4,500 Pages Of Blackwater's Rampage: Shooting Judges, Pet Dogs, Fast Drivers & Everything In Sight

[kpete]

‘Gentlemen, We Shot a Judge’ and Other Tales of Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy’s Rampage Through Iraq

Shooting Judges, Pet Dogs, Fast Drivers and Pretty Much Everything In Sight

Every time a Blackwater centurion discharged his weapon in Iraq, the company filed a written report with the U.S. State Department. Blackwater shot Iraq to shit. Here are the reports.
http://gawker.com/5866375/gentlemen-we-shot-a-judge-and-other-tales-of-blackwaters-rampage-through-iraq

Blackwater, the private mercenary firm that became synonymous with Bush-era war profiteering and reckless combat-tourism, announced yesterday that it has changed its name to Academi (after a previous incarnation as Xe Services) in a bid to distance itself from its history of wanton lawlessness. We've obtained a 4,500-page record of that history in the form of State Department incident reports documenting every time a Blackwater guard shot at an Iraqi between 2005 and 2007.

In Iraq, Blackwater's "protective services" consisted in large part of preemptively shooting any car that drove near its convoys. Page after page of the reports feature drivers (and occasionally boat pilots) who were fired upon simply because they drove "aggressively," attempted to pass, or didn't heed warnings to keep their distance. There was no routine mechanism for following up with the drivers to determine if they were injured or were actually hostile. Blackwater (and DynCorp and Triple Canopy) guards roamed Iraqi cities and highways, ignoring traffic rules and shooting at other drivers literally at will, and driving on. According to a 2007 investigation by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (pdf) http://www.latimes.com/media/acrobat/2007-10/32930222.pdf, between 2005 and 2007 Blackwater operatives fired on Iraqis at least 195 times, or an average of 1.4 times per week. That included an infamous Baghdad firefight at Nisour Square that killed 17 civilians.

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SNIPPETS:

"Any Disciplinary Actions Would Be Seen as Lowering Morale"



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"Well Gentlemen, We Shot a Judge"



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All 4,500 pages of reports are embedded below. As we mentioned previously, we haven't read them all, but they don't appear to include some high-profile events, like the Nisour Square shootings (presumably because the State Department considers them to still be under investigation and exempt from the FOIA).

We've uploaded them to Document Cloud, an excellent service that allows readers to search and annotate documents and send around links to specific pages. So we encourage you to peruse them and flag any interesting incidents worth following up on.

HERE: http://gawker.com/5866375/gentlemen-we-shot-a-judge-and-other-tales-of-blackwaters-rampage-through-iraq

[RC]

1. More people that should be brought up on war crimes.

We need to regain control of our country so this shit stops.