For Crimes Committed In October 2007, The US Department of Justice is Trying to Salvage Remains of Blackwater Case
The team of F.B.I. agents arrived in Iraq to investigate a shooting involving a private company that provided security for Americans in a war zone. It was October 2007, and the name of the company Blackwater Worldwide did not yet mean anything to the agents. But what they found shocked them.
Witnesses described a convoy of Blackwater contractors firing wildly into a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad the previous month, killing 17 people. One Iraqi woman watched her mother die as they rode the bus. Another died cradling the head of her mortally wounded son.
This is the My Lai massacre of Iraq, one agent remembers John Patarini, the teams leader, saying as they were heading home.
That shooting in Nisour Square, along with the massacre by Marines of 24 Iraqi civilians at Haditha and the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, became a signature moment in the Iraq war. Five Blackwater security guards were indicted on manslaughter and weapons charges, and a sixth entered a plea deal to testify against his former colleagues.
But over the years, a case that once seemed so clear-cut has been repeatedly undermined by the governments own mistakes.
Prosecutors are trying to hold together what is left of it. But charges against one contractor were dropped last year because of a lack of evidence. And the government suffered another self-inflicted setback in April when a federal appeals court ruled that the prosecution had missed a deadline and allowed the statute of limitations to expire against a second contractor, Nicholas A. Slatten, a former Army sniper from Tennessee who investigators believe fired the first shots in Nisour Square. A judge then dismissed the case against Mr. Slatten.
The appeals court unanimously rejected the argument that letting Mr. Slatten walk free would be a miscarriage of justice. If such an injustice occurred, the court said, it was caused by the governments delays, which the court called inexplicable.
The Justice Department responded Friday by charging Mr. Slatten with first-degree murder, which has no statute of limitations but carries a much heftier burden of proof.
Full Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/us/trying-to-salvage-remains-of-blackwater-case.html
And we wonder why the international community has no faith that they will receive justice in U.S. Courts.
Mercenaries have to accept that they are leaving the security of their Nations Laws and putting themselves at the mercy of the governments or National Laws of the countries they are working in. We have seen very recently where the mercenaries are violating not only the laws of the countries they are serving in but also some of the very laws we hold our own military to enforce on themselves. And we can't force our laws on other countries anymore than they can force theirs on us.
Those that were sent are representatives of the U.S. Government not true merc's. And the Nigerian government request the help.
Seems sort of odd that the Feds have managed to dick around for 6 & 1/2 years, they had a stool pigeon who was on the scene, yet they still don't have enough evidence and statute of limitations are running out??? Something about this whole deal smells 'many day dead'--- shit is being swept under the bureaucratic rug, I'd say...
