To: Crocodile who wrote (4417 ) 11/10/2003 9:33:52 AM From: epicure Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 20773 Now here is a fascinating story: U.S. Opposes Money for Troops Jailed in Iraq By PHILIP SHENON Published: November 10, 2003 WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 — 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. If the administration succeeds, the former prisoners would be deprived of the money they won and, they say, of the validation of a judge's ruling that documented their accounts of torture by the Iraqis — including beatings, burnings, starvation, mock executions and repeated threats of castration and dismemberment. "I don't want to say that I feel betrayed, because I still believe in my country," said Lt. Col. Dale Storr, whose Air Force A-10 fighter jet was shot down by Iraqi fire in February 1991. "I've always tried to keep in the back of my mind that we were never going to see any of the money," said Colonel Storr, who was held by the Iraqis for 33 days — a period in which he says his captors beat him with clubs, broke his nose, urinated on him and threatened to cut off his fingers if he did not disclose military secrets. "But it goes beyond frustration when I see our government trying to pretend that this whole case never happened." Another 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. (continued)