A New Way Forward Must Include More Mental Territory

This past Sunday, my talk radio show Action Point's interview guest was Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim, author of Illicit, a fascinating book about global smuggling and it's mechanism, players and effects. It is the effects part that I found most fascinating; terrorism as we know it today could not exist without sophisticated international smuggling.

I brought on Moises, as I will others in coming months, to widen the discussion about terrorism. Currently still swirling around the Occupation of Iraq (notice how 9/11 is fading into the background?) I believe the discussion needs to include more than issues fueling partisan political positioning.

Using the seemingly polar nodes of fear and nationalism, linked to knee-jerk moralistic values, the United States corporate media (insistent to be on the commercial side of politics) and the Bush government (determined to do whatever it takes to undermine the Democratic party) abdicated their jobs as gatekeepers and defenders and blundered into the Middle East adding further fuel to unstable political conditions. Monetary connections to Saudi oil princes and Bush/Halliburton aside, the decision seemed then and now decidedly uninformed by global realities that citizens now must take into account as we--not the media and policy makers alone--attempt to find a New Way Forward.

Having said that, this NYT article is about an American whistleblower who reported apparent smuggling activities and then in a "mix-up" became a detainee for 97 days. Hopefully smuggling was the target of the raid, not grabbing people, but doesn't it make you nervous that the process of acquiring people to interrogate is wasting precious resources if it can't tell the good guys from the bad?

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

--snip--

Mr. Vance went to Iraq in 2004, first to work for a Washington-based company. He later joined a small Baghdad-based security company where, he said, “things started looking weird to me.” He said that the company, which was protecting American reconstruction organizations, had hired guards from a sheik in Basra and that many of them turned out to be members of militias whom the clients did not want around.

Mr. Vance said the company had a growing cache of weapons it was selling to suspicious customers, including a steady flow of officials from the Iraqi Interior Ministry. The ministry had ties to violent militias and death squads. He said he had also witnessed another employee giving American soldiers liquor in exchange for bullets and weapon repairs.