With our economy in a state where everyone in Washington DC is claiming that we must all "share the sacrifice" in order to get our budget deficit in hand, I have to wonder what this fiasco cost us. In a news cycle dominated understandably by the coverage of what's going on in Japan, I give Rachel Maddow credit for making at least a small amount of time for this and not allowing it to go completely under the radar.
I already posted about this at Video Cafe last month -- American Being Held for Shootings in Pakistan Worked as Blackwater CIA Contractor.
Here's the latest.
CIA contractor Raymond Davis freed after ‘blood money’ payment:
Pakistan’s decision Wednesday to release a CIA contractor accused of killing two men resolved a standoff that threatened to damage diplomatic relations between Islamabad and Washington, but it triggered new protests in Pakistan that reflected rising hostility from the United States’ key counterterrorism ally.
Raymond A. Davis was freed from a jail in Lahore after relatives of the Pakistani victims received as much as $2.3 million in “blood money” compensation.
Davis, a CIA security guard, was pardoned and flown to a U.S. facility in Kabul, where he was to be examined and questioned about his treatment before returning to the United States.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed gratitude to the victims’ families in Pakistan and said that the Justice Department has begun an investigation of the shooting that led to Davis’s arrest in Lahore on Jan. 27.
Clinton insisted that the United States had not made any payment to the families or agreed to reimburse the Pakistani government. But other U.S. officials signaled that Washington had endorsed the “blood money” payments and that it expects to reimburse Pakistani authorities, who had led an effort in recent weeks to persuade the Pakistani families to accept cash in return for dropping the case.
“We expect to receive a bill,” a U.S. official said.
