Strange story: Americans suing for being brutalized in Iraq

[Daniel]

Link here: http://chicagoist.co...owed_to_sue.php

To sum up: in 2006, two Americans were working in Iraq for an FBI investigation of a security company suspected of corruption. They were seized and held by U.S. forces, during which time they say they were kept in freezing cold cells, deprived of sleep for days on end, deliberately slammed into walls, and threatened constantly with additional violence.

They are suing the former Secretary of Defense among others. A federal court has ruled that they are allowed to sue, disagreeing with the government's argument that no one working for the U.S. government can be sued for anything that happens in a war zone. This is still a long way from a trial, so nothing has been proven yet, but a leaked U.S. government document matches the two Americans' story of how they got into military custody. http://www.iraqwarlo...m/PDF/25/13.pdf

So far, so depressing, but the main thing I wanted opinion on was about how the two guys were first seized. They were working for a security company that was suspected of corruptly trading alcohol to U.S. soldiers in exchange for weapons, which weapons the company then sold to God-knows-whom. The two men say they were secretly sending information on the company to the FBI; I'm not clear on whether the FBI confirms this. The security company got suspicious of our two whistle blowers and yanked their Green Zone passes, effectively confining them to the company's compound. When they called the FBI for help, they say they got this answer: "they should interpret [the company's] actions as taking them hostage, and should barricade themselves with weapons in a room of the compound."

Does that strike anyone else as incredibly bad advice? If you do that, isn't there an excellent chance that the company will report, "We have two heavily armed terrorists barricaded in our building with lots of weapons," and that the two guys could well have simply been killed before anyone figured out that they were actually FBI informants? Indeed, wasn't there a very serious threat of the company sending goons with grenades to kill the two guys themselves, and later explaining it as as a necessary response to a life-threatening emergency?

The story seems so strange that only two explanations come to me. First, our two guys might be lying, at least about the part where the FBI told them to barricade themselves. Second, if they are telling the truth about it, whoever they were talking to might have been trying to set them up to be killed. At any rate, the fact that our two whistle blowers first came to the attention of the military while barricaded with guns in a security firm's arsenal might explain, though not excuse, the abominable way their captors treated them.

[Matty Bottles]

I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI sent them up the river, frankly. It is a big organization filled with individuals, any number of whom could be crooked. It wouldn't be the first time private US enterprises had moles IN the justice department, either.