one more problem with our on-going efforts in Iraq (or theory vs. practice of govt-- revisited)

From Chris Bray in Reason on the government's inability/unwillingness to prosecute the Blackwater killings...

The U.S. government must not have much power, because no one seems able to figure out how to bring American security contractors to justice for violent crimes committed in Iraq. In September 2007, Blackwater employees opened fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square, allegedly killing 17 civilians. That shooting is the subject of an FBI criminal investigation, complicated just a bit by the fact that the Bureau of Diplomatic Security has offered criminal immunity to everyone involved.

In May 2007, a Blackwater employee shot an Iraqi he thought was driving too close to a security detail, causing further tension without legal or contractual consequence. Wait a few months, and you can read the same story with a new date and place name. Expect as many Blackwater shooters to be prosecuted in the coming months as have been prosecuted in recent years: none.

But the inaction is the action. Watch closely when government finds things it can't do, because that's precisely where you'll see what government is really doing.

Reading late-18th-century frontier newspapers, the historian Cynthia Cumfer noticed a recurring phenomenon: White settlers repeatedly told dramatic stories about killing Indians in self-defense. As evidence, they presented clothing riddled with bullet holes. In 1792 a settler in what would become eastern Tennessee reported that he'd been attacked while hunting. "Four balls passed through his clothes and shattered his powder horn without injuring him," Cumfer writes. The whole implausible performance was intended for federal officials, who had threatened to prosecute whites for killing Indians over the control of land. The miraculous artifact of bullet-riddled shirts on un-injured bodies allowed government officers to pretend they believed the stories about self-defense....

In Iraq the Coalition Provisional Authority granted blanket immunity from Iraqi criminal law to security contractors several years ago, and--I'm just guessing--did so on purpose. Since then, Congress and the State Department have been really meaning to stick it to the companies that provide war zone security for State Department officials and members of Congress.

But somehow no one has managed to do very much. Either all those years of impotence were an accident, or the U.S. government finds it useful to have a force of armed men beyond the reach of the law in a country it is occupying.