Matters Blackwater (Merged thread)

[jmm99]

are at Cryptome, including today's DoJ press release, case jacket and the docket card (which doesn't require PACER). The indictment is here.

Judge Robert G. Doumar is assigned to the case. He is a Senior Judge (b. 1930), appointed by Pres. Reagan, who has a very interesting personal bio, as well as experience in GWOT cases (trial judge for Hamdi). See Wiki and official bio.

[Pete]

Spotty service records for charged Xe guards

By Mike Baker - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Jan 25, 2010 19:33:09 EST

RALEIGH, N.C. — A pair of former Blackwater contractors charged with murdering two people in Afghanistan had checkered pasts with the military before getting hired to work overseas, according to service records disclosed in recent U.S. court hearings.

The troubled backgrounds of the two men — including instances of violence, drug use and disregard for authority — are a first sign that Xe, the company formerly known as Blackwater, was staffing its war-zone workforce with contractors who might not be suited for the job.

The military typically keeps its detailed service records confidential. That makes it difficult to verify the conventional perception that Xe has long filled its rosters with decorated special forces personnel. In the cases of Chris Drotleff and Justin Cannon, prosecutors brought up their records while arguing at hearings this month that both men should be jailed pending their trials.

Drotleff’s three-year service in the Marine Corps ended with an other-than-honorable discharge in 2001 and a military record that included offenses for seven unauthorized absences, two failures to obey an order, assault, disrespect toward a noncommissioned officer and falsely altering a military ID card. Before his service with Blackwater in Afghanistan, the 29-year-old also faced a number of state convictions for reckless driving, disturbing the peace, assault and battery, resisting arrest and DWI.

Cannon, 27, was discharged from the Army after going AWOL and testing positive for cocaine. He later petitioned successfully to have his military records officially changed to an honorable discharge.

Both men were indicted by a federal grand jury in Virginia this month on two counts of second-degree murder, attempted murder and weapons charges in a 2009 shooting along a Kabul road. They had been in Afghanistan working for Xe subsidiary Paravant under a Department of Defense contract to provide weapons training to the Afghan National Army.

Their records were detailed in exhibits and arguments at detention hearings in Virginia and Texas this month. Cannon, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and Drotleff, of Virginia Beach, Va., have been ordered held in custody, with the federal judge in Drotleff’s hearing citing his “decade long pattern of refusing to obey laws orders and regulations.”