Trump pardons Blackwater contractors jailed for massacre of Iraq civilians
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President Donald Trump has pardoned four Blackwater security guards who were given lengthy prison sentences for killing 14 civilians in Baghdad in 2007, a massacre that caused international uproar over the use of private contractors in war zones.
The four – Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Nicholas Slatten – were part of an armoured convoy that opened fire indiscriminately with machine-guns and grenade launchers on a crowd of unarmed people in the Iraqi capital. Known as the Nisour Square massacre, the slaughter was seen as a low point in the conflict in Iraq.
In 2014, Slough, Liberty and Heard were found guilty of 13 charges of voluntary manslaughter and 17 charges of attempted manslaughter, while Slatten, the team’s sniper who was the first to open fire, was convicted of first-degree murder. Slatten was sentenced to life; Slough, Liberty and Heard got 30 years each.
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An initial prosecution was thrown out by a federal judge – sparking outrage in Iraq –but the then vice president, Joe Biden, promised to pursue a fresh prosecution, which was backed by judges.
At the sentencing, the US attorney’s office said in a statement: “The sheer amount of unnecessary human loss and suffering attributable to the defendants’ criminal conduct on September 16, 2007, is staggering.”
After news of the pardon came through on Tuesday night, Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for one of the four pardoned Blackwater defendants, said: “Paul Slough and his colleagues didn’t deserve to spend one minute in prison. I am overwhelmed with emotion at this fantastic news.”
The pardons reflected Trump’s apparent willingness to give the benefit of doubt to American service personnel and contractors when it comes to acts of violence against civilians in war zones. In November last year, he pardoned a former US Army commando who was set to stand trial in the killing of a suspected Afghan bomb-maker, and a former Army lieutenant convicted of murder for ordering his men to fire upon three Afghans.
Supporters of the former contractors at Blackwater Worldwide had lobbied for the pardons, arguing that the men had been excessively punished.
Prosecutors asserted the heavily armed “Raven 23” Blackwater convoy launched an unprovoked attack using sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers. Defence lawyers argued their clients returned fire after being ambushed by Iraqi insurgents.
The US government said in a memorandum filed after the sentencing: “None of the victims was an insurgent, or posed any threat to the Raven 23 convoy”. The memorandum also contained quotations from relatives of the dead, including Mohammad Kinani, whose nine-year-old son Ali was killed. “That day changed my life forever. That day destroyed me completely,” Kinani said.
Also quoted in the memorandum was David Boslego, a retired US army colonel, who said that the massacre was “a grossly excessive use of force” and “grossly inappropriate for an entity whose only job was to provide personal protection to somebody in an armoured vehicle”.
Boslego also said the attack had “a negative effect on our mission, [an] adverse effect … It made our relationship with the Iraqis in general more strained.”
FBI investigators who visited the scene in the following days described it as the “My Lai massacre of Iraq” – a reference to the infamous slaughter of civilian villagers by US troops during the Vietnam war – in which only one soldier was convicted.
After the convictions, Blackwater – which changed to Academi after being sold and renamed in 2011 – said it was “relieved that the justice system has completed its investigation into a tragedy that occurred at Nisour Square in 2007 and that any wrongdoing that was carried out has been addressed by our courts.
“The security industry has evolved drastically since those events, and under the direction of new ownership and leadership, Academi has invested heavily in compliance and ethics programs, training for our employees, and preventative measures to strictly comply with all US and local government laws.”
The 14 victims killed by the Blackwater guards on trial were listed as Ahmed Haithem Ahmed Al Rubia’y, Mahassin Mohssen Kadhum Al-Khazali, Osama Fadhil Abbas, Ali Mohammed Hafedh Abdul Razzaq, Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Qasim Mohamed Abbas Mahmoud, Sa’adi Ali Abbas Alkarkh, Mushtaq Karim Abd Al-Razzaq, Ghaniyah Hassan Ali, Ibrahim Abid Ayash, Hamoud Sa’eed Abttan, Uday Ismail Ibrahiem, Mahdi Sahib Nasir and Ali Khalil Abdul Hussein.