On a scorching September 2007 Baghdad afternoon, a 19-man convoy of four armored Blackwater trucks rolled into Nisour Square, one of the city’s most congested and volatile intersections.
What happened next would ignite an international firestorm, trigger a yearslong legal battle and leave four American contractors known by their team’s call sign, Raven 23, branded war criminals.
It became “one of the most notorious incidents of the Iraq War,” writes Gina Keating in her new book, “Raven 23: How the Department of Justice Betrayed American Heroes” (Broadside Books). Yet “nearly every ‘fact’ in the official story was a lie.”
At the heart of the controversy: a white Kia.
Iraqi police officers stationed at the circle said it refused to stop as the Raven 23 team, employed by the private-security firm Blackwater USA, attempted to secure the intersection.
The contractors maintained the Kia’s driver ignored repeated warnings and accelerated toward them in a manner consistent with a suicide bomber toting an improvised explosive device.
Several team members believed they were under imminent threat and unloaded their machine guns.
Whether it was self-defense or overreaction, the Nisour Square incident left 17 Iraqis dead, including two children, and the US-Iraq diplomatic relationship in crisis.
The American government would later describe the event as an unprovoked massacre, portraying Raven 23 as reckless, trigger-happy thugs firing into civilian traffic without cause.
Keating proclaims a much murkier reality.
“The government went to create a cartoonish narrative in which racist, bloodthirsty mercenaries drove into a peaceful area of Baghdad and shot people for no reason,” Keating tells The Post in an exclusive interview.
“They lied to two grand juries, hid and destroyed evidence, suborned perjury and tried to intimidate the men into taking plea deals. It was done in plain sight, yet the Washington, DC, media reported on none of it.”
The four men at the center of it all — Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Paul Slough and Nick Slatten — were soldiers before they were contractors, trained for the kind of split-second decisions war requires.
Slough, a former Texas National Guard soldier, was one of the team’s most experienced members, having completed multiple combat tours before joining Blackwater.
Liberty, an ex-Marine security guard at US embassies, brought a precision and discipline that stood out even in Baghdad’s chaos.
Heard, a Marine machine gunner from Tennessee, was known for being steady under pressure.
Slatten, the youngest, had served in the 82nd Airborne and was blunt, intense and fiercely loyal.
They weren’t mercenaries roaming Iraq unchecked. Their job, per Keating, was to provide security for State Department officials — driving convoys, maintaining defensive perimeters and reacting instantly to threats in a war zone where suicide bombers and ambushes were daily risks.
“I don’t know of anything different that I could have done that day,” Slough told the author of his decision to fire at the Kia’s driver.
“I responded the way they trained us. The befuddling thing was we didn’t change,” he said. “The narrative changed.”
What began as a textbook security response was reframed into a political scandal, with the men cast as rogue gunmen to satisfy a furious Iraqi government and a scandal-averse US State Department.
“The Raven 23 men had the misfortune of having their case play out during America’s most acute disillusionment with the Iraq War and after Americans had listened to Democrats complain in the 2008 midterms about how much money Blackwater Worldwide was profiting from the war,” Keating tells The Post.
“The military was looking for a scapegoat,” she writes. “It needed an explanation for why Iraq was still a boiling cauldron of hatred and mayhem, and in Nisour Square they found one.”
The first signs came weeks after the shooting, when a State Department source leaked the men’s protected statements to ABC News, a clear violation of their employment contracts.
The leak wasn’t just a breach of protocol — it was the opening salvo in a campaign both parties in Washington could exploit.
With midterm elections looming and public patience for the war evaporating, lawmakers who had once backed the conflict now needed cover.
Raven 23 offered it — a headline-friendly distraction from the reality that Iraq was collapsing on their watch.
In one high-profile hearing, Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who chaired the oversight panel, sidestepped whether the men’s split-second war-zone decisions had been justified. He zeroed in on their employer’s bottom line.
“Privatizing is working exceptionally well for Blackwater,” Waxman said. “The question for this hearing is whether outsourcing to Blackwater is a good deal to the American taxpayer.”
That framing would dominate much of the coverage. The contractors’ military service, the possibility they had acted within their training and Baghdad’s lethal unpredictability all took a back seat to a neater storyline: unaccountable corporate guns for hire running amok.
“The story of Raven 23 got curiouser and curiouser the more I looked into it — especially from the perspective of the media coverage,” Keating writes.
The State, Defense and Justice departments, along with the FBI, “had taken a gun battle in the world’s most dangerous city and spun it to suit their competing messages to the American public.”
The result wasn’t clarity; it was choreography.
The prosecution that followed was a masterclass in political damage control.
Among the most damning omissions: no reliable witness statements, no forensic evidence linking the men’s weapons to the fatalities and no secure crime scene.
A ballistics analysis found the murder Slatten was charged with “was not even possible at the angle in which the command vehicle was facing,” Keating writes.
The single bullet fragment recovered from one of the wounded civilians “was a match not for the Blackwater weapons but for the AK-47s carried by the Iraqi insurgency,” she says.
Vehicles allegedly blasted by Blackwater machine guns and grenades sat in an open, uncovered parking lot for nearly a decade before trial. Key shell casings vanished. Vehicle positions were altered in photographs.
More than a dozen Iraqi witnesses who corroborated the team’s account were never interviewed or called to testify.
Instead, the Justice Department built its case on a single, deeply flawed eyewitness identification that placed Slatten as the first shooter, portraying him as “an evil racist” who opened fire without provocation “as part of his plan to kill as many Iraqis as possible as retribution for 9/11,” Keating writes.
Assistant US Attorney Patrick Martin told jurors Slatten had peered through his scope “with hatred in his heart, an intense dislike and hatred for the Iraqi people.”
While many outlets labeled the incident a civilian massacre, few questioned the investigation’s integrity.
The overlapping jurisdictions, missing evidence and Baghdad disorder were flattened into a simplified headline.
The men at the center of it ceased to be veterans operating under combat conditions; they were symbols. And symbols don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
Reporting the story carried its own hazards.
“Some of the Raven 23 family members and I experienced anomalies with our cell phones, including dropped calls and weird noises on calls, wiped contact lists and mysteriously deleted emails,” Keating says.
She also faced backlash professionally, with her literary agent refusing to represent the project on “moral grounds.”
All four were convicted in federal district court in 2014. Slatten received life for first-degree murder; the others, 30-year terms for manslaughter and firearms charges.
They spent years in high-security prisons, fighting appeals under the weight of the war-criminal label.
President Trump granted full pardons to all four in December 2020, but freedom could not return the years lost or undo the damage.
“This was a show trial designed to serve several ends: to appease the anger of the Iraqi people at the endless violence the war unleashed, to get Nouri al-Maliki elected prime minister of Iraq despite a lack of popular support, to preserve Iraqi oil leases for American companies and to assuage American guilt for the costly, unnecessary debacle that was the Iraq War,” Keating says.
“If the government wanted to deliver ‘American justice’ to Iraqis, it needed to follow the rules of normal American criminal trials. And it was not doing that.”
The experience shattered Slough’s faith in his country.
“As a citizen, as a warrior, as a soldier — when you go into service of your nation, you agree to uphold the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and you go in with full faith against enemies that your country has identified as such,” he told the author.
“It was so mind blowing that the government wasn’t just lying to the American people — they had been lying for generations, and it was staggering to see it in real time.”
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