It looks like military sources on the scene of the Nisoor Square massacre support the horrifying descriptions put forward by the Iraqi government and by the New York Times. (That Times article is a must-read, by the way.)
“It was obviously excessive, it was obviously wrong,” said the U.S. military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident remains the subject of several investigations. “The civilians that were fired upon, they didn’t have any weapons to fire back at them. And none of the IP or any of the local security forces fired back at them,” he added, using a military abbreviation for the Iraqi police. The Blackwater guards appeared to have fired grenade launchers in addition to machine guns, the official said.
Of course, none of this stopped the Pentagon from handing Blackwater another contract. But it may lead to the beginnings of oversight.
