FBI agent on pardons for Iraq massacre: ‘I thought President Trump had more character’
Just before Christmas, after President Trump had pardoned four former Blackwater operatives convicted of killing more than a dozen Iraqis during a 2007 Baghdad massacre, John Patarini says he received a phone call.
It came from the father of one of the dead.
Mohammed Kinani’s 9-year-old son, Ali, had been among the 17 civilians shot and killed when the Blackwater team opened fire in crowded Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007. More than 20 others were wounded.
Ali and his family had been stuck in gridlock surrounding a central Baghdad traffic circle when he was shot in the head and died instantly. His father told the BBC that Trump’s pardon of his son’s killers “broke my life again.”
Patarini, who now lives near Charlotte, headed the FBI delegation sent to Iraq to investigate the killings. It later recommended that criminal charges be brought against five employees of Blackwater, a highly controversial, private security firm based in North Carolina that had been hired by the federal government during the Iraq war.
The veteran FBI agent, now retired, said his conversation with the still-grieving Kinani moved him to tears.
“I just wanted him to know that we did the investigation, that they were prosecuted and they were convicted, and that justice doesn’t always end up where we’d like,” Patarini told the Observer.
There was one more thing.
“Just because they were pardoned,” Patarini said he told the father, “doesn’t relieve them of the responsibility for what they did.”
According to Patarani, Kinani replied this way: “God will judge them.”
Condemning the pardons
Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten and Paul Slough had been found guilty by U.S. juries of crimes ranging from manslaughter to first-degree murder in connection with the rampage. Heard, Liberty and Slough were convicted in 2014; Slough, charged with murder, was convicted in 2018. At the time of their pardons, the four were serving prison sentences ranging from 12 years to life.
A fifth defendant, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to two felonies connected to the killings and testified against his accomplices. He was sentenced in 2105 to one year and a day in prison. Trump did not pardon him.
All worked for Blackwater, which was owned and operated at the time by a close Trump ally, Erik Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Over the weekend, Patarani, now living with his wife in Lincoln County, publicly condemned Trump’s decision to free the men the FBI helped put in prison.
In a weekend letter to The New York Times, the 63-year-old said he was “disgusted” by the president’s pardons, which he described as reckless, ill-informed and politically motivated.
“President Trump should have had staff members review the trial evidence that led to the convictions and read the judges’ opinions and sentencing statements. God forbid they might have actually picked up the phone and called the investigators who built the case,” Patarini wrote in a 10-page opinion piece, which he said the Times solicited, then edited down to four paragraphs for its letters page.
“Having spent many hours with the innocent Iraqi victims who are permanently maimed and crippled because of the actions of these Blackwater guards, and the heartbroken family members of those killed, I am embarrassed for our country.”
Patarini’s criticism of the outgoing president — for whom the retired agent says he voted twice — didn’t stop there.
In an almost two-hour phone interview with the Observer this week, the Army veteran and former federal law enforcement officer said Trump’s decision had undermined the prosecution and punishment of those responsible for “the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians,” damaged the country’s standing in the world, and put Americans everywhere at risk.
“I’m so pissed off,” he said. “If the president were to call me, I would have to use all my restraint not to use words that I can’t use. There was absolutely no justification for what the shooters did and absolutely no justification for the president’s pardon.”
White House explains pardons
Not everyone agrees.
In announcing the pardons of Heard, Liberty, Slatten and Slough, the White House cited the men’s “long history of service” to the country as well as problems with the government’s prosecution of the case, which involved multiple trials and what the White House described as the belated discovery that the Iraqi lead investigator into the killings may have had ties to insurgent groups.
The statement said the president’s pardon was “broadly supported by the public” and also had the backing of a group of conservatives on Capitol Hill, including U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman of Rock Hill, S.C.
“Paul Slough and his colleagues didn’t deserve to spend one minute in prison,” Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for Slough, told The Associated Press. “I am overwhelmed with emotion at this fantastic news.”
“These are four innocent guys, and it is completely justified,” Bill Coffield, a lawyer for Evan Liberty, also told the AP.
After his release, Liberty said he felt at peace with his actions.
“I feel like I acted correctly,” he said. “I didn’t shoot at anybody that wasn’t shooting at me.”
Nonetheless, the president’s action drew broad international rebuke while reopening diplomatic wounds between the U.S. and the Middle East.
In a column for CNN, former FBI agent Thomas O’Connor, who was part of Patarini’s team in Iraq, said investigators never found any evidence to support the defendants’ contention that they drew their weapons only after being fired on by enemy insurgents.
“The families of those killed and wounded at Nisour Square will now watch those responsible for this tragedy go free thanks to a pardon by the President of the United States. This simply makes me sad and angry,” O’Connor wrote. “There is no forensic evidence of anyone shooting at the Blackwater team. How do I know? The evidence told me that.”
Looking back, Patarini said he and his team expected to investigate a tragic case of wartime collateral damage — of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire between the Blackwater team and Iraqi gunman. Within a matter of days on the ground in Baghdad, he said, that assessment changed. A two-week stay stretched into a month. Seven more visits would follow.
Said Patarini: “The longer we looked at it the more disgusting it became.”
The white Kia
Prosecutors — and Patarini — said Blackwater Team Raven 23 should never have been at Nisour Square to begin with.
The team, which included the defendants, asked for permission to help get a U.S. diplomat from central Baghdad back to the safety of the so-called Green Zone.
According to court documents, Raven 23 was ordered to stand down. They went anyway.
Right around noon, the group’s four armored vehicles reached the traffic circle at Nisour Square, which was more chaotic than usual due to ongoing construction.
The Blackwater vehicles came to a stop in the middle of the circle, blocking traffic in all directions. According to Patarini, cars began shuffling around to navigate the gridlock. One of them was a white Kia.
The defendants would later say they thought the car contained a suicide bomber. In fact, a young medical student, Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al-Rubia’y, was at the wheel with his physician mother sitting beside him.
Prosecutors said Slatten fired the first shot. Al-Rubia’y was the first to die.
Four of Slatten’s companions joined in with machine guns and grenade launchers, Patarini said, firing bullets and explosives that were illegal for Blackwater guards to use.
According to Patarini, his investigation showed that the team members were still firing indiscriminately a quarter of mile away as they speeded back to the Green Zone.
Later, the FBI found dozens of Army-issued shell casings at the site, Patarini said, but none that indicated there had been an exchange of gunfire with heavily armed insurgents dressed as police officers — as the Blackwater guards alleged.
“I’ve always wanted to ask them, ‘Answer me this, Sparky: If there really was a car bomb (in the Kia), why did you shoot at it with grenades? You’d set it off,’” Patarini said. “None of their excuses held up.”
One bad decision
The retired agent said he does not fear that his criticism of Trump will bring retaliation from the president’s supporters. Patarini says he doesn’t have a Facebook account, nor does he spend time on social media.
However, he declined to be photographed by the Observer or to supply a photo to appear with this story.
“This case is not about me. I’m just the guy bringing this forward,” he said. “This case is about the 17 killed and the 20-plus wounded ... Those are the people who should be on TV, and those are the people whose wounds and injuries and funerals should be presented to the world.”
Which brings him back to Patarini’s conversation with the dead boy’s father, and his hopes that he salvaged some of the faith Kinani once had in the word of the United States.
“The president gets bad information and he makes a bad decision. But that doesn’t mean all Americans are bad and that you don’t have justice here,” Patarini says he told the Iraqi.
But in a section of his column that did not appear in the Times, Patarini added this: “I really thought President Trump had more character and better judgment.”
