2.17.2005

Your pain isn't worth a penny

I've seen this article mentioned in a few places, and every time I do, I just get more angry and disgusted. I want you all to be angry and digusted with me!

White House Turns Tables on Former American POWs

The Bush administration is fighting the former prisoners of war in court, trying to prevent them from collecting nearly $1 billion from Iraq that a federal judge awarded them as compensation for their torture at the hands of Saddam Hussein's regime.

The rationale: Today's Iraqis are good guys, and they need the money.

The case abounds with ironies. It pits the U.S. government squarely against its own war heroes and the Geneva Convention.

Many of the pilots were tortured in the same Iraqi prison, Abu Ghraib, where American soldiers abused Iraqis 15 months ago. Those Iraqi victims, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, deserve compensation from the United States.

But the American victims of Iraqi torturers are not entitled to similar payments from Iraq, the U.S. government says.


So, let me get this straight. If you are American and you are tortured at Abu Ghraib, you get squat. But if you are Iraqi, you get compensation. But you weren't really tortured because cheerleaders make naked pyramids and it's just like hazing in a frat house.

They want to pour billions of more dollars in to this useless war, but they want to bar Americans from being compensated for the horrors they suffered during the first conflict. How is that okay? How does Bush sleep at night? I just don't get it.