Just weeks before Blackwater guards fatally shot 17 civilians at Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, the State Department began investigating the security contractor's operations in Iraq. But the inquiry was abandoned after Blackwater's top manager there issued a threat: "that he could kill" the government's chief investigator and "no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq," according to department reports.
U.S. Embassy officials in Baghdad sided with Blackwater rather than the State Department investigators as a dispute over the probe escalated in August 2007, the previously undisclosed documents show. The officials told the investigators that they had disrupted the embassy's relationship with the security contractor and ordered them to leave the country, according to the reports.
Domestic Glance
A group of Oklahoma death row inmates filed a federal lawsuit against state officials on Wednesday, arguing their executions would violate the constitution and amount to human experimentation on prisoners after a botched execution earlier this year.
The Central Intelligence Agency secretly developed an Osama bin Laden action figure whose face peeled off to reveal a scary devil beneath, according to an account first published this week in The Washington Post.
The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.





























