FBI Calls It 'Instrumental.' Gen. Jones Calls It 'Dysfunctional.'

"The assistance provided by the Iraqi national police was instrumental to our success of our mission." That's what FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Joseph Persichini, Jr., tells reporters when unveiling the government's case against five former Blackwater men allegedly involved in the 2007 Nisoor Square shootout.

This is the same force that's so plagued with corruption and infiltrated by terrorists that it can scarcely function.

The same force under the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, which a panel of retired US generals and police chiefs said was so dysfunctional that it should be shut down and that the police should be "disbanded and reorganized." The panel, called the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, concluded,

"The Ministry of Interior is a ministry in name only. It is widely regarded as being dysfunctional and sectarian, and suffers from ineffective leadership. Such fundamental flaws present a serious obstacle to achieving the levels of readiness, capability, and effectiveness in police and border security forces that are essential for internal security and stability in Iraq."

One of the members of the panel was Gen. James Jones USMC (Ret.), whom President-Elect Barack Obama recently appointed to be his National Security Advisor.

The group's report was published and released in a highly publicized news conference just 10 days before the Nisoor incident.

And the FBI says the force that Gen. Jones said should be shut down was "instrumental" in helping build the case?

Click here for a PDF of the independent commission's report.

Justice Department 'Reckless' in Assault on Blackwater Men

"Lawyers for the five Blackwater guards indicted by the Justice Department in connection with a 2007 shooting in Baghdad accused the government of overstepping its authority and recklessly staining the reputations of five decorated veterans who had honorably served their country," the New York Times reports today.

"Justice officials have faced trouble with the case nearly from the start," adds the Wall Street Journal. "Investigators from the State Department, which had jurisdiction over the guards, gave the men immunity in exchange for providing statements immediately following the incident. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents arrived to take over the probe weeks later, having to reconstruct a crime scene on public streets, and tracking down witnesses. The men said they fired in response to shooting from insurgents; some Iraqi witnesses disputed that there was any firing other than that by the Blackwater guards."

"These battlefield incident prosecutions are notoriously difficult to win no matter what the forum," says former Navy lawyer Tara Lee.

"Plaintiff attorneys also plan to argue that the men's work for the State Department doesn't fall under the authority of the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, the law originally written to cover Pentagon contractors and now being used to prosecute the men," according to the Journal.

Iranian Press Condemns Blackwater - Oh No!

The Associated Press isn't the only one abandoning journalistic integrity when it comes to reporting on Blackwater. In fact, AP in very good company: the Iranian state-controlled media.

Iran's Press TV describes Blackwater's operations at Nisoor Square on 17 September last year as "an unprovoked shooting spree." Well I'm glad the Iranians have sorted out this difficult matter for us, a matter the FBI is still investigating. (Though Time magazine has reported that a variety of evidence supports Blackwater's account of events.)

The Iranians' journalism is almost laughable; one doesn't expect much more from the mouthpiece of a terrorist-sponsoring theocratic autocracy. But when the Associated Press (along with Reuters, the New York Times and others) use the same sort of non-nonsensically biased language, it's a cause for concern. It's time for more accountability in American journalism.

FBI Finally Gets Around to Investigating Blackwater Incident

The AP reports that eight FBI agents and federal prosecutors investigating the September 17 shoot-out at Nisoor Square are returning to the scene as part of their ongoing investigation. The AP writes,

Since opening a grand jury investigation in November, prosecutors have questioned about 30 US witnesses, including Blackwater security guards and managers, during closed-door grand jury sessions in a Washington courthouse. To accommodate the crush of witnesses, prosecutors took the unusual step of requesting a third day of grand jury time each week.

However, read a little further and you find out that some key people were not interviewed, namely the Iraqis at the scene:

Authorities plan to interview about two dozen Iraqis during this trip, many for the first time, according to one person familiar with the investigation. Some Iraqi witnesses spoke to reporters and local police following the shooting.... FBI agents reviewed reports of those interviews but did not question the Iraqi witnesses themselves during the agency's first trip to Baghdad two weeks after the shooting.

So now, five months after the fact, we're hoping that the witnesses are still reliable, if ever they were. Surely the FBI has done enough investigations to know that people begin to confuse details, "remember" things they never saw, and generally become unreliable. It's not the witnesses' fault; it's just the way the human mind works.

Let's hope the good folks at the Bureau are sharp enough to realize their mistake and the limits of this latest fact-finding mission, rather than jumping to conclusions.

State Department review panel keeps open mind

A State Department panel to review the use of private security contractors has faulted the department for poor coordination and oversight, but reached no conclusion about Blackwater.

AP reports that the panel is keeping all options open, pending the conclusion of an FBI review. Once the FBI report is completed, the US Embassy in Baghdad, in the words of the panel, should assess "whether the continued services of the contractor involved is consistent with the accomplishment of the overall mission in Iraq."

Secretary of State Condolezza Rice has already ordered some interim changes in how the private diplomatic security service contractors are administered and overseen. Blackwater had requested at least one of those changes in 2005, but State Department lawyers denied the request.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates is expected to come up with additional changes to ensure that Blackwater's aggressive security services for the State Department do not conflict with the softer counterinsurgency efforts instituted earlier this year by Gen. David Petraeus.