Murderer "Fired" by Blackwater Hired By Defense Department

So today, while Prince's testimony before the House Oversight replays on CSPAN RADIO, we learn that Blackwater concealed the reason it terminated Andrew J. Moonen, enabling him to be hired as a mercenary for the Defense Department in Kuwait. Although Moonen's lawyer defends his client by pointing out that he apparently doesn't shoot Americans while drunk, the former paratrooper felt free to incur six traffic offenses since 2002, including driving on a suspended license. Moonen received an honorable discharge after serving with the 82nd Airborne from April 2002 until April 2005. His wife divorced him in December of 2004, but little else has been unearthed.

Moonen who?? The New York Times revealed him as the Blackwater mercenary who got drunk at a Christmas Party in the Green Zone last year, wandered through a checkpoint being manned by the Iraqis, and shot to death a guard there who challenged him. No wonder the Iraqis don't see the point in "standing up" if it means drunk Americans get to gun them down and flee the country. After he shot the Iraqi guard three times, he fled to a nearby guard shack run by Triple Canopy (a Blackwater rival). There, he lied about what happened, claimed he was being pursued by Iraqi insurgents, and denied he was drunk. Triple Canopy pried the gun out of his fumbling hands, and then passed him off to Blackwater. The rest is history...

Andrew J. Moonen returned to the United States within a few days of the incident, his attorney said, but in February he returned to Kuwait, working for Defense Department contractor Combat Support Associates (CSA), a company spokesman said.

Mooney worked for CSA from February to August of this year, spokesman Paul Gennaro said.

Because the State Department and Blackwater kept the incident quiet and out of Moonen's personnel records, CSA was unaware of the December incident when it hired Moonen.

According to Moonen's personnel record, the U.S. Army tried to call him back to service in April 2007, but canceled the request when they were notified he was overseas.

Two months?? You get your @$$ evacked for gunning down a friendly while you were toasted, and you somehow end up next door. Avoiding getting called back to active service and real combat, and a lack of alcohol plus supervision. Meanwhile, the Defense Department either has atrocious employment screening, or else they knew he was dismissed from Blackwater for at least the listed reason: "armed while drunk." Two months later, this is no bar to contracted work with the US government, to carry arms? And then one has to wonder, what did the Blackwater representative who got the background check call say to the Department of Defense, since it obviously didn't include a little "under the table" advice about Moonen's trigger finger. And then there is the honor and integrity of Blackwater itself, measured out by the utter silence in Moonen's personnel records with both the mercenary company and the State Department, on the events of December 2006. Nothing more damning than a blank page.

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