headline.
Iraqis outraged at payout for US victims of Saddam’s regime.
Published 15 September, 2010, 13:31
Edited 19 September, 2010, 23:18
Iraq has agreed to pay $400 million to American citizens who say they were tortured or traumatized by Saddam Hussein’s regime after he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Locals are outraged.
It comes as a shock to the millions of Iraqis who are still suffering from the US-led campaign – especially since many have received nothing for their suffering.
The deal will finally settle claims by the American citizens who were caught up in Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and became subject to torture and psychological abuse. Many have since sued the Iraqi government for compensation.
The timing of the deal is significant, says RT’s Middle East correspondent Paula Slier.
article continues, click, read more.
The doco on TV was different, also mentioned that only about 25% of the revenue raised by allowing Iraq to trade Oil for food during the USA imposed trade sanctions actually ended up in Iraqi hands.
The rest went to US… it was $US Billions…
oil companies, Kuwait, etc etc
thoughts anyone?
No. The old government is destroyed, and we’ve already inflicted vast amounts of suffering, death and destruction on Iraq. We owe them reparations for what we’ve done, if anything.
Well, that was a lousy article. Let me see if I can recite some facts from memory.
In 2003, a group of former US servicemembers who had been POWs sued Saddam’s government because they were tortured. Their case was not part of the 1991 agreement between Iraq and the UN which made Iraq liable for the damage they inflicted in invading Kuwait.
Iraq did not send any lawyers to contest the case, so the US court issued a summary judgment for the full amount of the suit. The Bush Administration then diverted all the frozen Iraqi assets it has under US control to reconstruction projects, leaving the soldiers with no assets to collect. That was pretty much where things ended.
Now, if the new Iraqi government wishes to pay the claim, so far as I can tell, that’s an issue between the iraqi government, it’s people, and the lawyers for the plaintiffs. There have been many stories about how Iraq is now flush with oil money, perhaps theyre just looking for things to spend money on.
I would say that if the New Iraqi government wanted to contest the US court ruling, I would say it seems fair to allow them to do so. If they do not, and they wish to pay the claim, well, that’s their decision.
I am unaware if the US government has applied any pressure at all to the Iraqi government to pay the claim. And that article certainly doesn’t enlighten me at all.
Saddam is dead. The Iraqi people should not be held responsible for anything he did. Some Americans were hurt by the former regime? So were the people they’re trying to collect from. This makes no sense. It’s victims trying to hold up fellow victims.
It should be noted that the US has spent more than $50 billion in reconstruction funding for Iraq. Not personal compensation, of course, but certainly that ought to figure into the equation.
The US has also made well in excess of $30 million of personal payments to Iraqis and Afghans for civilians who were killed and injured. Link.
No, it shouldn’t. It went to profit the cronies of the Bush Administration, and as little as possible went to actually benefiting Iraq in any way. They went out of their way to avoid employing Iraqis, importing foreign workers instead; and what little got actually built was generally unusable or outright dangerous.
And 50 billion is pretty small compared to the damage we did, even if there had been an actual attempt to spend it constructively.
And a great deal of what we did to them can’t be valued in money; we did our best to destroy as much as possible of their institutions, their history and culture; we wanted them leveled into a blank slate we could rewrite. That’s damage we can’t repair.
But the same government is in charge, the same Constitution is in force, the same political parties, the same electorate. The analogy is badly flawed.
Or in fact punished him at all, not so much as a fine or even something as mild as an official denouncement of what he did without any penalty attached. That makes it hard to argue that we’ve repudiated his polices, or really changed in any significant way. Which we haven’t.
my thoughts on what the thread debate was meant to be about.
to whit.
to the victor the spoils.
the loser? well they just pay, yield,
Corporations only gain…
ordinary folk? well, they just die, don’t seem to matter too much what religion, race, creed they are.
main game is, they are expendable.
Did i read what is actually important here wrong?
like, its OK to waste whole countries.
no one seems to care too much, its old news.
we did a tactical withdrawal, said it was victory…
mission accomplished, scene 1, act 2 …
act 2 still as fabricated as scene 1…
flying suit, weapons of war,
any thinking person would have mutinied, thrown Bush overboard, like captain Bligh.
let the bastard swim for it…
democracy, imposed, of a lousy hap hazard sorts, unsuccessfully, upon nations who never wanted it,
when do you think we should have learn’t our folly?
Vietnam should have done us in, good and proper, but it did not, we keep repeating the same ol stuff ups, repeatedly, like lame ducks…already dead in the water.
main hassle is, we don’t seem to recognise this salient fact as yet.
we still keep killing foreign ppl, and bleeding ourselves to do so.
our young are dying too… for just what exactly?
how strange.
barely hear a mention nowadays of the devastation we laid waste to them other ppl too much.
why? simply, why?
is their pain at our slaughtering them, deforming them, silent now?
no longer exist, just cos it aint in the headlines no more?
You should get out more. (And my moderating has nothing to do with this.) Bush was not removed from office. He left due to term limits. The U.S. government as established by the Constitution in 1789 still exists. Some politicians and appointees left, as they periodically do, but the continuity is there. Legal cases and prison sentences and things involving prior administrations still exist; they didn’t go away because there was a transfer of power. That’s nothing like the overthrow of a government following an invasion. So let’s put that comparison to bed.
Anyone ? Anyone ? **Bricker **?