Okay. Am I wrong here? It seems to me that the outfit’s asking to be tried in the Afghanistan civilian courts and that the report is putting a spin on the issue to make it more newsworthy.
Well, as a lawyer I can tell you, it’s perfectly ethical, in fact it’s part of your fiduciary duty, to plead whatever theory best serves your client’s interest in the case, and even to plead several mutually logically incompatible theories in the alternative; any wider legal or sociopolitical implications are not your responsibility (unless your client is a political organization like the NAACP or ACLU and changing the law a certain way is the whole point of the case).
It may be perfect ethical in your role as a lawyer to plead whatever theory best serves your client’s interest in the case, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfectly ethical in general. That is, suppose your client has in fact somehow contributed to the death of the men involved, perhaps through egregiously bad training, or no training, or failure to properly research your employees’ backgrounds before hiring them, making it much more likely that they would die/fail/whatever. Then you as a lawyer are aiding and abetting a moral wrong. Not perfectly ethical in general at all.
Well, yeah.
Blackwater isn’t in Iraq to apply “Western Kick-ass-ification” as a matter of deeply felt personal mission. It’s not a corporate reason for existing to implement democracy and secularism. They have contracts to do work. That’s all. And their contracts are not to “implement secularism.”
Do you seriously sit around the house and picture that Blackwater is on some kind of personal mission?
That’s true WRT Blackwater as a for-profit corporation, but I suspect Erik Prince might have a more ideological agenda.
I know it’s all about money in the end, but it would be nice if they could at least act like they’re interested in serving the will of their clients.
Who are you addressing?
Sure! They offer an outlet for the kind of guys who whack off reading Soldier of Fortune magazine.
I would note that his agenda doesn’t appear to include secularism, either. 
There is, however, an overriding principle in conflict of laws / choice of laws matters. That principle is: The widow and orphans win.
In an adversarial system, a lawyer relies on the system itself producing justice by each participant doing his or her own part. It is not a lawyer’s function to take on the role of judge and jury and pre-determine whether or not the client is guilty. That is what the court process is for, and it only works if the defendant is defended and the complaint prosecuted to the best of everyone’s ability.
This is the reason, for an example chosen from the criminal sphere, why defending a guy accused of horrible child rape isn’t in and of itself immoral. If the guy is in fact innocent, it would be a real shame if no-one offered to defend him because everyone pre-judged him as guilty.
Calling it your job, old hoss,
sure don’t make it right
But if you want me to, I’ll say a prayer
for your soul tonight.
-Mellencamp
In Afghanistan, they’re called legal burkhas.
Regards,
Shodan
As noted it’s a good try by Presidential’s counsel but I doubt it will work. The owner operator of the plane is domiciled in the United States. The decedents and surivors bringing claims are Americans, there’s no reason Afghani law should apply. Where it occurred is incidental.
Contra, Harris v. Polskie Linie Lotnicze, 820 F.2d 1000 (9th Cir. 1987) (law of place of crash (Poland) applied despite fact that plaintiffs were California residents).
Bickel v. Korean Airlines Company, 83 F.3d 127 (6th Cir. 1996) (would have applied U.S.S.R. law had U.S.S.R. still existed at the time of suit).
I agree there is some play in the joints, but the cases reject the fortuituous-place-of-crash doctrine in cases where the crash occurred in the state of departure or destination. The fact that all parties are from the U.S. is tougher to gloss over, and might be decisive. Both of the cases I cited above involve foreign corporate defendants, which to me, makes a difference.