Support The Troops

According to several sources, including this article, the Bush Administration is blocking American former POWs from the first Gulf War (Desert Storm) from suing Iraq for damages after being tortured there.

Their treatment was a clear violation of the Geneva Convention, to which Iraq was and is a signatory, but the Administration is claiming that to allow the lawsuits to go forward would threaten Iraq's stability.

Much has been made on other sites about the fallaciousness of this argument, from the numbers involved (representing according to one site, about 1% of the interest that Iraq currently earns on money it has on deposit within the United States) to the fact, according to another site, that the Bush Administration is actively supporting foreign companies to recover damages from Iraq in the amounts of billions of dollars, far more than the POWs collectively could ever win in their case.

The thing is, 17 of those former POWs were in fact awarded damages in U.S. Federal Court in this case five years ago, said award having been subsequently blocked by the Administration.

This item isn't getting enough coverage, in my opinion, in as much as it's been going on more or less since 2002 and I hadn't heard of it until recently, but I especially wanted to weigh in because I have a theory I have not seen expressed elsewhere.

I believe that the Administration isn't blocking this suit because they do not believe it is meritorious, and also not because they honestly believe that any such award could seriously damage Iraq or U.S./Iraqi relations.

I believe that ultimately it comes down to their own complicity in violations of the Geneva Convention. If they allow this lawsuit to go forward, they lose a leg, however tenuous, in our own government's defense if/when some of our own held POWs in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ultimately bring suits against the United States for their own treatment at our hands.

And thus does illegal and immoral treatment of prisoners lead to unconscionable treatment of our veterans at the hands of the group that continues to successfully sell themselves as the ones who "support the troops".

It makes me just sick.

Liam.

[UPDATE: In doing some more research, I learned a couple of interesting facts. First, as a signatory to the Geneva Convention ourselves, we are forbidden from absolving any nation of responsibility for torturing a POW. Also, much of the torture in question happened in Abu Ghraib, which isn't germane to anything, but an interesting footnote and an embarrassing reminder for the Administration.