Bush blocks aid to tortured U.S. veterans from Iraq war, Rachel Maddow investigates

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• Description : President Bush surprised Congress b...(more)y refusing to sign a Defense Department authorization bill, in part because the legislation could revive a lawsuit brought by American prisoners of war during the 1991 Persian Gulf War who say they were tortured by the Iraqis. Their suit sought to establish the principle that war prisoners who were tortured in violation of the Geneva Convention were entitled to sue the country that tortured them. By keeping the bill from becoming law, the president delayed pay raises for the troops and improvements in the care of wounded veterans...the main lawsuit that had drawn the attention of the White House and the Iraqis was a claim from American prisoners of war. The 17 ex-POWs, most of them pilots who had been shot down, sued Saddam Hussein's regime for their brutal treatment after they were captured. In 1996, Congress partly waived the rule that shields foreign countries from being sued. And after hearing evidence of how the former POWs had been beaten and starved, a judge awarded them a total judgment of $959 million. But the verdict came shortly after the United States had invaded Iraq and toppled Hussein. Bush administration lawyers then intervened in the case and said the judgment should be thrown out...government attorneys also worry that weakening the sovereign-immunity rule could encourage filing legal claims against the United States or U.S. officials for abuse allegedly meted by American authorities. http://www.veteransforcommonsense.org/index.cfm/Page/Article/ID/9052 John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books. Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them. The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the US prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain. http://www.nationinstitute.org/p/schanberg09182008pt1 (less)