Let Black Water hang?
For the next week I’m going to try blogging every day. Things have just been happening too fast for the occasional article. Every day there’s something I want to talk about, and that’s how I’m going to do it.
Today’s big news, or comedy skit, however you want to call it, was the news that five Blackwater guards have been indicted on Federal charges of manslaughter and using a machine gun in the commission of a crime. No joke I could make about this could top that great line from Apocalypse Now: “Shit, charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”
The Blackwater guys are on trial because they messed up in a big way in a place the Iraqi government actually cared about, at a time when the Iraqis were already massively pissed at the occupation. They’re a sacrifice to Iraqi-US relations: “Here, take these five steroid-casualty overpaid hicks and stop making us look bad with yer bellyachin’!” You can’t exactly say they didn’t do anything wrong, but you can say what they did was SOP for the time and place.
On September 16 2007 A Blackwater guard heard a backfire or felt threatened or was just in a bad mood or something while escorting a State Department convoy through Nisoor Square in Baghdad. The guards were nervous because there’d been a car bombing about an hour before. So this Blackwater guy did what came naturally: shot and killed a kid driving toward the square. The trouble with shooting the driver is that the car keeps moving. That made the Blackwater mercs nervous, so they all started shooting at anybody they saw.
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