Mohammed forced a doctor to look at Ali. "This was the slaughter of innocent civilians who were merely going about their day when a Blackwater convoy rolled through a traffic circle after having violated orders to stand down and not exit the Green Zone and began firing indiscriminately into cars that were carrying people going to work.". The Blackwater guards appeared to have fired grenade launchers in addition to machine guns, according to the report. [83], In September 2013, the charges against Ball were dropped. 2004 Fallujah ambush - Wikipedia Blackwater mercenary defends role in Iraq massacre after Trump pardon "Paul Slough and his colleagues didn't deserve to spend one minute in prison," Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for Slough, told The Associated Press. They claimed they were fired on, but prosecutors said the Blackwater guards opened fire first. [17], Just before noon on September 16, 2007, a car bomb exploded near the Izdihar Compound where US and Iraqi officials were meeting,[20]:547 and a 19-man Blackwater Tactical Support Team (TST) consisting of a convoy of four trucks, answering to the call sign "Raven 23", took up positions on the south side of Nisour Square to secure an evacuation route for the US officials and another Blackwater team providing security for them. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Blackwater Worldwide - The New York Times Hussein Saheb Nasser, 35, told NBC News by telephone from his home in Baghdad on Wednesday. Iraqi traffic police initially tried to wave down the Blackwater men that there was no threat, but they too had to run for cover. Mohammed quickly got out of the car and saw blood inside the rear window. [12] The U.S. State Department has said that "innocent life was lost",[13] and according to The Washington Post, a military report appeared to corroborate "the Iraqi government's contention that Blackwater was at fault". How is Eric Prince still breathing? Their cover: "return of Ukrainians from the French Foreign Legion.". "These are four innocent guys, and it is completely justified," Bill Coffield, a lawyer for Evan Liberty, told the AP. "On what basis did Trump depend on to release them? Depicting a doomsday scenario in order to malign Russias calculated offensive in Ukraine to minimize collateral damage, mainstream reporting focused today on thefire that broke out [1] at Zaporizhzhia plant, one of Europes largest nuclear power plants situated 550 km southeast of Kyiv. Suddenly, bullets began to riddle Mohammeds car. [95][96] Heard, Liberty, and Slough were resentenced on September 5, 2019 to terms approximately half the original 30-year periods. Private Military Companies: Blackwater - Silent Professionals Contractor Banned by Iraq Over Shootings", "F.B.I. In 2013, Academi subsidiary International Development Solutions received an approximately $92million contract for State Department security guards. Five were charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter and a weapons violation: Donald Ball, a former Marine from West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard, a former Marine from Knoxville, Tennessee; Evan Liberty, a former Marine from Rochester, New Hampshire; Nicholas Slatten, a former army sergeant from Sparta, Tennessee, and Paul Slough, an army veteran from Keller, Texas. He was shot through the back with a massive exit wound in his chest. The expense was to show the people of Iraq that the U.S. government would hold people accountable for their crimes, no matter when or where they were committed. Former Blackwater mercenary convicted of Baghdad civilian massacre Blackwater and the Corporate Mercenaries who've - NationofChange His sister was safe. [78] The opinion elaborated "the government failed to establish that the Iraqi witnesses it presented to the second grand jury were not in any way influenced by their previous exposure to the defendants' compelled statements. Justice Blackwater mercenary sentenced to life in prison On Wednesday, Slatten was sentenced to life in federal prison for initiating a massacre that left 14 Iraqi civilians dead. At the sentencing, the US attorneys office said in a statement: The sheer amount of unnecessary human loss and suffering attributable to the defendants criminal conduct on 16 September 2007 is staggering., After news of the pardon emerged on Tuesday night, Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for one of the four pardoned Blackwater defendants, said: Paul Slough and his colleagues didnt deserve to spend one minute in prison. Nassar Hamza was 67 years old when he was shot and wounded in the arm. A caption at the bottom of the screen states . The traffic circle, Nisour Square, was only a block away from one of the main entrance gates to Baghdads Green Zone. [37], Blackwater, which had been operating in Iraq without an Iraqi government license, applied for one after the incident, but the application was rejected by Iraqi officials in January 2009. [33], Three Blackwater guards who witnessed the incident later said that they believed the shootings were unjustified. He had tried to run but was lying in a pool of blood killed by machine gunfire from the armored cars. The other three guards faced decades in prison; the weapons charges carried a minimum 30-year sentence under a law enacted during the 1990s cocaine epidemic. Dozens of witnesses were brought to the United States to testify about what happened on September 16, 2007. "With those sentences reversed by the stroke of a pen, who will trust the American justice system again?". There are numerous reported incidents of mass murder conducted by US soldiers, special forces. The bullets rained through the roofs of cars, taxis and buses, he says. Again be warned it is ugly. None of the bullets the lab had available could be matched to the rifles used by the guards. "This incident motivated the Iraqi authorities to seek the withdrawal of American troops from the country. courts. [79] Three weeks later, Vice President Joe Biden, who was overseeing U.S. policy in Iraq, promised Iraqi leaders the U.S. would appeal the dismissal of these charges. President Donald Trump's decision to pardon four Blackwater private security contractors convicted of a massacre in Baghdad has been met with fury by the victims' families in Iraq. [14] The Iraqi government vowed to punish Blackwater. Blackwater mercenaries on trial in US court for 2007 Iraq massacre Before. Slatten faced a potential sentence of life in prison. Blackwater Founder Remains Free and Rich While His Former Employees Go Pepe Escobar (@RealPepeEscobar) March 1, 2022. Our civil case resulted in a resolution that was acceptable to the parties. On January 31, 2009, the U.S. State Department notified Blackwater that it would not be renewing its security contract with the company. In his testimony, Prince noted that, "It seems the ballistics analysis was done to prove the guilt of the Americans, not to just try to identify what happened there." But its the much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare for which Russia has no antidote, as the global neocolonial order is being led by the United States and its Western European clients since the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War. The efforts of the investigators, the prosecutors, and the men and women who supported them was immeasurable. He was shot through the roof of his car as the Blackwater convoy drove past firing down into traffic. Nicholas Slatten was sentenced to life in prison without parole after being convicted of murder, while Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard were convicted of manslaughter and weapons charges. Luckily, before his SUV was attacked, Mohammed, his sister, and their children had time to duck into the car. The American judiciary is fair and equitable. [93], On December 19, 2018, Slatten was found guilty of murder[94] and again was sentenced to life in prison on August 14, 2019. . A federal district court judge sentenced four former Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries to lengthy prison terms on Monday for their role in the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. A. [29] The banning was described by P. W. Singer, an expert on the private military industry, as "inevitable", given the US government's reliance on and lack of oversight of the private military industry in Iraq. Thats what lawyers do in the United States: We fight for those who cant fight for themselves. In fact, private military contractors in close coordination and consultation with covert operators from CIA and Western intelligence agencies are not only training Ukraines conscript forces in the use of caches of Stingers and Javelins provided by Germany and the rest of the European nations as military assistance to Ukraine but are also directing the whole defense strategy of Ukraine by taking an active part in combat operations in some of the most hard-fought battles against Russias security forces north of Kyiv and at Kharkiv and Donbas. They beat citizens and scorn them. It remains unclear whether the team member mistook the civilians for insurgents. On Tuesday, President Trump pardoned four former Blackwater contractors convicted in the killings. ", Human Rights Watch says the pardons "show contempt for the rule of law.". It was not an easy path in either the civil or criminal legal system. The Kia continued to roll forward after the driver was killed, according to an eyewitness, and Raven 23 continued to fire on it, killing the passenger (the driver's mother); eventually, the Kia was struck by a grenade and was incinerated. These men will now be free, despite their crimes, and they will not serve the time in prison they deserved. President Donald Trump's decision to pardon four Blackwater private security contractors convicted of a massacre in Baghdad has been met with fury by the victims' families in Iraq. "This was Baghdad's Bloody Sunday," Dickinson told NPR's Mary Louise Kelly on Wednesday. Although Mohammed was going to return quickly with his sister and Alis cousins for a visit, Mohammed told his son that he could go with him. Trump's pardon of Blackwater 'Four' highlights deep divisions over Iraq They started out as a private security firm providing training support to law enforcement, the justice department, and military organizations and received their first contract from the United States government in 2000 after the bombing of the USS Cole. Four Blackwater security guards convicted in 2014 of carrying out a massacre of Iraqi civilians, sparking an international outcry over the use of mercenaries in war . The logs depicted "a hectic eight minutes in which the guards repeatedly reported incoming gunfire from insurgents and Iraqi police". Blackwater mercenary Nicholas Slatten sentenced to life in prison for The White House further stated that the Court of Appeals "ruled that additional evidence should have been presented at Mr Slatten's trial", and recently that prosecutors said "that the lead Iraqi investigator, who prosecutors relied heavily on to verify that there were no insurgent victims and to collect evidence, may have had ties to insurgent groups himself". [19] A Blackwater spokeswoman responded to the findings by saying Blackwater "supports the stringent accountability of the industry. The U.S. remains one of the notable holdouts of the 2001 UN treaty known in full as the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries and it is unlikely we will ever join. 3", is named Paul Slough. [68][69], On September 24, 2007, the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior announced it would file criminal charges against the Blackwater staff involved in the shooting, although it is unclear how some of them will be brought to trial. He received poor treatment because his injuries were less life threatening, but he was left with a disfigured and useless arm. It was chaotic. Blackwater was founded by ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince in 1997 as a shooting range and military training ground in Moyock, North Carolina. 15 years after US Blackwater mercenaries massacred civilians in Baghdad [6][86] Bringing the weapons charges was disputed within the Justice Department, which initially opposed including them in the indictment. [42] A spokesman stated that the ban would last for the duration of the investigation, and that it would not be permanent. Erik Prince, chair of the Prince Group LLC and Blackwater USA, holds up a picture showing the effect of a car bomb while testifying during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill Oct. 2, 2007 in Washington, D.C. Mohammed was going to visit his sister and her children. He was in the car next to Mohammed. Nicholas Slatten, 35, was a former security guard at the private US military firm Blackwater and was based in Baghdad. An Iraqi policeman went over to the car, possibly to help the passenger, but the vehicle kept moving and it looked to the guards as if the policeman was pushing the car towards the Blackwater TST. It wasnt unusual for regular U.S. Army convoys to stop traffic. Trump's pardon of mercenaries guilty of massacre in Iraq leads to "[51][52][53], On January 19, 2008, The New York Times reported that the contractor responsible for many of the deaths in the engagement, previously known only as "turret gunner no. We dont have ads, so we depend on our members 35,000 and counting to help us hold the powerful to account. Convoy Attacked in Baghdad, Sparking a Shootout", "3 Blackwater Guards Called Baghdad Shootings Unjustified", "Blackwater Denies Any Wrongdoing in Shooting Incident (Update1)", "Iraqi leader urges U.S. to cancel Blackwater contract", "Iraqi Investigators say Videotape Shows Blackwater Guards Fired Without Aggravation", "House Passes Bill That Would Hike Penalties for U.S. Security Contractors in Iraq", "Private Security Company Association Iraq", "Iraqi Government Disputes Blackwater USA's Version of Shooting", "Iraq battle was self-defense, security firm says", "FBI takes lead in probe over Blackwater crisis", "Blackwater most often shoots first, congressional report says", "Report: Blackwater Killings Unjustified", "From Texas to Iraq, and Center of Blackwater Case", No forensic match for ammo in Blackwater shooting, "The Associated Press: APNewsBreak: Blackwater founder questions FBI work", "Overcoming post-colonial myopia: A call to recognize and regulate private military companie"s, Judge Advocate General's Corps, U.S. Army, "Wounded Iraqis: 'No one did anything' to provoke Blackwater", "Blackwater incident witness: 'It was hell', Family Members of Slain Iraqis Sue Blackwater USA for Deadly Baghdad Shooting, "Blackwater Verdict a U.S. 'Snub' of Iraqi Leader Nouri al-Maliki: Kayhan, Islamic Republic of Iran", "White House: Contractor bill would have 'intolerable' effects", "Blackwater settles Nisoor Square lawsuit", "5 Blackwater guards face manslaughter charges", "Blackwater Guard in Secret Deal to Testify in Massacre Case", "US judge sets trial in 2010 for Blackwater guards", "Appeals court revives Blackwater shooting case", "US judge dismisses charges in Blackwater Iraq killings", "Reopening of Blackwater Case Confuses Iraqi Victims", "Biden Says U.S. Will Appeal Blackwater Case Dismissal (Published 2010)", "ICD - Slough et al.
blackwater mercenaries massacre