You read that right. An American working for an Iraqi contractor was unlawfully detained and tortured after he blew the whistle on his company’s illegal deals with possible insurgents and other bad actors. Who detained him? The US military in Iraq, that’s who. Meet Donald Vance, US Navy veteran, FBI informant and two-time Bush voter (via an article by David Phinney posted at IraqSlogger):
A year ago, Donald Vance learned what its like to be falsely accused by the US military of aiding terrorists, held without charge for more than three months in a high-security prison in Iraq, and interrogated daily after sleepless nights without legal counsel or even a phone call to his family. […]
“My name used to be 200343,” Vance said recalling his prisoner ID. “If they can do this to a former Navy man and an American, what is happening to people in facilities all over the world run by the American government?”
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Vance worked for a company, Shield Group Security (“Shield Group”), owned by a Iraqi family which had been exiled by Saddam Hussein. After US forces deposed the Hussein regime, Shield Group obtained numerous “US funded contracts the Iraqi government, Iraqi companies, NGOs and US contractors.” The problem? The FBI became suspicious that Shield Group was illegally selling arms to Iraqi insurgents, militias and/or criminal gangs. Vance even describes numerous occasions where he witnessed a Shield Group employee bartering alcohol and beer with US soldiers for ammunition, what that employee jokingly called his “Bullets for Beer” program.
When the FBI approached Vance, he agreed to work for them as an unpaid FBI informant. For several months prior to his imprisonment, Vance frequently shared information that he discovered about his employer with an FBI agent in Chicago, as often as twice a day. Last April 15th, Vance and a fellow American contractor working for Shield Group, had their ID tags taken away. Fearing for their lives, they barricaded themselves into their office and eventually were rescued by a squad of US soldiers. Little did Vance know his nightmare was just beginning:
Once they reached the US-controlled Green Zone, government officials took them inside the embassy, listened to their individual accounts and then sent them to a trailer outside for sleep. Two or three hours later before the crack of dawn, US military personnel woke them. This time, however, Vance and Ertel, Shield Security’s contract manager, were under arrest. Soldiers bound their wrists with zip ties and covered their eyes with goggles blacked out with duct tape. […]
Vance and Ertel both accuse their US government captors of subjecting them to psychological torture day and night. Lights were kept on in their cell around the clock. They endured solitary confinement. They had only thin plastic mattresses on concrete for sleeping. Meals were of powdered milk and bread or rice and chicken, but interrupted by selective deprivation of food and water. Ceaseless heavy metal and country music screamed in their ears for hours on end, their legal complaint alleges.
They lived through “conditions of confinement and interrogation tantamount to torture,” says [vance’s] lawsuit filed in northern Illinois US District Court. “There interrogators utilized the types of physically and mentally coercive tactics that are supposedly reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”
What was Vance’s crime? Apparently he simply wasn’t as well connected with the Iraqi government and the US military in Baghdad as was his employer, Shield Group. In short, his crime was being one of the good guys, where the corruption is rife, and the “bad guys” rule the roost. Despite the ease with which his military interrogators could have checked out his FBI connections, they never once bothered to confirm his story. Instead they told him to limit himself to the questions he was being asked. In fact, Vance is convinced he was singled out for the “Gitmo experience” because his work with the FBI threatened to expose the corruption among US and Iraqi officials in Iraq:
By working with the FBI, Vance contends that U.S. government officials in Iraq decided to retaliate against him and Ertel. These officials conspired to jail the two not because they worked for a suspicious security company they suspected of selling weapons to insurgents, but because they were sharing information with law enforcement agents outside the control of US officials in Baghdad.
“In other words,” claims the lawsuit, “United States officials in Iraq were concerned and wanted to find out about what intelligence agents in the United States knew about their territory and their operations. The unconstitutional policies that Rumsfeld and other Unidentified Agents had implemented for ‘enemies’ provided ample cover to detain Plaintiffs and interrogate them toward that end.”
This is what happens when you toss civil liberties and respect for human rights overboard. You inevitably enable the worst kinds of bad actors, who can hide behind “official policy” to hide their corruption and thievery. Vance fortunately obtained his release from this American Gulag, but how many others are still be held within its walls, guilty of nothing other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time or, like Vance, of having crossed the wrong people?
As for the managers and owners of Shield Group, what happened to them? They have never been charged with any crime, and have reformed their company under a new name National Shield Security. According to Vance “[T]hey are still being awarded millions of dollars in contracts.” Your tax dollars and mine, most likely.
