This is a very interesting matter I’ve heard very little about. In the first Gulf War (Daddy’s War), Americans were caught and tortured. In the last 10 years, those victims won a court judgement granting them millions of Iraqi dollars for pain and suffering. Duhbya will make sure they get none of it. Just another example of his lip-service to the military or thoroughly consistent with a view that citizens should not be allow to use courts to collect high dollar damages? mjh

U.S. Opposes Money for Troops Jailed in Iraq

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. …

[A] former prisoner, David Eberly, a retired Air Force colonel whose F-15 fighter was shot down over northwest Iraq and who said his interrogators repeatedly pointed a gun at his head and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber, said he was surprised by the administration’s eagerness to overturn the judgment.

”The administration wants $87 billion for Iraq,” he said. ”The money in our case is just a drop of blood in the bucket.”