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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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January 16th,
2010 - Blackwater Guards’ Accounts of 2007 Attack on Civilians Unveiled |
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Blackwater Guards’
Accounts of 2007 Attack on Civilians Unveiled in Court Papers By Del Quentin Wilber Washington Post January 16, 2010 One Blackwater Worldwide
security guard thought he had witnessed a murder. Another felt that innocent
Iraqis "clearly were no threat to anyone." A third worried that his
managers would try to cover up what had happened. All three were horrified by
what they thought was an unprovoked attack in 2007 that left 14 Iraqi
civilians dead in Baghdad, prosecutors say. The guards' accounts of the
shooting by a team of Blackwater contractors emerged from prosecutors' court
papers that a federal judge ordered unsealed Friday, two weeks after he
dismissed manslaughter and weapons charges against five Blackwater
contractors in the incident. Federal prosecutors have
said the shooting was an unprovoked assault on civilians. They were seeking
to bring five guards - one has pleaded guilty - to trial on voluntary
manslaughter and weapons violations in the District's federal court. But on
Dec. 31, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina threw out all charges against
the guards, ruling that prosecutors had acted overzealously and recklessly in
their investigation. Urbina's decision followed
three weeks of closed hearings into the conduct of prosecutors, federal
agents and witnesses. On Friday, the judge ordered redacted motions filed by
prosecutors and defense attorneys to be unsealed, providing a detailed
account of the shooting and the government's efforts to investigate it. Until now, it was not clear
how other Blackwater guards had reacted to the Sept. 16, 2007, incident in
Nisoor Square, which strained relations between Washington and Baghdad. The
episode so badly stigmatized Blackwater that it renamed itself Xe Services,
and the incident prompted serious questions about how to police the behavior
of private contractors in war zones. The papers reveal that 19
Blackwater guards were providing security for diplomats under a State
Department contract and were members of a four-vehicle convoy that secured an
evacuation route for U.S. officials fleeing a bomb explosion. After the incident,
prosecutors wrote, three guards felt so terrible about what they had
witnessed that they vowed to report what occurred to authorities. "We
could not believe what we had just seen," one guard, Adam Frost, wrote
in a journal. Another, Mark Mealy, told
the grand jury that he saw "some heinous" acts that deeply upset
him. He also watched as two of the guards involved in the shooting patted
each other on the back and bragged "about what a great job they had
done," prosecutors wrote. Frost wrote in his journal
that a manager had encouraged him not to talk to FBI agents. The guards,
former members of the military and Iraq War veterans before joining
Blackwater, later testified before a grand jury. In the court papers, defense
attorneys argued that the five guards charged in the shooting - Evan Liberty,
Nicholas Slatten, Donald Ball, Dustin Heard and Paul Slough - fired in
self-defense. The attorneys also accused government officials of improperly
using immunized statements to build their case. The guards provided those
statements to State Department investigators in the hours and days after the
shooting, thinking they could be fired if they did not talk to the
investigators. They also thought they had a guarantee that their statements
would not be used against them. Attorneys for the guards
urged Urbina to throw out the indictment. Two of the guards' attorneys went
further and accused prosecutors of engaging in intentional misconduct by
withholding helpful evidence from grand jurors and by using the immunized
statements in their investigation. According to the court
papers and Urbina's 90-page opinion, it was clear early on that Justice
Department officials were worried about how the guards' statements might
hinder their investigation. One team of prosecutors and
agents was taken off the case after it read some of the guards' statements,
and another squad was assigned to the case. The department set up a second
platoon of prosecutors to review material to ensure it wasn't
"tainted" before reaching trial lawyers or agents. In the court papers,
prosecutors said they managed to avoid immunized statements and any errors
were harmless. "The United States has
proved that its evidence stems from legitimate sources wholly independent of
any immunized statements," they wrote. Prosecutors added that they
thought the first oral statements by the guards were not protected by
promises of immunity. Urbina wrote that
prosecutors should have known better and avoided all of the statements and
disregarded advice from experienced Justice Department lawyers on the matter.
He also wrote that prosecutors provided tainted material to grand jurors and
withheld from them material favorable to the guards. In throwing out the case,
Urbina sided with defense attorneys and found that the guards provided the
statements, in which they admitted opening fire, to investigators because
they were afraid they would lose their jobs if they didn't cooperate. They
also thought their statements could not be used against them in court, the
judge found. The Justice Department has
not disclosed whether it will appeal the ruling. Staff researchers Julie Tate
and Meg Smith contributed to this report. External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/15/AR2010011503937.html |