Two days after Blackwater USA employees opened fire and killed as many as 11 Iraqi civilians whose only crime was getting in the "security contractors" way, Blackwater's employee, the State Department said:
It's also important to remember that this convoy was attacked...
There was -- the basic fact is that there was an attack on the convoy.
I understand that the convoy was attacked and that there was a response.
And a Blackwater USA spokesman claimed:
Blackwater regrets any loss of life, but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life.
And what reason would the State Department and Blackwater have had to lie? I mean, besides the nearly 200 times Blackwater had fired on Iraqi civilians in the past, or the time a drunk Blackwater employee murdered a bodyguard of the Iraqi Vice President, or the more than $1 billion dollars in contracts Blackwater has received from this administration.
And now, three weeks later we learn that:
U.S. military reports from the scene of the Sept. 16 shooting incident involving the security firm Blackwater USA indicate that its guards opened fire without provocation and used excessive force against Iraqi civilians, according to a senior U.S. military official. [...]
The civilians that were fired upon, they didn't have any weapons to fire back at them. And none of the IP or any of the local security forces fired back at them," he added, using a military abbreviation for the Iraqi police. The Blackwater guards appeared to have fired grenade launchers in addition to machine guns, the official said.
Shocking, eh? Stay tuned for the administration to denounce Blackwater and announce that their government contracts have been revoked and that the killers will be prosecuted for murder. This will be followed by the announcement that the sky is green and the sun will now be rising in the west.