The firm formerly known as Blackwater is populating the news cycle yet again, this time in a string of reports stating that this private military firm still has ties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Germany, while also sidestepping legal mines in the United States.
News has just landed that on May 5, 2009 in Kabul, Afghanistan, two Blackwater (XE) operatives allegedly shot and killed two Afghanistan nationals and wounded a third. These men were in the country acting as military trainers, not diplomatic guards or a fighting force. Yet, within this role, they managed to exterminate two innocent lives. As Obama expands the war in Afghanistan, he wants more trainers on the ground to equip Afghans with the knowledge to eventually take over this war once our troops leave at the end of the bizarrely revealed timetable. With that, more incidents like these will occur with Blackwater on the ground – it seems that you can take the soldier out of the killing field but not the killing field out of the soldier. And, the gunfire of this incident has punctured relations between Karzai and the White House, an affiliation we must try to keep bulletproof not by trial and error but by restraint.
Last week prosecutors in Germany announced that an investigation is underway to uncover information about the CIA and Blackwater’s secret operations in 2004 to assassinate a German citizen who may have had ties to al Qaeda. Government-sanctioned assassination attempts are illegal enough, but what abuses the moral mind even more is that we are actually outsourcing these labors to a trigger happy firm that keeps misery well accompanied. The thought experiment that readers must do is ask themselves if the German government outsourced assassination work to a private firm where the suspected targets were in New York City or Dallas, how would the US react? How would American citizens react?
Another grim report landing last week was of the settlement between Blackwater and the Iraqi victims in the Nissor Square Massacre and six other gruesome and unforgivable incidents. Blackwater is to pay $100,000 for each human being they killed and $30,000 for each human being they shot and injured, with the grand total reaching $6 million to the victims' families who say that they were forced to take the settlement. Blackwater receives $1.5 billion for work in Iraq alone, and 90 percent of that money comes from the US government. Tax payers paying for relentless illegal killing is one thing, but that money being pinched when the time to pay grieving families has come is an infinite injustice. Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, commented that the firm is “pleased” and ready to go back to business. Many Iraqi government officials are calling the company’s work a “culture of lawlessness”, especially in the face of the reptilian bargaining power the firm has over its victims. Chalk one up for the bad guys while chalk outlines continue to sweater the streets of Iraq.
News of this settlement tiptoed alongside reports that two Blackwater operatives were killed during the December 30th suicide bombing of the CIA station in Khost, Afghanistan. All contracts between the CIA and Blackwater were supposed to be cancelled last month. Yet, at a highly sensitive meeting where an intelligence asset (who turned out to be a double agent suicide bomber) was to reveal important information about top targets like Ayam al-Zawahiri and potentially Osama bin Laden, somehow Blackwater was still there. The CIA station at Khost is the pulse of the intelligence operations in the area, and if Blackwater was there that means the ties are not severed but rather triple knotted together.
Last but not least, a federal judge in our nation’s capital threw out all charges against five Blackwater soldiers for the Nisoor Square Massacre where seventeen Iraqi civilians were gunned down. The judge stated that the Justice Department built its case against the firm based on sworn statements by the guards who were given a promise of immunity by the State Department immediately following the massacre. Any information stated by the operatives could not be used against them because of this outlandishly improper immunity given to the killers. Why would the prime suspects of this slaughter be given immunity? Anyone "Law and Order" fan knows that immunity is given to a suspect in order to get something from them. What could it have possibly been in this case? Furthermore, why would the Justice Department use these statements as the spine of their case knowing that the operative had immunity, even after several warnings that their strategy would lead to a dismissal? Why not use the volumes of evidence that ranged from eye witness testimony to forensic data to build a case against these well-paid murderers?
Was the Justice Department sabotaging its own case in order to keep this firm that professionally does illegal bloody and dirty work happy? Does the Justice Department want them to keep quiet in court so it doesn’t get burned when word comes out that fingers from Washington sent Blackwater bullets in the civilians’ direction? Is this terroristic firm here to stay in our fight against terrorism? Perhaps the Iraqis were right. This is becoming a “culture of lawlessness.” However, maybe it’s not Blackwater’s culture. Maybe it’s ours.
