Blackwater gunned down Iraqi civilians as they tried to flee, US says as case goes to jury

[Galraedia]

Source: Raw Story

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Four former security guards for Blackwater Worldwide “took something that didn’t belong to them, the lives of 14 human beings,” in September 2007 when they fired on civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle, a U.S. prosecutor told jurors on Wednesday.

Several victims were shot in the back as they tried to flee, federal prosecutor Anthony Asuncion noted. Summing up the government’s case against the guards, he also recounted the testimony of relatives who had given emotional accounts of their loved ones’ gory deaths.

Asuncion began closing arguments by painting the ex-security guards as cold-blooded killers who unleashed firepower on Iraqi civilians who posed no threat.

The shootings at Nisur Square, four years into the Iraq war, sparked international outrage. The guards were trying to secure a path for a State Department convoy.

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/27/blackwater-gunned-down-iraqi-civilians-as-they-tried-to-flee-us-says-as-case-goes-to-jury/

[polly7]

1. Sick *'s!

It takes a big, tough person to shoot civilians/aka anyone who lived in Iraq in the back! But gee, I hope the convoy got through alright.

[freshwest]

2. The aggressive Obama prosecution is why the GOP will attempt another government shut down:

Blackwater Jurors Urged to Give Iraqis Justice... Behind the Blackwater Trial

By MATT APUZZO - AUG. 27, 2014

A look at why the case of four Blackwater guards, accused of murdering 17 Iraqis in Nisour Square on Sept. 16, 2007, has taken so long to reach the courtroom...

“People who could laugh, who could love, were turned into bloodied, bullet-riddled corpses,” said Anthony Asuncion, an assistant United States attorney...

Mr. Asuncion, who spoke softly for much of his three-hour closing argument, said that even if jurors believed there was Iraqi gunfire that day, nothing justified the Blackwater response. When the shooting stopped, he said, it was clear that none of the victims were insurgents, he said.

“Why shoot all of these people who are running away?” he asked. “Why shoot women and children who are unarmed? There’s no reason. What they did was criminal...”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/us/in-closing-blackwater-prosecutor-says-us-court-levels-the-playing-field.html

Asuncion works out of the Washington, D.C. circuit, the one which the GOP has worked hardest to prevent Obama appointing judges and funding prosecutors. They fear what the law will do to the ones they are protecting:

[frylock]

3. how many of those guys are current or former law enforcement?

[C Moon]

4. Yuck! How do they sleep?

[jtuck004]

5. Huh. Wonder where they got the idea to shoot at people who were running away

or out of combat. Heck, it almost sounds like a a war crime or something. But then if everyone is doing it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death

...
During the United Nations coalition offensive in the Persian Gulf War, American and Canadian aircraft and ground forces attacked retreating Iraqi military personnel and others attempting to leave Kuwait on the night of February 26–27, 1991, resulting in the destruction of hundreds of vehicles and the deaths of many of their occupants.
...
The 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing A-6 Intruder aircraft blocked Highway 80, a massive vehicle column of mostly Iraqi Regular Army forces with Mk-20 Rockeye II cluster bombs, effectively boxing in the Iraqi forces in an enormous traffic jam of sitting targets for subsequent airstrikes. Over the next 10 hours, scores of U.S. Marine and U.S. Air Force aircraft and U.S. Navy pilots from USS Ranger (CV/CVA-61) attacked the convoy using a variety of ordnance. Vehicles surviving the air attacks were later engaged by arriving coalition ground units, while most of the vehicles that managed to evade the traffic jam and continued to drive on the road north were targeted individually. The road bottle-neck near the Mutla Ridge police station was reduced to a long uninterrupted line of more than 300 stuck and abandoned vehicles sometimes called the Mile of Death. The wreckage found on the highway consisted of at least 28 tanks and other armored vehicles with many more commandeered civilian cars and buses filled with stolen Kuwaiti property.

The death toll from the attack remains unknown and controversial. British journalist Robert Fisk claimed to have "lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smouldering wreckage or slumped face down in the sand" at the main site and to see hundreds of corpses strewn up the road all the way to the Iraqi border. American journalist Bob Drogin reported seeing "scores" of dead soldiers "in and around the vehicles, mangled and bloated in the drifting desert sands." Some independent estimates go as high as 10,000 or more casualties (even "tens of thousands&quot , but this is a highly unlikely number. A 2003 study by the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA) estimated fewer than 10,000 people rode in the cut-off main caravan; and when the bombing started most simply left their vehicles to escape through the desert or into the nearby swamps where some died from their wounds and some were later taken prisoner. According to PDA, the often repeated low estimate of the numbers killed in the attack is 200-300 reported by journalist Michael Kelly (who personally counted 37 bodies), but a minimum death toll of at least 500-600 seems more plausible.[6]
...
Additionally, journalist Seymour Hersh, citing American witnesses, alleged that a platoon of U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicles from the 1st Brigade, 24th Infantry Division opened fire on a large group of more than 350 disarmed Iraqi soldiers who had surrendered at a makeshift military checkpoint after fleeing the devastation on Highway 8 on February 27, apparently hitting some or all of them. The U.S. Military Intelligence personnel who were manning the checkpoint claimed they too were fired on from the same vehicles and barely fled by car during the incident.[4] Journalist Georgie Anne Geyer criticized Hersh's article, saying that he offered "no real proof at all that such charges--which were aired, investigated and then dismissed by the military after the war--are true."[11]
...

We make too many bullets.

[jakeXT]

6. Shooting unarmed people in the US isn't that uncommon/nt