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Title: Blackwater threatened to kill US official in Iraq: report
Source: [None]
URL Source: [None]
Published: Jul 1, 2014
Author: staff
Post Date: 2014-07-01 07:10:40 by Tatarewicz
Keywords: None
Views: 1136
Comments: 2

Yahoo... Washington (AFP) - The top manager in Iraq of the notorious private security firm Blackwater threatened to kill a US State Department investigator for probing the company's performance, The New York Times reported Monday.

The Times, citing an internal State Department memorandum, said the threat came just weeks before Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 civilians on September 16, 2007 in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

In an August 2007 memo detailing the threat made to her, lead State Department investigator, Jean Richter, said it "sent a clear message that the Blackwater contractors saw themselves as 'above the law' and actually believed that 'they ran the place.'

However, US embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater and the State Department team was ordered to leave, The Times said.

Four former Blackwater employees are currently on trial in a US court for the Nisour Square deaths.

The killings, seen as an example of the impunity enjoyed by private security firms on the US payroll in Iraq, exacerbated Iraqi resentment toward Americans and was part of the reason the Iraqi government refused to reach a treaty allowing US troops to stay beyond 2011.

Richter warned in her memo dated August 31, 2007, that little oversight of the company, which had a $1 billion contract to protect US diplomats, had created "an environment full of liability and negligence."

Daniel Carroll, Blackwater’s project manager in Iraq, told Richter after an argument "that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq."

"I took Mr Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract," Richter wrote.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said there was little information she could provide to reporters as it was an ongoing legal case, but said the department's staff had been conducting a regular "contract review" not an investigation into Blackwater.

A fellow State Department investigator who witnessed the exchange corroborated Richter’s report in a separate statement.

Blackwater lost its license to work in Iraq; it since been renamed twice and after merging with a rival firm is now called Constellis Holdings.

The State Department canceled its contract with the company soon after President Barack Obama took office in January 2009


Poster Comment:

Levine Levine Congress usurped the US Constitution by allowing the POTUS to wage war under the War Power Act which gave the POTUS the power to wage war without the Congressional Official Declaration of War. The POTUS has exploited the power further. He has hired contractor killers in place of US combat troops. The Geneva Convention and the US Military Code of Justice do not apply to contract killers even as they are on US government payroll. The contract killers are not accountable to American people or institutions. Essentially, the contract killers have license to kill any one at any time in Iraq.+8-1 The American government has unleashed an indiscriminate killing machine in Iraq, again. The Iraqi insurgents have little difficulty recruiting anti-USA jihadists as America's contract killers roam Iraq. The days of the US puppet government in Baghdad is numbered long ago when the contract killers were used to protect certain government officials

. Mike What about the Boston bombings? Anyone held responsible for those Black Water False Flags attacks? They were the true architects, who recruited the brothers into action. The whole country stinks of corruption, as the Government keeps growing in total power

. webfoot internet isnt teaching history or facts, I was there, in a small part of history, and the net, along with the new books for students are b.s. If you werent there you dont know, and some moron in Washington dictating what his beliefs are will not change the truth

niggieEric Prince, founder and ex-CEO of Blackwater got his #$%$ handed to him in a Congressional Inquiry...he first changed the name of the company to Xe to rebrand it....didn't work so he sold his interest and went to Dubai to raise and train an army.....so, after his own country stuck it to him, where do you think he deploys his new army? To the highest bidder you morons.+8

LeoM "...the threat came just weeks before Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 civilians on September 16, 2007 in Baghdad's Nisour Square..." This, when the whole invasion and occupation was based on a pack of documented lies in the first place, and unleashed chaos that ruined millions of lives (1 million killed, and over 4 million refugees) and has continued non-stop for over 10 years. The psychopaths that pushed this war, PNAC members like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton, Wolfowitz and the tittering blood-thirsty talking head William Kristol who founded the PNAC are the same people who brought us 9/11 in the first place, and a police state in the USA, borrowing trillions of dollars to fund all of this madness in Afghanistan and Iraq. The present administration has only allowed the fiction to continue, with false flag operations of its own (Underwear Bomber, to streamline Michael Chertoff's 'Rapiscan' machines into airports and legalize the sexual humiliation of ordinary American travellers as a means of controlling them, including children and senior citizens). What would it take to round up the real 9/11 "masterminds" and "ringleaders," Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush, and try and convict them for mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity? They can rat out their accomplices, like Larry Silverstein, Rudy Giuliani, Marvin Bush and others. Not so many people, but they still are running free and running their mouths on TV, like Cheney, showing themselves to be the remorseless, lying psychopaths without a conscience that they actually are. Round them up and send them to Gitmo to spend the remainder of their lives in orange jumpsuits+17-4

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#1. To: Tatarewicz (#0)

From your comment I quote you in part.

"The contract killers are not accountable to American people or institutions. Essentially, the contract killers have license to kill any one at any time in Iraq."

Unfortunately, in our U.S. law books, there exists laws of immunity and in this matter it is diplomatic immunity. Sad but true.

I met a young white man back in 2000 who was riding a city public transit bus in Los Angeles. He was telling his story of woe to me of how he happen to be in the wrong place at the right time where he was seriously run over by a car driven by a U.S. diplomat. He suffered such injury to the point that he was unable to walk and was bound to a wheelchair. He did sue the U.S. government but the suit was thrown out by the U.S. federal court on grounds that government private contractors and even foreign diplomats have diplomatic immunity. It's hard to believe this to be the case but I strongly would encourage every American to look into this and perhaps challenge this diplomatic immunity doctrine. I mean look where we are heading with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

purplerose  posted on  2014-07-01   13:44:20 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: purplerose (#1)

I don't know the rationale for diplomatic immunity. Possibly has something to do with different laws in different countries. Karzai and Maliki are not buying it. BTW many of the comments I include are those of other posters; they offer insights missing from the original article. Yahoo readers are particularly good and among them are just a few Jew trolls whom you can recognize by the inanity of their comments. A shortcoming of the Yahoo news site is they allow posters to repeat comments so you end up with comments in the hundreds or thousands. Each comment I select for posting on 4um has the original poster's name at the beginning and thumbs up/down indicated by +/- at the end.

Tatarewicz  posted on  2014-07-03   22:30:09 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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