WASHINGTON – The courtroom monitors carried the image of a smiling 9-year-old boy as his father pleaded for the punishment of four U.S.
government contractors convicted in shootings that killed that child and more than a dozen other Iraqi civilians.“What’s the difference," Mohammad Kinani al-Razzaq asked a Washington judge at an emotional 2015 sentencing hearing, "between these criminals and terrorists?”The shootings of civilians by Blackwater employees at a crowded Baghdad traffic circle in September 2007 prompted an international outcry, left a reputational black eye on U.S.
operations at the height of the Iraq war and put the government on the defensive over its use of private contractors in military zones.