The Law and Facts Matter

Pushback of the Week, June 15, 2025

The Law and Facts Matter

By Catherine Austin Fitts

In August 2021, Shawn Ryan published a 5+ hour interview with four former Blackwater contractors involved in a firefight in Iraq in 2007 later called the Nisour Square massacre. The contractors (Nicholas Slatten and Dustin Heard of Tennessee, Paul Slough of Texas, and Evan Liberty of New Hampshire) were persecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for many years before finally being pardoned by President Trump in 2020.

I spent a decade of my life experiencing lies and criminality by U.S. federal enforcement. The attitude of numerous Inspector General staff and auditors, judges, DOJ attorneys, and private attorneys was that it was fine to break the law and falsify evidence to achieve a political result. So, this episode of the Shawn Ryan Show rhymes again and again with what I know to be true. It is a remarkable example of why the U.S. government is failing—when your word and your contracts have little to no meaning, it becomes difficult to get good men to fight and risk their lives and fortunes for you.

At the time, Blackwater was one of the largest military contractors in Iraq, with multiple government contracts, including providing personal security for diplomats. The four contractors all had been members of the U.S. military—deployed to locations like Iraq, Egypt, and Afghanistan—before making it through strenuous training to work for Blackwater as contractors protecting State Department personnel. Throughout their trial and imprisonment, the four men disputed the prosecutors’ “war crimes” narrative and maintained that they had acted correctly. A press release by Shawn Ryan’s Vigilance Elite suggests that the government viewed them as “disposable heroes who had outlived their usefulness.”

There is a still a mystery to be solved here. What operation, if any, did the Blackwater team prevent or interrupt that day? Who wanted the company to lose their State Department contract? Who benefited? Cui bono? Like many aspects of the Iraq war, the story does not yet add up—just like the endless pallets of cash that disappeared into Iraq during this period.

Long, in-depth interviews like this one provide essential pushback. They demonstrate how people of integrity stick together and ultimately win. Facts matter. Teams matter. Leadership matters. The law may not matter to the Department of Justice, but it matters to us—and we can make it work for us.