The New York Times is reporting tonight that:
A federal appeals court on Friday reopened the criminal case against four former American military contractors accused of manslaughter in connection with a shooting that killed at least 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.
Source ~ NYT
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the decision of a District Judge, who had dismissed the charges against the contractors on grounds that the prosecutors had relied on tainted evidence.
Read the decision here. (.pdf)
From the opinion:
On September 16, 2007 a car bomb exploded near the Izdihar Compound in Baghdad, where a U.S. diplomat was conferring with Iraqi officials. American security officials ordered a team from Blackwater Worldwide to evacuate the diplomat to the Green Zone. (citations omitted)
(snip)
Another Blackwater team, Raven 23, headed out of the Green Zone to block traffic at the Nisur Square traffic circle and thus assure the diplomat’s safe passage back. (In fact, because a checkpoint had fortuitously been closed, the escort convoy never passed through Nisur Square.)
(snip)
Raven 23 positioned its four vehicles on the south side of the Square and its members started gesturing to stop traffic. Shots were fired; the dispute over who fired at whom and when is the substantive crux of the criminal case underlying this appeal. When the shooting stopped, 14 Iraqi civilians were dead and 20 wounded.
Within hours of the incident, the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service conducted brief interviews with each of the 19 members of Raven 23.
(snip)
Among the 19 were the five defendants in this case, Paul Slough, Nicholas Slatten, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Donald Ball.
On September 18, 2007, two days after the incident, all Raven 23 members submitted sworn written statements to the State Department, using a form that included a guarantee that the statement and the information or evidence derived therefrom would not be used in a criminal proceeding against the signer.
* * *
The incident almost immediately became the focus of media attention in both the United States and Iraq. Some of the early articles, published within a few days of the incident, reported that the Blackwater team was attacked, and purported to quote from and otherwise rely on a State Department “incident report,” presumably prepared at least in part on the basis of the interviews and statements.
(snip)
These very same articles, however, also cite Blackwater representatives as making the same assertion.
The defendants were re-interviewed later.
But because the defendants invoked only the statements of September 16 and September 18 as sources of potential taint of the evidence presented to the grand jury, . . ., only those statements are relevant to this appeal.
(snip)
The September 18 written statements were also leaked to the media. On September 28, 2007, ABC News reported that it had obtained all 19 of the September 18 sworn statements and quoted from some of them. . . . and the New York Times, among others, reproduced parts of defendants’ and other team members’ September 18 statements.
The witnesses that the government relied on most heavily before the grand jury—Raven 23 members Adam Frost, Matthew Murphy and Mark Mealy—admitted to having read these news reports, and it soon became apparent that parts of their testimony may have been tainted by their exposure. In an effort to safeguard its case, the government decided to present a redacted case to a second grand jury, which returned an indictment against the defendants, finding that there was probable cause to believe that defendants committed (and attempted to commit) voluntary manslaughter and weapons violations.
The defendants moved to dismiss the indictment as tainted. . . . . The district court held a hearing to determine the existence and extent of any taint. It found that exposure to defendants’ statements had tainted much of the evidence presented to the second grand jury—the testimony of security guards Frost and Murphy and Iraqi witnesses and victims, Frost’s written journal, the factual proffer and debriefing of Jeremy Ridgeway (a Raven 23 member who had been indicted and had pleaded guilty), and physical evidence recovered by DSS from the scene of the crime—and had also tainted the prosecutors’ decision to indict defendants Heard and Ball.
The district court thus dismissed the indictment as to all five defendants.
* * *
(All emphasis, mine.)
After reviewing the evidence and the law, the Appellate Court found that the District Court’s findings depended on an “erroneous view of the law.”
As The New York Times notes:
The appeals judges called on the lower court to determine “as to each defendant, what evidence — if any — the government presented against him that was tainted as to him,” and whether that was enough to justify throwing out the charges.
More:
The Nisour Square shootings became a watershed event in the Iraq war, and led the Iraqi government to demand greater sovereignty and control over foreign contractors operating in the country.
(snip)
“This new decision has brought optimism and happiness back to me,” said Talib Mutlak, who was injured in the Nisour Square shooting. “This is a victory for the blood of martyrs and injured people who were affected by Blackwater.”
Source ~ The New York Times
Erik Prince, Blackwater's founder, has sold the business and has moved his family to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
From The New York Times Editorial Page (October 2007):
It should come as no surprise that the Bush administration would take any opportunity to reward its political friends with lavish no-bid contracts. Still, there is something particularly unseemly about the munificent payments to Blackwater, the State Department’s principal private security contractor in Iraq.
(snip)
Former Bush administration officials are peppered throughout Blackwater’s highest executive positions. Erik Prince, the former Navy Seal who founded the company, was a White House intern under President George H. W. Bush and has been a Republican financier since, with more than $225,000 in political contributions.
(snip)
Mr. Prince denied yesterday that his connections had anything to do with it, but he certainly has done well under the Bush administration. Federal contracts account for about 90 percent of the revenue of Prince Group holdings, of which Blackwater is a subsidiary. Since 2001, when it made less than $1 million in federal contracts, Blackwater has received more than $1 billion in such contracts — including at least one with the State Department for hundreds of millions of dollars that was awarded without open, competitive bidding.
The Congressional investigation found that Blackwater charges the government $1,222 per day for each private military operative — more than six times the wage of an equivalent soldier.
Source ~ The New York Times