Batya founded Reaper Feed to provide unprecedented insight into the lesser-seen sides of human conflict and modern warfare. [21]:116, During opening arguments for a criminal trial held in 2014, defense lawyers representing former Blackwater members of Raven 23 argued the men felt the approaching Kia was a credible threat as a possible car bomb, and opened fire in self-defense. Opines that the iraqi shooting by blackwater guards was unethical and impacted public impressions of all private security companies operating overseas. But this was likely due to the fact that the U.S.Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, which took effect in 2009, ended contractor immunity. The incident led to at least five investigations and although the Blackwater guards repeatedly claimed that their actions were justified, several of them came to the opposite conclusion. He also maintained that he wanted to limit and reduce the authority of all security contractors, not just Blackwater, Timereports. 273. Protesters in Nisour Square demand reforms Last updated Sep 3, 2022 Dozens of citizens organized a protest this Friday afternoon in Nisour Square in capital Baghdad, to demand putting an end to corruption and quotas, as well forming a "national salvation" government with absolute power. [26][27] A U.S. Army convoy arrived at 12:39p.m., backed by air cover, to escort TST 22 back to the Green Zone. And none of the I.P. And after the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, Blackwater won a $25 million contract to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, an American diplomat who led the transitional government following the invasion. At the end of the day, none of the Blackwater guards deny what they did, they just deny that there was any wrongdoing. 3", is named Paul Slough. What Really Happened in the 2008 Georgian War and Why it Matters Dies geschieht in Ihren Datenschutzeinstellungen. Four former security guards for Blackwater USA were found guilty today of charges stemming from the Sept. 16, 2007, shooting at Nisur Square in Baghdad, Iraq, that resulted in the killing of 14 unarmed civilians and the wounding of numerous others. Rejecting claims from defense attorneys and family members that U.S. prosecutors scapegoated former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to improve U.S.-Iraqi relations, a federal judge sentenced former Blackwater security guard Nicholas Slatten to life in prison Wednesday for his role in the notorious 2007 Nisour Square . Add a Comment. The audit also revealed that Blackwater overbilled at least $70,000 in travel costs. The PMC was kicked out of Iraq the next day. Slatten was found guilty of one count of first-degree murder, which carried a mandatory life sentence. Viciously murdering a foreign entity that has been leveling your country for a month and doing just as worse if not the same, i.e bombing hospitals, kindergartens, civilians etc. According to Vox, investigators Jean C. Richter and Donald Thomas Jr. discovered, among other issues, that migrant workers were being used as guards for the Blackwater compound and Blackwater guards had neglected to even give them beds to sleep on in their living quarters. [14], On October 13, 2007, the FBI reported that it had concluded that at least 14 of the 17 Iraqis who died in the square had been killed without cause. For several years, a private security firm known as Blackwater Security Consulting received an unprecedented level of funding and incredibly limited oversight from the United States. [63] The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum in January 2010. Nine-year-old Ali Kinani died from a gunshot wound to the head in the Nisour Square massacre. How did the Casio F91W Become a Terrorist Icon? According to eyewitness accounts of both Iraqi civilians and other Blackwater employees, several Blackwater guards began shooting recklessly at Iraqi civilians in the square, even those who were fleeing or turning their cars around to flee. [66] Howard Krongard, who was appointed Inspector General of the U.S. State Department in 2005,[67] resigned in December 2007 after he was accused by the House Oversight Committee of improperly interfering with investigations into the Blackwater Baghdad shootings. The Charlie Company of the US military tortured and slaughtered 504 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly people, on March 16, 1968, in the My Lai sub-hamlet during the Vietnam War. As a result, on October 17, 2013, the Department of Justice once more filed charges against the Blackwater security guards, according to the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. And despite numerous failures to comply with its security contract, including a failure to maintain the required number of security specialists, the State Department never sought out the $55 million in penalties that Blackwater should've been charged. Former Blackwater USA guard Nicholas Slatten was sentenced on Wednesday to life in prison nearly eight months after a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder for his role in the September 2007 massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in Baghdad. [73], The trial was set for early 2010,[74] but the charges were dismissed by United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Ricardo Urbina on December 31, 2009, who ruled that the Justice Department had mishandled evidence and violated the guards' constitutional rights. The Kia continued to roll forward after the driver was killed, according to an eyewitness, and Raven 23 continued to fire on it, killing the passenger (the driver's mother); eventually, the Kia was struck by a grenade and was incinerated. Erik Prince. When the dust cleared it appears that 17 Iraqis were dead. Some of the counts resulted in a mistrial, but none of the defendants got an acquittal on any count. The following compilation of footage leaked by Harpers Magazine in 2007. [50], On October 4, 2007, U.S. military reports indicated Blackwater's guards had opened fire without provocation and used excessive force. [17], Just before noon on September 16, 2007, a car bomb exploded near the Izdihar Compound where US and Iraqi officials were meeting,[20]:547 and a 19-man Blackwater Tactical Support Team (TST) consisting of a convoy of four trucks, answering to the call sign "Raven 23", took up positions on the south side of Nisour Square to secure an evacuation route for the US officials and another Blackwater team providing security for them. According to Courthouse News Service, they also stated that Slough, Heard, and Liberty should also be re-sentenced "because their 30-year prison terms were too long" and constituted "cruel and unusual punishment.". Four guards from private security corporation Blackwater Security Consulting, now known as Academi, have . It outraged Iraqis, put severe strain on. Russian security team lacks support in Iraq. [63], A U.S. judge's decision to dismiss all charges against Blackwater on January 1, 2010, sparked outrage in the Arab world. The incident led to at least five investigations and although the Blackwater guards repeatedly claimed that their actions were justified, several of them came to the opposite conclusion. Mastering the elements: U.S. Army Train to Fight Underground, Armenian Journalist Pinned Down and Shot by Azeri Sniper on Camera, Armed Albanians in Rhodesia and an Exiled King in Brushstroke Camo, Watch North Korean Army Firing at U.S. This decision was appealed by the Department of Justice and in 2011, the ruling was reversed. The Blackwater guards were escorting a diplomatic convoy when, without provocation, they opened fire in the crowded square with machine guns, grenade launchers and other weapons. Becki Gass. Additionally, the massacre was first reported as a US military victory. After detailed investigations conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the U.S . 20ft 20ft = 400 sq ft. How many square feet is a 12x12 room? Blackwater flip side. "[46] Hasan Jaber Salman, a lawyer who was one of the wounded, said that "no one did anything to provoke Blackwater" and that "as we turned back they opened fire at all cars from behind"[61] An Iraqi police officer who was directing traffic at the scene said Blackwater guards "became the terrorists" when they opened fire on civilians unprovoked, while a businessman said he wasn't seeking compensation but only "the truth" from the guards. However, after "Raven 23" entered Nisour Square, Watson was ordered to "lock down the traffic circle to expedite the travel of [the other Blackwater team]". He is a security advisor and a high-risk expedition leader across former and active conflict zones such as Eastern Ukraine, unrecognized post-Soviet states, the North Caucasus, and the Middle East. [36], On September 19, as a result of the incident, the United States temporarily suspended all land travel by U.S. diplomats and other civilian officials in Iraq outside Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone. Easy. [23]:32 Shortly after assuming their positions, "Raven 23" began firing on civilians in response to an approaching car, killing fourteen and wounding twenty more. They beat citizens and scorn them. Subscribe 947. Without his intervention, the massacre would have continued. Prince strongly criticized the way in which federal authorities had handled the investigation and disputed the claims that U.S. or Blackwater personnel were to blame for the shootings. In the last month of his term, U.S. President Donald Trump issued pardons to Slatten, Slough, Liberty, and Heard. [57], In October 2007, the United Nations released a two-year study that stated that private contractors, although hired as "security guards", were performing military duties. The case was consolidated with four other cases against Blackwater and on January 1, 2010, the plaintiffs agreed to a settlement and to withdraw their complaint. State Department investigators of the September 16h Blackwater Nisour Square shooting have granted limited immunity to Blackwater operators who were present at the incident, according to the . The lawyer who represented families of the victims of the Nisour Square massacre shares their story. However, according to The New York Times, the Iraqi government technically didn't have the legal authority to do so since the U.S.-led transitional government shielded security contractors from Iraqi laws, per CNN. It earned so much notoriety that Blackwater was forced to rebrand itself as 'Academi'. Five Blackwater security guards are getting ready to turn themselves in, after being indicted on manslaughter and gun charges in connection with a 2007 shooting in Baghdad's Nisour Square. However, the vehicles had already been repaired and repainted by the time the FBI found them. Show me some footage of Azov battalion on foreign soil doing something like this, please, I beg you. On 16 September 2007, Blackwater employees escorted a convoy of US State Department vehicles to a meeting in western Baghdad. Prosecutors argued the men did not face hostile gunfire when they began shooting, and continued to shoot despite the lack of threats. Instead, they tried to help and protect Blackwater by cleaning up evidence in the square and promising the employees involved immunity for what they told State Department officials, which they didnt have the authority to do. In their view, this confirmed that they were under attack by a vehicle bomb, whereupon they fired at the car, killing both people in it as well as the Iraqi policeman. As shootings in the square were not uncommon, it is unclear whether the shells were from the shooting in question or from other incidents. [19] The three justifiable killings were those of the two passengers in the white Kia sedan and an unidentified Iraqi nearby. NOW ON DVD www.noendinsightmovie.com The first film of its kind to chronicle the reasons behind Iraq's descent into guerilla war, warlord rule, criminality . Some witnesses also claimed that the same Blackwater team subsequently opened fire on another line of traffic after the shooting in Nisour Square. In August 2019, Slatten was once more sentenced to life in prison without parole, Al Jazeera reports. In 2008, the United States Department of Justice filed criminal charges against Donald Ball, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nicholas Slatten (pictured, center), and Paul Slough, all of whom were Blackwater guards during the Nisour Square massacre. A lawsuit filed in 2007 also accused Blackwater of killing five Iraqi civilians without justification just one week before the Nisour Square massacre. Raven 4 sent up a distress signal, triggering a . 308 Views 1. In Nisour Square, the Blackwater team later claimed that they were "engaged with small arms fire" by an "estimated 8-10 persons." In the span of 20 minutes, 17 Iraqi people were killed and another 24 were left wounded. Five were charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempted manslaughter and a weapons violation: Donald Ball, a former Marine from West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard, a former Marine from Knoxville, Tennessee; Evan Liberty, a former Marine from Rochester, New Hampshire; Nicholas Slatten, a former army sergeant from Sparta, Tennessee, and Paul Slough, an army veteran from Keller, Texas. [70] A second civil lawsuit filed jointly by the families of six victims against Blackwater was settled on January 6, 2012 for an undisclosed sum. "It was obviously excessive", a U.S. military official speaking on condition of anonymity told the Washington Post. By 2007, the State Department started reviewing Blackwater's $1 billion contract and they discovered a slew of misconduct. Although one military review found that "all of the killings were unjustified and potentially criminal," in November 2007, the FBI determined that only 14 out of the 17 killings were unjustified, according to Reuters. Most reports, however, state that Blackwater guards opened fire when one car didnt stop at the intersection. ft. = 141 sq. On that day, a bombing took place a few miles from a busy traffic circle called Al Nisour Square, which is used by Iraqis to access major roadways across Baghdad. In an instant, Ahmed was shot through the head. However, according to Reuters, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, claiming that "the U.S. government had recklessly violated the defendants' constitutional rights." the convoy opened fire on a crowd of unarmed citizens killing 14 and wounding 18. The trial lasted ten weeks, and the FBI had flown in 30 witnesses from Iraq, which marked the largest number of foreign witnesses to ever be brought to the US in a criminal trial. The Untold Truth Of The Blackwater Massacre, no evidence to support Blackwater's claims, Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. And that harm was only the beginning, before the world would learn of Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Nisour Square. Pt.2 (AMAZING VIDEO) Sniper (Blackwater Commando) in Iraq shoots insurgents. On September 16, 2007, a car bomb went off in Baghdad, Iraq, near the Izdihar Compound, where a U.S. diplomat was meeting with Iraqi officials, at approximately 11:53 AM. Find the length and width of each section (labeled A and B here), then calculate each square footage: A: 3 ft. x 7 ft. = 21 sq. ", Meanwhile, on October 11, 2007, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed charges against Blackwater U.S.A. on behalf of an injured survivor and the families of three men who were killed during the Nisour Square massacre. As Raven 23 was departing Nisour Square, several members continued to discharge their weapons, causing additional civilian deaths and injuries. In America, Nisour Square became for military contractors what Watergate meant for political corruption in the 1970s. On that day, Raven 4 - a diplomatic security team - had a close call with a vehicle detonating an IED (improvised explosive device) near their convoy. Overall, Blackwater had been given over $1 billion in US government contracts. Trump Just Pardoned Those Convicted Killers", "Pardons in killings of Iraqi civilians stir angry response", "Chief of Blackwater Defends His Employees", "Tracing the Paths of 5 Who Died in a Storm of Gunfire", "Blackwater Execs Remain Free as Guards Convicted for Killing 14 Iraqis in Massacre", Use of white phosphorus by the United States, United States and the International Criminal Court, A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq, "The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time", AfghanIraqi Freedom Memorial (Salem, Oregon), The Iraq War: A Historiography of Wikipedia Changelogs, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nisour_Square_massacre&oldid=1141803510, Violent non-state actor incidents in Asia, People convicted of murder by the United States federal government, Pages using embedded infobox templates with the title parameter, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 26 February 2023, at 22:05. [29] The banning was described by P. W. Singer, an expert on the private military industry, as "inevitable", given the US government's reliance on and lack of oversight of the private military industry in Iraq. The Intercept reports that others who tried to run for cover were killed by machine gunfire. In some instances, like in 2004 when Blackwater members were hired to locate and assassinate top Al-Qaeda operatives, they failed to capture or kill anyone. After the September 11th attacks, Blackwater expanded their security-related work and followed the U.S. military into Afghanistan. Blackwater was even hired by the Department of Homeland Security during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and according to PBS, collected "more than $70 million in hurricane-related contracts. [10][11] The next day, Blackwater Worldwide's license to operate in Iraq was temporarily revoked. Friend of mine was in Iraq he was a marine and he said blackwater would start shit call for assistance and then nope the fuck out and make them deal with a fucked situation. However, there's never been any evidence that the Blackwater convoy took hostile fire. Meanwhile, the Blackwater guards continue to maintain that they "didn't shoot at anybody that wasn't shooting at me," as Liberty stated in an interview with the Associated Press. Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former The report found that the guards fired their weapons 195 times from the beginning of 2005 through the second week of September 2005. And despite subsequent trials, it's unclear if the victims of the massacre and their families got the justice they deserve. The Nisour Square Massacre On September 16, 2007, employees of the Blackwater Security Consulting private security firm opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad while directing traffic. The square footage of a room measuring 12 feet wide by 12 feet long is 144 square feet. 4:23. Salman ran over to the car and as he raised his hand to stop the shooting, the Blackwater guards responded by shooting Mohassin dead as she clung to her son, reports NPR. Within 10 days of the massacre, it appeared as though the State Department had already investigated the incident based on a report leaked to the media. One of the Blackwater guards reportedly screamed "No! We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract." In the end, after seven weeks of deliberations, Slough, Heard, and Liberty were convicted of voluntary manslaughter and Slatten was found guilty of murder, since he was responsible for the first death in Nisour Square, Reuters reports. The vehicle struck the . The perimeter wall to the Army Base is just east of the square. [33], Three Blackwater guards who witnessed the incident later said that they believed the shootings were unjustified. [80], On April 22, 2011, after closed-door testimony, a federal appeals-court panel revived the Justice Department's prosecution of the former Blackwater Worldwide guards by reinstating the manslaughter charges against the five men. A State Department employee who was walking into the department's Baghdad operations center on the day of the incident heard a radio call from the convoy: "Contact, contact, contact! The facts of the Nisour Square massacre case have been well documented and authenticated. It took seven years for the surviving Nisour Square victims and their families to get justice in a U.S. federal court for 14 of the killings. This private militia is among the entities . A Blackwater team was already there, with the diplomat, who ended up being escorted back to the International Zone without any incident. The trial against Heard, Liberty, Slatten, and Slough began around June 2014 and lasted over two months. Although 17 people were killed, the FBI only charged the Blackwater guards in 14 of the deaths for violating rules regarding the use of deadly force. None of the bullets the lab had available could be matched to the rifles used by the guards. [38] Waxman stated that "the controversy over Blackwater is an unfortunate demonstration of the perils of excessive reliance on private security contractors. [54] He enlisted in 1999, and served in Bosnia with the 3rd Infantry Division. Even General David Petraeus and former ambassador Ryan Crocker, top officials in charge of Iraq policy at the time of the massacre, issued a joint statement called the pardons "hugely damaging, an action that tells the world that Americans abroad can commit the most heinous crimes with impunity.". The massacre lasted four hours and only ended when another US soldier, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, intervened and ordered his men to shoot any Charlie Company troops who shot at the civilians. [6][86] Bringing the weapons charges was disputed within the Justice Department, which initially opposed including them in the indictment. After being leaked by a former employee of the notorious PMC, the footage dated April 2006 was featured in a piece called The Warrior Class by Charles Glass. It is important to note that none of the civilians fired at the Blackwater guards. Klicken Sie auf Einstellungen verwalten um weitere Informationen zu erhalten und Ihre Einstellungen zu verwalten. Putin Is A War Criminal: Russia Is A Terrorist State "Protests Against War in Ukraine 059 - Three Tyrants Stalin Putin Hitler 2" by Amaury Laporte under CC BY 2.0 Vladimir Putin is a terrorist and a war criminal. Fareed Walid Hassan remembers that "the shooting started like rain." While reports differ on the death toll, the Iraqi government eventually found that the Blackwater employees had killed 17 civilians and injured 20 more. Despite being heavily involved with the United States' military involvement in Southwest and Central Asia, Blackwater was often harmful and rarely helpful. Footage was nowhere to be found and many other things that would have justified the actions of Raven 23 after they were being fired upon by enemy forces. [32] In response to the guards' killing of the Iraqi policeman, other Iraqi police officers began to fire at the Blackwater men, who communicated to the State Department operations center that they were under attack. The key people in this have not spoken with investigators. Around 12 pm on September 16, 2007, 15 Blackwater employees in the tactical support team known as Raven 23 were driving four trucks in an armed convoy through Nisour Square to get to the site of a car bombing, which had happened earlier in the day. This time, only four out of the five guards were charged, since the charges against Ball were dropped based on "prosecutorial discretion.
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