The trials of Donald Vance.

Donald Vance has received this year's Ridenhour Truth Telling Prize for his account of his capture and detention in Iraq. The Ridenhour Prize is named after Ron Ridenhour, who, after returning to the United States from Vietnam, distributed a lengthy account of the incident at My Lai to his congressman and others.

Vance, this year's winner, is an American citizen and former Navy sailor who went to Baghdad to work for an American-based security firm in 2004. Eventually, he wound up working for another security firm, this time one based in Iraq. While employed there, Vance began noticing irregularities. "Things," he said, "started looking weird to me."

By this time, Vance was working as an unpaid informant for the FBI, but that wouldn't help him when events began to unravel on April 16, 2006. That day, he and Nathan Ertel, another American employee of the Iraqi security firm, had their IDs taken away from them by their employer. Fearing for their lives, the two barricaded themselves in a room and Vance called the U.S. Embassy for help, alerting them that a weapons cache was next door. Shortly after, a team of U.S. soldiers came to the rescue, but what should have been cause for celebration quickly became the beginning of a nightmare.

Despite working for the FBI and exposing ...