January 8, 2010
Former Blackwater Guards Charged With Murder
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON — Two former Blackwater security guards were arrested Thursday on murder charges stemming from a shooting in Afghanistan last May that left two Afghans dead and a third wounded, the Justice Department said.
The arrests came just days after a federal district judge dismissed a separate criminal case against four other former Blackwater security guards involved in a 2007 shooting in Nisour Square in Baghdad that left at least 17 Iraqi civilians dead. In that decision, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina offered scathing criticism of the prosecution’s handling of the case.
Thursday’s arrests seemed to signal that the Justice Department did not plan to abandon its scrutiny of Blackwater despite its defeat in the Nisour Square case.
Separately, some of the victims of the Nisour Square shooting have reached a settlement with Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, in several civil lawsuits. The survivors and families of the victims agreed to drop their case in return for an undisclosed financial settlement.
In the criminal case involving Blackwater in Afghanistan, the two former guards — Justin Cannon, 27, of Corpus Christi, Tex., and Christopher Drotleff, 29, of Virginia Beach, Va. — were arrested after being indicted in federal court in Virginia on charges of second-degree murder, attempted murder and firearms violations. At the time of the May 5 shooting in Kabul, the men were working for Paravant LLC, a subsidiary of Xe Services, and under a contract they were assigned to train Afghan soldiers.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Xe Services, said the company “immediately and fully cooperated with the government’s investigation of this tragic incident and terminated the individuals involved for violating company policy.”
In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Drotleff defended his actions in the shooting, saying: “I feel comfortable firing my weapon anytime I feel my life is in danger. That night, my life was 100 percent in danger.”
In Iraq, victims of the Nisour Square shooting said they had accepted the settlement because they worried that it was their last chance for compensation.
Abdel Amir Rahim Jihan, who was shot three times in the legs, said he would receive $30,000.
“Our rights were not redressed,” said Mr. Jihan, 45. “We didn’t achieve victory. But the legal procedures take a long time, and we were given the choice to either settle or not. I did.” He is among at least 10 other victims who accepted the settlement.
Susan Burke, a Washington lawyer representing the victims, declined to comment about the settlement. Xe Services said that the settlement “enables Xe’s new management to move the company forward free of the costs and distraction of ongoing litigation, and provides some compensation to Iraqi families.”
Another group of 10 victims represented by a different law firm said they had not yet been offered settlements.
The Iraqi government, furious that the criminal case in the Nisour Square shootings was dismissed, is considering filing a civil lawsuit against Blackwater in American courts, Iraqi government officials said this week.
Meanwhile, the security company’s involvement in clandestine operations with the Central Intelligence Agency surfaced this week after the disclosure that two of its employees had been killed along with five officers of the C.I.A. and a Jordanian intelligence agent in a suicide bombing at a base in Khost, Afghanistan.
The company’s employees were identified as Jeremy Wise, 35, a former member of the Navy Seals, and Dane Clark Paresi, 46, who had served for years in the Army’s Special Forces. They had been assigned to provide security to C.I.A. officers at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, where a Jordanian double agent acted as a suicide bomber and killed eight people, including the C.I.A.’s chief of the base.
A former Blackwater employee who worked for the company in Pakistan and Afghanistan said that the security personnel were assigned to that base to provide personal security for the C.I.A. officers, especially when they left the base to gather intelligence.
The former Blackwater employee, who asked not to be identified in order to discuss the firm’s operations, said: “The B.W. guys’ only role is to protect the agency personnel when they go downrange to investigate and disseminate intelligence. But they are not used for any of the actual interrogations.”
The C.I.A. has used the Chapman base in Khost to gather information from paid informants on members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, who are then attacked either by Predator drones or by more conventional American or Afghan forces.
