Blackwater USA Kicked Out of Iraq
Iraq’s Interior Ministry has canceled the license of Blackwater USA, the controversial American security firm that supplies many of the American mercenaries in the war zone, after company bodyguards allegedly shot dead eight civilians and wounded 13 others in west Baghdad.
Said Brigadier General Abdul Kareem Khalaf, a spokesman for the ministry: “It has been revoked. They committed a crime. The judicial system will take action.”
Blackwater has become the symbol of foreign gunmen whom Iraqis accuse of speeding through Baghdad’s streets and shooting wildly at anyone seen as a threat.
Khalaf said the incident occurred on Sunday when a U.S. convoy sped through Nisoor Square at the edge of the Mansour district of west Baghdad. Some Iraqi witnesses claimed that no one had attacked the convoy, while Iraqi television and the U.S. Embassy said there was an exchange of gunfire at the scene.
Blackwater is led by Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and messianic right winger who has close ties to the White House and Pentagon. It employs about 1,000 people in Iraq.
Many of Blackwater’s operatives are former Army Special Forces troopers and SEALS who get paid fat salaries to guard prisoners, protect convoys, stand sentry and do security overflights in their armed-to-the-teeth black helicopters.
Four of those mercenaries were killed by a mob in Fallujah in March 2004 and their bodies hung from the trestles of a bridge.
Their widows sued Blackwater. They claimed that Prince, in an effort to increase his profit margins, failed to provide the armored vehicles, weapons, maps and necessary lead time in which the four men could have familiarized themselves with the area.
Blackwater claimed that it was above the law, but when that ludicrous argument failed to pass muster with the courts, it counter-sued the men’s estates for $10 million to try to silence the widows and keep them out of court.
Security firms working for the U.S. government and its allies are technically granted immunity under an order issued in 2004 by L. Paul Bremer, then-U.S. administrator of Iraq. The U.S. government has the right to waive the immunity for contractors, allowing them to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts.
More here on the Baghdad incident and here for my most recent post on Blackwater.
