Criminal charges dismissed? Iraq responds with lawyers

From Baghdad comes word that Iraq's government plans to help victims of the notorious 2007 shooting in Nisour Square to file lawsuits in the United States against private security guards working for the U.S. government. An Iraqi government spokesman called "unacceptable and unjust" last week's decision by a U.S. judge to dismiss murder and other charges against five employees of Blackwater Worldwide, then the largest U.S. security contractor, according to the Reuters international news service. Fourteen civilians were killed in the 2007 shooting when guards protecting a U.S. convoy opened fire in a crowded Baghdad intersection. The guards claimed they were reacting to gunfire and an explosion when they began shooting, but Iraqi witnesses said the guards shot indiscriminately. "The government will facilitate a lawsuit from Iraqi citizens to sue the guards and the company in a U.S. court," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters. Al-Dabbagh also said the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad would ask the U.S. Justice Department in Washington to review the decision by Judge Ricardo M. Urbina throwing out the charges. The shooting provoked widespread outrage in Iraq and led to a new agreement between Washington and Baghdad that lifted immunity provisions that had protected the private guards from Iraqi law. Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services after the shooting, and Iraq barred the company from working in the country. Dabbagh said Iraq was investigating whether any Blackwater employees were still in the country, Reuters said. "We don't want any member of this company, which committed more than one crime in Iraq, to work in Iraq," Dabbagh said.

Justice can wait -- charges against Blackwater defendants dismissed

The longer the United States puts off a comprehensive review of George W. Bush's presidency, the more disgraces like these are going to happen. We're discussing, of course, Thursday's decision by a federal judge to dismiss murder and other charges against five private security guards involved in a 2007 shooting that killed 17 civilians in Iraq. In a 90-page ruling, U.S. Judge Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington said government officials had misused statements made by the five defendants in such a "reckless violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights" that dismissal of the indictment was the appropriate sanction, according to the New York Times. That works out well for the five guards who worked for Blackwater Worldwide, the McLean, Vir., company that provided security for foreign diplomats in Baghdad following the U.S. invasion in 2003, and, perhaps, for the rest of us in the long run, because it discourages prosecutorial overzealousness by the government. But there is a price to be paid. The decision further delays the urgently needed reckoning - the conduct of the U.S. government during the Bush administration has put the philosophical basis of the country at risk. The U.S. government has put its own survival ahead of its founding principles -- that's why it feels justified in operating secret prisons in other countries, torturing suspects, kidnapping suspects in other countries and holding them for years without charge or access to attorneys, in spying on its own citizens. These were supposed to be the truths we held self-evident and, yet, our government has chosen to restrict them with the support of the citizenry. It is an outrage.