{"id":357824,"date":"2010-02-24T10:41:33","date_gmt":"2010-02-24T15:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/?p=77515"},"modified":"2010-02-24T10:41:33","modified_gmt":"2010-02-24T15:41:33","slug":"blackwater-vets-gearing-up-for-an-info-free-hearing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/357824","title":{"rendered":"Blackwater Vets Gearing Up for an Info-Free Hearing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Senate Armed Services Committee right now is in a brief recess, but the likelihood of getting information out of two invited witnesses formerly employed by Blackwater is already looking pretty slim. One of them, Brian McCracken, a Raytheon employee who used to be an executive with the Blackwater arm known as Paravant, parried with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) for nearly five minutes about whether, strictly speaking, he was right to describe a 2008 incident in which a Blackwater employee rode a moving car &#8220;like a stagecoach&#8221; and accidentally shot a comrade as an &#8220;authorized&#8221; training exercise. And a former Paravant program manager, John Walker, eschewed an opening statement by saying he had questions<em> for the committee<\/em> and then had difficulty speaking into the microphone.<span id=\"more-77515\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll see if this gets any more illuminating when the panel reconvenes. Like for instance: What became of those hundreds of weapons Blackwater took from U.S. military weapons depots &#8212; depriving the Afghan Army of them? <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtonindependent.com\/77476\/blackwater-the-senate-and-south-park?dsq=36277919#comment-36277919\">Levin told reporters yesterday Blackwater &#8220;misrepresented the facts&#8221;<\/a> when the committee asked if all the guns had been returned. So where are they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Senate Armed Services Committee right now is in a brief recess, but the likelihood of getting information out of two invited witnesses formerly employed by Blackwater is already looking pretty slim. One of them, Brian McCracken, a Raytheon employee who used to be an executive with the Blackwater arm known as Paravant, parried with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-357824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357824\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}