"People... Do Stupid Things Sometimes."

There’s an old saying that when one is faced with two diametrically-opposed versions of a story, the truth is usually to be found somewhere in the middle. Unless, of course, one side is stuck to by a Republican, holy-roller psychopath such as Blackwater USA founder and chairman Eric Prince.

In his testimony to Congress yesterday, Prince denied that his latter-day gunslingers acted inappropriately when they went berserk and killed 17 Iraqis and wounding two dozen more in a firefight in Baghdad last September 16th. Here’s an example of how appropriately Prince’s fine mercenaries conducted themselves:

A man was driving toward Nisour Sq. when a bullet crashed through his windshield. Instantly killed, the man’s foot stayed on the accelerator, giving Blackwater goons another opportunity to shoot the car, killing the driver’s mother as she was cradling her son and screaming.

At least one Blackwater helicopter appeared out of nowhere and strafed the cars from above, even the ones that were trying to flee the scene. Despite bullet holes being found in the roofs of several cars, Eric Prince had the audacity to deny that Blackwater helicopters were ever used.

Fleeing Iraqis were shot in the back.

A boy was killed.

Only the Blackwater murderers were armed.

One Blackwater mercenary had to train his gun on his own colleagues and shout at them to stop firing.

These are but some of the facts as we know them after an exhaustive investigation by the Iraqi national police who had interviewed a dozen Iraqis and one American. Yet the best Eric Prince could come up with by way of an explanation before Congress yesterday was a sociopathic, "We have 1,000 guys out in the field. People make mistakes, they do stupid things sometimes."

No, lighting the wrong end of a cigarette is stupid. Putting the toothpaste on the wrong side of your toothbrush is stupid. Shooting up a busy public square when a bomb goes off, killing civilians who are trying to flee, getting air support to strafe the cars and doing this without being shot at once isn’t stupid: It’s psychotic.

Casually dismissing the deaths of those 17 innocents and rationalizing the wounding of 24 others as mere “mistakes”, as if it’s a mere management failure on a par with not Fed-Exing a package in time is something one would expect of a sociopath. I wish to God someone in Congress had told Prince that.

Henry Waxman said, “Privatizing is working exceptionally well for Blackwater. The question for this hearing is whether outsourcing to Blackwater is a good deal to the American taxpayer.” But Waxman’s obviously missing the bigger, more important point, which is how good a deal Blackwater is to the countless Iraqi men, woman and children murdered by them over the years.

Naturally, the problems involving life and death, too, was quickly drawn along party lines, as vividly exemplified by North Carolina Congressman Patrick McHenry (God, I hope he’s not your congressman, Susan) who spoon-fed Prince this talking point: “Your client is the State Department. The State Department has a contract with you to provide protective service for their visitors. And you’ve had zero individuals under your care and protection killed.”

Not a word, you’ll note, about the women and babies killed by Prince’s Blackwater thugs, including the ones killed on the September 16th shootout in question. And even more forgotten was the fact that we’re primarily there, say the Powers That Be, to safeguard and liberate the Iraqis, not state department officials, from cruelty.

But let's not forget the more important issue here, folks: No American state department officials have died on your watch. Plenty of Iraqis, sure, but no American fatalities, so that's what we should be concerned with, here. Translation: American lives are vastly more important than Iraqi lives.

Yet Blackwater is still in Iraq, on the taxpayer dole, murdering innocents, men, women and children, in your good name, with your hard-earned money, while their boss cooly denies to Congress that anything inappropriate happened.

Iraq has become a massive live-action video game, with a sociopathic monster like Eric D. Prince holding the master control.