Iraq Corruption Whistleblowers Face Penalties

In the world of prison and Rap snitches are the worst sort of humans. I'm sorry, I forgot, also in a Dubya run administration. Whistleblowers are treated like al Qaeda captives, in would seem. You see plenty of Bush/Cheney cronies are making big bucks from reconstruction contracts. Snitches interfere with those profits. In fact, one of the reasons for invading Iraq was to gain access to all that oil. We are governed by pirates and profiteers:

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.

There were times, huddled on the floor 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 mouth shut

Exposing government corruption should be protected and encouraged, not punished. This kind of behaviour is not something that should happen in a democracy. Its the kind of thing you would expect in a third world or banana republic:

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.