are many and constant. Our courts
even protect our world’s largest stockpiles of weapons
of mass destruction despite international treaties and
laws that declare them illegal and demand their
disarmament. US courts make sure that if our weapons
of mass destruction are one day used to destroy the
planet and all life on it, to undo all of God’s
creation, that it will be perfectly legal.
So, what are we to do when the laws of the land are
murderous? Laws everywhere that protect militarism in
all its guises are a scourge upon the earth and its
people. On October 20th we hoped to join those around
the world who are opposing the forces of death by
breaking such laws. We hoped to add our voices to the
global outcry for Blackwater to leave Iraq
immediately. Blackwater and the entire US military
presence in Iraq need to be repatriated today and
tonight we must begin massive reparations to an entire
people we are destroying. There is blood on all of our
hands, we are all enmeshed in the structures of
militarism, we all participate in such atrocities
through our votes, our dutiful payment of taxes and
our silence. We must repent, disarm, and redistribute
the planet’s wealth. We must stop heaping corpses upon
the altar of national security and instead worship God
who resides in its victims.
As an aside, judge, I won’t cooperate with a sentence
of community service as I feel that our action at
Blackwater was a community service, and neither will I
pay any fines as I believe that everything belongs to
God and thus try to render as little to Cesar as
possible.
