U.S. fights GIs' award for Iraqi torture~Frozen funds intended for rebuild

[pinniped]

An update from a story I first saw here a couple months ago.
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/10/MNGLN2U2FO1.DTL

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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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.

More:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/11/10/MNGLN2U2FO1.DTL

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So their money was diverted to Halliburton and Bechtel?

Here are some numbers I gathered from another source:

- 17 soldiers + 37 immediate family members filed suit
- $653,000,000 in compensatory damages
- $306,000,000 in punitive damages

[asjr]

1. gis

I'll bet those frozen assets melted long ago into someone's pockets in D.C.