03/01/2020
So, I sat and thought about it -- and this is what I said to The Daily Beast and to everyone else who can't get the facts straight.
Asawin and Spencer:
I was disappointed and frankly, enraged, to see your story today about the potential pardons of Nick Slatten and the other members of Raven 23 by President Trump. As a former Reuters journalist, author and podcaster -- and a fellow liberal (yeah, don't bother denying it) -- it is heartbreaking to see how this one-sided reporting redounds so severely on those of us who do our jobs properly. Raven 23 is not a story I wanted to do or even felt equipped to do from a foreign policy standpoint, but as a journalist and an American, the abuses of power by the DOJ cannot be allowed to stand for the safety of our nation.
I'm sharing with you some US State Department cables that you could have received from the Slatten, Slough, Liberty or Heard families, had you actually taken the trouble to cultivate a relationship with them. The accuracy of these cables, which show the dilemma of the Obama administration in trying to appease the Iraqi government over a shooting that was no more and no less deadly than several other incidents that week in Baghdad, was confirmed to me by the man who wrote them, Robert Ford. Ford and Entifah Qanbar, a senior advisor on the Iraq war and an Iraqi cabinet member, explained (as you can hear in my podcast) that the Iranian-backed militias who controlled the Iraqi National Police and the Iraqi Army wanted Blackwater out of Iraq to complete their domination of its government.
Neither was surprised that the Iraqi colonel to whom the investigation was handed over by Ambassador Crocker had well-documented ties to these militias. Qanbar told me several weeks ago that the Iraqi police and the Iran-backed militias -- even in 2007 -- were identical. And we can surmise from the scene in Iraq this week that he was absolutely correct. Here's what Robert Ford told me: "There was undoubtedly a lot of Badr people brought into the Interior Ministry. Frankly, we warned President Bush about it and we were told to live with it."
So who exactly are we giving "confidence" in the US legal system when we allow an enemy government to try our citizens and demand that they be put in prison?
The Iraqi people had nothing to do with what happened in 2010 after Judge Urbina correctly dismissed the cases for lack of evidence -- as Robert Ford says in my podcast: "I think this is an important bit of context to understand. The American forces … predominantly U.S. military but like this Nisour Square incident. We killed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of Iraqi civilians over the years. And Iraqis aren’t stupid. They knew this and it was done with a sort of impunity in a place that family is a huge deal, I mean it’s a huge deal in the United States but we have here in the United States individual self fulfilment and self expression -- they don’t have that in Iraq. You do what the family expects, etc and etc. So this was a hugely sensitive issue, the way the Americans reacted. The way armed Americans reacted with Iraqis so there’s that."
"And I don’t blame Blackwater for the Nisour Square incident. All this pent-up dissatisfaction erupted."
Do you know who Robert Ford did blame? Paul Bremer and Order 17 but since you're taking your entire story from DOJ press releases, you probably don't know what that is. In law, that's called a mitigating circumstance. So let's turn to the legal case that you so incuriously included in your story.
Being shot at is a complete defense to both manslaughter and murder charges -- and these men were in a well-documented firefight. Even the government admitted that -- after denying it -- in their 2017 appellate argument and briefs. These convictions were obtained with no physical evidence such as autopsies, bullet trajectory analysis or forensics of any kind that would stand up in an American court. I have videos that show hundreds of Iraqi Army officers walking around in the square, minutes after this incident, picking up shell casings and removing other evidence from the crime scene. There are three cars of the dozens that were involved in this incident, as well as two bodies and some brain matter and blood on the seat of another car. These videos were shot by US Army investigators. Later, we learned that the Iraqi witnesses were paid by the US government. Would you feel confident enough in "American Justice" to go on trial for your life in these circumstances? I don't -- and that's why I did this story.
The "prosecutorial misconduct" you glaze over in your story includes six separate incidents in which the government hid and then "lost" AK-47 bullets, failed to turned over an email between the FBI and Ahmed Al-Rubiya's father in which the father refuses to testify against Nick Slatten because he had been told since Sept. 16, 2007 that someone named Paul shot his son, failed to turn over CIA reports that Col Faris Kareem (who led the investigation) was a known informant of JAM and the Badr Corps, that two of the main witnesses against Slatten and Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard, had perjured themselves with the encouragement and knowledge of prosecutors. I covered gang murder trials in LA Superior Court, as well as many federal criminal trials. One of those violations should have voided this case, and what I have listed is not a complete list of vindictive and illegal behavior by this prosecution team. If you doubt my accuracy or intent, take a look at the amicus brief written in 2016 by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers -- a nice liberal organization whose opinion even the Daily Beast should respect.
Had you done the bare minimum of looking through the case file or having a background chat to the defense attorneys, you would know that these men have been offered multiple plea deals over a decades' worth of litigation and have consistently refused to take them because they are innocent. Nick Slatten passed an FBI lie detector test. Your reference to Nick's lawyer apologizing to the family of the poor victims in the Kia are not some kind of admission of guilt - it was a sincere expression of regret of the horrible toll that ill-considered wars such as the Iraq war take on the innocent.
Had you read the trial transcripts, you would know that the main witness against them, Jeremy Ridgeway, was the only man on the Raven 23 team to have fired wildly and possibly killed civilians. He perjured himself at least twice and yet served one year in prison. All of this information is all in the transcripts of the three trials it took to convict them for an incident that you, in your story, describe as one of the pivotal events of the Iraq war, yet you don't even bother to educate yourself about what happened - other than taking the government's word for it. Were you curious at all about why the DOJ paid to bring over 46 Iraqi witnesses to the US to testify in a case that would not stand up in any other US court? Is it possible that these victims -- and I use that term loosely -- were intended to create a prejudicial effect that covered up the fact that the government had no evidence against the Blackwater guards? If these men were American gang members -- the highly emotional and factually questionable testimony that I read from these witnesses would never have been allowed in court.
If you had an ounce of curiosity, you might then ask yourself, as I did -- why did Nick Slatten get charged with murder and why did the prosecutors' theory of the case change so radically between the first indictments in 2008 and the second indictments in 2014 after the government incompetently allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the manslaughter charges against him? Well, if you had done any criminal court reporting at all, you'd realize it's because the only charge that doesn't have a statute of limitations is, that's right, murder. You would know that Paul Slough didn't "allegedly" confess to killing Ahmed Al Rubiy'a -- he gave four sworn statements stating exactly that -- the first of which leaked within weeks of the incident to ABC News and posted on their website.
You would know, had you pulled contemporaneous accounts by the New York Times and the Iraqi government's statement (as I have done), that eight people died or were wounded in Nisour Square, and 12 died across Baghdad that entire day (according to a statement issued by the Iraqi government) -- so where did this enormous body count come from? You would also know, had you questioned Robert Ford -- that he recalls paying six families bereavement payments of $10,000 apiece for Nisour Square, not 17.
The similarities between the two of you and me are these: I also believed the worst of Blackwater and the men who joined an outfit I believed to be corrupt. I opposed the Iraq war and supported Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the Democratic Party with my votes and my confidence, as I have since I began voting in 1982. I have never, ever voted for a Republican and I do not plan to. The differences between us is this: I was willing to challenge my prejudices when the evidence showed that I was wrong. That's what being a responsible journalist and a person who wields enormous power in a democracy means.
Your moral and intellectual laziness offends me, and has contributed to the downfall of a profession I have worked at and loved all my life.
Shame on you.
