Bush administration betrays Iraq war POWs.

"During the [1991] Persian Gulf War, Iraq brutally tortured U.S. prisoners of war," recounted attorney John Morton Moore in a November 10 Washington Post column. "Saddam Hussein's secret police broke bones; shattered skulls and eardrums; and whipped, burned, shocked, beat, starved and urinated on our POWs. Yet these brave Americans, as did generations of POWs before them, refused to give in to their captors."

Before the current war began, 17 Gulf War POWs and 37 of their family members filed a lawsuit demanding financial compensation from Saddam's regime. The Bush administration, however, moved to seize Iraqi assets that "the POWs had been counting on to enforce their judgment," continued Moore. "In seizing the entire $1.7 billion, leaving nothing for the POWs, the administration argued that the money was urgently needed for the 'reconstruction of Iraq.'" (Attentive Americans might recall that prior to the war, Vice President Cheney and Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz insisted that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for reconstruction and other war costs.)

In seizing the Iraqi funds, the Bush administration ignored the advice of 20 former national security officials, "including a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff'," recalls Moore. "Even more shocking: the administration then intervened in court on the side of Saddam Hussein and Iraq to erase the POWs' judgment from the books ... presumably again in the interest of the 'reconstruction of Iraq.'" Yet 18 months after this decision was made, "most of the funds for reconstruction remain unspent." And it's not as if there's a shortage of available funds: many other claims against Iraq are being honored, such as a $30 billion reparation demand from Kuwait, $25 billion in war debts to Saudi Arabia, and payments to France, Russia, and the United Nations.