Originally Posted by David Cotterell
"Patience my ass!! "I'm gonna kill something!"
That's apparently what the Blackwater contractors thought and were found guilty of massacring Iraqi civilians.
" In 2007, it committed perhaps the worst war crime of the conflict. At a traffic circle in Baghdad, four armed Blackwater contractors killed 17 civilians, including women and children, and injured another 20, many seriously. " "They shot women and kids who had their hands in the air.”
"There may be at least two reasons behind Trump’s pardon of Blackwater. The first is scandal-magnet Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and a big Trump supporter. His sister is Betsy DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, giving him access to the White House. In 2017, he promoted an absurd plan to replace all U.S. troops in Afghanistan with mercenaries led by a “Pro-Consul,” like the British East India Company that ruled India from the 1750s to the 1850s. He claimed he could turn Afghanistan around in six months for the bargain basement price of $5 billion a year. Even more crazily, when Prince was peddling this, he also reportedly was working for China, the U.S.’s main geopolitical competitor."
"The second possible reason would be more nefarious: Trump’s pardon of Blackwater’s contractors reopens deep wounds in the Middle East, thus helping to sabotage President-elect Biden’s foreign policy in that delicate region."
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/531558-trumps-pardons-complete-the-wrongs-of-blackwater