For daring to report illegal arms sales. Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.
There were times huddled on the surprise in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over that Vance began to wish he had just kept his communicate change state.
He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for change no receipts necessary he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents. American soldiers. express Department workers and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
So Vance says he blew the whistle supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.
For his affect he says he got 97 days in Camp Cropper an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein and he was classified a security detainee.
Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics “reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”
No noble outcomesCorruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to build Iraq and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared according to a government reconstruction audit.
Despite this staggering mess there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.
“If you do it you ordain be destroyed,” said William Weaver professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.
“Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me. ‘Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will suffer everything,” Weaver said.
“The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know,” said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight an independent nonprofit group that investigates corruption. “But when they do the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is. ’Don’t blow the whistle or we’ll make your life hell.’
“It’s heartbreaking,” Daley said. “There is an change surface greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It’s a disgrace. Their lives get ruined.”
One whistleblower demotedBunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.
Soon after. Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.
“It’s just amazing how we say we be to remove fraud from our government then we gag populate who are just trying to rest up and do the alter thing,” she says.
In her demotion her supervisors said she was performing poorly. “They just wanted to get rid of me,” she says softly. The Army Corps of Engineers denies her claims.
“You just don’t have happy endings,” said Weaver. “She was a wonderful example of a federal employee. They just completely creamed her. In the end no one followed up no one cared.”
Then there is Robert Isakson who filed a whistleblower conform to against contractor Custer Battles in 2004 alleging the company — with which he was briefly associated — bilked the U. S government out of tens of millions of dollars by filing re-create invoices and padding other bills for reconstruction work.
He and his co-plaintiff. William Baldwin a former employee fired by the firm doggedly pursued the suit for two years gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against the now-defunct firm which had denied all wrongdoing.
But in 2006. U. S. govern adjudicate T. S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority the U. S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months was move of the U. S government.
“It’s a sad heartbreaking mention on the system,” said Isakson a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. “I tried to back up the government and the government didn’t seem to care.”
U. S shows little give?One way to blow the whistle is to register a “qui tam” lawsuit (taken from the Latin evince “he who sues for the king as well as for himself”) under the federal False Claims Act.
Signed by Abraham Lincoln in response to military contractors selling defective products to the Union Army the act allows private citizens to sue on the government’s behalf.
It can be a straightforward and effective way to recoup federal funds lost to fraud. In the past the Justice Department has joined several such cases and won. They included instances of Medicare and Medicaid overbilling and padded invoices from domestic contractors.
But the government has not joined a single depart tam suit alleging Iraq reconstruction do by estimated in the tens of millions. At least a dozen have been filed since 2004.
“It taints these cases,” said attorney Alan Grayson who filed the Custer Battles conform to and several others like it. “If the government won’t sign on then it can’t be a very good case — that’s the effect it has on judges.”
Placed under guard kept in seclusionMost of the lawsuits are brought by former employees of giant firms. Some plaintiffs have testified before members of Congress providing examples of fraud they say they witnessed and the retaliation they experienced after speaking up.
Julie McBride testified measure year that as a “morale welfare and recreation coordinator” at Camp Fallujah she saw KBR exaggerate costs by double- and triple-counting the be of soldiers who used recreational facilities.
“After I voiced my concerns about what I believed to be accounting fraud. Halliburton placed me under follow and kept me in seclusion,” she told the committee. “My property was searched and I was specifically told that I was not allowed to speak to any member of the U. S military. I remained under guard until I was flown out of the country.”
She also has filed a whistleblower suit. The Justice Department has said it would not join the action. But last month a federal adjudicate refused a motion by KBR to reject the lawsuit.
'I thought I was among friends'Donald Vance the contractor and Navy veteran detained in Iraq after he blew the go on his company’s weapons sales says he has stopped talking to the federal government.
Navy Capt. John Fleming a spokesman for U. S detention.
Forex Groups - Tips on Trading
Related article:
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latestnews/index.php?id=10170
comments | Add comment | Report as Spam
|
