Blackwater pardons spark fear of backlash
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s decision on Tuesday to pardon four former Blackwater security guards – convicted in a 2007 massacre in Baghdad that left more than a dozen Iraqi civilians dead – has unleashed a torrent of criticism and anger from lawmakers, former prosecutors and ex-military officials.
Some warned that Trump’s decision would carry severe consequences – jeopardizing the safety of American military personnel, inflaming U.S.-Iraqi tensions and tarnishing the U.S. justice system in the eyes of the world.
“Trump’s move is corrosive to the U.S. military,” said Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official who worked on Iraq policy in the George W. Bush administration.
“It’s one thing when justice is served under the law. It’s another when the president in effect blesses state-sanctioned murder,” said Rubin, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank.
“Today, Trump killed justice,” Glenn Kirschner, a former prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which was involved in the prosecution of the four Blackwater employees, tweeted on Tuesday. He said the Blackwater contractors slaughtered 14 innocent Iraqis.
“I considered it one of the proudest accomplishments of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, obtaining justice for those victims,” he wrote.
The four Blackwater security guards – Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – have consistently professed their innocence. And their defenders cheered Trump’s announcement on Tuesday.
“Paul Slough and his colleagues didn’t deserve to spend one minute in prison,” said Brian Heberlig, a lawyer for one of the four pardoned defendants. “I am overwhelmed with emotion at this fantastic news.”
But others expressed shock and dismay at the president’s move.
“I’ll never forget how upsetting it was – especially for those of us who served in Iraq – when news broke about this brazen act of hostility on innocent Iraqi civilians,” Olivia Troye, a former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, wrote on Twitter. (She left the Trump administration over the summer and has since become an outspoken critic of the president.)
Trump’s pardon of the Blackwater contractors “sends an awful message to the world about the U.S. & undermines our military,” wrote Troye, who also served at the Pentagon during the Bush administration.