#The Nisour Square Massacre

[wraithdance]

I wish people like the Graves fan you reblogged wouldn't defend COD characters so heavily. Graves and the Shadow Company's massacre of Las Almas has heavy parallels to the real life Blackwater PMC's massacre of Nisour Square in Iraq, so hearing them say Graves was, "on the good side of fighting a terrorist," was like hearing the founder of Blackwater say his company, "acted appropriately while operating in a very complex war zone.” This isn't just limited to Graves too. The 141 are not good people. Captain Price literally commits several war crimes in one scene alone when he 1) kidnaps and takes The Butcher hostage, 2) tortures him, and 3) kidnaps and takes the Butcher's family hostage to threaten him into revealing information (MW2019)! Despite that, I've seen so many comments about how Price had to, "do what was needed." That sentiment of, "do what was needed," is the exact propaganda that the first game/the military is trying to push onto you!

I don't know. I'm rambling now but my point is two things can be true at once: 1) fiction (such as the content you consume or the characters you like) is not a reliable or inherent indicator of one's real life morals, and 2) it is your responsibility to critically analyze the fiction you consume and your treatment of it because not all art is morally neutral - some of it is straight up military propaganda.

I have nothing to add because you’re completely right. it’s so important to get out of the horny matrix long enough to acknowledge these men are literal war criminals and the cod franchise is military propaganda that makes them millions.

[ptseti]

ERIK PRINCE: ‘U.S. SHOULD COLONISE AFRICA’… AGAIN? 🤡

Imperialists’ audacity can amount to clownery. But their intentions have dangerous consequences.

For example, private US-based mercenary firm Blackwater killed 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007 in what came to be known as the Nisour Square massacre.

Erik Prince, the speaker in this video, is Blackwater’s founder, who once served as CEO and later as chairman. Some might see him as an extension of US foreign policy. Blackwater has won billion-dollar US-government security contracts to patrol throughout West Asia. He now thinks ‘underdeveloped’ Africans need the US to help govern the continent.

Africa certainly has leadership issues, but hasn’t Africa had genuine leaders who worked for the good of their people? And what became of them? France, a NATO member, assassinated Burkina Faso’s Thomas Sankara. The US, UK and Belgium killed the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba. The US-backed South African apartheid government allegedly took out Mozambique’s Samora Machel. The CIA ousted Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, as well as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. In every case, the West’s fingerprints are on the crime scene. Why are these facts glaringly absent from Prince’s rationale?

In many ways, the US already colonises Africa. Most African countries’ economies are at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund’s loan terms. These countries are reeling in debt on Washington’s conditions. The impacts can range from cuts to healthcare and subsidies, labour market deregulation, and privatisation of state assets and services. Plus, while numbers are not easy to pin down, of Africa’s 54 countries, 15 reportedly host 29 AFRICOM military bases. And 53 African states have varying military partnerships with the United States.

The point is, has Africa ever been free?

[blairelythere]

re: teleporting, asking for a friend, who should get merc'd first

It's always going to be a rotating pick for my number one guillotine spot (because there are just too many living sacks of human shit out there), but I think today I'll pick:

The warmongering, earth-reaping, living ass-pustule Erik Prince, founder of one of the most notorious private military companies, called Blackwater.

Leaving aside his involvement with Betsy DeVos, his sister and former head of Trump's Department of Education, the tally of war crimes, genocides, and treasons that his Blackwater is responsible for rivals the worst terrorist groups of modern warfare.

Because Blackwater is thoroughly a fascist terrorist group.

They were a major proponent and fire-fueler for the Iraq War, continually using their government contracted money to fund insurgent groups, spread anti-muslim rhetoric, and continue the lie that Iraq possessed nuclear capabilities.

The worst of it though?

The Nisour Square Massacre.

I recommend reading about this on the Human Rights Watch website. It's too fucking vile for me to type out.

Yeah, that motherfucker should get the worst of the worst done to him. I really, truly hope hell exists, just because this traitor murderer belongs in the hottest, spikiest of all the lowest pits.

[tungledotedu]

In 2007, Constellis (then Blackwater) received widespread notoriety for the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad, when a group of its employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians and injured 20. Four employees were convicted in the United States and later pardoned on December 22, 2020, by President Donald Trump.[11][12]

[michaelcosio]

Erik Prince on Blackwater's Nisour Square Massacre, 100K Missions in Iraq & Afghanistan (Part 4)

Sep 29, 2024

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, discussed the Nisour Square Massacre. Prince confirmed that a car bomb went off near a USAID building, causing Blackwater's 19-man team, Raven 23, to leave their post. Ordered by the State Department, they used heavily marked Suburbans, which made them visible targets. While in a Baghdad traffic circle, the team was warned about a suspicious white Kia but mistakenly engaged a civilian vehicle, firing at a woman and her son, inciting a larger firefight.

Controversy surrounds whether Raven 23 faced hostile fire, with conflicting reports of grenades used and helicopters firing. Prince emphasized Blackwater’s broader impact, mentioning over 100,000 missions in Iraq and Afghanistan without losing a single protectee, though 41 Blackwater personnel died. He underscored the complexity and danger of war zones, attributing much of Iraq's chaos to Iranian influence post-Saddam Hussein’s fall. Despite tragic events like Nisour Square, Prince defended Blackwater’s performance in a heavily hostile environment.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.16 (After 1970)

1970 – King Hussein of Jordan declares war against the Palestine Liberation Organization, the conflict came to be known as Black September. 1975 – Papua New Guinea gains independence from Australia. 1975 – Cape Verde, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe join the United Nations. 1975 – The first prototype of the Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptor makes its maiden flight. 1976 – Armenian champion swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan saves 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into a Yerevan reservoir. 1978 – The 7.4 Mw  Tabas earthquake affects the city of Tabas, Iran with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). At least 15,000 people are killed. 1979 – Eight people escape from East Germany to the west in a homemade hot air balloon. 1982 – Lebanon War: The Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon takes place. 1987 – The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer from depletion. 1990 – The railroad between the People's Republic of China and Kazakhstan is completed at Dostyk, adding a sizable link to the concept of the Eurasian Land Bridge. 1992 – The trial of the deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega ends in the United States with a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. 1992 – Black Wednesday: The British pound is forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism by currency speculators and is forced to devalue against the German mark. 1994 – The British government lifts the broadcasting ban imposed against members of Sinn Féin and Irish paramilitary groups in 1988. 1996 – Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on STS-79 to dock to the Russian space station Mir. 2004 – Hurricane Ivan makes landfall in Gulf Shores, Alabama as a Category 3 hurricane. 2005 – The Camorra organized crime boss Paolo Di Lauro is arrested in Naples, Italy. 2007 – One-Two-Go Airlines Flight 269 carrying 130 crew and passengers crashes in Thailand, killing 90 people. 2007 – Security guards working for Blackwater Worldwide shoot and kill 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square, Baghdad. 2013 – A gunman kills twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. 2014 – The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant launches its Kobani offensive against Syrian–Kurdish forces. 2015 – A 8.3 Mw  earthquake strikes the Chilean city of Illapel, killing 15 people, injuring at least 34, leaving at least six missing, and causing extensive damage. One person also dies in Argentina. 2019 – Five months before the COVID-19 stock market crash, an overnight spike in lending rates in the United States prompts the Federal Reserve to conduct operations in the repo market. 2021 – A 6.0 Mw  earthquake strikes Lu County, Sichuan, China, killing three and injuring more than 88. 2022 – During the Let Yet Kone massacre, the Burmese military kills 13 villagers, including eight children, after attacking a school in Sagaing Region, Myanmar. 2022 – The death of Mahsa Amini occurred, which sparked worldwide protests.

[elmacheteillustrated]

Blackwater Pardoned

[seriousbusinessforhumans]

Heather Cox Richardson - December 22, 2020 (Tuesday)

https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson

Tonight, Trump pardoned 15 people, including four military contractors convicted of opening fire on a crowd and killing 14 unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007. The men sparked an international outcry about the use of private military contractors in war zones when they fired machine guns and grenade launchers in what came to be known as the Nisour Square massacre. One had been sentenced to life in prison; the other three to 30 years each. When the massacre occurred, the four worked for the Blackwater Worldwide security company, founded by Erik Prince, a key Trump loyalist. Prince is Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s brother. 

Trump also pardoned three Republican lawmakers, two of whom were early supporters of his: California Representative Duncan Hunter, convicted of stealing campaign funds, and New York Representative Chris Collins, convicted of insider trading and lying to the FBI. Trump also pardoned two more of the men swept up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election: campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about a conversation he had about Russia’s possession of “dirt” on 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton; and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer who was associated with Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort. Van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to making a false statement to investigators. Papadopoulos and van der Zwaan make up two of the now four people involved in the Russia investigation that Trump has pardoned or whose sentence he has commuted. The other two are his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, and his adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying under oath, withholding documents, and threatening a witness.

Normally, pardons go through the Justice Department, reviewed by the pardon attorney there, but the president has the right to act without consulting the Department of Justice. He has done so.

[sixth-light]

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now, w/r/t the Old Guard fandom and what it means that they’re “mercenaries for hire” in 2019/2020. A massively underplayed facet of American and Western imperialism is that it is not limited to official militaries: it includes large numbers of “private military contractors” (a.k.a. mercenaries but they hate that name because they don’t KILL people they just (checks notes) go to other countries with guns which is totally different. obvs.). This was particularly true in the Iraq War, where it resulted in mercenaries massacring Iraqi civilians, and it is true in lots of places where the US claims to not have “boots on the ground”. Boots belonging to US soldiers? No. Boots belonging to contractors employed by the US military...yes. 

It is worth noting that many many private contractors are former US military because the pay and conditions are much better. Warfare has been significantly privatised over the last two decades; it is also not a coincidence that the founder of the most notorious PMC, Blackwater (now called Academi) is the brother of Betsy DeVos, who is frantically trying to privatise American education. It worked for them once already! 

This means two things for the Old Guard characters:

1) they are private military contractors in canon (canonically, they have worked for the CIA) and this is a very very shady space to operate in. As much as we might like to imagine them only doing warm fuzzy missions “fighting for what [they] think is right”...there are likely to be a lot of recent shades of grey there. They will be mistrusted by a lot of people because of this and fairly so. They are not operating separately from Western imperialism. 

2) if you are writing an AU where they are not immortal warriors but still military/security contractors...again, shady as fuck, and a profession that would not reflect creditably upon them as people (and arguably doesn’t even in canon). It’s not a neutral choice and it’s particularly not-neutral for Joe, a Maghrebi Muslim. I’m not saying “don’t write this”; I’m saying, consider what it implies about who they would be and why they would choose to do this, absent their canonical history.

If you’ve read all this and gone “but doesn’t everybody know this? I certainly do” then we’re cool, this post isn’t for you, it’s for the many people who are literally too young to remember the Nisour Square Massacre as a headline event.                    

[watchingalotofmovies]

The Gray Man

The Gray Man    [trailer]

When the CIA's most skilled operative - whose true identity is known to none - accidentally uncovers dark agency secrets, a psychopathic former colleague puts a bounty on his head, setting off a global manhunt by international assassins.

Oh goodie, normalising torture, and using the cheapest of action movie tropes, putting a young kid in peril. And it looked like Erik Prince worked as a consultant for the Prague mayhem shootout, inspired by what are probably his fond memories of the Nisour Square massacre.

Yeah, I know, it's just a movie. But sometimes it's just too much.

On the plus side, there's some good banter between Ana de Armas and Gosling. And it made me look up that castle in Croatia where people seem to speak French. It's partially real, it's based on the Château de Chantilly.

Has there yet been a review that doesn't mention the moustaches?

[nowthisnews]

On December 21, Trump issued a new round of presidential pardons and sentence commutations, including ones for former campaign officials, Republican allies from Congress, and four Blackwater security contractors convicted in the deaths of 17 Iraqis, including two children. Former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos and lawyer Alex van der Zwaan received pardons after making false statements to federal investigators during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the connection between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Sources close to the president suggest that this may foreshadow other Russia investigation-related pardons to come. Three former GOP members of Congress received pardons or sentence commutations for various criminal activities. Former Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) was sentenced to serve 11 months in prison after misusing $200k in campaign funds for personal use; former Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) was in the midst of serving a 26-month sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to commit securities fraud and giving false statements; and former Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX) had been serving a 10-year sentence after being convicted of almost two dozen white-collar felonies, including fraud and money laundering. Hunter & Collins were two of the earliest lawmakers to publicly support Trump during his 2016 campaign. Trump also pardoned four Blackwater security contractors who were found guilty in the deaths of 17 Iraqis in a 2007 incident that's become known as the Nisour Square massacre. At least 20 others were also injured in this event. Three of the private security contractors were convicted of manslaughter and one other, Nicholas Slatten, was convicted of first-degree murder and serving a life sentence without parole. Witnesses said the four men fired on a crowd of Iraqi civilians in a public square without being provoked or attacked. Their pardon specifically was encouraged by Fox News host and Trump confidant Pete Hegseth. Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, is the brother of Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos. Other pardons included two former U.S. Border Patrol agents who were convicted of shooting an immigrant at the Mexican border in 2006 and a dentist who pleaded guilty to health care fraud. Trump also commuted the sentences two women convicted of non-violent drug crimes at the urging of Alice Johnson, whose own sentence was commuted by the president in 2018 with the help of Kim Kardashian West. Trump has pardoned other allies in the past, including Roger Stone and former national security adviser Gen. Michael Flynn, and has been alleged to have discussed preemptive pardons for his three eldest children—Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric—as well as for son-in-law Jared Kushner and personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

[meowmaids]

With the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 hours, away much of the focus will be centered around the loss of some American lives just as it has been for the last nineteen years. But we also can never forget:

We can never forget how Muslims and Sikhs experience physical violence and still twenty years later.

We never can forget the murder of Balbir Singh Sodh

We can never forget the murder of Vasudev Patel

We can never forget the shooting of Rais Bhuiyan

We can never forget the murders of the Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting

We can never forget the attacks on Sikhs and Muslims worshipping

We can never forget the Mosques and Temples burned down and vandalized

We can never forget the invasion of Iraq

We can never forget white phosphorus used against women and children in Al-Fallujah. Nor depleted uranium was used in Afghanistan Iraq.

We can never forget the torture at Abu Ghraib and Ali al-Qaisi. And that torturers were given light sentences or no punishment

We can never forget Blackwater contractors killing civilians in the Nisour Square massacre.

We can never forget the nearly 200,000 civilians killed during the war in Iraq

We can never forget the nearly 50,000 civilians killed during the war in Afghanistan

We mourn today so many kind and innocent people. May our actions today and every day forward be committed to preserving truth when discussing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Listening to survivors, and supporting them as they see fit. And never allow this to happen again.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

“Pardoning the Blackwater contractors is an affront to justice and to the victims of the Nisour Square massacre and their families,” said Jelena Aparac, chair of the U.N. working group on the use of mercenaries, said in a statement.

The Geneva Conventions oblige states to hold war criminals accountable for their crimes, even when they act as private security contractors, the U.N. experts said.

“These pardons violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level.”

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 9.16 (after 1960)

1961 – The United States National Hurricane Research Project drops eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther. Wind speed reduces by 10%, giving rise to Project Stormfury. 1961 – Typhoon Nancy, with possibly the strongest winds ever measured in a tropical cyclone, makes landfall in Osaka, Japan, killing 173 people. 1961 – Pakistan establishes its Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission with Abdus Salam as its head. 1963 – Malaysia is formed from the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, North Borneo (Sabah) and Sarawak. However, Singapore is soon expelled from this new country. 1966 – The Metropolitan Opera House opens at Lincoln Center in New York City with the world premiere of Samuel Barber's opera Antony and Cleopatra. 1970 – King Hussein of Jordan declares war against the Palestine Liberation Organization, the conflict came to be known as Black September. 1975 – Papua New Guinea gains independence from Australia. 1975 – Cape Verde, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe join the United Nations. 1975 – The first prototype of the Mikoyan MiG-31 interceptor makes its maiden flight. 1976 – Armenian champion swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan saves 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into a Yerevan reservoir. 1978 – The 7.4 Mw  Tabas earthquake affects the city of Tabas, Iran with a maximum Mercalli intensity of IX (Violent). At least 15,000 people are killed. 1979 – Eight people escape from East Germany to the west in a homemade hot air balloon. 1982 – Lebanon War: The Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon takes place. 1987 – The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer from depletion. 1990 – The railroad between the People's Republic of China and Kazakhstan is completed at Dostyk, adding a sizable link to the concept of the Eurasian Land Bridge. 1992 – The trial of the deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega ends in the United States with a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering. 1992 – Black Wednesday: The British pound is forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism by currency speculators and is forced to devalue against the German mark. 1994 – The British government lifts the broadcasting ban imposed against members of Sinn Féin and Irish paramilitary groups in 1988. 2004 – Hurricane Ivan makes landfall in Gulf Shores, Alabama as a Category 3 hurricane. 2005 – The Camorra organized crime boss Paolo Di Lauro is arrested in Naples, Italy. 2007 – One-Two-GO Airlines Flight 269 carrying 130 crew and passengers crashes in Thailand, killing 90 people. 2007 – Security guards working for Blackwater Worldwide shoot and kill 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square, Baghdad. 2013 – A gunman kills twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard. 2014 – The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant launches its Kobani offensive against Syrian–Kurdish forces. 2015 – A 8.3 Mw  earthquake strikes the Chilean city of Illapel, killing 15 people, injuring at least 34, leaving at least six missing, and causing extensive damage. One person also dies in Argentina. 2019 – Five months before the COVID-19 stock market crash, an overnight spike in lending rates in the United States prompts the Federal Reserve to conduct operations in the repo market. 2021 – A 6.0 Mw  earthquake strikes Lu County, Sichuan, China, killing three and injuring more than 88. 2022 – During the Let Yet Kone massacre, the Burmese military kills 13 villagers, including 8 children, after attacking a school in Sagaing Region, Myanmar.

[canchewread]

Editor’s note: after a weekend of doing precisely nothing and vaguely enjoying it, I’m back writing today. I’ve been waiting a solid five months for a news hook to allow me to share the above quotation and Donald Trump’s attempts to dog-whistle his support for the Crusader conquest of the Middle East finally presented one in the lead up to Memorial Day, but I ended up too busy to get to it until now. Buckle up; we’re headed back to 2007 folks.

---

A Brief Look at Blackwater by J. Scahill

Today’s quotation comes from one of the most important books to come out of U.S. Iraq War and Occupation journalism, “Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army” - written by journalist Jeremy Scahill, who is now a founding editor at The Intercept; a publication I reference often in my work.

On the surface it may seem a curious decision to reach back in time to review a book originally published in 2007 and about a company (Blackwater) that in theory (and only in theory) no longer exists. That surface appearance however is precisely why it’s a shameful tragedy that Scahill’s excellent work has largely fallen down the memory hole in America - because Blackwater isn’t really gone, the U.S. still makes extensive use of largely unaccountable private mercenary corporations to enforce the interests of Western elite capital abroad, and governments throughout the Pig Empire continue to subsidize these private mercenary corporations with public money. Although the prosecution of a select few Blackwater war criminals remained something of a political football during the early portions of the Obama presidency and Erik Prince’s recent attempts to privatize the forever war in Afghanistan created a moderate amount of controversy in the mainstream media, the once impassioned resistance to accepting government-employed mercenaries as a consequence of empire has largely dissipated in “the West.”

This is unfortunate because at its heart Scahill’s “Blackwater” is more than an investigation into founder and now “former” owner Erik Prince’s infamous private mercenary army and its role in the Iraq war. The book is also about the terrifying and then-rapidly expanding (now, fully entrenched) role of private mercenaries in the Pig Empire’s permanent war economy.– mercenaries employed in volatile combat, assassination and security roles, both abroad and domestically in America. From deployment as a modern “Praetorian Guard” serving high level American officials in Iraq, to acting as an ad hoc private army for the wealthy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and including ongoing training and even war zone contracts with various Western governments, Scahill lays out a virtually unassailable argument that private mercenary forces are simply unregulated thugs in the service of the American imperial project - an argument that now appears to be largely mainstream, if still rarely articulated thinking.

In terms of writing style, Scahill has the instincts of a war correspondent and the meticulous attention to detail of a prosecutor; useful traits for documenting what amount to war crimes, massive levels of bribery and direct protection for Blackwater employees provided by the Bush administration. This has led some commentators to critique Scahill’s writing in Blackwater as lacking an overall “narrative” flow, but personally I didn’t find that to be the case at all. Sure, you can argue that Blackwater lacks the casual storytelling of say Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone" but by that same measure, Scahill’s book is vastly more consequential. Frankly if you can read (Scahill’s friend and colleague) Seymour Hersh, you should have no problem following along with and enjoying Blackwater’s supposed “bombardment” of facts. Blackwater is, and remains both a rewarding and a monumentally important book in terms of exposing the inner workings of Pig Empire conquest and colonialism.

Mercenaries, Erik Prince and the Swine Emperor

All of which brings us to Downmarket Mussolini’s recent musings about possibly pardoning a number of accused American war criminals as a way of honoring veterans for Memorial Day; an objectively insane and monstrous idea Trump apparently decided not to go through with, at least for the moment. While much of the mainstream media coverage has (rightfully) focused on Herr Donald’s politically motivated potential pardon of depraved and murderous ex-Navy Seal Edward Gallagher, there was another curious name Trump was ruminating over - former Blackwater mercenary Nicholas Slatten.

For those unfamiliar with the exploits of Mr. Slatten, he’s the soldier of fortune the Department of Justice has successfully argued fired the first shot at a busy Baghdad intersection on September 16, 2007, triggering the depraved American war crime that would come to be known as the “Nisour Square massacre” or “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday” - a morally repugnant and utterly unjustifiable mass murder that lasted for up to fifteen minutes and resulted in the deaths of at least fourteen (and likely more) innocent Iraqis during the later stages of the Bush Administration. While the crypto-Crusader right wing media protests his innocence and Slatten himself declares that he‘s a “POW in his own country” the simple truth is that there is very little reason to doubt Slatten’s guilt - as noted by former assistant U.S. attorney Glenn Kirschner:

“Please bear with me for a moment while I relate some basic public facts about the Blackwater case. The defendants were US civilians (veterans) who were being paid to perform security services in Iraq. Multiple Blackwater employees opened fire on innocent Iraqis in what was a massacre in broad daylight. They killed 14 unarmed Iraqi citizens and injured 17 others in front of dozens of witnesses

"Some of the testifying witnesses were the defendants own Blackwater teammates," Kirschner said. "Many of the fellow Blackwater members testified about how the defendants were in the wrong - they did not even attempt to defend their teammates, rather they described their teammates’ use of deadly force as being wholly unjustified and without provocation. Evidence at trial included how one defendant, Nicholas Slatten, called Iraqis 'animals' and 'less then human.' According to Slatten, Iraqi lives were worth 'nothing.'”

On a related note, the 2008 paperback edition of Jeremy Scahill’s “Blackwater” opens with a detailed expose of the Nisour Square massacre. While Scahill doesn’t mention Nicholas Slatten by name, the updated introduction does offer a devastating account of Slatten and Blackwater’s wanton slaughter and violence; an account delivered by numerous Iraqi witnesses, including doctors, police officers and heartbroken relatives of the slain - many of whom were women and children. In light of the fact that all of this evidence has existed in the public sphere since at least 2008, I think it’s fair to say that justice has been a very long time coming for Nicholas Slatten; while justice for then-chief Blackwater corpse-farming scumbag Erik Prince, remains deferred.

This of course brings up the puzzling question of why Trump would even consider pardoning an almost certainly guilty piece of dogshit like Nick Slatten. Is the Swine Emperor indeed merely courting Fox News nation? Is he dog-whistling to a fanatically pro-Crusader, anti-Muslim reactionary right that worships at the altar of the Pig Empire “troop?”

Perhaps, but I also think it’s important at this juncture to consider Trump’s disturbingly close relationship with Erik Prince, their shared network of wealthy far right patrons and the political ramifications of a potential pardon. Prince donated at least $250,000 (and possibly more through other channels) to Trump’s election campaign, his (nearly as infamous) sister, Betsy DeVos serves as Herr Donald’s secretary of education and it certainly appears like Prince lied under oath to cover up a  August 3rd, 2016 Trump Tower meeting to discuss Iran policy involving himself, Donald Trump Jr, advisor Stephen Miller, “George Nader, an emissary for the Saudi and Emirati crown princes; and Joel Zamel, the Israeli head of the rather dodgy private intelligence company Psy-Group.” 

More importantly however Prince has clearly demonstrated that he has privileged access to President Trump for the purposes of pitching potential lucrative mercenary contracts - including the aforementioned proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan, a plan to deploy a US-backed private mercenary army to Venezuela and even the creation of an “off the books” private spy network to fight Trump’s political enemies at home and abroad.

Although intense public pressure has prevented the Swine Emperor from accepting any of Prince’s offers thus far, the “Dark Prince’s” continued presence in Trump’s inner circle seems to suggest that the President certainly wants to indulge the former Blackwater founder. Unfortunately for both men, while Nicholas Slatten is no longer “a troop”, he was serving as a private military contractor employed by Blackwater at the time he opened fire and touched off the mass murder of at least 14 Iraqi civilians. Since Prince is synonymous with Blackwater, and Slatten’s endless and exceptionally high profile series of trials has made Blackwater synonymous with “war crimes” - the would-be mercenary king has found it rather difficult to convince the American people he should be entrusted with multi-billion dollar government contracts.

While a pardon for Slatten won’t make all of that bad press go away, it would provide the necessary veneer of respectability for Prince’s ongoing attempts to worm his way back into the Pig Empire’s good graces; either now, or in the future. And if there’s one thing that anyone who has watched the rise, fall and rebirth of Erik Prince can say about that twisted son of a bitch, it’s that he knows how to grease the right wheels and he’s more than happy to play the long game.

- Nina Illingworth.

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter and Facebook.