John Doe, an American, has sued Donald Rumsfeld, in his individual capacity, for the conditions of confinement, the torture, and the abuse Doe suffered during his nine month imprisonment in Iraq. D.C. District Court Judge James Gwin has allowed portions of the lawsuit against Rumsfeld to proceed.
Daily Kos has diary coverage of the decision by Desi and by Bardo.
Doe was a mercenary intelligence contractor for the U.S. He worked for Titan, as interrogator and translator, at a fairly ordinary level. But he soon moved up. Doe was assigned to open talks with Sheikh Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. Abu Risha was essentially, and until his assassination in 2007, the Sunni Awakening.
Doe maintains that, as the Human Exploitation Team’s translator and as the first American to open direct talks with Al-Sattar, he served as the main point of contact for all communications between the Sheikh and the Team. Doe also contends that through a series of highly secretive meetings with Al-Sattar, the Sheikh pledged to support the United States and ultimately became “one of America’s staunchest allies” by providing the United States military with information to help control insurgencies in Anbar.
Opinion
The Sunni Awakening operation is sometimes said to have begun in August 2006, with a tribal council. But Doe was meeting Abu Risha a year earlier. John Doe was the beginning of our secretive Sunni Awakening negotiations.
The Bush program to enlist Sunni tribes in the fight against a supposed al-Qaeda in Iraq, actually a Sunni insurgency, was a thing of wild corruption. Secret money, secret guns, secret meetings, secret deals, secret sharing of intelligence. It was quite strictly a payoff program at its core. We would pay off the tribes not to fight us, with guns and money and deals.
The mercenary intelligence contractor, John Doe, was arrested in this context of secret guns and money. Well, actually not arrested. The American was abducted and thrown in a cell, without charge, without representation, and without any chance of defense. By the U.S. military intelligence he was working for.
Trying to read between the lines of the case is difficult, when you are dealing with a mercenary named John Doe. But Doe would have been in a severely stovepiped chain of command, in his operation to reach out and talk with the high level Anbar-province Sheikh. Stovepiped meaning, very straight up to the defendant in the case, Donald Rumsfeld. The Administration had been against the talks before they were for them. But information would have gone straight to the top.
Apparently, John Doe did something someone did not like. Doe's original questioning was by Naval Criminal Investigative Services. Doe, stovepiped and compartmented, wouldn't much talk to something as low as an NCIS:
Doe says he refused to answer questions, citing a concern for the confidentiality of sensitive information he had learned during his work on the Team.
Opinion
Such information was invaluable and the sheikh's cooperation was a closely guarded secret. "My supervisors were saying nobody should know this guy is giving us information, another marine unit," the translator said.
ABC News (2008)
So, Doe was thrown in the hole of Camp Cropper. Doe suggests he was set up via rumor campaign, by Iraqi intelligence opposed to the dealing.
He got our standard treatment. Beatings. Cold cells. Bright lights. Hooding. Blasting of country and heavy metal music. Banging on his cell bars for sleep deprivation.
In asking, how in hell could they do that to one of our own, I'd say, a trained and taught systematic brutality. It's just what Camp Cropper knew. It's just what Camp Cropper was for. Hapless innocent, IED maker, or our own, all got treated more or less the same.
Throwing the vulnerable into cages with the dangerous was one of our techniques:
When prison officials took Doe out of isolation, they moved him into a cell housing suspected Al Qaeda and Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party members hostile to the United States. Prior to moving Doe, the officials publicized Doe’s affiliation with the Department of Defense and his work for the Human Exploitation Team, thereby encouraging the Al Qaeda and Ba’ath Party detainees to physically attack Doe. Later, prison guards moved Doe into a cell with seven suspected Al Qaeda members, encouraging additional attacks. Doe says he lived in constant fear for his life.
Opinion
A minor point. But the prison officials sure weren't very careful about protecting our highest military secrets, when they told the cageful of men what Doe was in for.
John Doe spent nine months locked up at Camp Cropper. Reports of the imprisonment of an American would have gone to the very highest levels. To the very same highest levels that Doe's mission was stovepiped to. John Doe was hung out to dry. He was hung out to dry to the extent of throwing him, helpless, in a cage with the suspected enemy. John Doe is suing Don Rumsfeld about this.
Current media discussion of the case simply omits any mention of Abdul Sattar Abu Risha in this. Context is entirely stripped. The Sheikh, Abdul Sattar Abu Risha was once a well covered subject. The Awakening was the focus of very large scale opinion manipulation operations by our military.
The story has gone down the memory hole. Like John Doe once had, in his cell.