By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer

Two defense contractors working for a subsidiary of the former Blackwater Worldwide were charged with shooting and killing two Afghan citizens in Kabul and wounding a third, prosecutors said Thursday, the first slayings linked to the firm in that country and its latest legal blow.

Justin Cannon, 27, and Christopher Drotleff, 29, were indicted by a federal grand jury in Norfolk on murder and other charges in the May 5 shootings, in which the men opened fire with AK-47 assault rifles on a car that they said they thought was trying to run them down. The indictment was unsealed Thursday.

At the time of the shootings, the men were Pentagon contractors employed by Paravant LLC, a Blackwater subsidiary that specializes in firearms training. They were in Afghanistan to train that country’s army in using and maintaining weapons systems and were transporting two Afghan translators at the time of the incident, their attorney said.

The charges are another legal black eye for Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC), which has been under fire for a string of incidents in which its heavily armed guards have been accused of using excessive force overseas. But the controversy over the North Carolina company’s tactics has focused on its actions in Iraq, where it has provided security under a State Department contract.

The indictment marks the first instance in which employees of a Blackwater-affiliated company have been charged for their actions during the war in Afghanistan.

The 13-count indictment highlights growing sensitivities over the U.S. troop buildup in Afghanistan, which is expected to bring a flood of military contractors into the war zone, and the security problems that led to last week’s deadly attack on a CIA base there.

The May 5 shootings have caused “diplomatic difficulties” for State Department personnel in Afghanistan, prosecutors said in a court filing Thursday, and officials are concerned that media coverage of Thursday’s charges will require enhanced security for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul.

Mark Corallo, a Xe spokesman, said the company “immediately and fully cooperated with the government’s investigation of this tragic incident and terminated the individuals involved for violating company policy.” He would not comment further.

Daniel J. Callahan, an attorney for Cannon and Drotleff, said they should not have been charged because they acted in self-defense. “They thought their lives were in jeopardy,” he said. “They thought insurgents were attacking them.”

The charges followed a rare piece of good news for the company: A federal judge in the District dismissed criminal charges last week against five Blackwater guards accused of killing 14 Iraqi citizens in a shooting in a busy Baghdad square in 2007. The judge criticized the tactics of Justice Department prosecutors handling the case.

Cannon, of Corpus Christi, Tex., was arrested there Thursday by FBI agents, and Drotleff was taken into custody in Virginia Beach, where he lives. They were each charged with counts that include second-degree murder, attempted murder and weapons charges. If convicted, they could face the death penalty.

On May 5, the two men were in a two-car convoy in Kabul with two other Paravant contractors and the translators. Federal law enforcement officials and Callahan agree that the shootings occurred after one of the Paravant cars was involved in a traffic accident. But they differ about how the accident unfolded.

Federal officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is pending, said that 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.

But Callahan said the lead Paravant car was deliberately struck by another car traveling in the same direction. The first car flipped over. Callahan said Cannon and Drotleff, who were traveling in the second car, got out and were running to check on their injured colleagues when the car that had caused the accident accelerated toward them. The men opened fire, Callahan said, killing one Afghan in the car and a bystander about 900 feet away.

In a separate case Thursday, a federal judge in Alexandria dismissed a civil lawsuit filed against the former Blackwater over the deaths of Iraqi civilians, a decision hailed by Xe for allowing it to move “forward free of the costs and distractions of ongoing litigation.”

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III dismissed the lawsuit against Xe after attorneys for about 70 Iraqis who had sued the company affirmed that every plaintiff had signed on to a financial settlement that the plaintiffs had originally reached with the company in November.

The undisclosed settlement almost collapsed when plaintiffs’ attorneys tried to withdraw it, saying that several Iraqi plaintiffs had not approved the agreement. They blamed a translation error.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.  Click here to read this article at the source.

Judge weighs misconduct finding for Blackwater prosecutors accused of withholding evidence

By MATT APUZZO

The Associated Press

Prosecutors who mishandled the investigation into a deadly 2007 Blackwater Worldwide shooting face a possible misconduct citation from a judge who says they withheld evidence and violated the guards’ constitutional rights.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina admonished the Justice Department last week for its “reckless” handling of the investigation into a shooting that left 17 Iraqis dead. He threw out manslaughter and weapons charges against five security guards and, in a footnote, said he was also considering whether the repeated government missteps amounted to misconduct.

Such a ruling would be an embarrassing cap to a politically sensitive investigation and a black eye to a department that is still dealing with the fallout from last year’s botched corruption case against former Sen. Ted Stevens. In that case, a judge wiped away the senator’s conviction and appointed a lawyer to investigate prosecutors for withholding evidence from defense attorneys.

If Urbina rules the Blackwater prosecutors committed misconduct, it would touch off an internal Justice Department investigation and could lead to sanctions against the government or the individual prosecutors.

Blackwater guards were hired to protect diplomats in Iraq. The shooting unfolded in a crowded intersection, where Blackwater said its guards were ambushed by Iraqi insurgents. Prosecutors said the heavily armored Blackwater convoy used machine guns and grenades to unleash a wild, unprovoked assault on innocent civilians.

The Blackwater case fell apart because prosecutors built the investigation around State Department interviews the guards gave immediately after the shooting. Under an agreement commonly made following police shootings, the interviews were to be used only for the State Department investigation, not for criminal prosecution.

Urbina also cited prosecutors for withholding evidence from the grand jury. For instance, after a key witness told prosecutors he never saw Blackwater guard Donald Ball open fire, prosecutors blacked out that statement before presenting it to the grand jury. Grand jurors have the final say on whether to charge people.

Prosecutors also withheld the fact that four other Blackwater guards said they were attacked within seconds of entering the intersection. A prosecutor told the judge he withheld that evidence because he believed the witnesses were hostile to the government, according to the court ruling.

Ball’s attorney, Steven McCool, asked for the misconduct ruling but would not comment Monday because the request remains sealed. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd had no comment.

The five guards are Ball, a former Marine from West Valley City, Utah; Dustin Heard, a former Marine from Knoxville, Tenn.; Evan Liberty, a former Marine from Rochester, N.H.; Nick Slatten, a former Army sergeant from Sparta, Tenn.; and Paul Slough, an Army veteran from Keller, Texas.

Read source article here.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A former Navy Seal and an ex-police officer whose wife is expecting the couple’s first child were among seven people killed in a suicide bombing attack targeting a CIA base in southeastern Afghanistan last week.

Scott Michael Roberson, 39, was working as a security officer for the CIA when the blast on Dec. 30 rocked the remote outpost in Khost province, said his sister, Amy Messner of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

The government notified his wife Wednesday of his death, Messner said, and the CIA has allowed them to make his death public.

Before joining the CIA, Roberson had worked undercover in narcotics for the Atlanta police. He also served with United Nations security forces in Kosovo and did several tours of duty in Iraq, where he provided protection to high-risk officials.

“He always said that if something happened to him, he would have no regrets,” his sister said. “He was so proud of what he was doing.”

‘An amazing person’
Roberson had hoped to return to the U.S. for the birth of his first child in February, his sister said.

“As hard as all of this is, at least we are able to let the world know what an amazing person Scott was,” Messner said. “I can’t imagine how hard it would be for those families to not be able to share that.”

Roberson is survived by his wife, Molly, of Knoxville, Tenn.; his parents and sister. A memorial service is planned for Saturday in Akron, Ohio.

Jeremy Jason Wise, 35, was also killed in the attack, a memorial page on Facebook said.

Wise, a former Navy Seal, lived in Virginia Beach, Va., with his wife, Dana. He was working as security contractor after leaving the Navy in 2009. A funeral for Wise is expected to be held in the coming days.

Wise’s home phone number was not listed. The family declined through an e-mail to release any photos to The Associated Press or to comment further Sunday.

A third man has also been identified as one of the dead, his parents said. Harold E. Brown Jr., 37, of Virginia, served in the Army. His mother said Saturday he worked for the State Department. He is survived by a wife and three children, ages 12, 10 and 2.

The CIA is not releasing information about the victims, citing the sensitivity of their mission and other ongoing operations. The agency is trying to sort out what happened.

Many questions remain as to how the suicide bomber managed to get inside the outpost armed with explosives and why he was exposed to so many agency officers, including the chief of the CIA base who died in the attack, a woman with three children.

Six other agency personnel were wounded in what was considered the most lethal attack for the CIA since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001 and possibly even since the 1983 embassy bombing in Beirut.

The bombing occurred at a former military base on the edge of Khost city, the capital of Khost province, which borders Pakistan and is a Taliban stronghold.

The Taliban has claimed responsibility.

By THOMAS L. DAY

A group of Georgia National Guard soldiers joined Lt. Col. Mir Salam Adamkhil, a Kabul precinct chief, in his office Thursday. At first the conversation centered on small talk, mostly about the precinct chief’s teenage sons, as the men sipped chai.

Then Staff Sgt. Josh Heaton opened a metal folder and flipped through a sheaf of paper marked “Secret.”

“Ask him if he knows who this guy is?” Heaton told his interpreter as he underlined the name of an insurgent planning attacks on U.S. troops.

The precinct chief was very familiar with the name, and his expression changed: “If I see him, I will arrest him.”

This was not the first time the group had approached the local police looking for intelligence. In fact, several soldiers from the 48th Brigade of the Georgia National Guard said they routinely rely on the police for ground intelligence on looming attacks.

“We get more intel (from the Afghan police) than our own end,” said Capt. Kevin Nicklay of Statesboro, Ga. “Right now, they’re looking for some suicide bombers. They’ll find at least one of them.”

This dynamic presents a wrinkle in the Obama administration’s war strategy: As it prods the Afghan police to root out corruption in its ranks, U.S. soldiers still must charm its commanders into providing intelligence on Taliban elements in their neighborhoods.

The U.S. forces simply don’t have the personal reach into Afghan communities to dig up their own intelligence.

The soldiers from a Georgia Guard field artillery unit have worked with the police in Kabul since they arrived in March; they haven’t once fired an artillery round in Afghanistan. On Thursday, they trained a special operations police unit in north Kabul on searching a vehicle, first aid, and cleaning their AK-47s.

The subjects of the training were notable. For a police unit in the United States, these subjects are usually introductory-level topics.

When a regional police commander arrived at the precinct midday, he didn’t arrive with a smile on his face.

“They don’t know how to hold their weapons, they don’t know how to stand and salute, they don’t know how to be police,” Col. Abdul Rahman Rhahimi said of his young policemen.

Afghan police recruits begin their training through a police academy run by DynCorp, a government contractor based in Falls Church, Va.

The reputation of the Afghan National Police couldn’t be much worse. To many in Afghanistan, their officers seem better versed in extorting bribes at checkpoints than in filing a police report.

Rhahimi, a garrulous disciplinarian, turned even more irascible when asked about corruption in his ranks.

“I’d like to lock (corrupt police officers) in a room and light it on fire,” he said.

No doubt the feeling is shared by U.S. commanders, but any corruption that American ground troops witness in the police can only be reported to the Afghan authorities. U.S. troops cannot take any actions beyond telling their bosses.

On top of the constant allegations of corruption, many of the police in Kabul, Afghanistan’s largest city, hardly strike the kind of fear as the New York Police Department. One police officer who trained with the Georgia Guard team appeared to be well into his 40s and under five feet tall.

If anyone fears the Afghan police, it’s usually because of who they’re really working for.

“You’ve always got to be vigilant, because you never know,” said Brig. Gen. Larry Dudney, the commander of an Internal Security Force mentoring bureau.

The Georgia Guard sent a soldier home last fall after he was shot by an Afghan police officer, apparently a Taliban infiltrator.

Dudney’s answer to stopping police infiltration: “It goes back to that close, personal relationship you have with that provincial police chief or the Afghan leaders you’re working with on a day-to-day basis.”

Before the U.S. soldiers left, Nicklay and Rhahimi sat down for tea. Again the subject turned to intelligence. Nicklay’s soldiers waited outside for more than an hour as the two went over details of potential attacks.

“That’s where you’re going to get of your information on where the Taliban are, or where the people are that have stolen the police uniforms who are going to try to infiltrate the ranks,” Dudney said.

Read the article at its source here.