Greedy U.S. fights GIs' award for Iraqi torture

U.S. fights GIs' award for Iraqi torture
Frozen funds intended for rebuilding
Philip Shenon, New York Times
Monday, November 10, 2003
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URL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/10/MNGLN2U2FO1.DTL

Washington -- 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 that 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 U.S. prisoners should be overturned in its entirety.

If the administration is successful, the former prisoners would be deprived both 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 attack 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 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 reveal military secrets. "But it goes beyond frustration when I see our government trying to pretend that this whole case never happened."

Officials at the Justice Department and State Department, 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.

"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 White House spokesman Scott McClellan. "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 sworn court filing in the case for the former prisoners, Paul Bremer,

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 lawyers who brought the case on behalf of the former prisoners depicted the ruling as a larger victory, saying such a huge penalty against Iraq would discourage other governments from using torture against U.S. troops caught in future conflicts.

"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."