That was an interesting exchange between Rep. Maloney and Blackwater CEO Erik Prince. This regarded the incident in which a drunken Blackwater contractor shot and killed a bodyguard for Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi -- the case in which the State Department decided to give $15,000 in compensation to the family of the dead man instead of $100,000 to $250,000 so as not provide an incentive "try to get killed to set up their family financially."

Prince said the guy was fired because he "violated our policies." (I guess that's a for-profit military way of putting it.) But he added that ""We can fire, we can fine, but we cannot detain." When asked if Blackwater had then helped the guy flee the country, Prince said "It could easily be."

So the contractor gets drunk and kills a guy. He gets fired. But there's apparently no operative law he has to answer to. And Blackwater helps him flee the jurisdiction, apparently in the face of a DOJ investigation.

Late Update: TPM Reader TF follows up ...

You are certainly right that the exchange with Mahoney was interesting, but it was not as good as it should have been. Congressional investigations get mired in bad questioning. My guess is that members spend too much time listening to lawyer-staffers who have never questioned a witness. But that does not excuse non-lawyer members: lawyers are too trained in courtroom questioning; an honest curiosity should drive investigative questioning. It is not an issue of finely-honed cross examination technique, but instead of listening to the answers and not pontificating. Maybe the lot of them have spent too much time watching hearings run by Biden.

Mahoney’s questioning is a classic example. She did not need to repeat her concerns about accountability—for crying out loud: A Blackwater employee got drunk and killed the Vice-President’s guard. You don’t need to sanctimoniously ponder these facts. What she should have done is:

(1) Not let Prince weasel—when he said that prosecution was up to the justice department, she should have followed up and asked for an answer to her question. Her question was whether the guy had been prosecuted. The answer should have been, “I don’t know.” It is not an acceptable answer that the decision was up to Justice. Important? Of course, because the follow up question should have been, “Don’t you care whether a former employee who got drunk and killed the Vie-President’s guard was prosecuted?” Either Prince cares, in which case you ask him what Blackwater did to make sure its “rogue” employee was punished or he doesn’t care, in which case you let him say it himself. No pontification needed if he doesn’t care. (His smirking does not matter much at that point either.)

(2) Ask him the question every one else wants the answer to: “WHY did you ship the guy out of the country?” Blackwater may not have the ability to detain its employees on foreign soil (though does anyone really think that is true?), but they have no obligation to ship him back to safety.

This is an investigation, not a court-case. Members can, and should, ask questions they don’t know the answer to. What they should do, though, is listen to the answers.