The five Blackwater Worldwide guards indicted for a deadly 2007 Baghdad shooting are all decorated military veterans.The mercenaries are Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nick Slatten and Paul Slough. They are charged following the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians in a busy Baghdad intersection.
The six have been under investigation since a convoy of Blackwater contractors opened fire in a crowded Baghdad intersection on Sept. 16, 2007. Witnesses say the shooting was unprovoked, but Blackwater, hired by the US State Department to guard diplomats, says its guards were ambushed by 'insurgents' while responding to a car bombing.
Young children were among the victims, and the shooting case strained relations between the United States and Iraq. After the shooting, Blackwater became the subject of congressional hearings in Washington and insurgent propaganda videos in Iraq.
Prosecutors have also been considering bringing charges under American law, passed as part of a 1988 drug bill, that carries a mandatory 30-year prison sentence for using a machine gun in a crime of violence.
The whole grotesquerie says everything about the US Military and their mercenary cohorts. They will walk away, of course. As they all do.
The facts will come out but they will get away with it as you say, Tony. I think that will be more of a disaster for what they represent than if they get convicted. This from Huffington Post:
ReplyDelete"They started shooting randomly at people without any reason," recalled Ali Khalf Selman, a traffic policeman who said he witnessed the killing of 21 people on the day of the shootings. "I wish I could see the criminals in person, and I hope that they will pay a price for killing people who just happened to be in the wrong place on that bad day."