Not only does the White House get to break laws and get away with it, apparently the U.S. military and civilian contractors in Iraq are enjoying the same lack of accountability.
And anyone who dares to blow the whistle can expect to be persecuted -- and prosecuted. Maybe even tortured.
From the Associated Press:
-----
One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.-----
Or worse.
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.
[...]
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 cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.
The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.
"It was a Wal-Mart for guns," he says. "It was all illegal and everyone knew it."
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 trouble, 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.
And Donald Vance is just one example of many. Many others have been "fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms."
[Read the full article.]
So the good guys are the ones being punished, while the bad guys get away with their misdeeds.
This is Bush's "liberated" and "democratic" Iraq.
And this is our tax dollars at work.
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