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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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September 13th,
2009 - Prosecutors in Iraq Case See Pattern by Guards |
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Prosecutors in
Iraq Case See Pattern by Guards By James Risen New York Times September 13, 2009 Washington - Private
security guards who worked for Blackwater repeatedly shot wildly into the
streets of Baghdad without regard for civilians long before they were
involved in a 2007 shooting episode that left at least 14 Iraqis dead,
federal prosecutors charge in a new court document. While traveling through
Baghdad in heavily armored vehicles, at least one of the guards, under
contract with the State Department to provide security for United States
Embassy personnel, fired an automatic weapon “without aiming” while another
deliberately fired into the streets to “instigate gun battles in a manner
that was inconsistent with the use of force and escalation of force policies
that governed all Blackwater personnel in Iraq,” the federal prosecutors
stated. The new accusations were
included in a document filed by prosecutors last week in the criminal case
against five former Blackwater guards who have been charged with manslaughter
in federal court in Washington in connection with the shootings in Nisour Square,
in Baghdad, on Sept. 16, 2007. The guards have pleaded not
guilty and have argued that they did not fire their weapons with criminal
intent in the Nisour Square case. The prosecutors are trying
to prove that the shootings were part of a larger pattern of reckless
behavior. “These prior bad acts are
relevant to establish that the defendants specifically intended to kill or
seriously injure the Iraqi civilians that they fired upon at Nisour Square,”
the court document says. Part of the evidence relates
to the states of mind of the Blackwater guards, and whether statements they
allegedly made about killing Iraqis were factors in the shootings. The
document says, for example, that one of the guards, Nicholas Slatten, told
people that “he wanted to kill as many Iraqis as he could as payback for 9/11
and he repeatedly boasted about the number of Iraqis he had shot.” The new allegations also
seem to raise questions about whether there was adequate oversight of the
security details by either Blackwater or the State Department. Defense lawyers have not
formally responded to the government’s latest document, and a defense lawyer
for one of the guards reached on Sunday declined to comment. Previously, the
defense stated that the government’s evidence was weak and that its case was
without merit. The trial is set to begin in February. The guards were indicted by
a federal grand jury last December after a criminal investigation by the
F.B.I. in Iraq and were arraigned in federal court in Washington in January.
The case involves by far the bloodiest episode in Iraq linked to private
security guards protecting American diplomats, and it has transformed the
debate in both Washington and Baghdad over the proper role of private
contractors in a war zone. The Blackwater guards,
assigned to a four-vehicle convoy known as Raven 23, drove into a traffic
circle at Nisour Square in downtown Baghdad around noon that day and opened
fire with a sniper rifle, machine guns and grenade launchers. After the episode,
Blackwater officials said that the guards had been responding to fire from
insurgents, but prosecutors charge that they fired on unarmed civilians,
including many who were shot in their cars while they were trying to flee. The government points to
specific prior incidents to make the case that the Nisour Square shootings
were not isolated. In May 2007, one guard, Evan Liberty, fired his automatic
weapon without aiming from the turret of a Blackwater vehicle near Amanat
City Hall in Baghdad, according to the document. That September, it states,
Mr. Liberty was driving a vehicle near the same city hall and fired an
automatic weapon without aiming and while still trying to drive. That second
incident occurred just one week before the Nisour Square shootings. Mr. Liberty and two other
guards, Paul Slough and Mr. Slatten, were also said to have routinely thrown
frozen water bottles, frozen oranges and other items at unarmed civilians and
vehicles as they drove through Baghdad, “in an attempt to break automobile
windows, injure and harass people, and for sport,” the court document states. The two other guards named
in the case are Dustin L. Heard and Donald W. Ball. The document does not
specify the source or sources of information for the new accusations. But in
prosecuting the men, federal lawyers appear to be relying heavily on
testimony from a sixth guard, Jeremy P. Ridgeway, who has pleaded guilty and
is cooperating with the government. Blackwater, which has
changed its name to Xe Services, has not been charged in the case, but the
shooting aftermath has hurt the company’s business deeply. This year, Xe
(pronounced “zee”) lost its contract to provide diplomatic security for
United States Embassy officials in Baghdad, and its longstanding, but more
secret, ties to the Central Intelligence Agency have come under new scrutiny
as well. The shootings have caused a
deep-seated political reaction in Iraq against private security contractors,
leading the Iraqi government to demand successfully that the United States
agree to make the contractors subject to Iraqi law. Previously, the contractors
had been granted immunity from Iraqi law, even while it was unclear which
American laws governed their behavior. The company also faces a
civil lawsuit filed in the United States on behalf of the Iraqi victims that
day. This summer, Leon E.
Panetta, the C.I.A. director, told Congress that he had found that during the
Bush administration, the agency had once considered using Blackwater in a
covert assassination program. Officials have said that the
plan was never implemented. But the company still has other contracts with
the C.I.A., including one that calls for Xe’s personnel to handle and load
bombs and rockets on Predator drones at secret bases in Pakistan and
Afghanistan. External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/world/middleeast/14contractors.html |