This is a Nov. 10 Times article, but I haven't heard anything about it til now. Lady get's mildly stomped in a Walmart and it's CNN Headline news; US government steps in and heists the victim's compensation award to 17 tortured Gulf War vets and it's Suicide Girls.
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.
'Course, $1 billion / 17 works out to a whopping $58 million per tortured guy -- but I'm surprised the government's trying to screw 'em completely. Somehow I don't think the subject came up in the Thanksgiving chow line....
"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."
MarkoffChaney30832
Truth Or Consequences, NM
February 2003
DEC 03, 2003 04:20 PM