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Blackwater deaths detailed

Blackwater deaths detailed

Sunday, Jul 08, 2007 - 12:09 AM

Some can be found in memos from a second team for Blackwater operating around Fallujah on March 31, 2004.

Blackwater, a private security firm based in Moyock, sent two squads through Fallujah without maps, according to memos obtained by The News & Observer of Raleigh. Both of the six-man teams, named Bravo 2 and November 1, were sent out two men short.

The Bravo 2 team members had protested that they were not ready for the mission and had not had time to prepare their weapons, but they were commanded to go, according to memos written by team members. The team disregarded directions to drive through Fallujah and instead drove around it and returned safely to Baghdad that evening.

The November 1 team went into Fallujah and was massacred.

The Bravo 2 team memos, in emotional, coarse and damning language, placed the blame squarely on Blackwater’s Baghdad site manager, Tom Powell.

“He had sent us on this [expletive] mission and over our protest,” team member Daniel Browne wrote the next day. “We weren’t sighted in, we had no maps, we had not enough sleep, we was taking 2 of our guys [out of the mission]. As we went over these things we [knew] the other team had the same complaints.”

The memos surface amid heightened congressional scrutiny of the private security industry, which grows ever more valuable to the Pentagon.

The families of the four men killed in the ambush — Jerry Zovko, Wesley Batalona, Scott Helvenston and Michael Teague — sued Blackwater in Wake County Superior Court in an effort to find out what happened.

Blackwater countersued the estates of the four men in federal court, successfully arguing for arbitration, where the proceedings are closed to the public and the investigation of the incident can be much more limited.

Powell, the site manager, left Blackwater shortly after the Fallujah incident. He will not discuss the event while litigation is pending, said his attorney, Clifford Higby of Panama City, Fla. Efforts to reach the other Blackwater contractors for comment were unsuccessful.

Blackwater, owned by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, did not respond to requests for comment starting in early June.

. . .

Team Bravo 2 arrived in Baghdad late on the night of March 30, 2004, according to the memo written by team leader Jason Shupe.

In a meeting held just before midnight, Powell — the Blackwater site manager — told Shupe that his team would likely go on a mission the next morning. Shupe protested; his team was fighting jet lag and had not “sighted” its weapons, or adjusted the scopes so that the bullets would hit the targets sighted in the crosshairs.

The next morning, Bravo 2 was ordered to go to the Jordanian border and pick up an executive for ESS, a food catering company, and escort him to Baghdad.

Shupe protested, calling it “a bad idea” to send out the crew shorthanded, and wrote in his memo that Powell disregarded his concern.

Shupe briefed his team. Like Shupe, they thought the mission was a bad idea, according to the written accounts of two other team members.

Shupe eventually decided to drive around Fallujah rather than through it as Powell had instructed.

Unknown to Shupe, Blackwater’s November 1 squad had driven into the city on its way to Camp Ridgeway, an American base west of town. Gunmen approached the rear of the convoy and shot Helvenston, Teague, Batalona and Zovko. A crowd gathered, set the cars on fire, pulled the men out and dragged their bodies through the street.

Oblivious of the massacre, Bravo 2 drove to the Jordanian border and picked up the ESS executive.

There, Shupe got a phone call from Kuwait telling him that a Blackwater team had been ambushed. The team then drove back safely to Baghdad, taking care to skirt Fallujah.

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Isn’t that interesting?

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