Xe Services (Blackwater) Killers' Story Doesn't Add Up

Wherever Xe Services' mercenaries are deployed, dead civilians stack up.

Subjects of the empire tend to get pretty pissed off when this faceless American multinational kills off innocent people -- families out for a drive, folks walking down the street in the middle of the afternoon.

This can be bad for business. After the Nisour Square Massacre, XE Services -- then known as Blackwater Worldwide -- was briefly booted out of Iraq as a result of a massive public outcry (before the Iraqi government demonstrated its legendary sovereignty by buckling to U.S. demands that the company be reinstated).

Xe Services is in Afghanistan, and as one might expect civilian bodies have turned up over there as well. Last week, two of its mercenaries were charged by federal authorities for a shooting last May in Kabul which resulted in far fewer casualties than Nisour Square, but according to prosecutors was equally unjustified.

TPM reports that the killers -- who were fired after the incident for violating the company's alcohol policy -- say they're being "thrown under the bus by a company desperate to preserve its standing with the Afghan government, after another shooting case in Iraq led to a crackdown on its operations in that country." The company says they were out on a bender when the shooting occurred, and not on the official clock. The men say they were working at the time, and that the shooting was justified. 

I have no reason to doubt that they were working at the time and that Xe Services is covering up that fact (although, to be clear, I don't know all the details of this case). But, on its face, their claim of innocence seems to have a fatal flaw -- it doesn't pass the proverbial "smell test."

Here's TPM:

According to the contractors' version of the story, they were driving in a pair of cars bringing two translators home at the direction of their employer, Paravant, a Blackwater company. Drotleff and Cannon were in the back vehicle when an Afghan car driving the same direction came up from behind and rammed the front vehicle, flipping it over.

When Drotleff and Cannon got out to help their comrades, the Afghan car -- reportedly a Toyota sedan -- turned around and drove at them, they say. They opened fire, killing one of the Afghan men in the car, and one bystander who was walking some distance away.

However, local residents of the Kabul neighborhood where the shooting occurred have said the contractors fired unprovoked after one of their vehicles tipped over in some kind of accident.

Unnamed federal officials told the Washington Post this week that there was a traffic accident, but "no Paravant car was struck by another vehicle and that the Afghans who were shot were in a car that had passed the contractors from the other direction."

OK, he said, she-said? Actually, the contractors' story is ridiculous on its face.

They're claiming that they were attacked, but that they didn't take any fire -- they were rammed, and then the vehicle turned around and drove at them. Think about that. Can you imagine Afghan insurgents attacking an armed convoy without any guns? The country's awash in small arms. Before the invasion, Afghanistan had "one of the largest supplies of unaccounted small arms in the world. UN experts estimate that there are approximately 10 million small arms in circulation throughout the country." Since then, millions of additional weapons have flowed into the country -- this is not a place where someone who wanted to attack some translators working for the coalition would be hard-pressed to find a cheap AK-47 or two.

It's a pretty lame defense when you think about it.

PS: throughout his article, TPM's Justin Elliott does Xe Services a favor by referring to the firm as "Blackwater." As I've written before, "Xe Services shouldn't be able to shirk its reputation as a group of brutal and unrestrained bruisers-for-hire by losing the name 'Blackwater.'"