Dismissed Manslaughter Charges Against Blackwater Reinstated

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By Ernest A. Canning on 4/24/2011 3:05pm
Dismissed Manslaughter Charges Against Blackwater Mercenaries Reinstated by Appellate Court
PLUS: Updating another case against Blackwater founder Erik Prince and his management team...

Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning

On Friday, a three judge panel of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal in D.C. reinstated a criminal case against four of five Blackwater (now known as "Xe") mercenaries who had been indicted for voluntary manslaughter in connection with the Nov. 16, 2007 massacre of Iraqi civilians in Nisur Square.

The five guards, as reported by Reuters, were originally "charged with 14 counts of manslaughter, 20 counts of attempt to commit manslaughter and one weapons violation count over a Baghdad shooting that outraged Iraqis and strained ties between the two countries." The decision by the appellate court panel was unanimous and seen as "a victory to the U.S. Justice Department in a high-profile prosecution dating to 2008."

The five had been part of a 23 member Blackwater team known as Raven 23 who "submitted sworn written statements to the State Department using a form that included a guarantee that the statement and...evidence derived therefrom would not be used in a criminal proceeding against the signer," the court stated in its redacted opinion.

The District Court dismissed the case on the grounds that the government had failed to prove that the evidence it was relying upon was not derived or affected by the immunized statements. The Court of Appeal ruled that the District court had erred by treating all of the evidence as tainted instead of conducting an independent, line-by-line analysis as to whether the evidence was independently obtained from other sources, including Iraqis present at the massacre, noting "when armed guards shoot a number of people in a crowd, it doesn't take Hercule Poirot to start wondering what the crowd was doing."

While criminal proceedings continue against these four, low-level former Blackwater mercenaries, Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince are not amongst the accused --- this despite the never resolved, explosive allegations, discussed in our Aug. 10, 2009 article, "Blackwater = Murder, Inc." that the company and its founder had engaged in "murder, destruction of evidence, weapons smuggling" and other sordid crimes...

UPDATE to 'Blackwater = Murder, Inc.'

The allegations we discussed in August of 2009 --- separate from the manslaughter cases now re-instated, as mentioned above --- were directed at Prince and other members of Blackwater management. They arose not by way of indictment but by way of sworn affidavits that were submitted in the case of Albazzaz v. Prince, a federal civil action brought under the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATF) by the families of three Iraqis who were "killed when Blackwater personnel opened fire on a crowd of Iraqi civilians in and around Al Watahba Square in Baghdad on September 9, 2007."

The case, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern Virginia, was subsequently consolidated with four other cases, entailing 65 plaintiffs, 45 Iraqi nationals and the estates of 19 deceased Iraqis who were allegedly shot or beaten by Blackwater mercenaries.

Links to pertinent pleadings, motions and rulings are available here in PDF format.

Blackwater filed separate motions trying on the one hand to substitute the U.S. as a party, contending that the “shooters” should be considered U.S. government employees and therefore the U.S. should assume any liability for Blackwater’s actions. In a separate motion to dismiss, Blackwater urged that the ATF does not recognize claims of war crimes or summary executions; that ATF is limited to state actors and cannot be applied to corporations, that plaintiffs had failed to allege sufficient facts to support a cause of action under the ATF and that the plaintiffs had failed to exhaust remedies in Iraqi courts.

In a 56 page, Oct. 21, 2009 opinion [PDF] the court rejected Blackwater's claims that the ATF does not apply to war crimes or that it was limited to crimes committed by states and could not be applied to corporations. The court regarded the argument that remedies in Iraq had not been exhausted as absurd, since, under orders imposed by the Coalition Provision Authority at the outset of the conflict, Blackwater and its mercenaries were immune from liability in Iraqi courts.

The one area where the existing complaints were found deficient is that the plaintiffs were required to demonstrate that war crimes "not only occurred in the context of an armed conflict but must be in furtherance of the conflict." The court granted leave to amend the complaints in four of the cases, but denied it in a fifth, where it was not possible to show that the death of a former Iraqi vice president's security guard was "in furtherance of the conflict," because the widow had previously alleged that the security guard was shot by an intoxicated Blackwater mercenary for "no apparent reason."

In an Oct. 28, 2009 first amended complaint [PDF], plaintiffs alleged that Blackwater principals, Prince, Gary Jackson, and Bill Matthews, had conspired to kill Iraqis out of "greed and religious beliefs," citing racist remarks and Prince's statement about a "crusade"; that the three "expressly authorized Blackwater personnel to kill and seriously injure innocent Iraqis"; that "Prince personally authorized the use of...Little Bird helicopters for...'night hunting' of Iraqis...Prince and Gary Jackson personally traveled repeatedly to Iraq to oversee these murders of innocent Iraqis."

The amended complaint alleged that there existed an atmosphere of impunity inside Blackwater; that "when one Blackwater employee questioned executive Mike Rush about the illegalities involved in smuggling...weapons...Rush responded, 'You fucking idiot, we are at war and we are going to do whatever it takes. If it means moving weapons in there outside of some of these stupid laws, do it." The complaint went on to allege that Blackwater employees who bragged about killing Iraqis were promoted and the company purchased hollow-point bullets that were designed to inflict maximum damage on Iraqi victims. "The illegal weaponry and ammunition kept Blackwater's private army...fully armed and able to kill innocent civilians."

The amended complaint also alleges that Blackwater paid a series of bribes to Iraqi officials.

A short time after the amended complaint was filed, the parties settled, and on Jan. 6, 2010, Albazzaz v. Prince was dismissed. The Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the plaintiffs in the Albazzaz case, did not disclose the terms of the settlement.

One year later, the Washington Post reported that a "company closely associated with...Blackwater...won a new State Department contract worth more than $84 million over five years."

The firm, according to an unnamed State Department official, no longer has a relationship with Blackwater/Xe, though both "are headquartered in tiny Moyock, N.C., formerly headquarters of Blackwater and Xe Services," according to WaPo's intelligence reporter Jeff Stein.

The case, re-instated on Friday against the four Blackwater guards --- Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard, and Donald Ball --- will now be sent back to U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina, who was found to have improperly dismissed the charges originally in December 2009. Charges against the fifth guard, Nicholas Slatten, have been dismissed by prosecutors. A sixth guard had pleaded guilty to charges of voluntary manslaughter and attempt to commit manslaughter, and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.

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Is Blackwater Finally Going to Be Held Accountable for Civilian Deaths?
Controversial case is one of few in which US forces have been tried for civilian deaths in Iraq.

August 28, 2014 |


One of the darkest days of the US occupation of Iraq was relived in a Washington courtroom on Wednesday as the prosecution of four Blackwater security contractors accused of killing 14 civilians in a mistaken attack in Baghdad reached an emotional and legal climax.

Seven years after the bloody shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that left a total of 17 Iraqis dead and more than 20 seriously wounded, jurors were told of the “shocking amount of death, injury and destruction” that saw “innocent men, women and children mowed down” by private guards working for the US State Department.

In closing arguments, assistant US attorney Anthony Asuncion claimed three of the four defendants were guilty of manslaughter and a fourth of murder for showing extreme disregard for human life in retaliating against what they mistakenly believed was a car bomb attack on their convoy.

But the defence summed up its case with a blistering attack on the government for ignoring evidence of alleged incoming machine gun fire at the convoy, which it also accused Iraqi police of helping to cover up.

The controversial case, which will go to the jury next week, is one of the few in which US forces have been tried for civilian deaths in Iraq and has already been abandoned once after an earlier judge questioned the way evidence was gathered.

But federal prosecutors pulled no punches on Wednesday as the closing stages of the second trial, which has lasted for 10 weeks, saw emotional scenes from attorneys on both sides.

Pointing at the four accused – Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – Asuncion said: “These men took something that did not belong to them; the lives of 14 human beings ... they were turned into bloody bullet-riddled corpses at the hands of these men.”

After he described at length the fate of individual Iraqi civilians attacked by the Blackwater convoy, Asuncion’s voice was shaking, and he was asked to repeat a key line for the court stenographer to hear. “[The witness] opened the door and his son’s brains fell out at his feet,” Asuncio told the jury a second time. “As [the witness] put it, ‘the world went dark for me’.”

Dozens of witnesses and relatives from Iraq have been flown over for the trial, some showing jurors the scars on their bodies and giving evidence that caused one juror to be recused after she said she could no longer sleep at night.

“It must have seemed like the apocalypse was here,” said Asuncion in his closing argument, as he described how many were shot in the back, at long range, or blown up by powerful grenades used by the US contractors.

“There was not a single dead insurgent on the scene,” claimed the prosecutor. “None of these people were armed.”

He also recapped evidence from Blackwater colleagues who testified against the accused, claiming they acted with contempt for Iraqi civilians and boasted of turning “a guy’s head into a canoe” and “popping his grape”.

Earlier in the trial these witnesses had spoken of telling the accused to “cease-fucking-fire” after the attack, which one described as “the most horrible botched thing I have ever seen in my life”.

But defence attorneys argue the men were acting in legitimate self-defence after suspecting a car that was rolling toward them at a busy traffic intersection could contain a bomb.

Brian Heberlig, lawyer for Paul Slough, said the ensuing “hectic firefight” was heightened by an earlier car bomb attack on another Blackwater convoy and accused prosecutors of ignoring witnesses who had spoken of hearing AK-47 fire from possible insurgents in the area.

“I felt I was in the wrong courtroom, he said. “The argument was long on emotion and rhetoric but short on citation of the evidentiary record.”

Heberlig acknowledged that fears of a bomb attack were ultimately misplaced but said the defendants responded with an appropriate escalation of force given what they suspected was happening.

“Perhaps their perception was erroneous, perhaps the [Iraqi police] was trying to help,” he said. “It does appear that this was not a [car bomb], it does appear that this was a medical student and his mother, but our clients did not know that.”

However he ridiculed the prosecution’s suggestion that AK-47 shell casings found near the scene were normal on the streets of the Baghdad – “as common as finding cigarette butts in the streets of a US city or finding sea shells at the beach,” claimed Asuncion – and therefore not necessarily proof of any incoming fire.

“If these were just ‘sea shells’ why, four days later, were the shells no longer there?” asked Herberlig. “We will never know how much [Iraqi police] scrubbed the scene after the attack; what else was gone”.

US District Judge Royce Lamberth told jurors he would probably send them out to consider the case on Tuesday after a day or two more of closing arguments.

Blackwater, which settled a separate civilian claim following the attack, has since been renamed Xe and then Academi in efforts to improve its reputation.

A fifth security guard in the convoy, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to manslaughter before the trial in exchange for a more lenient sentence and was one of two contractors to give evidence against his former colleagues.

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Jury convicts Blackwater guards in 2007 Iraq deaths
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By Spencer S. Hsu October 22 at 12:22 PM
Seven years after American security contractors killed 14 unarmed Iraqis by firing machine guns and grenades into a Baghdad traffic circle, a jury in Washington on Wednesday convicted all four Blackwater Worldwide guards charged in the incident on at least some of the charges.

The verdicts marked a victory for prosecutors, who argued in a 10-week trial that the defendants fired wildly and out-of-control in a botched security operation after one of them falsely claimed to believe the driver of an approaching vehicle was a car bomber.

The guards claimed they acted in self-defense and responded appropriately to the car bomb threat and the sound of incoming AK-47 gunfire, their defense said.

Overall, defendants were charged with the deaths of 14 Iraqis and the wounding of 17 others at Baghdad’s Nisour Square shortly after noon on Sept. 16, 2007. None was an insurgent

The jury of eight women and four men deliberated 27 days before convicting Nicholas A. Slatten, of Sparta, Tenn., of murder. The panel also convicted Paul A. Slough of Keller, Tex.; Evan S. Liberty of Rochester, N.H.; and Dustin L. Heard of Knoxville, Tenn., who faced manslaughter, attempted manslaughter and firearms charges.

The jury’s verdict marked an end to a years-long quest by prosecutors to bring the case to trial, and a milestone in the government’s efforts to monitor security contractors’ conduct on the battlefield.

The contractor shootings and the American government’s refusal to allow the men to be tried in Iraq sent relations between the two countries into a crisis, and the Blackwater name became shorthand for unaccountable U.S. power.


In Congress, lawmakers denounced the Nisour Square shooting as recently as July, but legislation that would provide clearer jurisdiction for U.S. prosecutors and investigators to pursue criminal wrongdoing overseas by private security contractors has languished for years.

The security firm’s founder, Erik Prince, eventually left the company, which was renamed Xe Services and then Academi.

The defendants were among 19 Blackwater Worldwide guards providing security for State Department officials in Iraq. At the time of the incident, their convoy was clearing the way for another Blackwater team evacuating a U.S. official from a nearby car bombing.

Jurors appeared to partly accept the guards’ claims that they acted in self-defense, but concluded that at least some of them reacted excessively and unreasonably. The men mistakenly believed that a white Kia sedan approaching their four-vehicle convoy was carrying a bomb, and responded to the sound of AK-47 gunshots, their defense said.

The prosecution faced several obstacles, including some problems of the government’s own making.

Charges in the shooting were first brought against six Blackwater employees in 2008, one of whom, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and testified for the government in the current trial. Charges against another man, Donald Ball, were dropped.

A federal judge, however, threw out the other indictments in 2009, saying that prosecutors improperly relied on statements that the guards gave the State Department immediately after the shooting, believing that they would not be used in court. An appeals court reversed that ruling in 2011, enabling prosecutors to obtain fresh indictments.


The remaining four defendants claimed the violence was triggered by Ridgeway, whom a prosecutor conceded suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and “lost it” in Iraq, and by the convoy’s team leader, Jimmy Watson, who like several other members of the Blackwater team was granted limited immunity by the government for their testimony against former colleagues.

While prosecutors called 70 witnesses to only four for the defense, some ex-Blackwater employees also disagreed over whether Slatten or others fired the first shots, and some agreed that they heard incoming AK-47 fire.

The prosecution suffered another setback during the trial when they discovered that they had failed to turn over all the photographs from a computer disk of evidence taken by investigators after the incident, including one belatedly released to defendants showing AK-47 shell casings from a bus stop near the square from which they claimed to be taking fire.

Prosecutors claimed the convoy’s command vehicle was hit by shrapnel from an American grenade.

Prosecutors also claimed that Slatten “lit the match that ignited the firestorm,” assistant U.S. attorney Anthony Asuncion said in closing arguments, and charged Slough, the convoy command vehicle’s turret gunner, with causing the most harm, as team members fired unprovoked into stopped traffic and then turned more and more firepower onto a panicked, fleeing crowd.

To make the case, prosecutors called 30 Iraqis to appear, in what it said was the largest number of foreign witnesses to testify in a U.S. criminal trial.


Prosecutors also contended that Slatten and Liberty held hostility toward the Iraqi civilian population, and with Slough on occasion fired weapons at Iraqi targets without provocation.

Defendants’ attorneys said their clients acted reasonably at a time when the Iraqi capital was the scene of “horrific threats” from car bombs, ambushes and follow-on attacks, sometimes aided by Iraqi security forces infiltrated by guerrillas.

Defense attorneys said the U.S. government was overstepping legal limits by even bringing the prosecution under MEJA, or the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, under which government employees and contractors can be prosecuted for criminal acts they commit abroad.

Defendants said they were in Iraq under contract with the State Department, not the Pentagon. Prosecutors said MEJA extends to those engaged in actions related to supporting the U.S. military mission.

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Court Overturns Ex-Blackwater Guard’s Conviction In Slayings Of Iraqi Civilians

ASSOCIATED PRESS
By MICHAEL BIESECKER Published AUGUST 4, 2017 2:17 PM


Updated 2:57 p.m. ET.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal appeals court on Friday overturned the first-degree murder conviction of a former Blackwater security contractor, ordering a new trial for the man prosecutors say fired the first shots in the 2007 slayings of 14 Iraqi civilians at a crowded traffic circle in Baghdad.
In a split opinion, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit ruled a lower court erred by not allowing Nicholas Slatten to be tried separately from his three co-defendants in 2014. The 33-year-old contractor from Tennessee is serving a life sentence for his role in the killings, which strained international relations and drew intense scrutiny of the role of American contractors in the Iraq War.

The court also ordered new sentences for the three other contractors, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Herd. They were each found guilty of manslaughter and firearms charges carrying mandatory 30-year terms.

The judges determined those sentences violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment because prosecutors charged them with using military firearms while committing another felony. That statute, typically employed against gang members or bank robbers, had never before been used against overseas security contractors working for the U.S. government.

The lawyers for the defendants could not immediately be reached for comment.

At the weekslong trial held in 2014, federal prosecutors and defense lawyer presented very different versions of what triggered the September 2007 massacre in Nisour Square.

The government described the killings as a one-sided ambush of unarmed civilians, while the defense said the guards opened fire only after a white Kia sedan seen as a potential suicide car bomb began moving quickly toward their convoy. After the shooting stopped, no evidence of a bomb found.

In issuing their ruling benefiting the defendants, the judges said they were in no way excusing the horror of events they said “defies civilized description.”

“In reaching this conclusion, we by no means intend to minimize the carnage attributable to Slough, Heard and Liberty’s actions,” said U.S. Circuit Judge Karen L. Henderson, writing for the court. “Their poor judgments resulted in the deaths of many innocent people.”
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/court ... conviction

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Former Blackwater guard convicted for 2007 massacre of civilians in Baghdad
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2018/ ... re-baghdad

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Defiant Former Blackwater Contractor Again Sentenced to Life
Aug 14, 2019

Nicholas A. Slatten was convicted last year for his role in killing one of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007.Cliff Owen/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Shortly before a federal judge sentenced him on Wednesday to life in prison for his role in the deadly 2007 shooting of dozens of unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad, Nicholas A. Slatten, a former Blackwater security contractor, stood in a tan jumpsuit and defiantly proclaimed that he was an innocent victim of Justice Department prosecutors run amok.
“This is a miscarriage of justice that will not stand,” said Mr. Slatten, who in December was convicted by a jury of murdering an Iraqi civilian in Nisour Square, the act prosecutors said kicked off the chaotic hail of machine-gun fire and grenades targeting other civilians by guards in Mr. Slatten’s convoy that left 10 women, two men and two children dead, and 18 other people injured.
But the trial judge, Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, rejected Mr. Slatten’s assertion of innocence, including a reference to a fellow Blackwater guard’s statement that it was he, not Mr. Slatten, who fired the initial shot that killed the driver of a white Kia sedan in the traffic circle, Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y, 19.

“The court’s view of the evidence is the same as that of the jury,” Judge Lamberth said, declaring that the other guard’s statement was an “effort to mislead authorities about what was going on,” and that it was Mr. Slatten who “shot Mr. Al Rubia’y between the eyes and killed him” without provocation.

The government had hired Blackwater Security to escort State Department officials through a chaotic war zone at the height of the Iraq insurgency. One of the darkest episodes in the conflict, the massacre of civilians became a charged symbol of American abuses and prompted a rethinking of American reliance on contractors in war zones. It also strained relations between the United States and the Iraqi government: The Iraqis wanted to prosecute the contractors, but the Americans insisted on handling it.

Judge Lamberth rejected a constitutional challenge by the defense to a law mandating that Mr. Slatten receive a life sentence for the first-degree murder conviction, which the judge formally imposed. Mr. Slatten swiftly said, “God bless you, sir,” before guards led him out of the courtroom.

But his defense lawyer and friends and family from Tennessee, many of whom gave emotional statements declaring that Mr. Slatten was a patriot whom they believed to be innocent, made clear that they would keep fighting, including by asking the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn the sentence and the verdict.

Left unmentioned in the courtroom were signs that President Trump might be weighing whether to grant a pardon to Mr. Slatten, as well as to several servicemen accused or convicted of war crimes. The New York Times reported in May that the White House had requested paperwork about his and a handful of other cases, according to two United States officials.
In his statement, Mr. Slatten also accused the government of covering up classified evidence that would have proved his claim, which prosecutors rejected, that insurgents started the Nisour Square episode. For Mr. Slatten’s supporters who stressed his prior combat tours with the Army before he went to work for Blackwater, that theory dovetailed with a recurring theme: the extreme peril of navigating a combat zone amid an insurgency, which Mr. Slatten’s father said many of those now judging his son did not understand.

But Judge Lamberth took exception to that, saying he had served a tour in the Vietnam War and had been in many dangerous situations. Nevertheless, he said troops must rely on each other and obey the rules to ensure that innocent civilians were not unnecessarily harmed. In the case of the Nisour Square massacre, he said, the evidence made clear that there had been no incoming fire against the convoy and that “there was no necessity” to shoot Mr. Al Rubia’y.

One security contractor involved in the episode, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and cooperated with prosecutors. But the cases against others involved in the shooting proved difficult.

A federal judge in 2009 threw out the indictment of five contractors, citing a “reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.” The judge said that investigators, prosecutors and government witnesses had inappropriately relied on statements that the guards had been compelled to make in debriefings by the State Department shortly after the shootings.
A new prosecution team was able to revive a case against four of them, and in a trial in 2014, a jury found Mr. Slatten guilty of murder and convicted three colleagues — Dustin L. Heard, Evan S. Liberty and Paul A. Slough — of voluntary manslaughter and using a machine gun to carry out a violent crime. Mr. Slatten was given life in prison, and the others were sentenced to 30 years in prison.
But charging the defendants with machine-gun offenses, a crime not meant for battlefield situations, was controversial, even in the Justice Department. In 2017, a federal appeals court ruled that the machine-gun charges and offenses were “grossly disproportionate to their culpability for using government-issued weapons in a war zone,” and said that Mr. Slatten should not have been tried alongside the other three.
The court ordered a do-over trial for Mr. Slatten and vacated the sentences of the three colleagues, deferring their resentencings until after his case is concluded. But in 2018, the first attempt to retry him ended in a mistrial, with the jury deadlocked after his defense lawyer stressed testimony from another contractor who testified that he, not Mr. Slatten, shot first. But prosecutors tried a third time, and won another guilty verdict against Mr. Slatten for first-degree murder.
Denouncing that outcome on Wednesday, Mr. Slatten also noted that prosecutors had offered to let him plead guilty to a manslaughter charge, but that he rejected the offer because, he said, he was innocent.

Judge Lamberth suggested that that level of charge might have been appropriate, but said that Mr. Slatten had decided to take the “all or nothing” gamble of going to trial on a more serious murder charge, and “got what he gambled for.”
http://archive.is/xf5QF#selection-373.2-373.21

Blackwater Founder Builds Secret Army for UAE
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