Did anyone see this...would like to hear some thoughts...
(snip)
A 1996 U.S. law allows for torture victims to sue a terrorist state in a U.S. Federal Court. So, in the spring of 2002, these four, along with 13 others, filed a lawsuit against Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
“What's really important here is that this lawsuit is a step in the right direction, towards preventing this kind of treatment,” says Storr. “What did we do after North Korea? Nothing. What did we do after Vietnam? Nothing. If that had been in place 20, 30 years ago, would their treatment have improved? Maybe. We don't know. Do we continue to do nothing? No. That's not gonna help anybody.”
The case wound up in a federal district court, and this past July, the judge decided in favor of the POWs.
In his decision, Judge Richard Roberts said, "POWs are uniquely disadvantaged and deterring torture of POWs should be of the highest priority. Only a very sizable award would be likely to deter the torture of American POWs ... in the future."
And, he granted the POWs a hefty award: $653 million in compensatory damages and $306 million in punitive damages.
That is over $900 million for the POWs and their immediate families, according to John Norton Moore, a former State Department officer, and one of the attorneys for the POWs.
“If what we do is to offer the tortured American POWs settlements that are the equivalent of the price of a used car, we're simply going to perpetuate this torture of POWs over and over. And say the price of torturing American POWs is virtually nothing,” says Moore.
How are they going to collect the money after they get the judgment? Where is it going to come from?
“Initially, when we filed this action, there was a large block of seized assets of Iraq, $1.7 billion, that would more than compensate any possible judgment that we had imagined in this case,” says Moore.
But when the second war in Iraq was launched, just last March, those frozen Iraqi assets were confiscated by President Bush and transferred to the U.S. Treasury Department. When the POWs won their case, they argued that U.S. law entitled them to some of that money. So the POWs decided to file a second lawsuit, this one against the secretary of the treasury, in order to collect the money that federal judge had awarded them.
(snip)
Confiscated by Bush...I wonder where those monies went...I'm thinking Halliburton...!
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/20/60minutes/main584810.shtml">Here's more...
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