He was arrested in Iraq by American forces, right?
Is there any legal requirement that there be charges for an arrest under those circumstances? U.S. law doesn’t apply, nor does UCMJ because he’s not in the military, and Iraqi law seems to apply loosely if at all to Americans in the country…
In that case, how does the U.S. military have any authority to arrest him?
Errr…I sorta lost track of the state of play of all the Enemy Combatant court decisions, but I think that SCOTUS decided that US citizens held by the US gov’t are still entitled to the right of Haebeus Corpus, even if captured overseas.
Who’s going to stop them?
Let’s not forget: This is the same administration that invaded the country on the premise of WMD, then couldn’t be arsed to come up with 1 vat of dangerous chemicals, one ICBM, hell one credible plan for any weapon of mass destruction let alone an arsenal.
Evidence is irrelevant.
It’s a military dictatorship. Why wouldn’t they?
For what it’s worth, I think the technical answer to that question is that the Iraqi gov’t has given the US military permission to detain people they deem as security risks in that country.
((not really relevant in this case since the person is a US citizen held by the US military and so has the rights guarenteed by the US constitution, but so far as I can tell from scanning an English translation, the Iraqi constitution has no guarantee to the right of Habeas Corpus.))
AFAIK, the US and Iraq have never worked out a Status of Forces Agreement. There was some talk that they would back in 2004, but nothing ever came of it.
As stated in some earlier threads, I have a pretty accurate bullshit detector, and it’s going off right now.
The story is quite sensationalist, and completely, utterly unverifiable. I’m definitely not convinced that what happened is what the story says happened.
Really? You’d figure if one of our main goals was to help the Iraqi gov’t assert its legitimacy, getting their permission to have our army running around their country would be important.
Completely utterly unverifiable? Which part? Certainly the FBI knows whether or not the guy really “blew the whistle” on the corrupt weapons sale, so thats certainly verifiable. As for his imprisonment, we won’t know anything till the details of the court case come out, but even in Iraq I doubt its that hard for a court to determine if he was imprisoned or not.
I thought it was an autonomous collective. 
I agree it sounds like there’s an element tothe story that’s been left out by the plaintiff. But need it be any more important than, “This guy is blabbing about potentially sensitive operational procedures in Iraq and we want to see if he’s wagging his tongue about anything else.” And as for the torture, heavy metal all starts to sound like white noise after 15 minutes anyway, Andy Williams on the other hand… :shiver:
What in the world are you talking about? Every element of the story is verifiable/falsifiable – not by you, perhaps, but by other professional journalists and news organizations, and by the attorneys of the government and other interested parties. The parties claiming to have been arrested have lawsuits in the works, which will stand or fall according to their ability to back up their claims.
Well, sure there’s more to the story. There was more to the story of Abu Ghraib when it first came up. There was more to Gitmo, too. And there was more to those CIA secret prisons in Europe, too. In each case, a LOT more, and all of it bad. Given the record of this government, the very likely outcome is that things are even worse than claimed.
I agree the smart thing to do is to look for more information, but in light of how the Republicans have governed, the experienced thing to do is to expect to find it, and to expect it to reflect badly upon the government, and us as a people.
You need to work on your quoting a bit there, Squink didn’t say that and your attributions make it look like he did instead of Mosier.
Use
[quote=poster} instead of [quote} if you’re quoting two folks in the same post, replacing the } with a ]
of course.
As for the story, I’m confused. Did he stay in Iraq and mail the stuff to the Chicago FBI? Or did he meet them in person and then return to Iraq? What’s the timeline on this?
OK, I’ll bite. The absence of a plausible charge makes you doubt that he was arrested for whistleblowing. So if there’s no plausible charge, that tells us they arrested him for… what, exactly? They just picked the dude up and tortured him for some other reason?
Woops, sorry squink. I usually check and make sure I don’t do that.
Well, that is sort of my point. I don’t know why he was arrested. I expect, however, that if the Evil Gubmit Conspiracy[sup]TM[/sup] arrested him to silence him about their nefarious activities, they would come up with something as a fig leaf. I rather doubt he was charged with “whistle-blowing”.
My completely random assumption, based on nothing expect speculation, is that he was arrested as part of an investigation into corruption at the Iraqi company for which he worked. Then they found out he was innocent, or that he was actually sending information about corruption to the FBI in Chicago, so they let him go. Now he wants some money so he filed a law suit.
My belief is that, if TPTB are targetting whistle-blowers, they would at least come up with some plausible excuse to arrest them. So why didn’t they? I am not much of a conspirator (as my wife will tell you, from whom I cannot seem to keep my sinister plans to whisk her away for the weekend), but it seems a pretty obvious first step in The Plan To Silence The Opposition. Can’t they plant some kiddie porn on his computer or something?
Regards,
Shodan
OK… if he were arrested as part of an investigation into corruption, as you say, you’d think they would use that as a perfectly good fig leaf for holding the guy 97 days and subjecting him to stress positions and duress. But they didn’t. So that rationale sort of goes crumbly.
Occam’s razor sort of suggests that the lawless power structure in Iraq, in particular the mercenary “contractors” who are not subject to the UCMJ, can pretty much do as they please. Who would stop them? This isn’t so much a conspiracy as an observation of the total lack of accountability of the US mercenaries in Iraq.
Though, somehow I don’t see the FBI as the type to compare notes with Iraqi contractors. I feel like we’ve read a chapter of a Clancy novel and are trying to infer the rest of it.
No biggy. I think our failure to conclude a status of forces agreement after so many years shows that we’re much more interested in maintaining a profit intensive environment than in helping “the Iraqi gov’t assert its legitimacy.”