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A Whitewash for Blackwater?
The federal manslaughter indictment of five Blackwater Worldwide security guards in the horrific massacre of more than a dozen Iraqi civilians in Baghdad may look like an exercise in accountability, but it's probably the exact opposite -- a whitewash that absolves the government and corporate officials who should bear ultimate responsibility.
If what Justice Department prosecutors allege is true, the five guards -- Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten and Paul Slough -- should have to answer for what happened on Sept. 16, 2007. The men, working under Blackwater's contract to protect State Department personnel in Iraq, are charged with spraying a busy intersection with machine-gun fire and grenades, killing at least 14 unarmed civilians and wounding 20 others. One man, prosecutors said yesterday, was shot in the chest with his hands raised in submission.
The indictment, charging voluntary manslaughter and weapons violations, demonstrates that those who engage "in unprovoked attacks will be held accountable," Assistant Attorney General Patrick Rowan claimed.
But it demonstrates nothing of the sort. As with the torture and humiliation of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, our government is deflecting all scrutiny from the corporate higher-ups who employed the guards -- to say nothing of the policymakers whose decisions made the shootings possible, if not inevitable.
Prosecutors did not file charges against the North Carolina-based Blackwater firm -- the biggest U.S. security contractor in Iraq -- or any of the company's executives. The whole tragic incident is being blamed on the guards who, prosecutors say, made Baghdad's Nisoor Square a virtual free-fire zone.
The Blackwater guards were nervous because of a car bombing elsewhere in the city that day. The company says the Blackwater convoy came under attack by insurgents, prompting the guards to fire in self-defense. "Tragically, people did die," defense attorney Paul Cassell told reporters.
There is a huge difference between self-defense and the kind of indiscriminate fusillade that the Blackwater team allegedly unleashed. Proper training and supervision -- which was the Blackwater firm's responsibility -- would have made it more likely for the guards to make the right split-second decisions amid the chaos of Nisoor Square. Rather than give Blackwater a free pass, the Justice Department ought to investigate the preparation these men were given before being sent onto Baghdad's dangerous streets.
Blackwater no doubt has rules and regulations about when and where its people can discharge their weapons. But were those rules enforced? Did the guards who were indicted yesterday have any reason to believe they would be punished for the rampage? Or were the shootings considered acceptable inside the Blackwater bunker? Company executives should have to answer these and other questions -- under oath.
But a real attempt to establish blame for this massacre should go beyond Blackwater. It was the Bush administration that decided to police the occupation of Iraq largely with private rather than regular troops.
There are an estimated 30,000 security "contractors" in Iraq, many of them there to protect U.S. State Department personnel. The presence of these heavily armed private soldiers has become a sore point between the U.S. and Iraqi governments. Until now, the mercenaries -- they object to that label, but it fits -- have been immune from prosecution by the Iraqi courts for any alleged crimes. This will change on Jan. 1, when the new U.S.-Iraqi security pact places them under the jurisdiction of Iraqi law. Blackwater and other firms are likely to have a harder time retaining and recruiting personnel, given the possibility of spending time in an Iraqi prison. Yet it is presumed that more private soldiers, rather than fewer, will be needed as the United States reduces troop levels.
Barack Obama has criticized the Bush administration's decision to outsource so many essentially military tasks in Iraq and elsewhere. The officials who made that decision, however, are not being held accountable -- not yet, at least. We deserve, at a minimum, a thorough investigation of what security contractors have done in the name of the United States.
Putting national security in the hands of private companies and private soldiers was bad practice from the start, and incidents such as what happened at Nisoor Square are the foreseeable result. The five Blackwater guards may have fired the weapons, but they were locked and loaded in Washington.
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11 Comments so far
Show AllEugene Robinson hits the nail on the head when he writes that the government officials who "hired" Blackwater and the company functionaries who loosed them on to Iraq's streets have a level of culpability that is entirely unaddressed in this prosecution. As is all too typical, the small fry get prosecuted, the big fish get stock options.
www.wunderman-comics.com
Sioux Rose
It may be considered "politically incorrect" to bring religion into this discussion, but I think it's more than relevant. Given that the CEO of Blackwater, Eric Prince, is a born again Christian who probably believes in End Times, he's no doubt managed to draw plenty of that specie of true believer into his mercenary fold. This belief, an irrational one that pits religion against religion in what to many is perceived as a holy war, predestined by God, changes the very nature of any premise of accountability (to those trapped by this ideological drift net).
We have heard stories of the names soldiers call the presumptive enemy, and how this downplays the humanity of those they shoot at. In a nonsensical war based on elaborate fabrications that UTILIZES the End Times myth the way Jim Jones got his followers to drink suicidal kool-aid, the concept of accountability becomes quite diffusive. The Law of Karma holds everyone to account at his or her level of understanding; and yet even blatant stupidity or religious delusion holds no impugnity since the Spirit of Truth is planted in every soul. It's known as the conscience.
A very wise analogy.
For the present, letting what or whom ever judge when the "end times" come---and this could be a self fulfilling prophecy, but one that need not become a reality. Religions, in all of their forms, need the conflict, then reconciliation or judgement then reconciliation to make their "case" for existence.
The only true manner anyone of us can be safe in our beliefs is for their to be no "decider" on religion, and if you violate established law in the conduct of your behavior, no matter how committed, then the courts should make the decision.
Mercenary forces on a historical level have never been awarded "special consideration" or "exemption" from established Law. If crimes committed on the soil of one nation can be tried in another, by the perpetrators, then the U.S.A. could be held in dire consequences for past behavior.
A "rational " approach should be applied and instead of these members of Blackwater being tried in the U.S.A. or Iraq, they and the company owners and managers, should be tried as co-conspirators, in the International Court of Justice, aka, the "World Court" in the "Hague". This would of course inform the world that this behavior will not be tolerated by civilized humanity, and that these people will not be allowed to direct the course of their own prosecution.
In ancient times, Mercenaries when captured alive were subjected to the most horrendous consequences, which is why most of them never were taken alive.
Let the "end times" be the end of the occupation according to the Obama 16 month plan, or, I pray, much sooner. In the years to come all Americans (unless we were regularly marching in the streets or or participating in hunger strikes we are all culpable to a greater or lesser degree) must come to see the folly and tragedy that the GWB wars of imperial aggression, and must support efforts to rebuild the shattered nation of Iraq.
Blackwater CEO Prince to the Senate: "...based on everything we currently know, the Blackwater team acted appropriately while operating in a very complex war zone on Sept. 16."
Meanwhile, this Blackwater indictment is actually meant to distract from the much larger issue - you know, the millions of innocent Iraqis killed and maimed by "our" military under direct orders from Bush, who said last night during his "Nightline" interview that he "lives in the Bible."
Except for those pesky Commandments, he later added...
Blackwater is Milton Friedman's devil child.
BUSHELZEBUBBANATION~Death, Destruction, Mayhem, Lies...
Business-As-Usual, Caught w/ its pants down
...Bad Moon Ri$in'...
http://flickr.com/photos/habitforming/2638856678/in/pool-828437@N25
Maybe it is a whitewash effort, but maybe not.
The legal issue of first impression in this federal criminal prosecution is jurisdiction: does the US government have authority to hold private contractor employees, technically operating under a contract with the State Department, criminally responsible for unlawful acts committed in a war zone overseas, on the same basis as if they were under a contract with the Defense Department?
This apparently is a legal distinction that has never been litigated before. If the point of the Blackwater indictments is to provide the American occupation forces with some political cover, while secretly betting that the federal courts will declare they are without jurisdiction to validly proceed, that would be a pretty clever whitewash effort indeed.
On the broader point Robinson makes about scapegoating the trigger pullers while the big corporate players skate away, don't forget the dynamics that will come into play. Each of these criminal defendants is likely to cite comments like those Mr. Prince gave in his Senate testimony as proof that they lacked criminal intent.
The defense lawyers will argue the grunts were led to believe (by training, and by their superiors' orders regarding the rules of engagement) that they were legally authorized to do what they did. A defense of this nature has actually been pled in federal prosecutions before, most notoriously in a commercial airline bombing case tried in Florida, in which the defendant argued he planted the bomb on a Cuban plane and killed dozens of people while working as a black ops contract agent for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Where all of this can twist back, in a non-whitewash fashion, is if the prosecutors chose to grant immunity to one or more of the trigger pullers in exchange for testimony about their training and their superiors' orders on the use of force. Just because the big corporate players weren't charged in the first set of grand jury indictments does not mean they are out of the woods forever.
Bill from Saginaw
Very good points, Bill. Mucho Mahalo. And irregardless of the manslaughter charge, any convictions will assist plaintiffs' counsel when pursuing Blackwater for civil damages on behalf of the victims of this outrage.
"The men, working under Blackwater's contract to protect State Department personnel in Iraq, are charged with spraying a busy intersection with machine-gun fire and grenades, killing at least 14 unarmed civilians and wounding 20 others. One man, prosecutors said yesterday, was shot in the chest with his hands raised in submission."
How is this any different from dropping a 5000 pound iron fragmentation bomb from 10,000 feet? Indiscriminate killing is indiscriminate killing. Its amazing how we try to draw fine shades of meaning such that killing is not murder. Killing is murder. Murder is killing. Killing is killing. Murder is murder. OOPS! Killed a wedding party. Sorry, my bad, but at least I won't be prosecuted.
-- EKATON --
snydly
It's the CORPORATION that should be on trial.