Contractor Banned by Iraq Over Shootings", "F.B.I. 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. Reports differ on what actually happened at Nisour Square that caused the employees to open fireBlackwater claimed that Iraqi insurgents had ambushed the convoy and the Blackwater employees were returning fire. [83], In September 2013, the charges against Ball were dropped. 268 Views 1. 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. All in all, Blackwater had a dark history in Iraq prior to the Nisour Square Massacre. 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.". 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. 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. [46] On September 21, CNN reported that Blackwater would resume normal operations the following day. As Raven 23 was departing Nisour Square, several members continued to discharge their weapons, causing additional civilian deaths and injuries. We are taking fire from insurgents and Iraqi police. On Sunday the 16 th, a Blackwater convoy on contract for the State Department came to a halt at a Baghdad intersection called Nisour Square. Founded by Putin's close confidante, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, the Wagner Group is the Russian version of Blackwater. [19] The three justifiable killings were those of the two passengers in the white Kia sedan and an unidentified Iraqi nearby. 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. 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. 3:48. The four were accused in connection with a Sept. 16, 2007, incident in Baghdad's Nisour Square, where 14 unarmed civilians were killed and 17 others were wounded. 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. A sixth guard, Jeremy Ridgeway, pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with investigators, World reports. 9:42. Russian security team lacks support in Iraq. And despite subsequent trials, it's unclear if the victims of the massacre and their families got the justice they deserve. ", 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. [62] After a group of Iraqi ministers backed the Iraqi Interior Ministry's decision to shut down Blackwater USA's operations in Iraq,[29] Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki called on the U.S. government to end its contract with Blackwater[39] and called on Blackwater to pay the families $8million in compensation. 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. Aug 15, 2019. It remains unclear whether the team member mistook the civilians for insurgents. "[29], On October 4, 2007, the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it would be taking the lead in the investigation of the shooting incident. For a moment, it appeared as though Blackwater was going to be responsible for guarding the FBI agents, but the Bureau soon announced that the FBI agents would instead be guarded by "official personnel," rather than the very company that they were to be investigating. Slatten faced a potential sentence of life in prison. [25][31], The account by the Blackwater firm differed from the Iraqi government's account; Blackwater's account stated the driver of the Kia sedan had kept driving toward the convoy, ignoring verbal orders, hand signals, and water bottles thrown at the car, and continued to approach even when fired upon. 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. 284. 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. 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! In December of 2020, President Donald Trump pardoned the four Blackwater guards in a similar fashion to President Richard Nixons pardoning of Lieutenant Calley, the man who ordered his soldiers to slaughter unarmed Vietnamese civilians in what is known as the My Lai massacre as well as participating in it himself. After the September 11th attacks, Blackwater expanded their security-related work and followed the U.S. military into Afghanistan. The square footage of a room measuring 12 feet wide by 12 feet long is 144 square feet. Witnesses described how the American men ambushed the civilians unprovoked, firing on Baghdad's Nisour Square with heavy gunfire and grenade launchers. The Untold Truth Of The Blackwater Massacre, no evidence to support Blackwater's claims, Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. The order did not say when the suspension would expire. As shootings in the square were not uncommon, it is unclear whether the shells were from the shooting in question or from other incidents. ", Once their name was associated with the Nisour Square massacre, Blackwater ended up changing its name to Xe Services. And in 80% of the cases, Blackwater guards were the ones firing first. Add a Comment. Drawn from the ranks of the Navy SEALs, Delta Force, former [54], Radio logs released in December 2008 seemed to affirm that the guards had been responding to an attack on September 16. And that harm was only the beginning, before the world would learn of Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Nisour Square. [89][90][91] The panel also recommended that Slatten undergo a re-trial on the grounds that it was unjustifiable to try him with his co-defendants, and that he should have been tried separately. Sequence of events triggering the Nisour Square massacre, Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, Private Security Company Association of Iraq, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security, Inspector General of the U.S. State Department, United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, "U.S. This decision was appealed by the Department of Justice and in 2011, the ruling was reversed. We are trying to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service. ft. The BBC reports that during Slatten's second trial in 2018, a mistrial was declared after the jury deliberated for 16 days. Around this time, another Blackwater team of 15 guards known as Raven 23 headed out of the International Zone to offer support, despite the fact that, according to United States v. Slough, they were given an order "not to leave the Green Zone [also known as International Zone]." Some of the counts resulted in a mistrial, but none of the defendants got an acquittal on any count. [15] The incident sparked at least five investigations, including one from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. to find out the entire room add up all the sq in then divide by 144 to give you the total sq ft. Don't forget to allow for waste, deduct 10 to 20%. Raven 4 sent up a distress signal, triggering a . The Nisour Square massacre was one of the lowest episodes of the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the years following, it underwent various name changes and restructuring and no longer exists under the original brand. Subscribe 944. Initially, they worked providing training support to law enforcement and the justice department, but as Prince once stated, their "corporate goal [was] to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service." With the contract to provide security for L. Paul Bremer, Blackwater essentially "cement[ed] its presence at the center of conflict in Iraq," per PBS. In 2002, Blackwater received its first contract from the United States government. "[51][52][53], On January 19, 2008, The New York Times reported that the contractor responsible for many of the deaths in the engagement, previously known only as "turret gunner no. On 16 September 2007, Blackwater employees escorted a convoy of US State Department vehicles to a meeting in western Baghdad. As the Blackwater convoy approached Nisour Square, a Kia sedan drove directly towards the convoy and disregarded a police . 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 . 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. Blackwater, which has since rebranded itself twice and is now known as Academi, is a private military company that, at the time, had a $1 billion contract with the United States government to provide security services to US officials in Iraq. When the smoke cleared, 17 Iraqi civilians lay dead. Liberty was found guilty of one firearms offense, 12 counts of attempted manslaughter, and 8 counts of voluntary manslaughter. However, there's never been any evidence that the Blackwater convoy took hostile fire. [37], Blackwater, which had been operating in Iraq without an Iraqi government license, applied for one after the incident, but the application was rejected by Iraqi officials in January 2009. The report further said that Blackwater had reported that its forces fired first in over 80 percent of the cases. There were 1,000 Blackwater security guards in Iraq on the day of the massacre. The Blackwater firm which . Here is the history of his path of destruction. In one incident on December 24, 2006, one drunk Blackwater guard, Andrew Moonen, got into an argument with one of the Iraqi vice presidents guards and shot and killed him. Easy. [84], The other four went on trial starting on June 17, 2014;[5] ten weeks of testimony and 28 days of jury deliberations resulted in convictions for all four men on October 22, 2014. The Iraqi government ordered Blackwater to leave Iraq as soon as a joint Iraqi-U.S. committee finished drafting new guidelines on private contractors under the Iraqi-U.S. security agreement. When the dust cleared it appears that 17 Iraqis were dead. The foot soldiers in these battles operate globally and inside the United States with orders from the White House to do whatever is necessary to hunt down, capture or kill individuals designated by the president as enemies. [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. 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 security detail from the . His father may be the one man standing between Blackwater and total impunity. [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. Multiply the length by the width and you'll have the square feet. [45] Also, it is not clear whether the license revocation is permanent. Erik Prince. And examine the transcripts of the Iraqi witness statements to deconstruct why the body count and survivor accounts changed so wildly in the aftermath of the incident. POV from Ukrainian tank during an offensive, Point blank kills: intense trench firefight caught on GoPro camera. [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. There was also an incident on December 24, 2006, when Andrew Moonen, a Blackwater guard, murdered Raheem Khalaf Saadoon, a security guard for Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Iraqi vice president. Immediately, after the trial, the four Blackwater guards were taken to prison. [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. department of treasury austin texas 73301 phone number; wii sports club unable to acquire data; randolph high school track and field; huntley ritter parents As of 2021, their name is Academi after being taken over by an "unnamed group of private investors.". [28] Nicholas Slatten was found guilty of first-degree murder, and Slough, Liberty and Heard were found guilty of voluntary and attempted manslaughter charges, and of using a machine gun to commit a violent crime. IE 11 is not supported. Additionally, when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was investigating Blackwaters account of events, Blackwater claimed that their account of events could be corroborated and proven by damage done to Blackwater vehicles. However, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki urged the United States to end their contract with Blackwater. And Blackwater didn't make the investigation easy. They were tasked with providing security services to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia as well as a different CIA base that was at the center for the mission to capture Osama bin Laden. Rogers. Between 2004 and 2008, the State Department ended giving Blackwater more than $1 billion in contracts. (Iraqi police) or any of the local security forces fired back at them", the official continued. No! . Slough, Liberty and Heard were convicted on multiple charges of voluntary and attempted. It is important to note that none of the civilians fired at the Blackwater guards. They beat citizens and scorn them. Pronunciation of Nisour square massacre with 1 audio pronunciations. However, as The New York Times reports, "not one witness heard or saw any gunfire coming from Iraqis around the square." [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. [6][85][86] Jurors sided with prosecutors' contention that the shooting was a criminal act, not a battlefield encounter gone wrong. Painting a house: [18][30] Iraqi investigators also alleged that Blackwater helicopters fired into the cars from the air, as at least one car had bullet holes in its roof; Blackwater has denied any of its aerial units discharged weapons. TwoFeather - 308 Views. The Nisour Square massacre occurred on September 16, 2007, when employees of Blackwater Security Consulting (now Constellis), a private military company contracted by the US government to provide security services in Iraq, shot at Iraqi civilians, killing 17 and injuring 20 in Nisour Square, Baghdad, while escorting a U.S. embassy convoy. At the end of the day, none of the Blackwater guards deny what they did, they just deny that there was any wrongdoing. This private militia is among the entities . The days of Blackwater, however, were numbered, following a security incident which occurred in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on September 16, 2007. Of the two passengers in the white Kia sedan and an unidentified Iraqi.... 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