Getting Off, American Style

"It feels like the weight of the world has been lifted off his shoulders. Here's a guy that's a decorated war hero who we maintain should never have been charged in the first place," so says the lawyer for one of the five Blackwater guards gotten off scot free from mowing down 17 Iraqi civilians for no reason, back in 2007.

Stupid ass remark. Decorated or undecorated, war hero or antihero, since when that justified one beating the rap I don't know. Timothy McVeigh was a decorated war veteran, Bronze Star amongst other military bling, didn't seem to sanction absolution there. Vets gone bad, it happens, so that comment alone pissed me off. I digress.

Back to the letting off the whole of the Blackwater bad guys. In his ruling dismissing the case against them, the judge had nothing to say about the massacring they pulled off whatsoever. Instead he dropped the case on the grounds that the five had had their constitutional rights violated by being threatened with loss of their jobs if they did not confess to wrongful conduct to the federal investigators.

On one hand I get it, I see the judge's point, the rule of law. Leave it to our FUBAR government to give this one up. They had promised the guys outright that what they had to say would not be used against them in a criminal case, then turned the statements over as the foundation for prosecution. Of course, underhanded is not so unfamiliar to our officials, and it is hard to argue against what they did here clearly infringing the guys' Fifth Amendment rights.

On the other hand, I'm really bummed at them being let go like that, a legal technicality that with some smarts could have been avoided. Of course the Iraqis are furious and rightly so, mostly of course the relatives of the 17 who were popped off unprovoked by these US-staked-out Blackwater assholes. They probably expected justness after all from the consummate American legal process. Ah, those poor, pitiable, naïve Iraqis.

It already took more than two years finally, after the mightily armed Blackwater convoy crossed into a busy square in Baghdad, not following orders to stay in the US-controlled green zone, and opened fire with automatic weapons and grenade launchers on unarmed and unsuspecting women, children and men trying to get out of the way. Only now to have the charges irresponsibly dismissed.

The Iraqi government plans to not merely let this one go, and intends to pursue justice on this account. Although they have not elaborated on what steps they might have in mind, I'm guessing it's probably safe to bet on a somewhat opposite outcome. I would expect a rather harsh sentencing at some point, if only by decree and for whatever it's worth. I doubt very much that any of the five have a ramble through Baghdad on the itinerary for any time in the foreseeable future.