[wvns] American Tortured in Iraq Sues Rumsfeld
American Tortured in Iraq Sues Rumsfeld
"My Name Used to Be #200343"
By David Phinney
Inter Press Service
Saturday 07 April 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/040907J.shtml
An American former Navy soldier and private contractor imprisoned and
tortured in Iraq by the US military and falsely accused of "aiding
terrorists" warns that our worst fears about Iraq have come true.
A year ago, Donald Vance learned what its like to be falsely
accused by the U.S. military of aiding terrorists. He was 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.
On Wednesday, the former private security contractor was honored
for his ordeal in Washington and for speaking out against the
incident. At a luncheon at the National Press Club, Vance received the
Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, an award named in memory of Army
helicopter gunner Ron Ridenhour who struggled to bring the horrific
mass murders at My Lai to the attention of Congress and the Pentagon
during the Vietnam War.
Vance was joined by former president Jimmy Carter, who won a
lifetime achievement award, and journalist Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The
Washington Post who was recognised for his recent book, "Emerald City:
Inside Iraq's Green Zone".
As hundreds at the luncheon finished their lobster salad, Vance, a
two-time George W. Bush voter and Navy veteran, recounted the events
of his imprisonment and the grief of his fiancé and family. They did
not know if he was alive or dead, he said. They were already making
inquiries to the U.S. State Department on how to ship his body home.
He then drew a wider circle around his ordeal to include the
countless others who have been held falsely without charge and denied
normal legal constitutional protections under law. "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?"
Vance's nightmare began last year on Apr. 15 when he and co-worker
Nathan Ertel barricaded themselves in a Baghdad office after their
employer, an Iraqi private security firm, took away their ID tags.
They feared for their lives because they suspected the company was
involved in selling unauthorised guns on the black market and other
nefarious activity. A U.S. military squad freed them from the red zone
in Baghdad after a friend at the U.S. embassy advised him to call for
help.
Once they reached the U.S.-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, U.S. 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.
The two were then escorted to a humvee and driven first to
possibly Camp Prosperity and then to Camp Cropper, a high-security
prison near the Baghdad airport where Saddam Hussein was once kept.
Vance says he was denied the usual body armour and helmet while
traveling through the perilous Baghdad streets outside the safety of
the Green Zone or a U.S. military installation.
It was not the way the tall 29-year-old with an easy charm and
keen mind had expected to be treated. Vance claims that during the
months leading up to his arrest, he worked as an unpaid informant for
the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Sometimes twice a day, he would
share information with an agent in Chicago about the Iraqi-owned
Shield Group Security, whose principals and managers appeared to be
involved in weapons deals and violence against Iraqi civilians. One
company employee regularly bartered alcohol with U.S. military
personnel in exchange for ammunition they delivered, Vance said.
"He called it the bullets for beer programme," Vance claimed while
relating the incident during an interview this week at a cigar bar
just walking distance from the White House.
But his interrogators at Camp Cropper weren't impressed. Instead,
his jailers insisted that Vance and Ertel had been detained and
imprisoned because the two worked for Shield Group Security where
large caches of weapons have been found - weapons that may have been
intended for possible distribution to insurgents and terrorist groups,
Vance said.
In a lawsuit now pending against former Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld and "other unidentified agents," Vance and Ertel accuse their
U.S. 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 the lawsuit filed in northern Illinois
U.S. District Court. "Their interrogators utilised the types of
physically and mentally coercive tactics that are supposedly reserved
for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants."
Rumsfeld is singled out as the key defendant because he played a
critical role in establishing a policy of "unlawful detention and
torment" that Vance, Ertel and countless others in the "war on terror"
have endured, the lawsuit asserts, noting that the former defence
secretary and other high-level military commanders acting at his
direction developed and authorised a policy that allows government
officials unilateral discretion to designate possible enemies of the
United States.
Because the incident and allegations are now in litigation, the
Pentagon has no comment, spokesman Army Lieut. Col. Mark Ballesteros
said. He referred all inquires to the U.S. Justice Department, which
also had no comment for similar reasons.
But darker allegations are included in the complaint over false
imprisonment. Because he worked with the FBI, Vance contends, U.S.
government officials in Iraq decided to retaliate against him and
Ertel. He believes these officials conspired to jail the two not
because they worked for a security company suspected of selling
weapons to insurgents, but because they were sharing information with
law enforcement agents outside the control of U.S. 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."
It may take some time to sort out the allegations as the legal
process grinds forward, but, in the meantime, Vance is raising new
questions about his detention. He still wonders why his jailers didn't
just call the FBI and have him cleared. They had access to his
computer and cell phone to determine if his claims were true.
"When I told them to do that, they just got angry and told me to
stop answering questions I wasn't being asked," Vance said. "I think
they were butting heads with the State Department. I just snitched on
the wrong people. I took the bull by the horns and got the horn."
And why weren't managers with the Shield Group held and interrogated?
Interrogators were certainly interested in these other
individuals, according to the lawsuit. They wanted to know about the
company's structure, its political contacts, and its owners - most of
whom are related to a long-established Iraqi family who fled Iraq
during the years the country was ruled by Saddam Hussein, Vance said.
More startling even now is that the company has reformed. At the
time they left, Shield Security held U.S.-funded contracts with the
Iraqi government, Iraqi companies, NGOs and U.S. contractors. As far
as Vance knows, the company still does - but under a different name:
National Shield Security.
"I built their web site," he said. "And they are still being
awarded millions of dollars in contracts."
David Phinney is a journalist and broadcaster based in Washington,
DC, whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, New York Times
and on ABC and PBS. He can be contacted at: phinneydavid @ yahoo.com.
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