[Peace-discuss] betrayal

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

Thinking about thousands of Iraqi citizens who lost their lives, got maimed,
lost their loved ones, suffering from cancer etc - who will never get any
compensation whatsoever to begin with, I have mixed feelings.

Yet, when the Government doesn't care a bit about their own people, their
own soldiers who they sent to Iraq to fight for their own pleasure, how can
they ever care about those Iraqis or Afghans or.....???

Right, they simply don't care!
Except about their own pockets.

I'm sure the money is not being used for the Iraqis now, anyway, in a
genuine sense.
__________________________________

November 10, 2003

U.S. Opposes Money for Troops Jailed in Iraq

By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 - The Bush administration is seeking to block a group of
American troops who were tortured in Iraqi prisons during the Persian Gulf
war in 1991 from collecting any of the hundreds of millions of dollars in
frozen Iraqi assets they won last summer in a federal court ruling against
the government of Saddam Hussein.

In a court challenge that the administration is winning so far but is not
eager to publicize, administration lawyers have argued that Iraqi assets
frozen in bank accounts in the United States are needed for Iraqi
reconstruction and that the judgment won by the 17 former American prisoners
should be overturned.

If the administration succeeds, the former prisoners would be deprived of
the money they won and, they say, of the validation of a judge's ruling that
documented their accounts of torture by the Iraqis - including beatings,
burnings, starvation, mock executions and repeated threats of castration and
dismemberment.

"I don't want to say that I feel betrayed, because I still believe in my
country," said Lt. Col. Dale Storr, whose Air Force A-10 fighter jet was
shot down by Iraqi fire in February 1991.

"I've always tried to keep in the back of my mind that we were never going
to see any of the money," said Colonel Storr, who was held by the Iraqis for
33 days - a period in which he says his captors beat him with clubs, broke
his nose, urinated on him and threatened to cut off his fingers if he did
not disclose military secrets. "But it goes beyond frustration when I see
our government trying to pretend that this whole case never happened."

Another former prisoner, David Eberly, a retired Air Force colonel whose
F-15 fighter was shot down over northwest Iraq and who said his
interrogators repeatedly pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger on
an empty chamber, said he was surprised by the administration's eagerness to
overturn the judgment.

"The administration wants $87 billion for Iraq," he said. "The money in our
case is just a drop of blood in the bucket."

Officials at the Justice and State Departments, which are overseeing the
administration's response to the case, say they are sensitive to the claims
of the former prisoners, who brought suit against Iraq under a 1996 law that
allows foreign governments designated as terrorist sponsors to be sued for
injuries.

But they say the case cannot be allowed to hinder American foreign policy
and get in the way of the administration's multibillion-dollar
reconstruction efforts in Iraq - an argument that federal appeals courts
seem likely to accept.

"No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the
suffering that they went through at the hands of a truly brutal regime,"
said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "It was determined earlier
this year by Congress and the administration that those assets were no
longer assets of Iraq, but they were resources required for the urgent
national security needs of rebuilding Iraq."

In a related case, a federal judge in New York ruled in September that the
families of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks could not claim any part
of about $1.7 billion in frozen Iraqi assets in the United States.

The judge noted that President Bush had signed an executive order in March,
on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, that confiscated Iraqi assets
and converted them into assets of the United States government. In May,
after Mr. Hussein was ousted, Mr. Bush issued a declaration that effectively
removed Iraq from a list of countries liable for some court judgments
involving past rights abuses and links to terrorism.

In a sworn court filing in the case for the former prisoners, L. Paul Bremer
III, the American administrator in Iraq, said the money won by the former
prisoners had already been "completely obligated or expended" in
reconstruction efforts.

"These funds are critical to maintaining peace and stability in Iraq," he
said. "Restricting these funds as a result of this litigation would affect
adversely the ability of the United States to achieve security and stability
in the region."

The case dates from April of last year, when the 17 former prisoners and
their families filed suit in the Federal District Court here against Mr.
Hussein and his government, seeking damages for the physical and emotional
injuries suffered as a result of torture during the prisoners' captivity.
The prisoners represented all branches of the military.

The Iraqi government made no effort to respond to the lawsuit.  In July,
three months after the fall of Mr. Hussein, Judge Richard W. Roberts ordered
the former Iraqi government to pay damages totaling nearly $1 billion - $653
million in compensatory damages, $306 million in punitive damages.

"No one would subject himself for any price to the terror, torment and pain
experienced by these American P.O.W.'s," the judge wrote. But he said that
"only a very sizable award would be likely to deter the torture of American
P.O.W.'s by agencies or instrumentalities of Iraq or other terrorist states
in the future."

The lawyers who brought the case on behalf of the former prisoners said such
a huge penalty against Iraq would discourage other governments from
torturing American troops.

"This was a major human rights decision," said John Norton Moore, one of the
lawyers and a professor of national security law at the University of
Virginia. "It never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that I would then
see our government coming in on the side of Saddam Hussein and his regime to
absolve them of responsibility for the brutal torture of Americans."

The administration moved within days of Judge Roberts's decision to block
the former prisoners from collecting any money. On July 30, the judge
reluctantly sided with the government, saying Mr. Bush's actions after the
overthrow of Mr. Hussein had barred the transfer of the frozen assets to the
former prisoners.

He said he had no other choice even though the administration's position
"that the P.O.W.'s are unable to recover any portion of their judgment as
requested, despite their sacrifice in the service of their country, seems
extreme." The former prisoners are appealing the case through the United
States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Stephen A. Fennell, a Washington lawyer who is also representing the former
prisoners, said the Bush administration had rejected a proposal that would
have allowed the United States to delay the payments to his clients for
months or years - until after the reconstruction of Iraq was well under way.
"My guys are obviously real patriots, and they authorized us to tell the
government that we were willing to wait," he said. "But that was turned
down."

Cynthia Acree, whose husband, Clifford, is a Marine colonel who was held by
the Iraqis for 47 days, said that "the money is not the issue and it never
has been."

She said Judge Roberts's ruling that detailed her husband's torture -
including beatings that resulted in a skull fracture and broken nose, as
well as mock executions and threats of castration - had been "a tremendous
gift" to her husband.

"I remember it so well, the look on my husband's face when he heard the
decision, because finally there was a public record," she said. "But now,
our government wants to act like none of this happened, to throw out the
entire case.  My husband is an active-duty Marine colonel, and President
Bush is his commander in chief.  But I'm not.  And I can say that I feel
betrayed."


                            Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company