

Judge dismisses all charges in Blackwater shooting



By Del Quentin Wilber

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, December 31, 2009; 4:15 PM



A federal judge on Thursday threw out charges against five Blackwater Worldwide security guards accused of killing 14 people in a 2007 shooting in downtown Baghdad.



In a 90-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled that the government violated the guards' rights by using their immunized statements to help the investigation. The ruling comes after a lengthy set of hearings that examined whether federal prosecutors and agents improperly used such statements that the guards gave to State Department investigators following the shooting on Sept. 16, 2007.



"The explanations offered by prosecutors and investigators in an attempt to justify their actions and persuade the court that they did not use the defendants' compelled testimony were all too often contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility," Urbina wrote.



Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said, "We're obviously disappointed by the decision. We're still in the process of reviewing the opinion and considering our options."



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One of the features I loved in Rachel Maddow's old Air America Radio morning show was the regular Monday-morning Friday News Dump report. It's one of those things that everybody, or at any rate lots of folks, know about, but hardly anyone does anything about.Anytime anyone in government has news that has to be made public, but that they would like to draw the minimum of attention, they dump it in with their Friday news dump, secure in the knowledge that all the media and an awful lot of media consumers tune out on Saturday. Anything that happens to get into the Saturday papers and newscasts gets hardly any attention, and by Sunday they're all off on the Sunday Round of Grand Pontificating -- you couldn't wedge anynews in there with a hatchet.I'm sure there are any number of blogs doing what Rachel did: combing through those leavings to see what embarrassments, not to mention revelations, were concealed there. But you see, that's the thing: It's just some lonely, no-account-paid bloggers, and the bureaucratic blunder bundlers can easily live with that -- that's almost better than silence, in that they can always say, if they're challenged about a particular news dump, that they put it out there and heck,picked it up -- are they supposed to be doing the journalists' job for them too?You might think of the Holday News Dump as the Friday news Dump on steroids, and maybe the dumpiest dump of them all the one that ushers out the old year, a veritable sea of forgottenness. Come Monday we'll see, assuming anybody looks, what got dumped in this year's New Year's Holiday-Plus-Weekend Dump.But who knew that federal judges also know how to do the Dump? Note the time stamp on thisreport:Now I'm not disupting the judge's call. Not that I'm any expert, but I do recall reading about this basic problem in this investigation of having to use immunized statements, and I'm prepared to believe that the facts and law left the judge no alternative. Also, there may be court-specific factors I don't know about, like a need or desire to clear certain rulings within the 2009 calendar year. Still and all, I guess Isuggesting that the judge knew this was a hot potato and did everything he could, short of quitting the bench, to direct heat away from his ruling.The insidious thing about the root problem in this case, the taking of those forever-off-limits statements, is that really it can't ever be fixed. Even if there were other sources of evidence (my recollection is that in this case there weren't), how would you ever establish that you've gathered that evidence independent of the unusable statements? I would point out that the "investigative" work was done by Bush regimistas, raising the possibility that it wasn't entirely by accident that uncorrectable errors happened in the early stages of the case, which as I recall the regime had no interest in pursuing to begin with. But then hey, with the regimistas, how would you go about separating deliberate incompetence (i.e., sabotage) from the natural kind?One obvious question: What happens now to the poor schlub who pled guilty and was presumably standing ready to testify against the five other suspects? Presumably he gets whatever sentence he was going to get anyway. I guess that's the roll of the dice in such matters. Nevertheless, I bet he (and his lawyers) are feeling pretty silly.It's easier if we just don't think about it. The Super-End-of-Year News Dump is perfect for that.As Timothy Williams pointed out in this morning's, Iraqis went through some more shock and awe when they read about the decision Friday, reacting "with disbelief, anger and bitter resignation to news that criminal charges in the United States had been dismissed against Blackwater Worldwide security guards who opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007."

Labels: Baghdad, Blackwater