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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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September 16th,
2009 - Another Lawsuit Targets Founder of Blackwater |
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Another Lawsuit
Targets Founder of Blackwater By Bill Sizemore The Virginian-Pilot September 16th, 2009 Yet another civil lawsuit
accuses Blackwater guards of driving through the streets of Baghdad randomly
shooting innocent Iraqis. The latest case accuses
Blackwater founder Erik Prince of personally directing murders from a 24-hour
remote monitoring "war room" at the private military company's
Moyock, N.C., headquarters. Prince "personally
directed and permitted a heavily-armed private army ... to roam the streets
of Baghdad killing innocent civilians," alleges the suit, filed by four
Iraqi citizens. Prince was well aware that
his men, including top executives, "viewed shooting innocent Iraqis as
sport," the suit says. In fact, "those who killed and wounded
innocent Iraqis tended to rise higher in Mr. Prince's organization than those
who abided by the rule of law." Prince's top executives
openly discussed "laying Hajjis out on cardboard" and "bragged
about their collective role in killing those of the Islamic faith," the
suit alleges. On more than one occasion,
the suit says, Prince's men went "night hunting" in helicopters
after 10 p.m. over the streets of Baghdad, wearing night goggles, killing at
random. The lawsuit says Prince
caused murders to occur on at least 11 occasions, including one and perhaps
more in the United States. The suit describes one case
in which a young man, not identified in the court papers, died after
photographing Anna Bundy, a Blackwater executive, packaging illegal weaponry
outfitted with silencers for shipment to Iraq. One employee is said to have
warned the young man that such photographs "are what get people
killed." Lawyers for the plaintiffs plan to use the legal discovery
process to learn whether Prince participated in the events leading to his
death. The latest suit, filed last
week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, is the sixth civil case brought
against Prince and his company, now known as Xe, by the Washington law firm
Burke O'Neil on behalf of more than 60 Iraqis or their estates. Many of them were injured or
killed two years ago today - Sept. 16, 2007 - in Baghdad's Nisoor Square in a
shooting incident that left 17 Iraqis dead and ultimately led to the loss of
Blackwater's diplomatic security contract. Five former Blackwater
guards face criminal charges of voluntary manslaughter in that incident. Last
week, federal prosecutors filed papers alleging a yearlong pattern of hostile
action against Iraqis by the defendants leading up to that shooting. In one episode described in
those papers, one of the five defendants, Evan Liberty, allegedly drove
through Baghdad on Sept. 9, 2007, a week before the Nisoor Square incident,
randomly shooting Iraqis through the porthole of an armored vehicle. The latest civil suit is an
apparent outgrowth of that event. The plaintiffs are four Iraqis who operated
a shop in Baghdad and were allegedly injured by Liberty's "wanton
shooting." Xe had no immediate comment
on the new allegations. External link: http://hamptonroads.com/2009/09/another-lawsuit-targets-founder-blackwater |