[Fwd: Sergeant who tried to report torture shipped out of Iraq as 'psycho' .../url]

[Neil Schneider]

<http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/12/08/coverup/index.html>
Whitewashing torture?

A veteran sergeant who told his commanding officers that he witnessed
his colleagues torturing Iraqi detainees was strapped to a gurney and
flown out of Iraq -- even though there was nothing wrong with him.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By David DeBatto

[Excerpts]

Dec. 8, 2004  |  On June 15, 2002, [date appears to be a typo] Sgt.
Frank "Greg" Ford, a counterintelligence agent in the California
National Guard's 223rd Military Intelligence (M.I.) Battalion
stationed in Samarra, Iraq, told his commanding officer, Capt. Victor
Artiga, that he had witnessed five incidents of torture and abuse of
Iraqi detainees at his base, and requested a formal investigation.

Thirty-six hours later, Ford, a 49-year-old with over 30 years of
military service in the Coast Guard, Army and Navy, was ordered by
U.S. Army medical personnel to lie down on a gurney, was then strapped
down, loaded onto a military plane and medevac'd to a military medical
center outside the country.

Although no "medevac" order appears to have been written, in violation
of Army policy, Ford was clearly shipped out because of a diagnosis
that he was suffering from combat stress. After Ford raised the
torture allegations, Artiga immediately said Ford was "delusional" and
ordered a psychiatric examination, according to Ford. But that
examination,
carried out by an Army psychiatrist, diagnosed him as "completely
normal."

Documents show that all subsequent examinations of Ford by Army
mental-health professionals, over many months, confirmed his initial
diagnosis as normal.

Ford, who has since left the military, claims that his superiors
shipped him out of the country to prevent him from exposing the
abusive
behavior. "They were determined to protect their own asses no matter
who they had to take down," he says.

Col. C. Tsai, a military doctor who examined Ford in Germany and found
nothing wrong with him, told a film crew for Spiegel Television that
he was "not surprised" at Ford's diagnosis. Tsai told Spiegel that he
had treated "three or four" other U.S. soldiers from Iraq that were
also sent to Landstuhl for psychological evaluations or "combat stress
counseling" after they reported incidents of detainee abuse or other
wrongdoing by American soldiers.

The 223rd M.I. Battalion was one of the first divisions to enter Iraq
after the U.S. "Shock and Awe" aerial bombardment ended, in mid-April
2003.

-- 
Neil Schneider                              pacneil_at_linuxgeek_dot_net
                                           http://www.paccomp.com
Key fingerprint = 67F0 E493 FCC0 0A8C 769B  8209 32D7 1DB1 8460 C47D

"All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies."
                 -- Dr. John Arbuthnot (1667-1735)