Iraq fraud whistleblowers arrested, tortured, by U.S. forces

BrainGlutton · August 25, 2007, 4:31pm

Not Iraqi whistleblowers, either. Americans. Story here.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers - all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

‘‘It was a Wal-Mart for guns,’’ he says. ‘‘It was all illegal and everyone knew it.’’

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics ‘‘reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.’’

Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

Despite this staggering mess, there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.

‘‘If you do it, you will be destroyed,’’ said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

Redfrost · August 25, 2007, 4:38pm

This will go a long way to feed the conspiracy theorists.

Triskadecamus · August 25, 2007, 4:52pm

linky no worky

BrainGlutton · August 25, 2007, 4:57pm

It’s the right link, I double-checked – something must be wrong at the moment with the website of the Santa Barbara News-Press. Try it again later.

Duck_Duck_Goose · August 25, 2007, 4:57pm

GoogleNews is your friend.

Different link, identical AP story.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/08/24/ap4052736.html

eta: linky didn’t work for me, either.

BrainGlutton · August 25, 2007, 4:59pm

This link to the same story should work.

Sapo · August 25, 2007, 5:27pm

Well, they are enemy combatants, traitors and terrorists. That will show them to try to do the right thing under the Bush administration.

Gala_Matrix_Fire · August 25, 2007, 5:34pm

It seems to me a big part of the story is missing. He blew the whistle, then something something happened, and then he was held in prison, being interrogated. Are the missing pieces of the story in the article? I haven’t clicked the link.

Shodan · August 25, 2007, 6:12pm

All the stories I can locate seem to be the same one, repeated off the AP wire. None of them mention why Vance was arrested. He says it was because he was a whistle-blower, but I don’t see any confirmation of this.

Vance worked for an Iraqi company, and sent information of some sort to an FBI agent in Chicago. Apart from that, we seem to have not much more than what he is alleging in a lawsuit. Perhaps he really was arrested for whistle-blowing. Perhaps he was arrested for participation in corrupt arms transfers, and is trying to claim that he was really an innocent bystander.

It would be interesting to see any independent corroboration of any of this.

Regards,
Shodan

John_Mace · August 25, 2007, 6:36pm

Might be true, might not be true. We have no way of knowing. But that was a great cut and paste job!

Steve_MB · August 25, 2007, 6:41pm

Profit!

Malodorous · August 25, 2007, 6:41pm

You’d think that if he was arrested for some actual wrong doing though, they would have pressed charges. But not only was he freed more or less without comment, his co-whistle blower has apparently been allowed to continue to work for contractors in Iraq. I guess we’ll have to wait to find out what the gov’ts defense to the lawsuit is, though.

Stranger_On_A_Train · August 25, 2007, 6:44pm

Now is not the time to question your illegal arms dealer.

Stranger

Shodan · August 25, 2007, 6:51pm

Sure, although if they really arrested him for whistle-blowing, I would expect that they would come up with something plausible to arrest him for. Couldn’t they even come up with a fig leaf? Couldn’t they even say, “well, we were investigating him for corruption, found out there was insufficient evidence to charge him, and released him”.

It’s hard to argue from negative evidence, but that applies to both sides.

Regards,
Shodan

Typo_Negative · August 25, 2007, 11:51pm

Hate to admit it, but this makes sense.

I mean, if you’re an evil government entity…wouldn’t you pretect yourself with a cover story? If for nothing else, as a way to discredit your victim should he squack?

Sapo · August 26, 2007, 12:13am

Ah, but there lies the evil of it. By not creating a cover story, when the whole thing blows up you can say “wouldn’t we have created a cover story if that were true?”, and thus negate the accusation.

Autolycus · August 26, 2007, 12:40am

That’s a scum tell right?

Evil_Captor · August 26, 2007, 4:58am

Well, yes, it’s true there’s not enough evidence in to convict anyone in the case of this whistleblower yet. But what we do know is that there is enough information to justify viewing with alarm, writing our Congresscritters and demanding investigations. Because the one thing we call should have learned from events like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is that this government has NO repeat NO credibility and should not be trusted in any way, shape or form. Any allegation concerning the action of this government should be thoroughly investigated, because frankly, all the evidence indicates they really believe themselves to be above the law.

elucidator · August 26, 2007, 7:26am

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/051579.php

Read it and weep…

Note especially…

How is it possible, with all the crap we hear about every day, with 200,000 of our weapons being scattered to the ill winds…how is it possible that not one…not one!..of these suits have any merit?

What an extraordinary coincidence!

BrainGlutton · August 26, 2007, 5:46pm

Awesome expose in Rolling Stone!

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush’s war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity – to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it’s not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over – not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureaucracy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profiteering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure – American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.

It was an awful idea, perhaps the worst America has ever tried on foreign soil. But if you were in on it, it was great work while it lasted.