 [Daily Beast] It was the U.S. military's most notorious security contractor--but it may also have been a virtual extension of the CIA. Eli Lake reports.
Last month a three-year-long federal prosecution of Blackwater collapsed.
The government's 15-felony indictment--on such charges as conspiring to hide purchases of automatic rifles and other weapons from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives--could have led to years of jail time for Blackwater personnel. In the end, however, the government got only misdemeanor guilty pleas by two former executives, each of whom were sentenced to four months of house arrest, three years' probation, and a fine of $5,000. Prosecutors dropped charges against three other executives named in the suit and abandoned the felony charges altogether.
But the most noteworthy thing about the largely failed prosecution wasn't the outcome. It was the tens of thousands of pages of documents--some declassified--that the litigation left in its wake. These documents illuminate Blackwater's defense strategy--and it's a fascinating one: to defeat the charges it was facing, Blackwater built a case not only that it worked with the CIA--which was already widely known--but that it was in many ways an extension of the agency itself. |