Quote Originally Posted by Uboat509 View Post
1)Is there an official report of an official investigation by US forces out there somewhere that I have missed? So far I have seen a lot of media reports, many of which are based on Iraqi reporting. I have been here long enough to know that uncorroborated Iraqi reporting is not the gold standard for accurate unbiased reporting. If this was a military unit would we be piling on or would we be saying that we should wait for the results of the official investigation?
Quote Originally Posted by Steve Blair View Post
Part of the reason for any sort of pile-on is the record of the PMCs in general (which has been rather to very trigger-happy). If that starts getting in the way of accomplishing the mission, then you have to look at it. But with the number of high-end political players who use PMCs, I'm not sure you'd see an official investigation for some time. And even then official investigations are not always without bias.
Uboat, I think you have raised a really good point, but I have to ask a counter question: given that these particular employees are DoS, is the military even allowed to investigate them? The quote that Tequila tossed up certainly seems to imply that they a) aren't empowered to do so and b) are under a lot of pressure not to do so. Baring the (unlikely) chance that State will, what are we left with but an Iraqi investigation?

Furthermore, if part of the mission is to stand up an Iraqi government that operates by rule of law, I don't think that we can afford to dismiss their investigation out of hand. Yes, I know that there have been a lot of problems with them in the past, but I think that this incident is generating enough interest Stateside that they are going t keep their investigation fairly transparent.

Marc