US contractor sues Rumsfeld over detainment

A former private security employee in Iraq has said he was imprisoned by US forces in a Baghdad military camp, held for three months without charges and denied access to an attorney, despite being a US citizen. Donald Vance, 29, filed a federal lawsuit on Dec. 18 against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his role in overseeing the military prison system in Iraq. In the lawsuit, Vance alleges that Rumsfeld's "policies and directives are completely inconsistent with fundamental constitutional and human rights." Vance alleges he was held in "physically and mentally coercive conditions which are supposedly reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants." Vance was taken into custody without charges in April. While imprisoned at Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport, Vance said, he was held in solitary confinement in a continuously lit, windowless and extremely cold cell as music blared non-stop. After working for one security company in Iraq in late 2004 and early 2005, Vance took a job with another security company in the fall of 2005. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the FBI about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading. But when US soldiers raided the company at his urging, Vance and another US contractor who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that 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." At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. Nathan Ertel, the other contractor held with 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. "Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had," said Vance. "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. She said officials did not reach Vance's contact at the FBI 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, Fracasso said, based on a "subsequent re-examination of his case," and his stated plans to leave Iraq. Ertel, a contract manager who knew Vance from an earlier job in Iraq, was released more quickly. Vance, a veteran of the US Navy, first worked for a Washington-based company and 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 US 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. 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 US soldiers liquor in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs. On a visit to Chicago in October 2005, Vance met twice with an FBI agent who set up a reporting system. Weekly, Vance phoned the agent from Iraq and sent him email messages. "It was like, 'Hey, I heard this and I saw this.' I wanted to help," Vance said. A government official familiar with the arrangement confirmed Vance's account. In April, Ertel and Vance said, they felt increasingly uncomfortable at the company. Ertel resigned and company officials seized the identification cards that both men needed to move around Iraq or leave the country. On Apr. 15, feeling threatened, Vance phoned the US Embassy in Baghdad. A military rescue team rushed to the company. Again, Vance blew the whistle on 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 Apr. 22, after the men were detained. "A search of the house and grounds revealed two large weapons caches." On the evening of Apr. 15, they met with US 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, 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 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," Ertel's detention notice said. 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 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 were told, represented the FBI, the CIA, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency. "It's like boom, boom, boom," 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 men's 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." Vance and Ertel were permitted at their hearings only because they were US citizens, 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. Vance and 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 at 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. Vance said he implored the board to delve into his laptop computer and cellphone for his communications with the FBI agent in Chicago. Each of the hearings lasted about two hours, and the men said they never saw the board again. The two men slept in their nine-by-nine-foot cells on concrete slabs, with worn three-inch foam mats. With the fluorescent lights on and the temperature in the 50s, Vance said, "I paced myself to sleep, walking until I couldn't anymore. I broke the straps on two pair of flip-flops." After three months of detainment, on July 20, Vance wrote in his notes: "Told 'Leaving Today.' Took shower and shaved, saw doctor, got civ clothes back and passport." On his way out, 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.' " Commenting on the conditions at the prison, Vance said: "I couldn't believe they did this to any human being." Vance said "sheer anger" provoked his decision to take the matter to court and help US citizens "protect their liberties at home."