Blackwater Top Manager Threatened to Kill U.S. Investigator Probing Iraq Shootings
This blockbuster scoop from the New York Times might explain (at least in part) why former Blackwater boss Erik Prince decided to leave the country:
Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor’s operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater’s top manager there issued a threat: “that he could kill” the government’s chief investigator and “no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,” according to department reports.
American Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy’s relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.
After returning to Washington, the chief investigator wrote a scathing report to State Department officials documenting misconduct by Blackwater employees and warning that lax oversight of the company, which had a contract worth more than $1 billion to protect American diplomats, had created “an environment full of liability and negligence.”…
Today, as conflict rages again in Iraq, four Blackwater guards involved in the Nisour Square shooting are on trial in Washington on charges stemming from the episode, the government’s second attempt to prosecute the case in an American court after previous charges against five guards were dismissed in 2009.
The shooting was a watershed moment in the American occupation of Iraq, and was a factor in Iraq’s refusal the next year to agree to a treaty allowing United States troops to stay in the country beyond 2011.
M D Reese June 29th, 2014 at 11:28 pm
Government services should not be privatized, especially when they have a license to kill.
fahvel June 30th, 2014 at 3:36 am
NO primary or necessary services should be privatized.
M D Reese July 1st, 2014 at 12:31 pm
I agree. I live in a remote area and all of our health care services are run by the catholic church. I was in the ER once after being hit in the arm by a large rock. As I sat there in pain and shock, their two pressing questions for me were how was I going to pay, and what were my RELIGIOUS “preferences”. I went off on them. My blood pressure probably went through the roof.
Dave Lanson June 30th, 2014 at 8:05 am
They should be held at Guantanamo under the same conditions as the other terrorism suspects.