Tortured TIs: US whistleblowers green-lighted to sue Rumsfeld
by covered on, examiner.comAugust 9th 2011
Despite the Bush and Obama administrations attempts to dismiss the case with settlement payments, two American whistleblowers allegedly tortured at the hands of the United States military, have been green-lighted to sue former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld according to a U.S. appeals court Monday. Now ruled that Rumsfeld has no immunity, other Targeted Individuals (TIs), allegedly persecuted by a covert US military program, might come forward with greater success, as one of the two men heading to court says he hopes, according to his interview with Keith Olbermann on Countdown.
In a landmark ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit explicitly rejected "this astonishing claim of government officials being above the law," reported New American Tuesday.
"Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel sued in federal court seeking damages from Rumsfeld and unnamed others over their roles in developing, authorizing and using harsh interrogation techniques in Iraq against them, thus violating their rights," reported Reuters.
"The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, based in Chicago, upheld a decision by a federal judge in Illinois to allow the lawsuit to proceed despite efforts by the former Bush and current Obama administration to get the case dismissed."
When Keith Olbermann of the Current TV channel asked Vance in an August 5 interview, "You say the government actually tried to pay you to keep quiet?" Vance replied, "Absolutely."
Vance furthered, "My case and John Doe's case [have] nothing to do with money. We have had settlement conferences in the past, and in every single instance we have come to no agreement whatsoever. We are going forward to court. I have no interest in having any settlement conferences."
The two men became Targeted Individual whistleblowers in 2006 at their place of work, Shield Group Security, a private security company in Iraq that provided "protection for businesses and organizations."
Vance, a former US Navy veteran, had evidence that the security company was "illegally selling arms that were making their way into the hands of militant groups and death squads" according to Keith Olbermann and MOXNEWS.
Problems for the two whistleblowers began in 2005 after they contacted the FBI to report the corruption and began co-operating with the "law enforcement agency" by becoming "informants," as the government built a case against the firm.
Vance told Olbermann that he believed police were meant to protect the innocent. Targeted Individuals reporting to the Examiner consistently state that this notion of police protection is now a dangerous myth in the lives of people targeted.
US 'rescue' meant torture
In early 2006, when tension in the lives of the two men became almost unbearable, Vance phoned the American embassy and was told help was on the way. A military “rescue team” arrived and Vance showed them where to find a cache of weapons.
After that, Vance and Ertel were taken to the embassy, bedded down for the night, and rudely awakened to be handcuffed, blindfolded. They were taken to the prison near Baghdad airport that once housed Saddam Hussein, Camp Cropper, the prison Rumsfeld said he wanted to "Gitmotize" according to Vance during his interview with Olbermann.
At the hands of the U.S. military forces at Camp Cropper, the two men, never charged with a crime, just like some 350,000 other American Targeted Individuals, were allegedly subjected to what Vance calls "the program," no-touch and touch torture.
The two innocent targets, classified as "posing a threat" as previously noted by the New York Times, were subjected to some of the same treatment tactics constituting torture that prisoners in the United States do. It was some of these treatment aspects that prompted approximately 7000 California prisoners to go on a hunger strike in July, and that prompted human rights defenders to declare that torture of 100,000 inmates in prison solitary confinement in the United States is America's "most pressing and ignored human rights issue."
Without right to legal representation, The New American reports that the court described that the two Americans' alleged treatment in Camp Cropper as "perfectly consistent with torture treatments approved by Rumsfeld's Defense Department":
Ninety-seven days later, the two men were unceremoniously dropped at the airport according to Vance.
The two men are seeking unspecified damages. They say their constitutional rights were violated and U.S. officials knew they were innocent according to Reuters.
"The appeals court ruled favorably that the torture decisions were made at the highest levels of government.
"We agree with the district court that the plaintiffs have alleged sufficient facts to show that Secretary Rumsfeld personally established the relevant policies that caused the alleged violations of their constitutional rights during detention," the court ruled in a split decision.
Vance told told The New York Times that life now is "really hard."
“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 some paranoia,” he said.
At Camp Cropper, Bagram Air Base, Guantanamo Bay, Kandahar and secret C.I.A. prisons around the globe, hundreds thousands of people "posing threats," "many of them innocent," continue to endure torture at the hands of their American captors. (See: "The Story of Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, two Americans Tortured by the U.S. Army in Iraq," Moral Low Ground)
Rumsfeld's lawyer said Monday's appeals court decision was a blow to the US military.
Meanwhile, on US soil, 100,000 Americans prisoners, many of whom are political prisoners, most without violent background, are subjected to torture daily in solitary confinement. They are kept in SHUs, small concrete cells, with no physical contact, driven insane at a cost from about $50,000. to $184,000. per year, highly lucrative for the prison industrial complex.
In the MOXNEWS report last week, it was stated that, now that this case is proceeding, other Targeted Individuals might also come forward. Vance said that he hopes so.
Back in 2006, after Vance's release, he told the New York Times, "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.”
Original Page: http://www.examiner.com/human-rights-in-national/tortured-tis-us-whistleblowers-green-lighted-to-sue-rumsfeld
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