The Daily Background

The Washington Post today gives us the horrific story of a Blackwater mercenary who sumbled upon a bodyguard for Iraq’s Vice President and shot him to death while he was drunk and wandering through the Green Zone after a party on Chistmas Day 2006:

At the vice president’s home, [former US Ambassador Zalmay] Khalilzad found the slain guard’s family assembled. [Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul] Mahdi demanded the names of the American and his employer. And he wanted the man turned over to the Iraqi government.

After consulting with the embassy’s legal officer, Khalilzad identified the shooter as Andrew J. Moonen, an employee of Blackwater USA, the company that provides security for U.S. diplomats in Baghdad. But he would not deliver Moonen himself. Within 36 hours of the shooting, Blackwater and the embassy had shipped him out of the country.

“As you can imagine,” the embassy’s Diplomatic Security office said in an e-mail to its Washington headquarters the day of Moonen’s departure, “this has serious implications.”

But as with previous killings by contractors, the case was handled with apologies and a payoff. Blackwater fired Moonen and fined him $14,697 — the total of his back pay, a scheduled bonus and the cost of his plane ticket home, according to Blackwater documents. The amount nearly equaled the $15,000 the company agreed to give the Iraqi guard’s family.

It is so unfuckingbelievable that our government goes to such lengths to protect these sons of bitches from justice.

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