Defiant Former Blackwater Contractor Again Sentenced to Life
WASHINGTON — Shortly before a federal judge sentenced him on Wednesday to life in prison for his role in the deadly 2007 shooting of dozens of unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad, Nicholas A. Slatten, a former Blackwater security contractor, stood in a tan jumpsuit and defiantly proclaimed that he was an innocent victim of Justice Department prosecutors run amok.
“This is a miscarriage of justice that will not stand,” said Mr. Slatten, who in December was convicted by a jury of murdering an Iraqi civilian in Nisour Square, the act prosecutors said kicked off the chaotic hail of machine-gun fire and grenades targeting other civilians by guards in Mr. Slatten’s convoy that left 10 women, two men and two children dead, and 18 other people injured.
But the trial judge, Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, rejected Mr. Slatten’s assertion of innocence, including a reference to a fellow Blackwater guard’s statement that it was he, not Mr. Slatten, who fired the initial shot that killed the driver of a white Kia sedan in the traffic circle, Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y, 19.
“The court’s view of the evidence is the same as that of the jury,” Judge Lamberth said, declaring that the other guard’s statement was an “effort to mislead authorities about what was going on,” and that it was Mr. Slatten who “shot Mr. Al Rubia’y between the eyes and killed him” without provocation.
The government had hired Blackwater Security to escort State Department officials through a chaotic war zone at the height of the Iraq insurgency. One of the darkest episodes in the conflict, the massacre of civilians became a charged symbol of American abuses and prompted a rethinking of American reliance on contractors in war zones. It also strained relations between the United States and the Iraqi government: The Iraqis wanted to prosecute the contractors, but the Americans insisted on handling it.
Judge Lamberth rejected a constitutional challenge by the defense to a law mandating that Mr. Slatten receive a life sentence for the first-degree murder conviction, which the judge formally imposed. Mr. Slatten swiftly said, “God bless you, sir,” before guards led him out of the courtroom.
But his defense lawyer and friends and family from Tennessee, many of whom gave emotional statements declaring that Mr. Slatten was a patriot whom they believed to be innocent, made clear that they would keep fighting, including by asking the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to overturn the sentence and the verdict.
Left unmentioned in the courtroom were signs that President Trump might be weighing whether to grant a pardon to Mr. Slatten, as well as to several servicemen accused or convicted of war crimes. The New York Times reported in May that the White House had requested paperwork about his and a handful of other cases, according to two United States officials.
In his statement, Mr. Slatten also accused the government of covering up classified evidence that would have proved his claim, which prosecutors rejected, that insurgents started the Nisour Square episode. For Mr. Slatten’s supporters who stressed his prior combat tours with the Army before he went to work for Blackwater, that theory dovetailed with a recurring theme: the extreme peril of navigating a combat zone amid an insurgency, which Mr. Slatten’s father said many of those now judging his son did not understand.
But Judge Lamberth took exception to that, saying he had served a tour in the Vietnam War and had been in many dangerous situations. Nevertheless, he said troops must rely on each other and obey the rules to ensure that innocent civilians were not unnecessarily harmed. In the case of the Nisour Square massacre, he said, the evidence made clear that there had been no incoming fire against the convoy and that “there was no necessity” to shoot Mr. Al Rubia’y. . . .
Copyright 2019 Martin P. All World Rights Expressly Reserved (no claim to The New York Times content)
No comments:
Post a Comment