Ex-Blackwater Guard Gets Life for Murder

An ex-member of Blackwater received a life sentence Monday for murdering unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007. Three other former mercenaries got 30-year sentences for manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, and the use of a machine gun in a violent crime. Seventeen people were killed by the guards, who had claimed that insurgents attacked them and the innocents’ deaths were collateral damage. Prosecutors said it was a massacre and a jury agreed. “What happened on Sept. 16, 2007, was nothing short of an atrocity. There’s just no other way to describe it,” federal prosecutor T. Patrick Martin said Monday, adding that the conviction demonstrates the U.S. “has shown that regardless of the nationality of the victims, it values justice for all.”