Just suppose that in some US city, a gang of six trigger-happy private security guards gunned down 17 Americans, in a panic because they thought, wrongly, that the high-value convoy they were protecting had come under attack. Would a US federal court have thrown out the manslaughter charges against them because when they gave their initial statements to police, they had been promised what they said would not be used against them?
Seventeen Americans lie dead and 18 others are injured and the men who shot them walk free from court on a technicality. Is it possible to imagine the howls of anger and anguish that would go up the length and breadth of the United States?
But, of course, the real crime of which five Blackwater security men were found not guilty Thursday in a US federal court was the slaying of 14 (not 17) Iraqis in Nisour Square in Baghdad on Sept. 16, 2007. The judge dismissed the charges because when the men were interviewed after the massacre, they were told that what they said would not be used to bring a case against them. Yet the prosecution had gone ahead and used information in those initial statements.
There is something very hard to grasp here. It has nothing to do with the vagaries in the US legal system but is rather a question of common justice and indeed, common sense. If someone confesses to a crime or gives evidence that is in some way incriminating, do they somehow become innocent of that deed if their subsequent confession was given on a confidential basis?
There are two explanations for the enormity of what happened to the case against the Blackwater killers, neither of them pleasant. The first is that for all the official bluster over the use of these hired guns in US war zones and for all the formal Washington protests of horror at what had happened in Nisour Square, in reality the authorities never wanted these men punished. Thus the case against them was constructed with this glaring technical fault that allowed the judge to trash the attempted prosecution. The US Justice Department says it is “very disappointed” at the court’s decision. But it would say that, would it not?
The second interpretation is even less palatable. It is that the death of 17 Iraqis does not really matter. The law is the law and if there is a technical flaw in the assembly of the evidence against the killers, they go free. Because they spoke readily to investigators on the understanding that they were in no danger of prosecution, they escape justice. Where then is the justice for the Iraqi dead and for their bereaved families? Iraqis know better. They also know that the government in Baghdad can’t do anything more than “regret” the decision of the US court. On his part, the US Judge Ricardo Urbina did not even regret that he was obliged to release the men.
It is hard to imagine a more offensive manifestation of US arrogance. The Obama administration simply cannot let these men go untried or this deep stain on US justice go uncorrected.
