The Times has an in-depth look at the case against Blackwater for shooting into a crowd in Iraq:
WASHINGTON — The team of F.B.I. agents arrived in Iraq to investigate a shooting involving a private company that provided security for Americans in a war zone. It was October 2007, and the name of the company — Blackwater Worldwide — did not yet mean anything to the agents. But what they found shocked them.
Witnesses described a convoy of Blackwater contractors firing wildly into a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad the previous month, killing 17 people. One Iraqi woman watched her mother die as they rode the bus. Another died cradling the head of her mortally wounded son.
“This is the My Lai massacre of Iraq,” one agent remembers John Patarini, the team’s leader, saying as they were heading home.
Whether it concerns bankers after the crisis in 2008 or the shooting of innocent civilians by American contractors in Iraq, the prosecution does not seem to be up to the task.
That shooting in Nisour Square, along with the massacre by Marines of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, became a signature moment in the Iraq war. Five Blackwater security guards were indicted on manslaughter and weapons charges, and a sixth entered a plea deal to testify against his former colleagues.
But over the years, a case that once seemed so clear-cut has been repeatedly undermined by the government’s own mistakes.
Prosecutors are trying to hold together what is left of it. But charges against one contractor were dropped last year because of a lack of evidence. And the government suffered another self-inflicted setback in April when a federal appeals court ruled that the prosecution had missed a deadline and allowed the statute of limitations to expire against a second contractor, Nicholas A. Slatten, a former Army sniper from Tennessee who investigators believe fired the first shots in Nisour Square. A judge then dismissed the case against Mr. Slatten.
The appeals court unanimously rejected the argument that letting Mr. Slatten walk free would be a miscarriage of justice. If such an injustice occurred, the court said, it was caused by the government’s delays, which the court called “inexplicable.”
Thanks to Kush Arora.
“Undermined by the government’s own mistakes.” This goes under the heading of : Intentional and with malice aforethought. 1) Former National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander is launching a consulting firm to assist corporations in protecting themselves against NSA spying. 2) Glenn Greenwald’s new book “No Place to Hide” is now on sale. 3) The military and the CIA are in the middle of a huge fight. Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, the top commander in Afghanistan, is really pissed off because the CIA has informed him that they are pulling all of their operatives back from the countryside and into Kabul. It seems that because the military is leaving the field of battle (to be gone by December) CIA Director John Brennan claims that without military protection the CIA can’t do its job. And the military claims that it can’t do its job without the CIA’s help. When did we start fighting wars in this fashion? Where is Army Intelligence?