First Gulf War POW's push for reparations

Gulf War POWs push for Iraqi reparations

By William H. McMichael - Staff writer
Posted : Friday Jan 25, 2008 14:30:59 EST

U.S. veterans of the 1991 Gulf War who were captured and tortured by Iraqi forces are renewing their efforts to get President Bush to relent and allow them to pursue damages against the Iraqi government that were awarded by a federal court in 2003.

Bush vetoed the 2008 defense authorization bill Dec. 28 over a provision that, in essence, would allow former prisoners of war to sue Iraq for damages for their torture while in captivity. Bush claimed that enacting the provision would, among other things, “allow plaintiffs’ lawyers to tie up billions of dollars in Iraqi funds for reconstruction that our troops in the field depend on to maintain security gains.”

According to a Dec. 28 report in Congressional Quarterly, Bush issued his veto after lawyers for the Iraqi government threatened to withdraw $25 billion worth of assets from U.S. banks if the provision was allowed to become law.

The American POWs were granted damages by a U.S. federal district court in July 2003. But earlier that year, after signing a bill that allowed Americans to collect court-ordered damages from the frozen assets of terrorist states — a list that included Iraq at that time — Bush had confiscated what was then $1.7 billion in Iraqi assets held in private banks. He allowed the payment of two judgments, including one for so-called “human shield” hostages held by Iraq in 1990, but none for the Americans taken prisoner in the 1991 Gulf War.
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http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/01/military_gulfwar_pows_080125w/

Bush and Rumsfeld refused to honor these men from the Gulf War. Was it because what was done to them is still being done to those held by them? Or is it because Bush never cared about those he sent to risk their lives or those sent by his father? Why would he refuse to honor these men who suffered at the hands of Saddam?
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Time as POW in Iraq haunts veteran

Report of captives revives Racine man's memories
By MEG JONES
mjones@journalsentinel.com
Posted: March 24, 2003
Joseph Small III was watching television Sunday morning in his Racine home when the first reports of American POWs flashed on the news.

He had nightmares, sometimes quite vivid ones, in the years after his release. Often when he was awake, he would get flashbacks. For the most part, Small said, he no longer has flashbacks or nightmares.

But he couldn't help but relive his experience when he saw reports Sunday of the American POWs.

"It brought back the fear I was feeling 12 years ago. I try to keep that experience in a compartment of my brain, and I dust it off every now and then. This did that for me," as he gazed at a television broadcasting war news.

Even though Small, like most soldiers, went through survival training, it didn't prepare him for a group of Iraqi soldiers pointing their guns at him. It didn't prepare him for a truck full of soldiers attempting to run the vehicle he was being transported in off the road so they could kill him. Or beatings from his captors, who tried to break his eardrums.

"The emotions and fear you get cannot be duplicated" in training, Small said.

What helped him get through his ordeal was thinking of images, such as a high school football game, that reminded him of home. Before he was shot down, he had read accounts of soldiers who were imprisoned in World War II and Vietnam. He found strength from their stories.

Small's oldest son is an Air Force captain whose unit has not been called to the Middle East yet. If his son goes to fight in Iraq like the sons and daughters who are already there, Small said, it's for a just reason. He does not doubt Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction if he has them.

"I believe in the cause of what we're trying to do, which is to rid the world of a sadistic regime," he said.

Small hopes and prays the American POWs will soon be returned to their families. They will face difficulties, Small knows, and they will need the help of their friends, spouses and parents to cope with the loss of their liberty.

"There's nothing like freedom. Once it's taken from you, you greatly appreciate getting it back," he said.


While a nation held its breath and the families of the prisoners waited for word of their loved ones, Small felt a different kind of fear.

Small, 51, is one of a handful of Americans who know what it's like to be held captive by the Iraqi military.

"They're probably in a state of shock. I can tell you they're terrified," Small said of the American prisoners of war. "I'm sure they're in an extreme state of terror."

Small now pilots DC-9s for Midwest Airlines, but during the Persian Gulf War, he flew OV-10 Bronco reconnaissance planes. His aircraft was shot down in Kuwait on Feb. 25, 1991, the second day of the ground war against Iraq, and Small spent nine days in captivity until he was released along with other captives.

He injured his leg and shoulder when he parachuted out of his stricken plane and landed 50 feet from Iraqi soldiers. They tore his rotator cuff as they wrenched his shoulder. His shoulder still hurts.

Small and the other American POWs were fed contaminated food, beaten, whipped and imprisoned in areas the Iraqi military knew were bombing targets - all violations of the Geneva Convention, designed to protect prisoners of war.

The Geneva Convention protections mean "everything to American and British soldiers. They mean nothing to the Iraqi military," Small said.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/mar03/127995.asp

Still Fighting
Senator Pushes Bush To Release Money To POWs From 1st Gulf War

Nov. 20, 2003

CBS) During the first Gulf War against Iraq in 1991, a number of American soldiers who were captured and became prisoners of war were brutally, brutally tortured by the Iraqis.

Eventually, though, the POWs came home, put the pieces of their lives back together - and largely remained out of the public eye. But today, a different battle is being fought by some of those American POWs, all these years after they returned. Correspondent Mike Wallace reports.

It was back in 1991 that the POWs came home from Iraq to a hero's welcome and were greeted by the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, and then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

"Your country is opening its arms to greet you," said Cheney.

Many of the POWs had suffered wounds both physical and psychological. Some of them suffer to this day, more than a decade after they were captured and appeared on Iraqi TV.

“They had broken my nose many times. And I was just getting used,” says Col. Cliff Acree. “You just, kind of, get used to it.”

Acree was shot down during the second day of the war. He said his interrogations always began the same way: “They would have these six or eight people just beat you for 10, 15, 20 minutes. Just no questions asked, bring you into the room, and beat you with fists, feet, clubs, whatever.”

“Hearing Cliff talk about it, we never really talked like this before, in such detail,” says Dale Storr, now in the National Guard, who was shot down by Iraqi ground fire. “But it brings back memories. It's almost like I'm back in my cell again.”

Jeff Tice, now retired from the military, was captured after his F-16 was hit by a surface-to-air missile. He was tortured with a device he calls "the Talkman."

“They wrapped a wire around one ear, one underneath my chin, wrapped it around another ear and hooked it up to some electrical device. Asked a question. I wasn't interested in answering,” recalls Tice.

“They would turn on the juice. And what that does is it, it creates a ball of lightning in your mind or in your head. Drives all your muscles simultaneously together and it drives your jaw and everything together. And, of course, I'm chained to a chair. I can't move freely. So everything is jerking into a little ball. And your teeth are being forced together with such force. I'm breaking pieces and parts off.”

Tice’s jaw was dislocated so many times that he says he was lucky to be able to put it back into place.

Jeff Fox, also retired from the military, was shot down over southern Iraq. “Same type of experience where they would beat you and blindfold you, handcuff you, drag you around,” he says.

Some of the POWs endured mock executions, threatened castration, were urinated on, and had to survive on a starvation diet.

The torturers fractured Acree’s skull. “After 16 years in the Marine Corps, you develop a certain hardness. That hardness really helped me in captivity. But the people that treated us so terribly, right early on, made me so angry that it only stiffened my resolve,” he says.

“It only made me resist more. Because, in the back of my mind, I just know, it is so, what they were doing was so completely out, out of any Geneva Accord.”
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/20/60minutes/main584810.shtml

Capt. Larry "Rat" Slade retired in Norfolk on Thursday after 22 years in the Navy. u.s. navy


Slade spent 43 days as a prisoner of war during the Gulf War, above.



NORFOLK

CAPT. LARRY "RAT" SLADE served 22 years in the Navy, flying in the backseat of a Tomcat fighter over four combat zones, graduating from Top Gun school and winning the naval flight officer of the year award.

But one moment of Slade's career, honored this week at a retirement ceremony, fails to fold neatly into a shadow box with a flag, ribbons and medals.

On Jan. 21, 1991, a cloudy, damp night over Baghdad, an Iraqi anti-aircraft missile blew the tail off his Oceana-based jet at 25,000 feet.

Slade and the pilot, Lt. Devon "Boots" Jones, ejected safely and floated into the enemy's desert a mile apart.

Jones was rescued. Slade was captured.

For the next 43 days, Slade endured interrogation, torture and starvation at the hands of Iraqis. The military code burned in his mind: "I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability."

It still smolders: Did he resist to the utmost of his ability?

"I struggle with that question today," he said.

Slade retired on Thursday as perhaps the final prisoner of war in the active Navy ranks. At a Norfolk Naval Station ceremony, fellow sailors praised Slade, 42, for a no-nonsense career as a top aviator, skilled leader and aggressive advocate for new technology.

According to Slade, who stays in touch with other POWs, his retirement marks the first time in a century the Navy has not had a former POW in its active-duty ranks. A spokesman for the Naval Historical Center said researchers there do not track such information.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-vetscor/1855130/post