Government priorities shift away from tortured POWs

Guy Hunter is a patriot. He's defended the United States government in the jungles of Vietnam, the skies of Iraq, and the torture chambers of Saddam Hussein.

And he defends it today. Even as his lawyers fight to get this 1991 Gulf War POW compensation for his suffering, Mr. Hunter can sympathize with his government's choice to spend $1 billion in seized Iraqi funds rebuilding that shattered nation, rather than paying him and 16 fellow servicemen for the brutality they suffered in its prisons.

What he can't countenance is the message that decision sends to future US enemies: that those who torture American POWs won't have to pay.

This summer, a federal district court awarded substantial damages to 17 prisoners of war tortured in Iraq: Hunter was to receive $32 million. When lawyers filed the case in April 2002, Iraq was the heart of the "axis of evil," its assets frozen in US banks. By the time the judge's decision came down in July 2003, Iraq was a land of faltering hopes and ruined power plants. It was also, as it remains, a fledgling democracy the US wished to rebuild - much like Germany after World War II.

To that end, President Bush had in March seized $1.7 billion in frozen Iraqi assets and deposited them in the US Treasury to help with Iraq's rebuilding. When Hunter and his fellow plaintiffs came to claim their awards in July, the money had already been spent. Taking no chances on their claim, the Justice Department is now suing to nullify the POWs' award.

Filed under a controversial 1996 law, their case is intriguing in its legal complexities - but even more so for its ethical ones. At its moral root is the question: Is a greater good served in using the money to supply broadly the basic needs of Iraqis and pave the way for a stable peace, or, by handsomely compensating 17 Americans for war crimes committed against them, in sending a message to the world that the torture of soldiers will not be tolerated?

In a briefing earlier this month, White House press secretary Scott McClellan emphasized the administration's condemnation of the torture, but argued that the frozen assets were "required for the urgent national security needs of rebuilding Iraq."

Hunter maintains that deterring potential torturers is an equally urgent national security need. "I hate to say it," he says, "but there are always going to be wars. If we don't send a message that, 'You can't do this and get away with it,' what's the incentive to treat [prisoners] correctly the next time around?"

History offers no clear lesson. On one hand, the US has not opened its treasury to families of American Jews whose relatives were murdered by Hitler's SS. It did, though, spend $1.4 billion to rebuild Germany with its Marshall Plan, the largest reconstruction of an enemy land in recorded history.

The US has also decided not to extend aid to Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City victims, or to survivors of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Neither has it historically compensated the descendants of its slaves or native peoples. It has, however, made restitution to Japanese Americans interned in the US during World War II.

American society is the most litigious on earth. The nation's legal system puts individual price tags on the hardships of its disabled workers, the pain of its clergy sexual-abuse victims, the suffering of the families of its Sept. 11 dead. Why not also on the injuries of its tortured soldiers?

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