[PAA-Discuss] Rts & Liberties: Torture Is Now Part of the American Soul

[abo at AllBreedObedience.info]

Sadly, it's worse if you dare to be a whistle-blower.   Read on . . .

Navy Veteran Detained and Tormented in Iraq by US Military


Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and
released by the American military in Iraq, 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.



From:   http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121806M.shtml



Full Story:
Former US Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment (if you can limit it to that)
By Michael Moss
The New York Times
Monday 18 December 2006

    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, 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. 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 had more legal counsel than I ever had," said Mr.
Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H.
Rumsfeld, 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., the Naval Criminal Investigative Service
and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

    "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 fiancée, 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, A.C.L.U., Vatican, 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."

  -------

 -----Original Message-----
From: Ron and Kris Graham [mailto:graham2639 at mindspring.com]
http://www.alternet.org/rights/45613/?comments=view&cID=398798&pID=398446#c3
98798

  This article is really horrifying. It seems the U.S. interrogators  ...

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.5.432 / Virus Database: 268.15.25/593 - Release Date: 12/19/2006
1:17 PM
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://paa-tx.org/pipermail/discuss_paa-tx.org/attachments/20061219/6a0ad076/attachment.htm>