Two pops, to acoustic echoes, just around the corner someone was dead in a van. It’s the sixth homicide in town this year and we’re only thirty six odd days into it…

“Vancouver recorded its sixth homicide of 2008 Friday when a man was shot dead while sitting in his van at the 300 block of Carrall Street in the city’s infamous Downtown Eastside.

The Vancouver Police Department’s major crime and forensic identification teams have launched an investigation into the incident, which occurred at around 6:30 p.m. The man died at the scene.”

Gunshots, despite what they sound like in the movies or on television, sound unique in real life. The four that I heard last night, as I’m not even a half block away, were two in reality, as the two reports produced echoes off nearby buildings. They were the short, sharp, pops of a handgun.

Rumors spread last night around the neighbourhood that up to four people had been killed, but having read the news this morning, I discovered that there was only one victim.

Of course, it’s business as usual around here this morning, and nothing seemed at all different when I went to get coffee.

The prison at Bagram, not something that is commonly referenced with regards to US detention facilities. While Guantanamo garners most of the world’s attention, the prison at the US base at Bagram is currently home to 630 prisoners, almost three times as many as are being held at Guantanamo…

“In 2005, following well-documented accounts of detainee deaths, torture, and “disappeared” prisoners, the U.S. undertook efforts to turn the facility over to the Afghan government. But thanks to a series of legal, bureaucratic and administrative missteps, the prison is still under U.S. military control. And a recent confidential report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has reportedly complained about the continued mistreatment of prisoners.

The ICRC report is said to cite massive overcrowding, “harsh” conditions, lack of clarity about the legal basis for detention, prisoners held “incommunicado”, in “a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells,” and “sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions.” Some prisoners have been held without charges or lawyers for more than five years.”

And what would a US detention facility be without the initial denial of abuse only to be later recounted after the press did some digging…

“U.S. military officials in Afghanistan initially said the deaths were from natural causes. Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, the commander of allied forces in Afghanistan at the time, denied then that prisoners had been chained to the ceiling or that conditions at Bagram endangered the lives of prisoners.

But after an investigation by The New York Times, the Army acknowledged that the deaths were homicides. The prisoners were chained to the ceiling and beaten, causing their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners’ deaths were homicide.”

Of course, the US is attempting to have the prisoners transferred to a new facility that is under Afghan control. Unfortunately, one of the entanglements stopping it from happening is the Afghan government’s refusal to adopt the current administration’s model that requires prisoners to be labeled ‘enemy combatants’ and therefore held outside of the statutes of the Afghan legal system.

Today, while the President was referencing freedom and justice as being “written in our hearts by All Mighty God”, The New York Times began a new series entitled War Torn: A series of articles and multimedia about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home, which I think is sadly telling.

When I wrote The Boy Come Home for Hospital Music it was based on stories of paranoia and disparity felt by a handful of Iraq veterans that I had been corresponding with. Of course, the story that I convey in the song is fictional, but it is steeped in a psychology that, having corresponded with those veterans, is not.

The words “In God We Trust” first appeared on American currency during the US Civil War. It’s telling, given that that conflict was the deadliest in US history, that then Secretary of the Treasury, Simon P. Chase, received countless appeals from American Christians to have the motto, which was adopted as the official motto of the United States in 1956, placed on US currency. Prior to the 1956 adoption, the de facto motto of the nation had been, since its appearance on the Great Seal in 1782, E Pluribus Unum, or – “for many, one”.

During those catastrophic four years, the people of the United States perhaps looked to a greater power to somehow define the nation given the insanity that had torn it apart. And yet, those men that died to preserve it, religious or not, were duty bound to enact the nation’s first creed – for many, one.

It is this motto that is looked to in times of justifying the defense of liberty. It is the second, when the reality of the price being paid becomes apparent, that is clung to.

Not long ago, the less than adequate conditions that injured US veterans returning from overseas were made to endure were exposed to the nation. It caused national outrage, as it should have, and forced the administration to deal with a problem that they had perpetuated the existence of prior to it being uncovered by the media and becoming politically damaging. Lost in the enveloping comfort of In God We Trust, the nation, and its government, had forgotten…

…for many, one.

War Torn: Part 1

Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles…

“Late one night in the summer of 2005, Matthew Sepi, a 20-year-old Iraq combat veteran, headed out to a 7-Eleven in the seedy Las Vegas neighborhood where he had settled after leaving the Army.

This particular 7-Eleven sits in the shadow of the Stratosphere casino-hotel in a section of town called the Naked City. By day, the area, littered with malt liquor cans, looks depressed but not menacing. By night, it becomes, in the words of a local homicide detective, “like Falluja.”

Mr. Sepi did not like to venture outside too late. But, plagued by nightmares about an Iraqi civilian killed by his unit, he often needed alcohol to fall asleep. And so it was that night, when, seized by a gut feeling of lurking danger, he slid a trench coat over his slight frame — and tucked an assault rifle inside it.

“Matthew knew he shouldn’t be taking his AK-47 to the 7-Eleven,” Detective Laura Andersen said, “but he was scared to death in that neighborhood, he was military trained and, in his mind, he needed the weapon to protect himself.”

Head bowed, Mr. Sepi scurried down an alley, ignoring shouts about trespassing on gang turf. A battle-weary grenadier who was still legally under-age, he paid a stranger to buy him two tall cans of beer, his self-prescribed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

As Mr. Sepi started home, two gang members, both large and both armed, stepped out of the darkness. Mr. Sepi said in an interview that he spied the butt of a gun, heard a boom, saw a flash and “just snapped.”

In the end, one gang member lay dead, bleeding onto the pavement. The other was wounded. And Mr. Sepi fled, “breaking contact” with the enemy, as he later described it. With his rifle raised, he crept home, loaded 180 rounds of ammunition into his car and drove until police lights flashed behind him.

“Who did I take fire from?” he asked urgently. Wearing his Army camouflage pants, the diminutive young man said he had been ambushed and then instinctively “engaged the targets.” He shook. He also cried.

“I felt very bad for him,” Detective Andersen said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Sepi was booked, and a local newspaper soon reported: “Iraq veteran arrested in killing.”

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

About a third of the victims were spouses, girlfriends, children or other relatives, among them 2-year-old Krisiauna Calaira Lewis, whose 20-year-old father slammed her against a wall when he was recuperating in Texas from a bombing near Falluja that blew off his foot and shook up his brain.

A quarter of the victims were fellow service members, including Specialist Richard Davis of the Army, who was stabbed repeatedly and then set ablaze, his body hidden in the woods by fellow soldiers a day after they all returned from Iraq.

And the rest were acquaintances or strangers, among them Noah P. Gamez, 21, who was breaking into a car at a Tucson motel when an Iraq combat veteran, also 21, caught him, shot him dead and then killed himself outside San Diego with one of several guns found in his car.”

Continue reading ‘Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles’ here.

December 5th, 2007. A small candlelight vigil is held for the victims at the corner of East Cordova and Columbia on Vancouver’s downtown Eastside.

The jury in the Pickton trial reached a verdict this morning. He was found guilty on six counts of second-degree murder. Pickton was, of course, originally charged with six counts of first-degree murder. In Canada, first-degree murder is defined as follows:

“First degree murder is a murder which is (1) planned and deliberate, (2) contracted, (3) where the victim is an identified peace officer (4) in the furtherance of another serious criminal offence (kidnapping, robbery, harassment, terrorist activity, or using explosives within criminal organizations, etc.).”

Therefore, having been found guilty of six counts of second-degree murder, the conviction finds Pickton innocent of premeditation. Given that he fed his victims to pigs, one has to ultimately wonder how that isn’t an act of premeditation when it was done repeatedly? Obviously, given the various unknowns that plagued the case, the jury was ultimately left with no other option than to find him guilty of a lesser charge.

In all, Pickton has been charged with the deaths of 26 women, to which he pleaded not guilty. Having been found guilty of these six murders, another trial will eventually take place regarding the remaining 19*.

The verdict reached this morning has to do with the deaths of:

Pickton has also been charged with murder in the first degree of:

Pickton has also been implicated, though not charged, in the murders of:

For those of you that don’t know, this is what an SKS looks like…

The SKS fires 7.62mm rounds, the standard round size for most combat weapons – the M16, AK-47, etc. It’s magazine has a 10 round integral box capacity. Firearm enthusiasts in the United States passionately argue that the SKS is not an ‘assault rifle’, as assault rifles have ‘selective fire’, meaning that they can be set to fully automatic or semi-automatic. The SKS, without being modified, is a semi-automatic weapon at the point of sale in the US.

Nevertheless, it was an SKS that 19-year-old Robert Hawkins from Bellevue, Nebraska, used to gun down eight innocent people in an Omaha shopping mall before taking his own life.

As is commonly the case, those who knew Hawkins claim that he was a quiet boy, one that loved animals, but one that was not without his problems. He was solitary, drank, and suffered bouts of depression. Prior to the shooting he had lost his job at McDonalds, broke up with his girlfriend, and was living with a friend’s family…

“His friend’s mother, Debora Maruca Kovac, told the Associated Press news agency that when he first came to live with them, “he was introverted, a troubled young man who was like a lost pound puppy that nobody wanted”.

She said he phoned her about 1300 on Wednesday, telling her that he had left a note for her in his bedroom. She tried to get him to explain.

“He said, ‘It’s too late’,” and then hung up, she told CNN.

In the note, she said, Hawkins had written that “he was sorry for everything, that he didn’t want to be a burden to anybody, he loved his family, he loved all of his friends”.

The note went on to say he wanted to be famous, she said.”

I am, by no means, excusing the actions of Robert Hawkins. What he did was reprehensible. In the end he took his own life, but not before robbing eight others of theirs, robbing eight families of loved ones, and forever shattering the lives of those wounded in the shooting, those who witnessed it, and everyone besides that it will impact. But the question has to be asked – what possesses a young man to go on a suicidal shooting rampage in hopes of securing fame, even if cloaked in infamy? In fact, what possesses any young person to go on a shooting rampage as a way to attain some sort of finality? Is it because they were shit on? Is it because they felt that no one cared? Was it because, at a crucial moment in their development, one, or more, people failed them when they shouldn’t have?

There are, of course, the standard excuses that are relied upon so that the actual roots of the problems that plague everything from inner cities to troubled youths in Middle America don’t have to be faced – video games, music, film, and so forth. But those are simply cop-outs, conveniences that are used to justify that which would actually take real effort to confront. While we swim in the perception of our own societal perfection, the fact that it is rotting away from beneath us remains not merely overlooked, but willfully ignored.

Youth today live in a world of fear, a world of lies, a world of engineered wars, false hopes, false beliefs, and view those that promote such nonsense for what they are – full of shit. What else, given that reality, is there to breed but apathy, exhaustion, and desperation? Contentment is something purchased, that is the reality that young people today have been bombarded with, and to find oneself in the position, even as a teenager, of believing that failure is more probable that success is something so utterly damaging that it’s no wonder that the suicide rate is what it is, that kids are being put on medication to combat depression on an unprecedented scale, and that acts of senseless violence have become more common.

It is impossible to tell a child that the future is theirs to shape when they are given a block of stone and no chisel. Even worse, no idea of even how to sculpt.

Those steeped in religion will claim that the problem lies in a lack of religion. Those steeped in the ideological will claim that the problem lies in a lack of tradition. But neither has much to offer besides one-sided placebos in a world that grows more diverse and interconnected by the second.

Ultimately, and though it might be a bitter pill to swallow because it’s easier to allow anger to rule our feelings in such instances, one has to ask what it would have taken to keep that rifle out of that boy’s hands? And by that I am not suggesting that gun regulation is my primary point, though it is certainly one that must not be discounted. Simply that if he were given a chisel and some direction, eight people might still be alive.

I wrote, some weeks ago, that nothing would come of the criminal behaviour that Blackwater has been guilty of in Iraq. I stand by that statement, despite various investigations into criminality, predominantly to do with the events on September 16th of this year at Nisoor Square in Western Baghdad.

Witnesses of that event claim that Blackwater personnel did not come under fire, but rather opened fire without provocation. They are, believe it or not, in the majority as far as witnesses go. Unfortunately, they’re Iraqis, and thus somehow not as believable as, for example, Blackwater representatives that deny any wrong doing. And who, at the end of the day, is the Western public going to believe? Iraqis or Blackwater’s prim and proper all-American president?

The event hasn’t hurt Blackwater’s contractual relationship with the government either, having recently secured a $92 million dollar contract with the Pentagon to operate flights in Central Asia and a portion of a $15 billion dollar contract to help fight the ‘war on drugs’.

The ugly truth is that despite what happened at Nisoor Square that day, or on a variety of other occasions that could certainly be deemed criminal, Blackwater will be protected by The State Department because the State Department’s chief goal in this affair is to protect itself. It doesn’t matter if the Iraqi government passes legislation ending the immunity from prosecution of foreign security contractors, nor does it matter that the military is now in control of supervising all State Department security convoys in Iraq. Like the Abu Ghraib scandal, those ultimately responsible for oversight with regards to Blackwater’s conduct will never be properly scrutinized. And it’s not as if the conduct of Blackwater hadn’t been brought to the State Department’s attention by the Iraqi government in the past either. Not surprisingly, on those occasions, absolutely nothing was done, which only helped expand the company’s reckless parameters.

It is easy for us to claim that the rule of law now exists in Iraq, having been hammered over the head that the country has been gifted democracy, but the reality is that it is entirely ambiguous in its application, and certainly does not have the power to reach into the realm of dealing with foreigners that are guilty of war crimes. Going in, the United States took steps to protect themselves, the most important being their refusal to adhere to the scrutiny of the International Criminal Court. Had they not, then the President down to those guilty of the Nisoor Sqauare massacre could very well be tried for war crimes. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world, we live in this one – the one in which nations that profess to promote justice and transparency are, themselves, anything but just or transparent. Such is the reality of nations that knowingly have the ability to exercise their own set of specific rules precisely because they cannot be confronted. Justice, liberty, and a host of other terms are merely warm remembrances used to placate societies that desperately want to believe that such principles actually still endure. A Greek orator once remarked - “the theatre never was what it was”. The same is true of those principles on which we lean for comfort and a sense of lasting right. We are not only not what we once were, but we never were to begin with. And until we come to terms with that, then government by and for the people will never truly exist, let alone justice being done to those among us that are guilty of crimes against others deemed of less worth.

From the New York Times…

“Fresh accounts of the Blackwater shooting last month, given by three rooftop witnesses and by American soldiers who arrived shortly after the gunfire ended, cast new doubt Friday on statements by Blackwater guards that they were responding to armed insurgents when Iraqi investigators say 17 Iraqis were killed at a Baghdad intersection.

The three witnesses, Kurds on a rooftop overlooking the scene, said they had observed no gunfire that could have provoked the shooting by Blackwater guards. American soldiers who arrived minutes later found shell casings from guns used normally by American contractors, as well as by the American military.

The Kurdish witnesses are important because they had the advantage of an unobstructed view and because, collectively, they observed the shooting at Nisour Square from start to finish, free from the terror and confusion that might have clouded accounts of witnesses at street level. Moreover, because they are pro-American, their accounts have a credibility not always extended to Iraqi Arabs, who have been more hostile to the American presence.

Their statements, made in interviews with The New York Times, appeared to challenge a State Department account that a Blackwater vehicle had been disabled in the shooting and had to be towed away. Since those initial accounts, Blackwater and the State Department have consistently refused to comment on the substance of the case.

The Kurdish witnesses said that they saw no one firing at the guards at any time during the event, an observation corroborated by the forensic evidence of the shell casings. Two of the witnesses also said all the Blackwater vehicles involved in the shooting drove away under their own power.

The Kurds, who work for a political party whose building looks directly down on the square, said they had looked for any evidence that the American security guards were responding to an attack, but found none.

“I call it a massacre,” said Omar H. Waso, one of the witnesses and a senior official at the party, which is called the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. “It is illegal. They used the law of the jungle.”

Many of the American soldiers were similarly appalled. While Blackwater has said its guards were attacked by automatic gunfire, the soldiers did not find any casings from the sort of guns typically used by insurgents or by Iraqi security forces, according to an American military official briefed on the findings of the unit that arrived at the scene about 20 minutes after the Blackwater convoy left. That analysis of forensic evidence at the scene was first reported Friday by The Washington Post.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the matter, added that soldiers had found clear evidence that the Blackwater guards were not been threatened and also opened fire on civilians who had tried to flee. “The cartridges and casings we found were all associated with coalition forces and contractors,” the official said. “The only brass we found where somebody fired weapons were ones from contractors.”

The case has angered many in the military who believe that the conduct of the security guards makes the troops’ jobs harder. “If our people had done this,” another American military official said, “they would be court-martialed.”

The shooting, on Sept. 16, and the deaths of two Iraqi women in a shooting by a different security company on Tuesday, have provoked anger at politically potent levels of Iraqi society. In the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf, officials affiliated with Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, called for sanctions against the companies.

In Karbala, a spokesman for the ayatollah inveighed against “the cheapening of Iraqi blood” and called for Parliament to take action. In a legacy of orders handed down during post-invasion American rule here, Western contractors essentially have immunity to Iraqi law.

None of the roughly two dozen witnesses previously interviewed by Iraqi investigators said that they saw or heard anyone but the Blackwater guards fire during the shooting, which Iraq says killed 17 and wounded 27. Still, because nearly all of those witnesses were in the field of fire, their accounts could conceivably have been skewed by the terror and confusion of the moment.

The Kurdish witnesses on the rooftop said they had not been interviewed by Iraqi investigators. They said they had been visited by American investigators, but had not been fully interviewed.”

It will never happen. It doesn’t matter if they’re private contractors or not, they’re still Americans, and that carries more weight than the deliverance of justice, even in a country to which the rule of law was supposedly delivered…

“Iraqi authorities want the U.S. government to sever all contracts in Iraq with Blackwater USA within six months. They also want the firm to pay $8 million in compensation to families of each of the 17 people killed when its guards sprayed a traffic circle with heavy machine gun fire last month.

The demands - part of an Iraqi government report examined by The Associated Press - also called on U.S. authorities to hand over the Blackwater security agents involved in the Sept. 16 shootings to face possible trial in Iraqi courts.

The tone of the Iraqi report appears to signal further strains between the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the White House over the deaths in Nisoor Square - which have prompted a series of U.S. and Iraqi probes and raised questions over the use of private security contractors to guard U.S. diplomats and other officials.”

Deep pockets the US certainly has, and I am certain that financial reparations will be made by the State Department – which ultimately means that US taxpayers will flip the bill for Blackwater’s actions that day. But they’ll not be tried in any Iraqi court, of that I can assure you. Nor will the State Department sever ties with Blackwater until an investigation is completed that clears the State Department of any complicity with regards to the actions of Blackwater during their time in Iraq. To sever ties, which would see Blackwater lose its largest contracts, as The Pentagon would certainly have to follow suit, would be to risk the divulgence of any impugning information that Blackwater might have with regards to State Department or Pentagon complicity. At the very least, it would result in a civil law suit against the government for contractual breach, which would also result in the divulgence of information.

Seeking Haditha Reference Materials

I was recently contacted by a US Marine that pointed out that those tried for murder in connection with the Haditha massacre have all be cleared of wrong doing. I, personally, have not come across anything about this, though having been on tour I must admit that my daily access to information is limited. I do not doubt the Marine’s email whatsoever, but I would appreciate it if readers could email me as many different articles concerning this matter as possible. I would very much appreciate it.

More Blackwater developments. According to an unnamed senior US military official…

“Blackwater security guards involved in a Baghdad shootout last month that left up to 17 Iraqi civilians dead were “obviously wrong,” a senior US military official was reported as saying.

The unnamed official told the Washington Post newspaper that the US military reports from the scene of the September 16 incident suggested the US private security firm was to blame for the deaths, and that its employees in Iraq were trigger-happy.

“It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong,” the official told the newspaper.

“The civilians that were fired upon, they didn’t have any weapons to fire back at them. And none of the IP (Iraqi police) or any of the local security forces fired back at them,” he said.

In reports after the incident, Blackwater executives insisted their teams had come under fire in Baghdad’s Nisour Square.

But according to US military officials cited in the Congress report, Blackwater’s teams, contracted to protect US State Department diplomats and other officials in Iraq, behaved like impervious “cowboys” in Iraq.

“They tend to overreact to a lot of things,” the US military official told the Washington Post. “When it comes to shooting and firing, they tend to shoot quicker than others,” he said.

The official added that Blackwater has resisted sharing information with the US military on the incident, and prevented military officials from contacting company managers in Baghdad.”

The Guardian is reporting that the Iraqi government has received the report of Iraqi Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi which calls for those involved to be prosecuted in Iraq and the families of those affected to be compensated…

“The official Iraqi investigation into last month’s Blackwater shooting has been submitted to the government and recommends the security guards face trial in Iraqi courts, and that the company pay compensation to the victims, an Iraqi government minister told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The three-member panel, led by Defense Minister Abdul-Qader al-Obeidi, finished its work earlier this week and submitted the report and recommendations to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Tuesday, the government minister told AP on condition he not be identified by name.

The minister said the report was issued under the signatures of al-Obeidi, Maj. Gen. Tariq al-Baldawi, the deputy minister of national security; and Maj. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, the deputy interior minister for intelligence and security affairs.

The cabinet minister said the report determined that 13 Iraqi civilians - not 11 as originally reported - were killed when Blackwater USA guards sprayed western Baghdad’s Nisoor Square with gunfire Sept. 16. The investigation maintained, as Iraqi authorities have throughout, that the Blackwater guards had not been fired on when they unleashed the fusillade. It said no shots were fired at Blackwater personnel throughout.”

Of course, no matter what the Iraqi government wants to do, those employees of Blackwater that were responsible will never see the inside of an Iraqi courtroom. In fact, I’ll wager that they’ll never see the inside of an American courtroom either.

Unfortunately, that’s the reality of war crimes. When you’re on the side writing the rules they’re never labeled as such.

Henry Waxma’s opening at the Blackwater hearing today. Watch it.

With Blackwater in front of a Congressional Committee answering questions today, a new fifteen page House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report has lambasted the security company, claiming it ‘out of control’…

“Blackwater USA is an out-of-control outfit indifferent to Iraqi civilian casualties, according to a critical report released Monday by a key congressional committee.

Among the most serious charges against the prominent security firm is that Blackwater contractors sought to cover up a June 2005 shooting of an Iraqi man and the company paid, with State Department approval, the families of others inadvertently killed by its guards.

Blackwater has had to fire dozens of guards over the past three years for problems ranging from misuse of weapons, alcohol and drug violations, inappropriate conduct and violent behavior, says the 15-page report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Just after the report was released, The Associated Press learned the Federal Bureau of Investigation is sending a team to Iraq to investigate an incident that has angered the Iraqi government.

On Sept. 16, 11 Iraqis were killed in a shoot-out involving Blackwater guards protecting a U.S. diplomatic convoy in Baghdad. Blackwater says its guards acted in self-defense after the convoy came under attack. Iraqi witnesses have said the shooting was unprovoked.

The FBI team was sent at the request of the State Department and its findings will be reviewed for possible criminal liability.

The 122 personnel terminated by Blackwater is roughly one-seventh of the work force that Blackwater has in Iraq, a ratio that raises questions about the quality of the people working for the company.

The only punishment for those dismissed was the termination of their contracts with Blackwater, says the report, which uses information from Blackwater’s own files and State Department records.

The report, prepared by the majority staff of the committee, also says Blackwater has been involved in 195 shooting incidents since 2005, or roughly 1.4 per week.

In more than 80 percent of the incidents, called “escalation of force,” Blackwater’s guards fired the first shots even though the company’s contract with the State Department calls for it to use defensive force only, it said.

“In the vast majority of instances in which Blackwater fired shots, Blackwater is firing from a moving vehicle and does not remain at the scene to determine if the shots resulted in casualties,” according to the report.”