[Vision2020] Off List: Re: US Navy Veteran Whistle BlowerImprisoned In IraqRecalls Torment

[Art Deco]

It is just not in the military that whistle blowers are treated with a vengeance.  Two local examples:  the recent lawsuit against the UI by a whistle blower treated badly and the insidious vengeance aimed at apostates by the Wilson & Family's Christless Crackpot Cult & Cash Machine.  [If you haven't noticed, a new apostate has recently emerged.]

Punishing persons who report misdeeds or who point out differences between creed and practice is standard fare for most organizations, whose most primary goal once born, like that of most living organisms, is to survive.

W.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ted Moffett 
To: Saundra Lund ; Vision2020 
Sent: Thursday, December 21, 2006 9:00 PM
Subject: [Vision2020] Off List: Re: US Navy Veteran Whistle BlowerImprisoned In IraqRecalls Torment


Saundra et. al.

I grew up in a military family, so though I am appalled by a story such as this, I know the military mindset... Many would justify this sort of treatment as necessary in a war situation.  The weird thing is, this man was trying to do the right thing to expose misconduct, and then was accused of this very misconduct when he was jailed and interrogated.  No wonder people often keep their mouths shut when corruption is involved... The whistle blower often becomes a target for attacks from one side or the other. 

Ted Moffett

 
On 12/21/06, Saundra Lund <sslund at roadrunner.com> wrote: 
  Hi Ted,

  Thanks -- I guess -- for sharing this with us.  Further breaking of my
  patriotic heart  :-( 

  ""Even Saddam Hussein
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein
  /index.html?inline=nyt-per>  had more legal counsel than I ever had," said 
  Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald
  H. Rumsfeld
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/donald_h_rumsf 
  eld/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , on grounds that his constitutional rights
  had been violated. "While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp
  commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill 
  in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the
  Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.""

  Call me disloyal or an enemy to my country, but I expect -- no, I DEMAND -- 
  better than that that for our own citizens from our OWN government.
  Shameful, shameful, shameful . . . and in the name of the lie of WMD,
  regardless of who -- precisely -- started the lie  :-(((


  Saundra Lund 
  Moscow, ID

  The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do
  nothing.
  - Edmund Burke

  ***** Original material contained herein is Copyright 2006, Saundra Lund.
  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce outside the Vision 2020 forum 
  without the express written permission of the author.*****

  -----Original Message-----
  From: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com [mailto: vision2020-bounces at moscow.com]
  On Behalf Of Ted Moffett
  Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2006 11:57 AM
  To: Vision2020
  Subject: [Vision2020] US Navy Veteran Whistle Blower Imprisoned In
  IraqRecalls Torment

  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/world/middleeast/18justice.html?ex=1324098
  000&en=e8c9cab2d3af846b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss 

  December 18, 2006

  Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment

  By MICHAEL MOSS
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/michael_moss/i 
  ndex.html?inline=nyt-per>

  One night in mid-April, the steel door clanked shut on detainee No. 200343
  at Camp Cropper, the United States military's maximum-security detention
  site in Baghdad.

  American guards arrived at the man's cell periodically over the next several
  days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded
  room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was 
  returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

  The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most
  hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was
  rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. 
  Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out
  the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was
  exhausted, depressed and scared.

  Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and 
  released by the American military in Iraq
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/ir
  aq/index.html?inline=nyt-geo> , and his account of his ordeal has provided
  one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon's detention operations since
  the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual. 

  The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who
  went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower,
  passing information to the F.B.I.
  < http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/federal
  _bureau_of_investigation/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  about suspicious
  activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he 
  said was possible illegal weapons trading.

  But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and
  another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military,
  which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and 
  military documents.

  At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in
  a Bible.

  "Sick, very. Vomited," he wrote July 3. The next day: "Told no more phone
  calls til leave." 

  Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military
  records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive
  tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying 
  detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether
  they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.

  The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the 
  haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq,
  where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal
  representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the 
  endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats.

  "Even Saddam Hussein
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/saddam_hussein 
  /index.html?inline=nyt-per>  had more legal counsel than I ever had," said
  Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald
  H. Rumsfeld
  < http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/donald_h_rumsf
  eld/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , on grounds that his constitutional rights
  had been violated. "While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp 
  commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill
  in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the
  Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves." 

  A spokeswoman for the Pentagon's detention operations in Iraq, First Lt. Lea
  Ann Fracasso, said in written answers to questions that the men had been
  "treated fair and humanely," and that there was no record of either man 
  complaining about their treatment.

  Held as 'a Threat'

  She said officials did not reach Mr. Vance's contact at the F.B.I. until he
  had been in custody for three weeks. Even so, she said, officials determined 
  that he "posed a threat" and decided to continue holding him. He was
  released two months later, Lieutenant Fracasso said, based on a "subsequent
  re-examination of his case," and his stated plans to leave Iraq. 

  Mr. Ertel, 30, a contract manager who knew Mr. Vance from an earlier job in
  Iraq, was released more quickly.

  Mr. Vance went to Iraq in 2004, first to work for a Washington-based
  company. He later joined a small Baghdad-based security company where, he 
  said, "things started looking weird to me." He said that the company, which
  was protecting American reconstruction organizations, had hired guards from
  a sheik in Basra and that many of them turned out to be members of militias 
  whom the clients did not want around.

  Mr. Vance said the company had a growing cache of weapons it was selling to
  suspicious customers, including a steady flow of officials from the Iraqi
  Interior Ministry. The ministry had ties to violent militias and death 
  squads. He said he had also witnessed another employee giving American
  soldiers liquor in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs.

  On a visit to Chicago in October 2005, Mr. Vance met twice with an F.B.I.
  agent who set up a reporting system. Weekly, Mr. Vance phoned the agent from
  Iraq and sent him e-mail messages. "It was like, 'Hey, I heard this and I
  saw this.' I wanted to help," Mr. Vance said. A government official familiar 
  with the arrangement confirmed Mr. Vance's account.

  In April, Mr. Ertel and Mr. Vance said, they felt increasingly uncomfortable
  at the company. Mr. Ertel resigned and company officials seized the
  identification cards that both men needed to move around Iraq or leave the 
  country.

  On April 15, feeling threatened, Mr. Vance phoned the United States Embassy
  in Baghdad. A military rescue team rushed to the security company. Again,
  Mr. Vance described its operations, according to military records. 

  "Internee Vance indicated a large weapons cache was in the compound in the
  house next door," Capt. Plymouth D. Nelson, a military detention official,
  wrote in a memorandum dated April 22, after the men were detained. "A search 
  of the house and grounds revealed two large weapons caches."

  On the evening of April 15, they met with American officials at the embassy
  and stayed overnight. But just before dawn, they were awakened, handcuffed 
  with zip ties and made to wear goggles with lenses covered by duct tape. Put
  into a Humvee, Mr. Vance said he asked for a vest and helmet, and was
  refused.

  They were driven through dangerous Baghdad roads and eventually to Camp 
  Cropper. They were placed in cells at Compound 5, the high-security unit
  where Saddam Hussein has been held.

  Only days later did they receive an explanation: They had become suspects
  for having associated with the people Mr. Vance tried to expose. 

  "You have been detained for the following reasons: You work for a business
  entity that possessed one or more large weapons caches on its premises and
  may be involved in the possible distribution of these weapons to 
  insurgent/terrorist groups," Mr. Ertel's detention notice said.

  Mr. Vance said he began seeking help even before his cell door closed for
  the first time. "They took off my blindfold and earmuffs and told me to 
  stand in a corner, where they cut off the zip ties, and told me to continue
  looking straight forward and as I'm doing this, I'm asking for an attorney,"
  he said. " 'I want an attorney now,' I said, and they said, 'Someone will be 
  here to see you.' "

  Instead, they were given six-digit ID numbers. The guards shortened Mr.
  Vance's into something of a nickname: "343." And the routine began.

  Bread and powdered drink for breakfast and sometimes a piece of fruit. Rice 
  and chicken for lunch and dinner. Their cells had no sinks. The showers were
  irregular. They got 60 minutes in the recreation yard at night, without
  other detainees.

  Five times in the first week, guards shackled the prisoners' hands and feet, 
  covered their eyes, placed towels over their heads and put them in
  wheelchairs to be pushed to a room with a carpeted ceiling and walls. There
  they were questioned by an array of officials who, they said they were told, 
  represented the F.B.I., the C.I.A.
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/central
  _intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , the Naval Criminal 
  Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/defense 
  _intelligence_agency/index.html?inline=nyt-org> .

  "It's like boom, boom, boom," Mr. Ertel said. "They are drilling you. 'We
  know you did this, you are part of this gun smuggling thing.' And I'm saying 
  you have it absolutely way off."

  The two men slept in their 9-by-9-foot cells on concrete slabs, with worn
  three-inch foam mats. With the fluorescent lights on and the temperature in
  the 50s, Mr. Vance said, "I paced myself to sleep, walking until I couldn't 
  anymore. I broke the straps on two pair of flip-flops."

  Asked about the lights, the detainee operations spokeswoman said that the
  camp's policy was to turn off cell lights at night "to allow detainees to 
  sleep."

  A Psychological Game

  One day, Mr. Vance met with a camp psychologist. "He realized I was having
  difficulties," Mr. Vance said. "He said to turn it into a game. He said: 'I 
  want you to pretend you are a soldier who has been kidnapped, and that you
  still have a duty to do. Memorize everything you can about everything that
  happens to you. Make it like you are a spy on the inside.' I think he called 
  it rational emotive behavioral therapy, and I started doing that."

  Camp Rule 31 barred detainees from writing on the white cell walls, which
  were bare except for a black crescent moon painted on one wall to indicate 
  the direction of Mecca for prayers. But Mr. Vance began keeping track of the
  days by making hash marks on the wall, and he also began writing brief notes
  that he hid in the Bible given to him by guards.

  "Turned in request for dentist + phone + embassy letter + request for 
  clothes," he wrote one day.

  "Boards," he wrote April 24, the day he and Mr. Ertel went before Camp
  Cropper's Detainee Status Board.

  Their legal rights, laid out in a letter from Lt. Col. Bradley J. Huestis of 
  the Army, the president of the status board, allowed them to attend the
  hearing and testify. However, under Rule 3, the letter said, "You do not
  have the right to legal counsel, but you may have a personal representative 
  assist you at the hearing if the personal representative is reasonably
  available."

  Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel were permitted at their hearings only because they
  were Americans, Lieutenant Fracasso said. The cases of all other detainees 
  are reviewed without the detainees present, she said. In both types of
  cases, defense lawyers are not allowed to attend because the hearings are
  not criminal proceedings, she said.

  Lieutenant Fracasso said that currently there were three Americans in 
  military custody in Iraq. The military does not identify detainees.

  Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel had separate hearings. They said their requests to
  be each other's personal representative had been denied.

  At the hearings, a woman and two men wearing Army uniforms but no name tags
  or rank designations sat a table with two stacks of documents. One was about
  an inch thick, and the men were allowed to see some papers from that stack. 
  The other pile was much thicker, but they were told that this pile was
  evidence only the board could see.

  The men pleaded with the board. "I'm telling them there has been a major
  mix-up," Mr. Ertel said. "Please, I'm out of my mind. I haven't slept. I'm 
  not eating. I'm terrified."

  Mr. Vance said he implored the board to delve into his laptop computer and
  cellphone for his communications with the F.B.I. agent in Chicago.

  Each of the hearings lasted about two hours, and the men said they never saw 
  the board again.

  "At the end, my first question was, 'Does my family know I'm alive?' and the
  lead man said, 'I don't know,' " Mr. Vance recounted. "And then I asked when 
  will we have an answer, and they said on average it takes three to four
  weeks."

  Help From the Outside

  About a week later, two weeks into his detention, Mr. Vance was allowed to
  make his first call, to Chicago. He called his fianc�e, Diane Schwarz, who 
  told him she had thought he might have died.

  "It was very overwhelming," Ms. Schwarz recalls of the 12-minute
  conversation. "He wasn't quite sure what was going on, and was kind of
  turning to me for answers and I was turning to him for the same." 

  She had already been calling members of Congress, alarmed by his
  disappearance. So was Mr. Ertel's mother, and some officials began pressing
  for answers. "I would appreciate your looking into this matter," Senator 
  Richard J. Durbin of Illinois wrote to a State Department official in early
  May.

  On May 7, the Camp Cropper detention board met again, without either man
  present, and determined that Mr. Ertel was "an innocent civilian," according 
  to the spokeswoman for detention operations. It took authorities 18 more
  days to release him.

  Mr. Vance's situation was more complicated. On June 17, Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin
  Curry, a spokesman for the American military's detention unit, Task Force 
  134, wrote to tell Ms. Schwarz that Mr. Vance was still being held. "The
  detainee board reviewed his case and recommended he remain interned," he
  wrote. "Multi-National Force-Iraq approved the board's recommendation to 
  continue internment. Therefore, Mr. Vance continues to be a security
  detainee. We are not processing him for release. His case remains under
  investigation and there is no set timetable for completion." Over the 
  following weeks, Mr. Vance said he made numerous written requests � for a
  lawyer, for blankets, for paper to write letters home. Mr. Vance said that
  he wrote 10 letters to Ms. Schwarz, but that only one made it to Chicago. 
  Dated July 17, it was delivered late last month by the Red Cross.

  "Diana, start talking, sending e-mail and letters and faxes to the alderman,
  mayor, governor, congressman, senators, Red Cross, Amnesty International 
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/a/amnesty
  _international/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , A.C.L.U., Vatican
  <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/roman_c
  atholic_church/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , and other Christian-based 
  organizations. Everyone!" he wrote. "I am missing you so much, and am so
  depressed it's a daily struggle here. My life is in your hands. Please don't
  get discouraged. Don't take 'No' for answers. Keep working. I have to tell 
  myself these things every day, but I can't do anything from a cell."

  The military has never explained why it continued to consider Mr. Vance a
  security threat, except to say that officials decided to release him after 
  further review of his case.

  "Treating an American citizen in this fashion would have been unimaginable
  before 9/11," said Mike Kanovitz, a Chicago lawyer representing Mr. Vance.

  On July 20, Mr. Vance wrote in his notes: "Told 'Leaving Today.' Took shower 
  and shaved, saw doctor, got civ clothes back and passport."

  On his way out, Mr. Vance said: "They asked me if I was intending to write a
  book, would I talk to the press, would I be thinking of getting an attorney. 
  I took it as, 'Shut up, don't talk about this place,' and I kept saying, 'No
  sir, I want to go home.' "

  Mr. Ertel has returned to Baghdad, again working as a contracts manager. Mr.
  Vance is back in Chicago, still feeling the effects of having been a
  prisoner of the war in Iraq.

  "It's really hard," he says. "I don't really talk about this stuff with my
  family. I feel ashamed, depressed, still have nightmares, and I'd even say I 
  suffer from some paranoia."

  ----------------------

  Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett








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