Local NC Paper Reports Blackwater Manager's Role In Fatal 2004 Fallujah Fuck-Up

Blackwater manager blamed for 2004 massacre in Fallujah
Military contractors write that a site manager sent four Americans on an ill-advised, fatal missionJoseph Neff, Staff Writer

When four Blackwater USA security guards were ambushed and massacred in Fallujah in 2004, graphic images showed the world exactly what happened: four men killed, their bodies burned and dragged through the streets. A chanting mob hung two mutilated corpses from a bridge.
Since then, Congress and the families of the murdered private security contractors have been demanding answers: Why did the lightly armed and undermanned team go through the heart of one of Iraq's most hostile cities? Why did the two teams sent out that day have four members, not the usual six?

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

Blackwater, based in North Carolina, sent two squads through Fallujah without maps, according to memos obtained by The News & Observer. Both of the six-man teams, named Bravo 2 and November 1, were sent out two men short, leaving them more vulnerable to ambush. 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.

"Why did we all want to kill him?" team member Daniel Browne wrote the following day. "He had sent us on this [expletive] mission and over our protest. We weren't sighted in, we had no maps, we had not enough sleep, he was taking 2 of our guys cutting off [our] field of fire. As we went over these things we new the other team had the same complaints. They too had their people cut."

The deaths of those four men was the spark that led to the attack upon and the destruction of Fallujah, as an orgy of revulsion in the States (unwarranted, imho, since the dead were mercenaries, and had forsaken their claims to sympathy by signing on with Blackwater to begn with), with consequences which are still being felt, not least by the Marines who apparently murdered civilian women and children there in vengeance.
This story was picked up at HuffPost, but if there has been wider dissemination of the piece, I am not aware of it; it didn't make the AP wire.
The whole ICORP of Iraq is a total clusterfuck.

The Coalition of the Billing: Accountable To No One, Mercs Ravage For Fun & Profit

Remember the furor over the death and mutilation of the four Blackwater, Inc. 'contractors' in Fallujah? The Nation did a longish piece several months ago on their fates and the trajectories of events that led to their deaths. Probably, that single event did more to trigger the battles for and the eventual razing of Fallujah, some weeks later, than any strategic of tactical considerations.

Contractors? Nice euphemism.

Truth? The four men were mercenaries, who sold their consciences. This 'out-sourcing of death, slaughter, and murder--once regarded by most civilized societies as anathema--now is apparently permitted under the rules of contemporary USer militarism, however, if the mercs are working for the USer regime

Journalist Robert Young Pelton has taken up the subject in a newish book, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. The United States has encouraged the use of the private sector in all facets of the War on Terror, placing contractors outside the bounds of functional legal constraints. With the shocking clarity that can come only from firsthand observation, Licensed to Kill painstakingly deconstructs the most controversial events and introduces the pivotal players. Most disturbingly, it shows that there are indeed thousands of contractors—with hundreds more being produced every month—who’ve been given a license to kill, their services available to the highest bidder.

Makes ya prahd t'be a Murkin, Ah'm tellin ya...