Do Halliburton, etc. get to cut in line before these people who put their lives on the line defending our country before these corporations that lost some money? Just wondering as I comment first and snip second.
It’s an old story, but here’s the link…
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/20/60minutes/main584810.shtmlAnd here are some snips…
It was back in 1991 that the POWs came home from Iraq to a hero's welcome and were greeted by the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.
"Your country is opening its arms to greet you," said Cheney.
Many of the POWs had suffered wounds both physical and psychological. Some of them suffer to this day, more than a decade after they were captured and appeared on Iraqi TV.
Snip
“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.
That’s when the U.S. Justice Department stepped in, and argued that once the president had confiscated those frozen Iraqi assets, they were no longer assets of Iraq. And that money, said the president, was needed to assist the Iraqi people and to rebuild Iraq. The government did acknowledge that the president had the authority to use that money to pay the POWs but that he did not choose to do so.
Snip
But the story does not end there. While the POWs were shut out from getting the money they were awarded, they still have their original judgment, which holds Saddam and Iraq responsible and liable for their torture. But now, the Justice Department is trying to have that judgment thrown out.
“They wanna extinguish the case. I don't know why they would want to just wipe this off the books and say it never happened,” says Storr. “Let's just sweep it under the carpet and pretend it never happened.”
“I hope George Bush, the President of the United States, doesn't know about this,” says Reid. “Because if he knows about it, if he knows about it, it's a pox on his house, his White House. This is wrong.”