[Anyone] war criminals in washington:

[Thos Myers]

"My Name Used to Be #200343"
By David Phinney
Inter Press Service

Saturday 07 April 2007

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 fianc 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."

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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 at yahoo.com.