The POW Scandal You Haven’t Heard About

In 2001, 17 former POWs from the 1991 Gulf War and 37 of their family members initiated a legal effort to hold Saddam Hussein’s Iraq accountable for the torture it illegally inflicted upon the POWs. They filed their case before the Court because they believed that a judgment would help deter the future torture of Americans by terrorist foreign governments, and that it might provide the financial resources to establish a Foundation to help support future American POWs, MIAs, and their families.

The Bush administration is fighting our own military veterans, who were the former prisoners of the Gulf War, in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein’s regime. At the same time, we have Donald Rumsfeld in the other corner calling for compensation to the Iraqi victims of torture at Abu Ghraib, but our own vets seemingly don’t deserve the same kind of compensation?!?

Although a U.S. District Court judge found in favor of the tortured Gulf War POWs in July 2003, the Justice Department won a court ruling shortly thereafter that prohibited the POWs from collecting on their judgment. The Administration in March 2003 had removed all the assets from the frozen assets fund and dedicated them to rebuilding Iraq, which effectively undercut Congress’s plan to make terrorists like Saddam pay for their crimes. That’s when the U.S. Justice Department stepped in, and argued that once the president had confiscated those frozen Iraqi assets, they were no longer assets of Iraq. And that money, said Our Employee, was needed to assist the Iraqi people and to rebuild Iraq. The government did acknowledge that the president had the authority to use that money to pay the POWs but that he did not choose to do so.

The result is that the POWs have been blocked by the Justice Department from receiving their court-ordered judgment. Even worse, the Justice Department went to court after the POWs won their judgment in an effort to erase the judgment from the books and take away the public recognition of the suffering the POWs endured in the service of the United States. Despite losing at the district court, DOJ has appealed, meaning that it will continue to fight to strip the POWs of their achievement, all the while using taxpayer dollars to do so.

In the White House press briefing (.pdf), Scott McClellan kept saying over and over: “…No amount of money can truly compensate these brave men and women for the suffering that they went through…” over and over again. I guess they meant literally no money.

The last hope for the POWs rests with the Supreme Court. Their lawyers petitioned the high court last month to hear the case. Significantly, it has been renamed Acree vs. Iraq and the United States.

Ironically, the hypocrisy of this entire situation is something no one at the White House seems to be talking about. Why is that? Where are all those flag-waving, ultra-patriots when they’re really needed?

Support Our Troops… inDEED!

[Tip of the Hat to David Rutt; Photo by CBS who also did a 60 Minutes segment on this in 2003. Also see Stop POW Torture]