All Charges Dismissed Against Blackwater Employees

By Author: Rob Thomas
Total Articles: 4777

In another stunning upset against politically motivated prosecutions at the Justice Department, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina dismissed all charges against five former employees of Blackwater USA.

The men were providing close protection services for U.S. diplomats in Iraq when they were ambushed in a busy intersection. Seventeen Iraqi's were killed in the ensuing gun battle.

Judge Urbina admonished the Justice Department for it's reckless handling of the investigation, including it's unethical behavior in withholding key evidence from the grand jury.

A federal grand jury indicted the Blackwater employees in 2007 after being presented with evidence with which Justice Department had tampered. This including editing the testimony of a witness who stated that he never saw Donald Ball open fire and statements from four witnesses who stated that the Blackwater personnel were attacked within seconds of entering the fateful intersection.

The Justice Department was never asked to explain why they believed that a group of security contractors would stop at a random intersection and make an unproved attack on Iraqi civilians. I believe this is key to the entire story, because it showcases the ridiculous level of political influence within the Justice Department.

Clearly, influential bureaucrats within our own Justice Department disagree with U.S. involvement in Iraq or with the use of private military companies by the State Department. They chose to misuse their authority to prosecute these five men in order to further their political goals.

This is not the first time that the Justice Department has been caught playing politics with justice. The most recent case was that of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. Senator Stevens was convicted in federal court after Justice Department prosecutors presented tampered evidence to the jury. When the Justice Department was caught, Judge Brendan V. Sullivan, Jr. vacated Stevens conviction. Judge Sullivan stated "In nearly 25 years on the bench, I've never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I've seen in this case."

These politically motivated prosecutions cost untold millions of taxpayer dollars and they can ruin the lives of innocent Americans who are caught up in them. Because of the prosecution, Ted Stevens lost his Senate seat to Democratic challenger Mark Begich. That was most likely the point of the entire investigation.

Similarly, although the charges have now been dismissed against the five gentlemen from Blackwater, they have already had more than two years of their lives ruined and they have faced untold financial and personal hardships as a result of this prosecutorial misconduct.

Moreover, the leftist media has been mindlessly parroting the lies created by the now disgraced prosecutors. I am quite certain that these media outlets will devote far less coverage to the exoneration of these men. Not only have these gentlemen been libeled by the prosecution and the media, but so has every American fighting man.

Tom Connolly, an attorney for one of the defendants, stated "The indictment is an effort by bureaucrats in Washington to second-guess split-second decisions made by honorable men during a firefight in the most dangerous neighborhood in the world." I think it's worse than that. It doesn't appear that there was any guessing involved, it appears that certain leftists in the Justice Department chose to use these prosecutions to make a political statement. They didn't care what happened in that intersection, they only cared about their ability to do damage to their political enemies.
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