Today is a Muslim holiday, so the traffic through Baghdad's Nasoor Square was light. When I went out to take a look, Iraqi police ate lunch on a bench near their traffic booth and greeted passing colleagues with hugs and handshakes near the red fire truck stationed along the sprawling roundabout. The city government has refurbished the curbs with new cement work around the centerpiece, an abstract statue of eaglets bursting from an egg--"Nasoor" means "eagles" in Arabic. There are saplings planted on the circle's fringe. Workers have even installed a spiky metallic date palm that lights up at night, an artistic take on the city's trademark flora. The security improvement in Baghdad has allowed such public works to flourish. Occasionally holiday revelers cruised through the circle, clapping hands in their minivans or blowing a trumpet.

A little over a year ago, this was the scene of one of the worst single-incident killings of civilians by U.S. forces during the war when members of the U.S. Embassy's private guard force, contractors working for Blackwater Worldwide, opened fire on commuters, killing 17 men, women and children and injuring more than 30 others on Sept. 16, 2007. U.S. prosecutors in Washington this week announced that they had charged five of the men with manslaughter and accepted a guilty plea made by a sixth. The Blackwater guards insisted at the time of the shooting that they had come under attack but Iraqi and now U.S. investigators have concluded the killings were unjustified. The Iraqi government threatened to throw the company out of the country and U.S. diplomats, apparently caught by surprise by the furor, rushed to provide new oversight to Blackwater teams.

Hard feelings still permeate what continues as a flashpoint between Americans and Iraqis. This major crossroads is at the corner of a National Police compound and a route skirting the fortified Green Zone. Large convoys for the Iraqi security forces, U.S. military and private security contractors regularly push through, prompting civilian traffic to an abrupt halt.

As a colleague and I chatted with Iraqi police and videotaped the unusually orderly flow of cars, a U.S. Army convoy passed by, first three or four of the hulking, monstrous MRAP armored trucks and then a couple of armored Humvees. I had stopped filming about the same time as the soldiers parked far away. To my surprise, they headed our way.

"Let's have it," demanded the first one, gesturing to my camera. We told him we were American reporters taking footage of the notorious roundabout and he answered, "[You're] videoing our convoy at a f---ing checkpoint." We protested that this was a public square albeit with a casual Iraqi checkpoint open to all passersby at one spot and that reporters regularly videotape passing convoys. A second soldier arrived to provide a friendlier face for the U.S. military. Explaining that they view video as a security breach, he accepted that we were not a risk and let me keep my camera.

The Iraqi police nearby laughed about the encounter. "You're from the same tribe," one said, crossing his wrists to signal the handcuffs he believed would have been employed if I had been Iraqi (in fact, I'm often mistaken for Iraqi, with my light beard, and my female colleague wore a black headscarf to help her blend in, so I suspect that is how the troops viewed us from their vehicles).

We had been talking to the police about yesterday's news of the Blackwater indictments. They were pleased but not satisfied. "Anyone who kills someone should be killed. That is the law of God," said one Iraqi police officer, asking not to be identified offering an opinion outside his duty. "You call someone a 'terrorist' when they kill without reason." The police pointed to bullet holes in a utility post and their own police booth left over from the shooting.

At a bus stop, unemployed Ali Abdel Ali sat in a place where he says he sometimes comes to take a break and think. He knows a man whose mother was injured in the shooting. "[The guards] were armed and the people were unarmed," he said. "I don't know if they are going to sentence them. It will have to depend on the trial." He said he would need to hear the evidence before judging the men. But he said he feels safer coming to Nasoor Square these days than he would have a year ago. "I feel safe and you feel safe talking to me," he said, and smiled.