Erik Prince, Blackwater and Sharia Law

(Photo of a Blackwater plane. © Bill Shull)

Blackwater is the name of a private contractor providing mercenaries and equipment to help fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater has also been employed by the CIA.

Some people call the Blackwater mercenaries "thugs," and claim they think they are above the law, that they can do pretty much whatever they want, even kill without reprisal, and nobody seems to be able to do anything about it, or even want to do anything about it! That's the kind of power Erik Prince wields in the corridors of corruption known as the Bush administration!

Erik Prince owns Blackwater. He is a "good" Christian and a friend of the prezident so he's mostly untouchable even when he breaks the law or does bad or stupid things. He's a former Navy SEAL, too, so that makes him a "hero." Oh, he's also very, very rich.

Blackwater has a subsidiary called Presidential Airways. Presidential was under contract with the U.S. military to fly cargo and personnel in and about Afghanistan. On one such flight, a Presidential plane, Blackwater Flight 61, went down in the mountains of central Afghanistan, killing three soldiers and the three-man crew.

The widows of the soldiers sued Presidential Airways. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed the crash on Presidential because of it's "failure to require its flight crews to file and fly a defined route," as well as failing to ensure that its crews obeyed all of the safety policies of not only Presidential Airways but also the Pentagon and the FAA.

Sounds kinda cut and dried, right? Wrong.

Presidential Airways tried to get the suit dismissed on the grounds that "legal doctrine holds that soldiers cannot sue the government, and the company was acting as an agent of the government."

Didn't work. Several federal judges threw that argument out the window last year.

So last April, Presidential went to a federal judge in Florida (a Bush appointee?) and asked to have the suit dismissed "because the case is controlled by Afghanistan's Islamic law." If the judge agrees with that line of reasoning, it will be dismissed. Additionally, the company is planning to request that the suit be tossed on the grounds that a court should not mess in military "decision-making."

Well, if you can't get where you want to go by one route, try another. Blackwater is skilled at that. Here's the thing: If the judge agrees with this Sharia law business, the suit is over. Under Islamic Sharia law, a company is not responsible for the actions of it employees when they are doing their job.

How nasty can you get? When Mr. Prince was questioned about why an American company working for the U.S. government being sued by American citizens should be decided by Islamic law, he said:

"Where did the crash occur? Afghanistan."

Of course. We knew that. And if one of Blackwater's "soldiers" rapes an Afghan girl, then Mr. Prince would argue he should be tried in an Islamic court, right? Right?

Or, as Attaturk said at Firedoglake, "If this becomes well-known, the GOP's corporate base will become fundamentalist Muslims faster than you can say Mecca Oil & Gas."

But what about the widows?